Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader
Page 74
2. I thought I heard a noise outside, but it was nothing after all. (0 after ALL)
3. Let’s have an understanding (AN under STANDING)
4. Look around you. (LOOK around U)
5. “Remember,” she said to the group, “united we stand, divided we fall.” (United WESTAND, divided WE FALL)
6. “Why’d he do that?” Jesse asked. “Well, son,” I said, “he’s a mixed-up kid.” (DKI = kid)
7. Texas? I love wide-open spaces. (S P A C E S)
8. “Drat! My watch broke. Time to get it repaired.” (RE paired)
9. “I remember the 1960s,” she said, looking backward. (GNIKOOL = “looking” spelled backward)
10. No, we’re not living together anymore. It’s a legal separation. (L E G A L)
11. Haven’t seen him in a while. He’s far away from home. (FAR away from HOME)
12. Careful, I warned my sister. He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. (WOLF inside WOOL)
13. “How do I get out of here?” he asked. I said, “Just calm down and put the car in reverse.” (RAC = car spelled backward)
14. I tried to teach her, but no luck. I guess she’s a backward child. (DLIHC = child spelled backward)
15. When it’s raining, she meets me under an umbrella. (SHE meets ME under AN UMBRELLA)
Queen bees don’t use their stingers—except to kill other queen bees.
THE GODZILLA QUIZ, PAGE 264
1. C) They added Raymond Burr, casting him as Steve Martin, a reporter who remembers the whole incident as a flashback. It starts off with Burr in a hospital bed, recalling the horror he’s seen. Then, throughout the film, footage of Burr is cleverly inserted to make it seem as though he’s interacting with the Japanese cast.
2. C) Gigantis; it was illegal to use the name Godzilla. Warner Bros. brought the film into America, but they forgot to secure the rights to the name Godzilla, so they couldn’t legally use it. In this film, by the way, Godzilla crushes Osaka instead of Tokyo, and begins his long tradition of monster-fighting (he takes on a giant creature called Angorus).
3. B) A giant cockroach and a robot with a buzz saw in his stomach. The Seatopioans, stationed under the sea, are using a metal bird monster with a buzz saw (Gaigan) and a giant cockroach (Megalon—described as a “metal monster insect with drill arms”) to fight Godzilla on the surface. Godzilla can’t take them on alone. He teams up with Jet Jaguar, a cyborg who can change size to fight monsters.
4. B) A giant moth. The thing is Mothra, who starred in its own film a few years earlier. Godzilla kills Mothra—but a giant egg on display at a carnival hatches, and two “junior Mothras” emerge. They spin a cocoon around Godzilla and dump him in the ocean.
5. A) He fought a Godzilla robot from outer space. The film was originally called Godzilla vs. the Bionic Monster, presumably to cash in on the popularity of the “Six Million Dollar Man” TV show. But the owners of that TV show sued, and the title was changed to Godzilla vs. the Cosmic Monster.
6. C) A three-headed dragon. To defeat them, Godzilla takes a partner again—this time Angorus, his foe from Gigantis.
7. A) The Smog Monster—a 400-foot blob of garbage. The smog monster flies around, leaving a trail of poisonous vapors that cause people to drop like flies, especially at discos where teens are dancing to anti-pollution songs. Don’t miss the smash tune, “Save the Earth.”
There is a town in Newfoundland, Canada called Dildo.
8. B) To show a little kid how to fight bullies. The boy falls asleep and dreams he travels to Monster Island, where Godzilla and his son teach him how to defend himself.
9. C) A giant lobster. Actually, he might be a giant shrimp. It’s hard to tell. His strength: He can regenerate a limb every time one is torn off.
10. C) It was Godzilla’s son. Imagine that—Godzilla’s a parent!
AUNT LENNA’S PUZZLES, PAGE 320
1. The accountant and lawyer were women. Steve is a man’s name.
2. The answers are WHOLESOME and ONE WORD.
AUNT LENNA’S PUZZLES, PAGE 359
1. He couldn’t have heard where she was going if he was deaf.
2. 99 99/99
3. His wife was on a life-support system. When he pushed the elevator button, he realized the power had gone off.
4. The first man, who saw the smoke, knew first; the second man, who heard it, knew second; the third man, who saw the bullet, knew last. The speed of light travels faster than the speed of sound, and the speed of sound travels faster than a bullet.
5. Her shoes. Check it out against the woman’s laments—it makes sense.
The flu was first described by Hippocrates, in 412 B.C.
6. Let’s start with the grandmothers and grandfathers. That’s 4. They’re all mothers and fathers, so if there are 3 mothers and 3 fathers, we have 2 new people—1 mother, 1 father—for a total of 6.
The 2 mothers-in-law and fathers-in-law are the grandparents, so we don’t count them again. The son-in-law and daughter-in-law are the 2 additional parents, so we don’t count them again, either. The 2 sons and 2 daughters are their children—which makes 10 people.
AUNT LENNA’S PUZZLES, PAGE 397
1. She’s talking about the amount of bills, not the year. 1,993 bills are worth exactly $1 more than more than 1,992 bills.
2. They were traveling at different times.
3. Noel (No “L”).
4. She grabbed one of the stones and quickly let it “slip” from her hands. Then, because she “couldn’t find” the stone she’d dropped, she just looked in the bag to see what was left. It was a black stone, of course...which meant she’d won the bet.
5. Cut them into quarters with two cuts...then stack the quarters on top of each other and cut once. Eight pieces, three cuts.
6. She wrote:
Elvis collected statuettes of Joan of Arc and Venus de Milo.
ACRONYMANIA, P. 457
1. Zone Improvement Plan Code
2. Deoxyribo Nucleic Acid
3. Dead On Arrival
4. Erhard Seminars Training (or Eastern Standard Time)
5. (Department of) Housing and Urban Development
6. INTERnational Criminal POLice Organization
7. Keep It Simple Stupid
8. Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation
9. UNIVersal Automatic Computer
10. NAtional BIScuit COmpany
11. National Aeronautics and Space Administration
12. New England Confectionary COmpany
13. Not In My BackYard
14. National Organization of Women
15. Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries
16. Occupational Safety and Health Administration
17. QUASi-StellAR Radio Source
18. Research ANd Development Corp.
19. Run Batted In
20. Rapid Eye Movement
21. Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus
22. Sealed With A Kiss
23. TriNiTrotoluene
24. United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization
25. United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund
26. Computerized Axial Tomography scan
27. Airborne Warning And Control System
28. Absent WithOut Leave
29. Compact Disc—Read Only Memory
30. Mobile Army Surgical Hospital
31. Will COmply
32. SOund Navigation And Ranging
33. Situation Normal, All Fouled (or F———) Up
34. North Atlantic Treaty Organization
35. Strategic Arms Limitation Talks
36. RAdio Detection And Ranging
According to one survey, Danes spent $166 million on prostitutes in 1993.
37. Subsonic Cruise Unarmed Decoy
38. Strategic Air Command
39. What You See Is What You Get
40. Women’s Army Corps
4L SEa-Air-Land unitS
42. MicroSoft Disk Operating System
43. NORth American Air Defense Command
44. Tele-Active Shock Electronic Repulsion
45. Random Access Memory
46. Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time
47. Also Known As
48. CANada Oil, Low Acid
TEST YOUR “BEVERLY HILLBILLIES” IQ, PAGE 489
1. B) Still smarting from the cancellation of a sitcom called “The Bob Cummings Show” in 1959, Paul Henning, a TV executive, took his wife and mother-in-law on a 14,000-mile automobile trip through the eastern half of the United States. Henning was trying to get his mind off business, but it didn’t work—the places he visited kept giving him ideas for new shows. After touring a Civil War site, he thought of creating a sit-com around the concept of an 1860s family that somehow lands in the 1960s...but he couldn’t think of a believable way to transport them through time. He later explained:
I wondered how, without being too magic, such a thing could be accomplished. I subsequently read a little bit about someone trying to build a road through a remote section of the Ozark Mountains and how the residents would try to stop the building of the road. They didn’t want to have access. Part of that, I’m sure, was that a lot of them made their living moonshining and they didn’t want “fereners,” as they called it, coming in the remote places.
Turning the concept around, Henning thought that hillbillies moving to California was a good idea for a sit-com. He jotted down some ideas and showed them to executives of Filmways Television over lunch; by the end of the meeting the series had been sold.
2. A) “I told [Filmways] the concept,” Henning later recalled. “These hillbillies strike oil and move to a sophisticated urban center, which I first imagined to be New York. But then I got to thinking of the cost of filming in New York and how it wouldn’t work. Where else could they land? I thought of Beverly Hills, which is about as sophisticated as you can get on the West Coast.”
The U.S. Congress didn’t make “The Star Spangled Banner” the national anthem until 1931.
3. C) Henning and “Beverly Hillbillies” producer Al Simon spent months hitting every hillbilly band and hoedown looking for an authentic hillbilly to play the part of Granny. “Finally,” he recalls, “we found someone and thought, ‘Gee, this woman’s great. This is gonna work out. She sounded great when we talked to her. She said she’d have her nephew, with whom she stayed, help her with the reading. When she came in and faced those cameras, she froze. She couldn’t read! She was illiterate, but she disguised it cleverly.”
Actress Bea Benaderet got ahold of the script and pleaded with Henning for an audition to play the part of Granny. He told her she was too “well built” for the part. “And when we did the test, she had seen Irene [Ryan] ready to go and do her thing. She said, #8216;There’s your Granny!’” Henning disagreed. “At first they said I was too young,” Ryan later recalled, “but I said ‘If you get anybody older than I am, she’ll be too old to do the series.’” She got the part—and Bea Benaderet got the part of Cousin Pearl. (Note: Did her voice sound oddly familiar to you when you watched the show? She also played the voice of Betty Rubble on “The Flintstones” cartoon show from 1960 to 1964.)
4. B) Bailey “wasn’t happy anywhere he was,” Henning recalls. “He complained a lot, but he played the part perfectly.” The other cast members remember him as arrogant, publicity hungry, willing to argue over just about anything, and frequently insulting, even in public. Paul Henning’s wife Ruth remembers one particular incident:
We were going to a bank opening in Independence, Missouri....Ray got loaded on the plane and when we arrived at Paul’s sister’s house, a big, historical, Victorian-style home, Ray made a loud remark that it looked like a whorehouse. When Paul’s sister stepped out on the porch to greet us, Ray said, “Are you the madam?”
“He alienated himself from everybody,” one press agent recalls. “Sometimes people hated to be around him, he complained so much.” But according to one California bank official, he was popular in the banking industry nonetheless. “The bankers all love him,” the official told TV Guide in 1970, “which is unusual considering the way bankers have always been portrayed....I have yet to hear a banker complain about the character of Drysdale.” Even so, Bailey’s attitude may have cost him his career: according to news reports published after his death, Buddy Ebsen had refused to offer him work on his new series, “Barnaby Jones”. Bailey spent his last years unemployed and bitter. He died of a heart attack in 1980.
Fully 50% of the Netherlands—including its two largest cities—lie below sea level.
5. B) During one break in shooting in 1966, Douglas starred opposite Elvis Presley in his film Frankie and Johnnie...and according to some reports, fell in love with the King. “She didn’t realize every girl he worked with fell in love with him. She really flipped out,” Paul Henning recalls.
6. B) Critics almost uniformly hated the show. “We’re liable to be Beverly Hillbillied to death,” one observer sniffed, “please write your Congressman.” Another complained that “‘Beverly Hillbillies’ aims low...and hits its target.” But the show was an unprecedented hit with viewers. It shot to the #1 ratings slot after only five weeks on the air and quickly became the most-watched show in TV history.
7. A) The part of Jed Clampett was made with Buddy Ebsen in mind, but he didn’t want the part. “My agent had mentioned the hillbillies,” he later recalled, “but I wanted to run the other way. I had played a lot of hillbillies, and I just didn’t want to get trapped again in that kind of getup with long hair and whiskers.”
8. B) The owners were happy for the first three seasons...but only because they had insisted that Filmways keep their address a secret. But in the beginning of the fourth season, TV Guide got ahold of the address and published it, and the house, known as the Kirkeby Mansion, instantly became one of the hottest tourist stops in L.A. The wife of the owner went nuts. “She had been just beleaguered by tourists,” Henning later recalled. “She had to get security people, shut her gates...it was a terrible mess. People would actually walk into her house and ask for Granny. Can you imagine?...The tragedy was that we were just about to go to color. This broke before we had a chance to film the exteriors in color. That was a real blow. We had to promise to stay away.”
9. B) Tate, who later became famous as one of the murder victims of Charles Manson, played typist Janet Trego in several episodes and even dated Max Baer (Jethro) for a time. She later won the part as one of Cousin Pearl’s daughters on “Petticoat Junction,” but was replaced by another actress when Playboy magazine published nude photos of her that had been taken before she got the part. “When we first got her,” director Joe Depew remembers, “She was very amateurish. It was hard for her to read a line. Then she went to [acting] school and she learned a lot. She was a very pleasant girl and extremely beautiful...a real tragedy.”
Average U.S. family income in 1915: $687 a year.
10. B) Granny was Granny Moses...just like the painter.
PRESIDENTIAL QUIZ, PAGE 542
1. (c) Carnegie, the steel magnate (1835-1919).
2. (d) Because liquor, as well as tobacco and profanity, was banished from the White House, Mrs. Hayes was also known as “Lemonade Lucy.” At one official dinner, it was said, “the water flowed like champagne.”
3 (a) Our eighth president (and Andrew Jackson’s second vice president) was born in New York in Kinderhook in 1782 and inaugurated in 1837. The first seven presidents were, of course, born in English colonies.
4 (c) By a special act of Congress, the former representative (North Carolina, 1811-1816) and senator (Alabama, 1819-1844, 1848-1852) took the oath in Havana as President Franklin Pierce’s vice president. King (1786-1853) died a month later, before the first session of the 33rd Congress was held, and so never got to preside over the Senate, the vice president’s principal role at the time.
5. (b) The only president to sit on the high bench was appointed in 1921
by President Warren G. Harding. Ill health forced his resignation nine years later, a month before he died.
6. (b) And only one president remained a bachelor: James Buchanan (1791-1868). Grover Cleveland (1837-1908), who had, as a young bachelor in Buffalo, fathered a child, was a bachelor still when he was first elected president in 1884, but married his ward midway through his first term.
7. (c) “The more I see of the czar, the kaiser, and the mikado,” Roosevelt declared, “the better I am content with democracy.”
8. (d) The polio-stricken governor of New York State flew in a flimsy trimotor airplane from Albany to Chicago in 1932 to accept his nomination.
It’s against the law to hunt camels in Arizona.
9. (b) It was in 1906, after yellow fever had been licked in the Canal Zone. The 25th president was also the first president to ride in an automobile, fly in an airplane, and dive into the sea in a submarine. “You must remember,” a British diplomat sighed, “that the president is about six.” The Rough Rider (1858-1919) also wrote 40 books, and left politics for almost two years in bereavement when his mother and his first wife died on the same day in 1884.
10. (b) George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Five other professional soldiers have been nominated for the presidency: Benjamin Lincoln, Winfield Scott, John Fremont, George McClellan, and Winfield Scott Hancock.
11. (a) Abraham Lincoln.
THE NUMBERS GAME, PAGE 566
1. 7 = Wonders of the Ancient World
2. 1001 = Arabian Nights
3. 12 = Signs of the Zodiac
4. 54 = Cards in a Deck (with the Jokers)
5. 9 = Planets in the Solar System
6. 88 = Piano Keys
7. 13 = Stripes on the American Flag
8. 32 = Degrees Fahrenheit, at Which Water Freezes
9. 90 = Degrees in a Right Angle
10. 99 = Bottles of Beer on the Wall