At 2:00 a.m. on January 8, Gardner broke Tom Rounds’s world record by staying awake past 260 hours; four hours later he achieved his own goal by staying awake for 264 hours—11 days straight. He was examined one last time by Dr. Ross at the naval hospital, then went to sleep there in the hospital instead of at home, so that Ross could measure his brain waves as he slept. Gardner dozed for 14 hours and 40 minutes straight, and only woke up because he had to go to the bathroom. Afterward he stayed up for 23 hours, then slept for another 10 hours. After that, his sleep patterns returned to normal.
…the hole, it would take you 38 minutes and 11 seconds to pop out the other side.
CAUGHT NAPPING
When the brain wave recordings and other data were analyzed, they revealed something that had been observed previously in combat and other situations where humans have been forced to stay awake for extended periods of time: Parts of Gardner’s brain appeared to shut down and take “catnaps” to restore themselves while other parts of his brain continued to function. Once one part of his brain refreshed itself, it would resume functioning, allowing another part of his brain to rest.
Ironically, though Gardner suffered no apparent ill effects of his 11 days without sleep, when he reached his early 60s, he was plagued with terrible insomnia for more than a decade. Today he’s able to sleep up to six hours a night, but no more than that. Though he loved to drink tea, today he abstains from caffeine entirely. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to sleep at night,” he says.
So is Gardner’s insomnia a result of his 11 days of sleeplessness some 40 years earlier? No one knows. “Maybe it’s karma, like the universe saying, ‘Oh, you don’t want to sleep? Well, there you go!’ ” he told the New York Times in 2010.
PUT TO BED
Gardner may have held the world record for sleep deprivation for only two weeks, because later that same month a California State University, Fresno, student named Jim Thomas reportedly stayed up for 266.5 hours, beating Gardner’s record by two and a half hours. Guinness World Records used to have a category for sleep-deprivation records, but it no longer does, out of concern that people who try to set such records will harm themselves in the process. The last recognized record-holder was Maureen Weston of Peterborough, England. She stayed awake for 449 hours, or 18 days and 17 hours, while competing in a rocking chair marathon from April 14 to May 2, 1977. “Though she tended to hallucinate toward the end of this surely ill-advised test, surprisingly, she suffered no lasting ill effects,” the Guinness editors noted.
What separates Gardner’s attempt from all the others is the fact that his experiment was so thoroughly documented by medical professionals. This makes Gardner’s experience especially useful to sleep researchers and other scientists and, as a result, his record-setting attempt is likely to remain one of the best-known cases for many years to come. (Bonus: Gardener and his friends won the science fair.)
Owl eyeballs aren’t round—they’re elongated and tubular in shape.
LIFE IN 1948
Here’s what the world was like 40 years before the invention of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader.
MAJOR EVENTS
•Israel was declared an independent nation.
•The United Nations established the World Health Organization.
•Congress approved the Foreign Assistance Act, or “Marshall Plan,” providing $13 billion to rebuild Europe after World War II.
MOST ADMIRED
Beginning in 1946, Gallup conducted an annual poll to determine the “most admired person in America.” In 1948 they asked respondents to vote for the most admired man and most admired woman for the first time. Voters’ picks: President Harry S. Truman and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
TELEVISION
Only 35,000 people owned a television set in 1948, but the first big TV hit—and one that prompted millions of Americans to buy TV sets—debuted that year: Texaco Star Theater, starring Milton Berle.
The first nightly newscast debuted in May on CBS. CBS Television News, with anchor Douglas Edwards.
A variety show called Toast of the Town premiered in June. It was later renamed after its host as The Ed Sullivan Show.
DEATHS
•Jan. 30: Mahatma Gandhi, 78
•Jan. 30: “First in flight” Orville Wright, 76
•July 15: World War I general John J. Pershing, 87
•Aug. 16: Babe Ruth, 53
•Dec. 23: Hideki Tojo, 63, prime minister of Japan during World War II, was hanged for war crimes.
WHAT THINGS COST
•Average price of a new home: $7,700
•A new car: about $1,250
•A gallon of gas: 16¢
NEW! NEW! NEW!
Available in stores for the first time in 1948: Cheetos, Dial (the first antibacterial soap), Mentos, Nestlé Quik, Reddi-Wip, the Frisbee, Scrabble, and the Polaroid camera.
BOOKS
Among the most popular novels of the year: The Big Fisherman, by Lloyd C. Douglas (the story of Jesus’s disciple Simon-Peter); Dinner at Antoine’s, by Frances Parkinson Keyes (a murder mystery set in Louisiana); and The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer (based on Mailer’s experiences in the Philippines during World War II).
Egg-poaching tip: add salt, lemon juice, and vinegar to the water. The egg white will coagulate faster and keep its shape.
James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific (which would later be adapted into the musical South Pacific) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Poet T. S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
MUSIC
According to Billboard, these were the top 5 hit songs of 1948:
1)“Twelfth Street Rag,” by Pee Wee Hunt
2)“Mañana,” by Peggy Lee
3)“Now Is the Hour,” by Bing Crosby
4)“A Tree in the Meadow,” by Margaret Whiting
5)“My Happiness,” by Jon and Sondra Streele
1948 was also the year that Columbia introduced the long-playing vinyl record, or LP. It played at 33⅓ rpm—rather than the previous standard, 78 rpm—and could hold up to 23 minutes of music per side.
SPORTS
Both the Summer and Winter Olympics were held for the first time since 1936. (The Olympics had been suspended during World War II.) The summer games were held in London, and the winter games in St. Moritz, Switzerland.
Almost 20 years before the Super Bowl, the big football event of the year was the NFL Championship Game. During a blizzard at Shibe Park in Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Eagles beat the Chicago Cardinals, 7–0.
The Cleveland Indians won their last World Series to date, defeating the Boston Braves in six games. They were led by American League MVP Lou Boudreau, who played shortstop and was also the team’s manager.
In the still obscure sport of professional basketball, the NBL (not yet the NBA) title went to the Minneapolis Lakers over the Rochester Royals.
On June 25, Joe Louis beat Jersey Joe Wolcott in 11 rounds and was named the heavyweight champion of the world for the 25th time. And then he retired.
Citation won the Triple Crown of horse racing, only the eighth horse to do so.
MOVIES
The top-grossing box office hits (U.S.):
1)The Red Shoes, a British movie starring Moira Shearer
2)The Three Musketeers, with Gene Kelly and Lana Turner
3)Red River, a John Wayne western
4)The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart
5)When My Baby Smiles at Me, a musical starring Betty Grable
Other films of 1948: The Snake Pit, starring Olivia de Havilland; Key Largo, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall; The Paleface, starring Bob Hope and Jane Russell; Rope, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring James Stewart; The Bicycle Thief, directed by Vittorio De Sica; Fort Apache, directed by John Ford, starring John Wayne; The Big Clock, starring Ray Milland and Charles Laughton
Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet won Best Picture at the Academy Awar
ds, the only Shakespeare adaptation ever to do so.
What’s “umop apisdn”? It’s “upside down”…spelled upside down.
LOONIE CANADIAN LAWS
Believe it or not, these bizarre statutes are still on the books up in the Great White North.
It’s illegal to whistle in Petrolia, Ontario.
Two bagpipers may not play on the street near one another at the same time in Victoria, British Columbia.
You can’t drive cattle through the streets of St. John’s during daylight hours. (It’s fine at night.)
Also in Victoria: street performers aren’t allowed to hand out balloon animals to children.
If you sneak out of a hotel in Ontario without paying, the establishment has the right to confiscate your horse and sell it to settle your debt.
If you live on the corner of a street in Souris, Prince Edward Island, you may not build a snowman taller than 30 inches.
Nationwide, it’s illegal to prank the queen.
Internet speeds exceeding 56K—state of the art in 1994—are illegal in Uxbridge, Ontario.
If you live in Beaconsfield, Quebec, you can be fined for having your home painted more than two different colors.
You can’t keep a cow as a pet in Newfoundland.
It’s illegal to lock your car doors in Churchill, Manitoba. Reason: Just in case somebody needs to run and hide from a rampaging polar bear.
It’s illegal to own more than four rats in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia.
You may not wear a snake on your shoulders in public in Fredericktown, New Brunswick.
You can get arrested in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, for unhinging someone else’s front gate.
You can’t fill a front yard water trough in Cobourg, Ontario, after 5:00 a.m.
In Hay River, Northwest Territories, it’s against the law to ride a dogsled on the sidewalk.
In Ontario, it’s against the law to drive one’s sleigh on the highway without at least two bells attached to the horse’s harness.
In Windsor, Ontario, you’re breaking the law if you play a musical instrument in an office.
Pretending to practice witchcraft is a crime throughout Canada. (Apparently, practicing it is okay.)
You can’t show a “For Sale” sign in the window of a moving vehicle in Montreal.
In the distinctly bilingual province of Quebec, it is illegal to curse in any language other than French.
It is explicitly against the law in Alberta to set someone else’s wooden leg on fire.
Canada, known for its politeness, has a nationwide law against “offending a place with a bad smell.”
Pretending to be a foreigner is against the law in Quebec.
The warm-blooded Atlantic bluefin tuna thrashes so hard when caught by fishermen that it can cook its own flesh.
SORRY, WRONG NUMBER
Most of the time when a person dials a wrong number, nothing unusual happens. You hang up, and try your call again. The recipient of the call will soon forget it, too. But that’s not what happened to these folks…
CALLS: In September 2017, Wendi Walsh of Winton, California, received a call from someone who wanted to order a pizza. A few days later she got a strange call, this time from someone asking how late the restaurant was open. Over the next few weeks, she received more and more such calls, and by early October her phone was ringing off the hook into the wee hours of the morning with callers demanding pizza.
WRONG NUMBER: Walsh learned from the callers that Rico’s Pizza, a local restaurant, had been distributing promotional flyers listing her phone number as the restaurant’s number. (It wasn’t an easy mistake to make: the restaurant’s number begins with 358 and Walsh’s number begins with 812.) Rico’s printed new flyers, but by then, hundreds had already been distributed. Walsh’s husband says that the restaurant offered him a gift card for free pizza for their trouble…and asked him to refer callers to the restaurant’s actual phone number. Nothing doing—instead, the exasperated Walshes changed their number. “I feel like they should pay a fine or maybe make a donation to a charity of our choice,” Wendi says.
CALL: When Hurricane Irma struck Puerto Rico and the Florida coast in August and September 2017, the Federal Emergency Management Agency tweeted a message to homeowners with storm-damaged roofs, instructing them to call a toll-free number to receive assistance with repairs.
WRONG NUMBER: The tweet listed an 800 number, but the correct number had an 888 prefix. Callers who dialed the 800 number were connected with…a sex hotline. “Welcome to America’s hottest talk line,” said the recording. “Guys, hot ladies are waiting to talk to you. Press ‘1’ to connect, free, now.” FEMA quickly deleted the original tweet, sent out a corrected version, and apologized.
CALLS: In early 2017, residents of Westport, Ireland, began receiving calls from Irish viewers of Babestation, an X-rated cable TV channel headquartered in the UK, who were hoping to speak to models working for a sex chat line.
WRONG NUMBER: The callers were dialing the right number, but they probably didn’t realize that Babestation operates out of the UK, and neglected to dial 00 and the UK country code—44—before dialing the number. Leaving it out when dialing the chat-line numbers, which all began with 098, routed the calls to Westport, which uses the prefix 098. Babestation apologized for the inconvenience and changed all of its chat-line numbers so that they didn’t begin with 098. They also sent three Babestation models to Westport to apologize to the locals in person. “Anyone calling the UK from the Republic of Ireland should always use the prefix 00 44,” said a spokesperson for ComReg, the agency that regulates telephone service in Ireland.
We can(’t) work it out: During the Beatles’ final year, John Lennon wanted to replace George Harrison with Eric Clapton.
CALL: In January 2017, Bub and Pop’s Deli in Washington, DC, got a call from someone who was angry that Donald Trump was the new president. Not surprising, considering that Bub and Pop’s is just blocks away from the White House. But when more than a hundred people called the deli with similar complaints, they knew they had a problem.
WRONG NUMBER: The deli’s phone number, it turns out, is just one digit different from the White House public comment line—the White House number has a 6, and the deli’s number has a 7. When someone tweeted out Bub and Pop’s number on Twitter, it was most likely a typo, but the calls came pouring in. According to employees of the deli, many callers “continue to rant about Trump even after being told they have the wrong number.”
Callers “continue to rant about Trump even after being told they have the wrong number.”
CALL: Someone called the Donald E. Schick Elementary School in Montoursville, Pennsylvania, in October 2017, and left the following message: ‘If you don’t stop calling this number, I’m going to find out what your [expletive] address is and believe me, three sticks of dynamite will get rid of you and all your [expletive].” School officials decided not to evacuate the campus, but they did notify the police, who remained at the school until the end of the day.
WRONG NUMBER: The call was traced to 81-year-old Lawrence Stabler, who was arrested and charged with threatening to blow up the school. Stabler, a retired college professor, says it’s all a misunderstanding. He was trying to intimidate a crank caller who had been calling him. “I have received a number of harassing telephone calls, whole bunch of calls, silence, deep breathing,” he explained in court. His explanation didn’t get him very far, though. At last report he was lodged in jail on a $25,000 bond and charged with “threatening to use weapons of mass destruction, terroristic threats, disorderly conduct and harassment.”
CALL: On Christmas Eve 2015, Betty Barker, a 79-year-old grandmother who lives in West Sussex, England, received an odd call. There was a long pause, and then a man asked, “Hello, is this planet Earth?” “I thought it was somebody asking if it was a nightclub. I just said ‘no’ and put the phone down,” Barker told the Daily Telegraph.
Say “cheese” in other languages: froma
ge (French), ost (Swedish), chizu (Japanese).
WRONG NUMBER: Moments later Tim Peake, a British astronaut, tweeted a message to Earth from aboard the International Space Station. “I’d like to apologize to the lady I just called by mistake saying ‘Hello, is this planet Earth?’—not a prank call… just a wrong number!” Peake says he was trying to call his own family, who also live in West Sussex, but inadvertently dialed the Barker house instead. “They didn’t know who I was. I blame it on my Excel spreadsheet. It had a rounding error. That’s my story, anyway,” he says.
CALL: In July 2017, a West Virginia man named Shannon Barbour was awakened by an early morning call asking him if his heifer was still for sale. Barbour, 19, did not have a heifer for sale. “I don’t know what a heifer is,” he said before hanging up the phone. (It’s a young female cow that has not borne a calf.) For the rest the day Barbour was besieged by similar calls and texts asking if his heifer was for sale.
WRONG NUMBER: Barbour found out that someone with a heifer for sale on Craigslist had posted his cell phone as the contact number with the online ad. He received more than a hundred calls and texts before the ad was taken down, and responded to many of the inquires with silly answers. “Too late, just had steak for breakfast,” he replied to one text; “It has been put down :(,” he told another. When he posted the silliest exchanges on Twitter they were re-tweeted more than 77,000 times and received 258,000 likes, earning him his 15 minutes of internet fame. Not that it mattered: “This has been the worst morning of my life,” he complained in one of his tweets. Adding insult to injury: the heifer was offered for sale for just $50, much less than the actual value of a heifer, leading Barbour to suspect that the ad may have been a prank placed by his friends.
Uncle John's Actual and Factual Bathroom Reader Page 49
