Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader
Page 13
•2000 B.C. The height of Minoan civilization on Crete (in the Greek Islands). The Minoans are very prosperous, with the world’s first “leisure society”: a large part of even the common person’s time is focused on leisure activities, such as sports. They’re also the first to have indoor plumbing and flush toilets. The Phoenicians are now the primary traders in the region, carrying news of the latest technology from port to port, which makes them instrumental in the spread of civilization. Europe’s Bronze Age begins.
•1800 B.C. The Babylonians have conquered and assimilated the Akkadian Empire. Among their achievements: they develop multiplication tables; invent the first windmills (to pump water for irrigation); and create the world’s first written laws, Hammurabi’s Code. Judaism is founded around this time by Abraham. Horse-drawn chariots are used in Egypt. The Chinese become the first civilization to record an eclipse.
•1600 B.C. As traders, the Phoenicians need a better record-keeping system, so they develop a phonetic alphabet, for the first time using written characters to represent sounds, rather than objects and concepts. It is the basis of our modern alphabet.
•1500 B.C. The earliest known medical textbook is written in Egypt. The Vedas, four collections of hymns that will become part of the basis for Hinduism, are written in India. Massive earthquakes and tidal waves in the Mediterranean destroy Minoan cities, ending that civilization. Hatshepsut becomes pharaoh of Egypt, the first woman known to rule an empire.
And then what happened? Turn to page 228.
Light snack: Americans eat about 95 million pounds of marshmallows every year.
THE LYIN’ KING
Over the years we’ve reported how Disney animators massaged, rewrote, censored, and sanitized classic fables and fairy tales for mass audiences. But this is the first time we’ve ever heard of them “borrowing” so much of another artist’s work. Did they? Or was it just a coincidence?
INSPIRATION
In 1950 a Japanese artist named Osamu Tezuka created Jungle Taitei (Jungle Emperor), a story about an orphaned lion cub who is destined to rule the animals in Africa. From 1950 to 1954 it was a Japanese comic book series, and in 1965 Tezuka turned it into Japan’s first color animated television series. The following year, all 52 episodes were released in the United States under the name Kimba the White Lion. Over the next few years, Kimba enjoyed some success in syndication, mostly on local or regional TV stations, and Tezuka freely acknowledged that the work of Walt Disney—Bambi in particular—was an inspiration for the story of his lion hero.
In 1994, nearly 30 years after the creation of Kimba and five years after Tezuka’s death in 1989, Disney released its feature-length animated film The Lion King—about an orphaned lion cub destined to rule the animals in Africa.
FALSE PRIDE
Officially, the executives and animators at Disney denied they had ever even heard of Kimba. But fans of the original Kimba the White Lion were incensed with the many similarities they found between the two projects. A group of more than a thousand animators in Japan sent a petition to Disney asking the studio to acknowledge its debt to the original series. Disney refused, citing only Bambi and Shakespeare’s play Hamlet as influences.
Walt Disney reportedly met Tezuka at the 1964 New York World’s Fair and mentioned that he someday hoped to make something similar to Tezuka’s earlier creation, Astro Boy. But Disney died in 1966, 28 years before The Lion King was made. If he really was a fan of Tezuka’s work, would he have approved of the project?
COPYCAT
Hot flash: 7% of people say they get heartburn every day.
Some of the most striking similarities between The Lion King and Kimba the White Lion:
•The main characters’ names are remarkably similar: Simba and Kimba.
•Both are orphaned as cubs and destined to become rulers.
•Each lost their father in treacherous circumstances.
•In The Lion King, Simba turns to a wise but eccentric baboon (named Rafiki) for guidance. In Kimba the White Lion, Kimba turns to a wise but eccentric baboon (named Dan’l Baboon) for guidance.
•One of Simba’s friends is a hysterical yet comical bird (named Zazu). One of Kimba’s friends is a hysterical yet comical bird (named Polly).
•Simba has a cute girlfriend cub named Nala. Kimba has a cute girlfriend cub named Kitty.
•Simba’s chief nemesis is Scar, an evil lion with a scar over his left eye. Kimba’s primary nemesis is Claw, an evil one-eyed lion with a scar over his blind left eye.
•In The Lion King, Scar enlists the aid of three hyenas (Shenzi, Banzai, and Ed). In Kimba the White Lion, Claw enlists the aid of two hyenas (Tib and Tab).
•Kimba and Simba each speak to the spirit of their father, who appears in the clouds.
•The image of Simba standing on Pride Rock in The Lion King is almost identical to an image of Kimba as a grown lion, standing on a jutting rock surveying his kingdom in Kimba the White Lion.
CAT FIGHT
Disney may have “borrowed” the idea, but they were legally protected. Mushi Productions, the company that made Kimba the White Lion, went bankrupt in 1973 and U.S. rights to the show ran out in 1978. That means Kimba was in the public domain. Someone tried to release it to home video in the U.S. in 1993, but was delayed by a lawsuit from an undisclosed company. At the same time, details of Disney’s new movie began to surface. In an online chat in 1993, Roy Disney mentioned Kimba, the lead character in Disney’s next animated film, The Jungle King. (Kimba’s original English title was The Jungle Emperor.)
Time magazine was originally going to be named Facts.
UNCLE JOHN’S PAGE OF LISTS
Random bits of interesting information from the BRI files.
10 Highest-Scoring Words in Scrabble
1. Bezique
2. Cazique
3. Jazzily
4. Quartzy
5. Quetzal
6. Quizzed
7. Zephyrs
8. Zincify
9. Zinkify
10. Zythums
6 Things That Can Kill Dracula
1. Sunlight
2. Garlic
3. Crucifix
4. Holy water
5. Wooden stake
6. Silver
9 Most Common U.S. Town Names
1. Fairview
2. Midway
3. Oak Grove
4. Franklin
5. Riverside
6. Centerville
7. Mount Pleasant
8. Liberty
9. Salem
7 Things Invented by Canadians
1. Snowmobile
2. Washing machine
3. Zipper
4. Plastic garbage bag
5. Foghorn
6. Electric range
7. Paint roller
5 Songs About Fruit
1. “Banana Boat Song”
(Harry Belafonte)
2. “Blueberry Hill”
(Fats Domino)
3. “Cherry Cherry”
(Neil Diamond)
4. “Lemon Song”
(Led Zeppelin)
5. “Little Green Apples”
(O.C. Smith)
6 Vegetables That Are Really Fruits
1. Cucumber 2. Okra
3. Eggplant 4. Tomato
5. Pumpkin 6. Squash
4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse
1. Pestilence 2. War
3. Famine 4. Death
9 Jackson Siblings
1. Michael 2. Janet
3. LaToya 4. Rebbie
5. Marlon 6. Randy
7. Tito 8. Jackie
9. Jermaine
7 Types of Triangles
1. Equilateral
2. Isosceles
3. Scalene
4. Right
5. Acute
6. Obtuse
7. Oblique
11 Wars Involving U.S.
1. Revolutionary War
2. War of 1812
4. Civil War
5. Spanish-American War
6. World War I
7. World War II
8. Korean War
9. Vietnam War
10. Persian Gulf War
11. Operation Iraqi Freedom
Dromomania is an abnormal impulse to travel.
THE OTHER MR. COFFEE
Does the name Howard Schultz ring a bell? He’s the guy who figured out how to get you to pay $4.50 for a 75¢ cup of coffee.
TALL ORDER
In the early 1980s, a Swedish plastics company called Hammarplast sold plastic coffee filters that fit over a thermos. One day in 1981, one of the company’s salesmen, 27-year-old Howard Schultz, happened to notice that a small Seattle coffee roasting company called Starbucks Coffee, Tea and Spice bought more of the filters than the entire Macy’s department store chain did. Why?, Schultz wondered. And who would bother making coffee using such a tedious method when an automatic drip coffeemaker could do it all at the push of a button?
Schultz was so intrigued that he made a trip out to Seattle just to have a look at the company. He visited Starbucks’ retail store in the historic Pike Place Market, where they sold fresh-roasted coffee beans by the pound and coffee-making supplies...but no coffee drinks or any other beverages by the cup. Schultz took a tour of the roasting plant and met the company’s co-founders, Jerry Baldwin and Gordon Bowker. He also drank some of the darkest, strongest, best-tasting coffee he’d ever had.
A FRESH START
Schultz decided right then that he wanted to work for Starbucks; but convincing Baldwin and Bowker to hire him took a little more time. It wasn’t until about a year later, when they were planning to open the company’s sixth store and the first one outside of Seattle, that they agreed to take Schultz on as director of retail operations and marketing. Even then he had a vision of building Starbucks into a regional and later a national chain, but like Baldwin and Bowker, he saw the company as a retailer of coffee beans that people would buy to make coffee in their own homes.
Then in the spring of 1983, Schultz made a trip to Milan, Italy, to attend an international housewares convention. He decided to walk from his hotel to the convention center. On the way he passed four coffee bars, each one of them overflowing with people who were lined up to buy espressos, cappuccinos, lattes, mochas, and other exotic drinks.
Number of Starbucks in Chicago’s O’Hare Int’l Airport (2004): 15. In all of South Dakota: 6.
SOMETHING BREWING
Schultz had already noticed that customers who were new to premium coffee got intimidated just standing in a Starbucks store—how many people could tell the difference between Sumatra coffee and Arabian mocha java, between Italian roast and French roast? Even Schultz was a newcomer. In the week he spent in Milan he drank his very first espresso and his very first latte.
Schultz came to realize that espresso bars were the means by which he could reach beyond Starbucks’ traditional, narrow clientele of coffee connoisseurs to a much larger customer base: people who’d never tasted really good coffee before and had no idea what they were missing. By serving cups of coffee and giving people a place to drink it, Starbucks stores could become a lot more than just a place to buy coffee beans. They could serve as a “third place,” as Schultz liked to call it, a place outside of the home and the workplace or school, where people could hang out and enjoy a coffee just as if they were in an espresso bar in Italy.
If Shultz had a hard time convincing Baldwin and Bowker to hire him, convincing them to sell coffee by the cup was an even bigger challenge. It took him a year just to get them to put a single espresso machine in the company’s sixth store when it opened for business in downtown Seattle in April 1984. By June that store was averaging 800 customers a day compared to 250 a day at the other Starbucks locations; but even then Baldwin and Bowker refused to sell ready-to-drink coffee from the other stores. “We’re coffee roasters,” Jerry Baldwin told him. “I don’t want to be in the restaurant business.”
IL GIORNALE
In late 1985 Schultz quit his job at Starbucks and founded an espresso bar chain called Il Giornale, which he named after an Italian newspaper. The first Il Giornale opened for business in Columbia Center, Seattle’s tallest skyscraper, in April 1986.
So why isn’t the world’s largest espresso bar chain called Il Giornale? Because in 1987 Jerry Baldwin and Gordon Bowker decided to sell Starbucks. Schultz, who by now had opened three Il Giornales of his own, managed to raise the $3.8 million he needed to buy the six Starbucks stores and the roasting plant. He had a decision to make: Should he keep the Il Giornale name, or go back to Starbucks? He asked around for advice. Nobody knew how to pronounce Il Giornale, people told him, and they didn’t know how to spell it, either. Starbucks it was.
The South American basilisk lizard can run up to a quarter mile across the surface of water.
COFFEE BUZZ
Starbucks grew exponentially in the years that followed. By 1990 it had grown to 55 locations. The company went public in 1992, and by the end of the year it had 165 locations. Five years later it had 1,412 stores, and by the end of 2002 it had more than 5,800. As of September 2004 Starbucks has 7,569 stores in 31 different countries around the world. It made nearly $268 million in profits in 2003.
How fast is the company growing today? Every time a Starbucks barista finishes working an eight-hour shift, a new Starbucks has opened somewhere in the world, and the rate of growth is increasing. The company hopes to grow to 25,000 locations around the world in the next decade. Is that kind of growth even possible? Here’s a clue: Italy has a population of just under 58 million people or about one fifth the population of the United States. It has more than 200,000 coffee bars.
In 1981 a cup of coffee cost 75¢, tops. Today a Starbucks Venti Java Chip Frappuccino will taste a lot better than that cup of coffee did back in 1981, but it’ll set you back as much as $4.50.
Now you know who to thank...or to blame.
IT’S A WEIRD, WEIRD WORLD
In 2004 the U.S. Postal Service allowed Internet users to make their own postage stamps featuring pictures of anything they wanted. The program was a success: 2 million stamps were printed in the first six weeks. Then it was terminated. Why? As a joke, some pranksters printed stamps with a picture of Ted Kaczynski (the “Unabomber”), the man who used the Post Office to mail letter bombs in the early 1990s. The USPS didn’t think it was funny.
Eye Opener: The original Starbucks logo featured a mermaid with naked breasts.
THE GREAT WALL OF FLORIDA
Why go all the way to Paris, France, to see the Eiffel Tower when you can visit Paris, Texas, and admire a 50-foot replica...wearing a bright red cowboy hat?
MONUMENT: Statue of Liberty, New York City
REPLICA: Paris, France
STORY: France gave the original statue to the United States in 1886 to honor the friendship between the two countries. To show their appreciation, Americans living in Paris built a 35-foot replica in 1889. It stands on the Isle de Grenelle in the middle of the Seine River. But there’s more: Between 1949 and 1951, the Boy Scouts of America donated about 200 eight-foot-tall copper Statue of Liberty replicas to towns across the U.S. (San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Cheyenne, Wyoming, each have one). The French have some as well: one in Barentin, made for a film; one in Colmar, birthplace of the original statue’s designer, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi; and one in Bordeaux.
MONUMENT: Great Wall of China
REPLICA: Kissimmee, Florida
STORY: The original is 4,163 miles long and is considered one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The one in Florida isn’t. This half-mile recreation is located at the Florida Splendid China Theme Park, built in 1993. It took 6.5 million bricks to construct.
MONUMENT: Leaning Tower of Pisa, Italy
REPLICA: Niles, Illinois
STORY: Industrialist Robert Ilg constructed the 94-foot “Leaning Tower of Niles” in 1934 to honor the I
talian “Father of Modern Science”—Galileo. Only half the size of the original, it matches the exact angle of the Pisa tower’s distinctive tilt. Do the Italians approve? Yes—Niles and Pisa officially became “sister cities” in 1991.
MONUMENT: HOLLYWOOD sign, Los Angeles, California
Sacre bleu! The busiest Pizza Hut in the world is located in Paris, France.
REPLICA: Palermo, Italy
STORY: In 2001 Italian “post-studio” artist Maurizio Cattelan over-saw the installation of a giant, oversized replica of the famous Hollywood sign. “I had been working on icons,” Cattelan explained of the piece. “The Pope, Adolf. I wanted to use one that would not be an icon, but a word. A word has more faces.” Each of the nine letters is 75 feet high, and the sign measures 557 feet across (the original is only 450 feet across). It sits on Bellolampo Hill, overlooking Palermo’s garbage dump.
MONUMENT: Easter Island statues, South Pacific Ocean
REPLICA: Hunt, Texas
STORY: Located in a field off Texas State Highway 39, these dimensionally accurate re-creations of the facelike statues of Easter Island were built by local artisans Doug Hill and Al Sheppard. Bonus: If you visit, you’ll get two for one—the statues share their space with a replica of another ancient monument, Stonehenge.
MONUMENT: Washington Monument, Washington, D.C.
REPLICA: Pope’s Creek, Virginia
STORY: It’s less than an hour from the actual Washington Monument, but if you’re tired of the real thing you can always go here. It’s part of the George Washington’s Birthplace National Monument—Pope’s Creek is where George was born—and although it doesn’t have many relics from his childhood, it does have this 56-foot recreation of the monument (the actual one is 555 feet tall).
MONUMENT: Eiffel Tower, Paris, France
REPLICA: Paris, Texas
STORY: Paris, Texas, erected a 55-foot Eiffel Tower in 1993 in honor of its French namesake. When officials in Paris, Tennessee, heard about it, they built one 60 feet tall. Paris, Texas, fought back and made theirs five feet taller. Then, Paris, Tennessee, made theirs five feet taller. In 1998 Paris, Texas, put a bright red cowboy hat on their tower, making it a few inches taller. But neither beats the 540-foot replica in Las Vegas (or the 1,052-foot original in Paris, France).