Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into History

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  Chinese Technology

  However, among other things the Chinese invented:

  Gunpowder and guns

  Magnetic compass

  Printing

  Earthquake detector

  Fan

  Fireworks

  Football

  Harnessing animals

  Kites

  World’s first robot

  Wheelbarrow

  Cast-iron ploughs

  Spaghetti

  Rudder

  A ziggurat tower called Etemenanki may have inspired the Tower of Babel story.

  THE REAL LEGACY OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

  * * *

  Don’t read this if you want to go on thinking of Columbus as some big hero.

  Christopher Columbus’s real legacy isn’t Columbus Day. It isn’t even the wonderful city of Columbus, Ohio. No. In discovering a New World, Christopher Columbus sounded the death knell for an old one. Here’s what they left out of those elementary school history lessons.

  OLD WORLD MEETS NEW

  The Arawak people of the Bahama Islands were minding their own business on October 12, 1492, when a big strange-looking boat approached one of their idyllic beaches. The men who got off the boat were impressive: They looked like gods with their shiny metal clothing and white skins. And even though the leader spoke harshly and pulled out a dangerous-looking long metal thing, the Arawak went out of their way to treat their visitors with kindness.

  They presented the strangers with parrots, balls of cotton, spears, and lots of other expressions of good will. Their captain, Christopher Columbus, was quick to take note of this extraordinary kindness. After recording in his log how generous the natives were, he went on to say, “With 50 men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

  MAN WITH A MISSION

  Columbus was looking for gold. So when he noticed that most of the natives wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears, he took some of them by force (the natives, not the ornaments) and brought them to his ship. He demanded to be led to the gold. The Arawak led him to Hispaniola, where he left 39 crew members who were supposed find the gold. Then he took more Indian prisoners and returned to Spain to report to Ferdinand and Isabella that he had reached Asia (what a dummy) where he’d found “great mines of gold and other metals.”

  To free their emperor, the Incas filled a 23 x 16 room with nine feet of gold.

  WRONG, WRONG, WRONG

  He was wrong, of course, on all counts. But his report was encouraging enough to get a second expedition underway–this time with 17 ships and more than 1,200 men. The avowed intention of this voyage was to get as many slaves and as much gold as humanly possible.

  SERVES THEM RIGHT

  On reaching Hispaniola, Columbus learned that his 39 crewmen had been killed by the natives after taking women and children as slaves for sex and labor. Columbus was further incensed when he found that there was very little gold here. Knowing that he had to show some dividend for the expensive expedition, he sent his men out on successive waves of slave raids. Five hundred natives were carried back to Spain; 200 died en route.

  OOH, HE’S A TOUGHIE

  But Columbus was still intent on finding that gold. He had to repay his investors. He returned to South America and, on the island of Haiti, ordered all persons 14 years of age or older to collect a minimum quantity of gold every three months. Those who failed had their hands cut off and bled to death. This, despite the fact that the only gold around was in the form of dust on the edges of streams.

  I’LL TAKE CASSAVA

  The natives who tried to escape were hunted down with dogs and killed. Mass suicides took place across the islands; hundreds of natives took cassava poison rather than fall into Spanish hands (or in Columbus’s case, Italian). The Arawak, who Columbus had first encountered, killed their infants to spare them from the inhumanity of the Spaniards.

  GOODBYE, OLD WORLD

  In unwittingly discovering a New World, Columbus thus also sealed the fate of an old one. For thousands of years the natives of the Americas had lived in relative peace and harmony. The real legacy of Christopher Columbus is that he sounded the death knell for that way of life.

  The original Draconian, Draco of Athens, executed people for stealing cabbage.

  TIE ONE ON

  * * *

  Codpieces and drawstring pants come and go, but over the centuries, the necktie and its antecedents persist, hanging about a man’s neck like a noose done in a four-in-hand.

  The necktie has never been anything but a pointless strip of cloth, born to dangle and sway and wait for a use. Yank on one, you half expect a ticket to issue forth from the mouth of the wearer.

  VANITY, THY NAME IS LOUIS

  In fact, ties can be traced back, like so many pointless things, to the idle vanity of a king. And in this case, the king who knew more about idle vanity than any before or since: Louis XIV, the Sun King. Seems in 1660, Louis was reviewing a regiment of badass Croat soldiers, who wore brightly colored silk handkerchiefs around their necks. Why? Who knows? Maybe the Croats were worried they’d get separated at court and needed some conspicuous item of clothing to find each other later, like wayward second-graders on a field trip. Whatever the reason, Louis saw the regiment and their handkerchiefs, and just had to have one: a regiment of bad-asses, that is, not a handkerchief. He already had some of those.

  THE KING’S REGIMENT

  So he got one, because who was going to tell Louis no, and he called them the “Royal Cravattes” (“cravatte” derived from “Croat” in French) and gave them fancy handkerchiefs for their necks. That was that. The king had spoken. Everyone started wearing ties. If it happened today, the bad-ass Croats could probably sue for copyright infringement. But this was the 17th century. What were you gonna do!

  The St. Nicholas on whom Santa Claus is based was from modern-day Turkey.

  CARRIED TO EXTREMES

  Men got stupid with the cravats. By the early 1800s, cravats were stuffed around the neck as if the head were being surrounded by tissue for transport in a box. Some guys couldn’t move their necks at all; like whiplash victims or HR Pufnstuf, they had to rotate their whole bodies to look around. And some of these boys wore two cravats at the same time; one imagines they needed servants and a system of mirrors so they could navigate the street. There were a hundred different ways to tie a cravat, some of which could take hours. Perhaps for this reason, fiddling with someone’s cravat was a dueling offense.

  EVEN TIES CAN BE FASHION VICTIMS

  The best you can say about today’s iteration of the necktie is that at least it’s not aggressively stupid. One does not wear it wrapped around one’s jaw, or more than one at a time. Even the horrifyingly wide ties in the ‘70s had a rational basis for their lateral expansion—they were merely keeping pace with the expanding lapels of the time. Mocking a ‘70s tie is purely a case of blaming the victim. They didn’t want to go wide. They had no choice.

  YES, BUT WHAT DOES IT DO?

  Be that as it may, it still doesn’t take away from the fact that the tie does not now serve, nor has it ever served, any useful purpose. At least bell-bottoms and Nehru jackets kept your extremities warm. Tie manufacturers would dispute this assessment of their products’ usefulness, of course. No industry can be trusted to be an objective observer of its product’s place in the universe—particularly one that has a literal chokehold on men’s fashion.

  LIFE AND DEATH SITUATIONS

  Men simply do not realize that the tie is there at all their major life events. It’s there when you graduate from high school and college. It’s there at your wedding. It’s there at your children’s baptisms and bar mitzvahs. And when you die, they stick one on you and, like a pharaoh taking a prized but aggravating cat into the next world, you are both stuffed into the ground together. The only reason men aren’t born with ties is the grudging acknowledgment by the tie industry that looping the umbilicus into a Windsor knot around the neck of a fetus m
ight cause brain damage. Which would limit tie purchases later in life.

  THE LOYAL OPPOSITION SPEAKS

  Tie enthusiasts, the Quislings of men’s attire, point out that ties allow for some individuality in an otherwise regimented world of men’s business attire. But really, now. It’s not individuality ties provide, it’s the illusion thereof, and a poor one at that.

  The 1898 book Futility eerily presaged the 1912 sinking of the Titanic.

  AND IS SHUT UP

  Wear your Jerry Garcia tie all you want, you still have to file the same reports as Ted, three cubicles down, wearing his $6 polyester blend from Sears. A tie with Edvard Munch’s The Scream silk-screened upon its narrow width will not stop you from your dark suspicions that The New Guy makes twice what you do, with half the experience.

  And anyway, you wouldn’t wear a single one of those ties to a performance review, so what does that say. Tie enthusiasts also point out that ties accentuate a man’s verticality. Well, if you want to accentuate your verticality, go on a freakin’ diet, already.

  A RAY OF HOPE

  Men wear ties, because so far as they know, men have always worn ties; it’s what men do. If they knew that the tie got started as the passing fancy of the foppiest of the Great Kings of Europe, it probably wouldn’t change a thing; the dress code is always dictated from above. Will they ever stop wearing them? Probably not. The best we can hope for is that ties don’t start hampering neck movement again, and that if they do, we can somehow take out those tie wearers before they infect the rest of us. Their peripheral vision would be shot, you know. They would never see it coming.

  Codpieces

  The codpiece could be equated with the padded bra, what you see is not what you get. It started innocently enough. . .The codpiece began as a flat piece of material to cover the slit in men’s trousers and, therefore, the genitals. As jackets got shorter, the focus on the area between a man’s legs grew. Now additional protection was required to protect the “unmentionables.” The codpiece grew to do double-duty as a place for men to store “other” valuables. Once breeches became wider, the need for codpieces decreased. The extra “room” in trousers developed into pockets. Although codpieces were no longer a fashion statement, men still needed a place for their valuables. Pockets met this need.

  Confucius was appointed Minister of Crime and wiped out crime in the Lu Province.

  WHEREWORDS: A QUIZ (Countries of the World)

  * * *

  Everybody comes from somewhere, but how did these somewheres get their names? Choose the explanation you like best, then check it with the correct answer on the next page.

  1. THE PHILIPPINES:

  a. Tagalog word “filip’pi,” for “erupting volcanoes.”

  b. Magellan named in honor of King Philip II of Spain in 1542.

  c. The New Testament book of the Bible, Philippians.

  2. BOLIVIA:

  a. South American revolutionary leader, Simon Bolivar.

  b. Bolvana, mythical Inca paradise.

  c. Spanish “bolina” for “shining” and “via” meaning “way.”

  3. INDIA:

  a. The word “indian,” for the country’s highest caste or class.

  b. Feminine form of “Indio,” one of the twin gods of fertility.

  c. The Indus River, from the Sanskrit “sindhuh,” for “river.”

  4. ARGENTINA:

  a. “The Argenis,” a poem by Brazilian poet Gabriel Marquez.

  b. The Latin word “argentum,” meaning “silver.”

  c. Spanish explorer Juan Argento, who died a hero there

  5. PORTUGAL

  a. Latin “portus cale”; it was a Roman “port.”

  b. Considered the front “porch” to the “house” of Spain.

  c. Legendary Spanish chieftain P’Ortuga whose troops rid Lisbon of the Huns.

  6. CHINA:

  a. Genghis Khan named it for his wife “Ka’china.”

  b. The Chin (Qin) dynasty that unified China.

  c. From Persian word “chini,” for the “porcelain” made there.

  7. FRANCE

  a. The early German invaders, the Franks.

  b. Its earliest ruler, Emperor Francis I.

  c. Named for Pope Franciscus.

  8. AMERICA:

  a. From Latin “americ” for “abundant.”

  b. “Mer ika,” the Algonquian name for “tall boat.”

  c. Named after early Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci.

  There was a New Australia in Paraguay in the 1890s.

  1-b. Magellan named the Philippines for the king of Spain. The 7,100 islands comprising the Malay Archipelago were Spanish colonies from 1521 to 1898.

  2-a. The popular Venezuelan-born soldier and statesman known as “the Liberator” led Peruvian nationals in their fight for independence in the 18th century.

  3-c. Some of the earliest humans on planet Earth lived along the banks of the Indus River in northwest India.

  4-b. The Spanish claimed the region in the 1500s and named it, in Latin, for the tons of silver that washed out of underground deposits and were carried downstream by the Silver River (“Rio Plata” in Spanish).

  5-a. Romans conquered the native Celts here around 200 B.C. The name stuck.

  6-b. The Chin (Qin) dynasty ruled China from about 221 to 205 B.C. The name stuck.

  7-a. Gaul was part of the Roman Empire (they called it “Gallia,”) when the Germanic tribe, the Franks, conquered the area in 486.

  8-c. A German cartographer, Martin Waldseemuller, who literally put America on the map, named the area for Vespucci, who argued that—despite what everyone else thought at the time—the American continent was not part of the Indies. Way to go, Amerigo!

  “The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.”

  O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

  “National injustice is the surest road to national downfall.” William Gladstone

  The Carib Indians, for whom the Caribbean is named, now survive mostly in Dominica.

  MOST LOPSIDED WAR: THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR

  * * *

  Hey, they started it.

  Actually, they did. A little-known fact about the Spanish-American War (as if any fact involving this war is perennially on the lips of Americans) is that Spain declared war on the United States first, on April 24, 1898. The United States, furious at being caught napping on this issue, declared war the very next day—and then backdated the declaration to April 21. Take that, you lousy Spaniards!

  ADIOS, ARMADA!

  This Battle of the Declarations was, alas for our sadly incompetent Iberian antagonists, the very last thing that the Spaniards won. A week later, George Dewey and a fleet of American battleships steamed into Manila’s harbor and sank the entire Spanish Pacific fleet like they were shooting fish in a barrel. Which, considering the Spanish fleet was anchored and silent, was exactly what they were doing.

  BULLY FOR YOU, T.R.!

  A couple of months after that, Americans landed in Cuba. Teddy Roosevelt had resigned as Secretary of the Navy to lead his “Rough Riders” into battle—proof that downward mobility isn’t always a bad thing for one’s career. The Rough Riders forced the Spanish fleet into a retreat that found it beached and burning up and down the Cuban shore line. The whole war took less than four months, and at the end of it, America got Guam and Puerto Rico for free, and bought the Philippines at a cut-rate price. Oh, and in all the hubbub, we somehow managed to annex Hawaii. Apparently, some folks there are still sore about that.

  The Parthenon was nearly destroyed in 1687, when it was used to store gunpowder.

  YOU BIG BULLIES!

  Spain never had a chance. Oh, sure, Spain could kick around Cuba, whose bid for independence, and Spain’s brutal repression thereof, had started this whole sorry shebang. But like the third-grade bully who terrorizes the kindergartners but cowers under the pummeling fists of the sixth-grade bully, Spain got spanked by superior firepower—and
a country that was itchin’ to use it. Yet another little-known fact about this war was that for years, the United States had a contingency plan to kick Spanish butt up and down the entire Western Hemisphere. It was called the “Kimball Plan”—the national equivalent of the sixth-grader waiting for that third-grader to rough up a younger kid, so he’d have a legitimate excuse to beat him up and take his lunch money.

  WHY IT WAS THE BEST

  The Spanish-American War was America’s debut out of the ranks of the second-raters. All our other wars up to that point (those couple of wars with Britain, that nasty intramural squabble between the states) had been fairly even slug-fests. Even that war with Mexico wasn’t entirely a blowout, although giving up two-thirds of their territory had to hurt ‘em.