Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader
Page 14
STINKOR. Introduced into the He-Man universe in 1985, this humanoid-skunk action figure was designed to smell bad (he attacks his foes with foul smells). Though they were made more than 20 years ago, the original Stinkors still stink. Why? When making the molds, the manufacturers added a strong, long-lasting, musky fragrance called patchouli oil, popular with hippies of the 1960s and ’70s (and believed to be an effective insect repellent).
THE SPONGEBOB RECTAL THERMOMETER. One end is shaped like the cartoon character, and the other end…isn’t. It’s designed to add a little fun to an otherwise not-fun activity. It even plays the SpongeBob SquarePants theme song.
BABY ALIVE LEARNS TO POTTY. Your toilet-training toddler feeds this animatronic baby doll “green beans,” “banana chunks,” and “juice.” But then Baby Alive must get to her “potty” fast, or she’ll have an “accident” (really) and announce: “I made a stinky!” (A warning on the box reads: “May stain some surfaces.”)
WATER WORDS
What’s the difference between a lake and a pond? You may be surprised.
Channel: a narrow body of water that connects two other, larger water- ways. Example: The English Channel connects the North Sea to the Atlantic Ocean.
Gully: an indentation in the land, such as a valley or ravine, worn down by thousands of of flowing water. They often serve as natural drainage after heavy rains.
Arroyo: a gully that flows with water only during the rainy season. Otherwise, it’s dry, and called a gulch.
Inlet: a narrow water passage between two pieces of land.
Sound: a wide inlet from a sea or ocean that runs parallel to a coastline.
Fjord: an inlet (or sound) bordered by tall, steep cliffs.
Bay: a body of water that is surrounded mostly by land and leads out into another, larger body of water.
Cove: a horseshoe-shaped bay.
Estuary: the place where river flows into an ocean.
Lakes and Ponds: Standing bodies of water that feed rivers and creeks, respectively. Lakes are bigger than ponds, but there’s no standard measure-ment for determining the size difference between the two. Many geographers set the area limit of a pond at about 12 acres; anything larger is con-yearssidered a lake. Depth is also a factor—ponds are usually shal-areaslow enough for light to penetrate to the bottom.
Sea: a large lake (fresh or saltwater) that connects to an ocean via an inlet or river.
Ocean: the single body of saltwater that encircles the continents. It is split up into five geographical divisions—the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, and Antarctic.
Gulf: a portion of ocean par-tially enclosed by land. For example, the Gulf of Mexico is part of the Atlantic Ocean, but it is surrounded by parts of Mexico and the U.S.
River: a wide, moving body of fresh (non-salty) water that a flows into an ocean or other large waterway.
DUMB JOCKS
Some are dumb, some are clever, and all are funny.
“I can play in the center, on the right, and occasionally on the left side.”
—David Beckham, when asked if he was “volatile”
“I have two weapons: my legs, my arm, and my brains.”
—Michael Vick
“We’ve got a good squad and we’re going to cut our cloth accordingly. But I think the cloth we’ve got could make some good soup, if that makes any sense.”
—Ian Holloway, soccer coach
“We’re starting to show spurts of consistency.”
—Jamaal Magloire, NBA player
“Don’t say I don’t get along with my teammates. I just don’t get along with some of the guys on the team.”
—Terrell Owens
“Chemistry is a class you take in high school or college, where you figure out two plus two is ten, or something.”
—Dennis Rodman
“Soccer is like chess but without dice.”—
Lukas Podolski, soccer player,
“It’s a humbling thing being humble.”
—Maurice Clarett, football player
“I found a delivery in my flaw.”
—Dan Quisenberry, pitcher
“I’m the Rocky of Philadelphia.”
—Bernard Hopkins, boxer
“I feel like I’m the best, but you’re not going to get me to say that.”
—Jerry Rice
“The pain is very painful.”
—Ze Maria, soccer player
“When a fielder gets the pitcher into trouble, the pitcher has to pitch himself out of the slump he isn’t in.”
—Casey Stengel
“Strength is my biggest weakness.”
—Mark Snow, college basketball player
FOUNDING FATHERS
You already know the names—here are the people behind them.
JOSEPH PILATES
In his youth, Pilates (pronounced pa-lah-dees) suffered from asthma, rickets, and arthritis. He wanted to be fit, so he took up a regimen of bodybuilding, gymnastics, yoga, calisthenics, and weight training. In 1912 the 32-year-old German moved to England, where he worked as a physical trainer for Scotland Yard, and later refined his exercise program, calling it Contrology. He focused on strengthening the “core muscles,” mostly the abdomen, through slowly stretching and holding muscles in place while sitting on a mat. Pilates realized that most people weren’t strong enough to do that, so he developed machines that worked the core muscles through resistance training—weights on pull cords. He opened a studio in New York City in 1925, attracting famous dancers such as George Balanchine and Martha Graham as clients. When Pilates died at age 87 in 1967, a handful of his students opened their own studios specializing in what they now called pilates. Ron Fletcher’s Beverly Hills studio led directly to the current popularity of pilates. Today, more than 10 million Americans are adherents.
ROBERT MONDAVI
After graduating from Stanford University in 1937, Mondavi settled in the nearby Napa Valley. Convinced that the region was the future of winemaking, he talked his father, who owned a fruit packing company, into buying the struggling Charles Krug Winery. Mondavi turned it around and ran it at a profit for nearly 30 years. In 1965 he and his brother Peter got into an argument about the direction of the business. It escalated into a fist fight, and Robert was forced out of the company. So he started his own winery a few miles down the road in Oakville, California, where he created wines popular with average consumers and critics alike. As Mondavi’s winemaking empire grew, he introduced both high-end brands and affordable ones, such as Woodbridge. Other contributions: He introduced the concept of naming wines by their grape, such as Zinfandel or Sauvignon Blanc, into the United States, and he promoted the California wine industry, helping to turn it from a group of small businesses into a billion-dollar industry that could compete in quality with European winemakers…or even surpass them. In 1997 Grand European Jury Wine Tasting (the most prestigious wine contest in the world) a panel of judges blind-tasted 27 Chardonnays, most of them from France. The winner: Mondavi’s Chardonnay Reserve, the first American wine ever to win the Grand European.
AH BING
In his Milwaukie, Oregon, orchard, Seth Lewelling specialized in cross-breeding cherry trees. In 1875 he grafted branches from several different cherry trees onto a Black Republican cherry, one of the first dark cherry trees ever developed. (Today the Black Republican is used to flavor most black-cherry-flavored foods.) The resulting fruit was dark red, firm…and twice the size of regular cherries. He named the new fruit Bing cherries, after his orchard foreman Ah Bing, a Chinese laborer who’d cared for the new plants. When Lewelling exhibited Bing cherries in 1876 at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, they were so big that fairgoers thought they were crabapples. Lewelling made a fortune shipping Bings on ice via railroad to the East Coast, where they sold for 3 cents each—the equivalent of 60 cents today.
RUDOLPH HASS
In 1928 Whittier, California, mailman Rudolph Hass bought a dozen avocado-tree saplings and planted th
em in his backyard. He thought he was getting all Lyon trees, but one of them bore black, bumpy avocados, not the smooth, green fruit of the Lyon. Hass wanted to chop down the odd tree, but his children begged him not to—they thought the fruit was smoother and richer than the Lyon avocados. So Hass took out a patent on the plant in 1935 (and named it after himself). Then he hired a local nursery owner named Harold Brokaw to market it to grocers. It was an easy sell—the Hass tree yields more fruit than the Lyon, and does so year-round. Today, 80 percent of the seven billion pounds of avocados sold worldwide each year are Hass.
The best answer to anger is silence.—German proverb
A REAL-LIFE GHOST STORY, PART I
Are you scared of the dark? Do you sleep with the light on? Do you hear noises in
other parts of the house when you know you’re alone? You’re about to read a
ghostly tale with an incredible twist: It really happened!
DOCTOR WHO?
William Wilmer, an ophthalmologist who practiced in Washington, D.C. in the early 1900s, was one of the most distinguished eye doctors of his era. Among his patients were eight different presidents, from William McKinley to Franklin Roosevelt. He also treated Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator; Joseph Pulitzer, the New York newspaper tycoon and creator of the Pulitzer Prize; and countless other prominent Americans. But perhaps his most unusual claim to fame is the fact that in 1921 he managed to talk a prestigious medical journal, The American Journal of Ophthalmology, into printing a ghost story.
The story had been recounted to Dr. Wilmer by one of his patients, whom he identified only as “Mrs. H” to protect her privacy. The strange occurrences she and her family experienced began in 1912, shortly after she, her husband, and their children moved into a large, run-down old house that hadn’t been lived in for about a decade. The house didn’t have electricity—it was lit with gaslights and heated by an old furnace in the basement.
THIS OLD HOUSE
The gloomy old house soon began to exert a strange influence on its new occupants, as Mrs. H recounted in Dr. Wilmer’s article. “Mr. H and I had not been in the house more than a couple of days when we felt very depressed,” she wrote. The floors were covered with thick carpets that absorbed all sound of the family’s servants going about their tasks, and Mrs. H found the quiet a little overpowering. But even more disturbing than the silent footsteps of the people who were in the house were the noisy footsteps of people who weren’t there…or at least could not be seen with the naked eye. “One morning, I heard footsteps in the room over my head,” Mrs. H recounted. “I hurried up the stairs. To my surprise, the room was empty. I passed into the next room, and then into all the rooms on that floor, and then to the floor above, to find that I was the only person in that part of the house.”
YOU ARE BEING WATCHED
The house’s strange power seemed to grow over time. Soon the entire family began to suffer from headaches and exhaustion, yet whenever family members took to their beds to regain their strength, the headaches and fatigue only grew worse. The children were affected most of all: They were pale much of the time, often felt tired and ill, and had poor appetites.
No part of the house offered refuge: When Mr. H sat in the dining room, he was so overcome by the sense of an unseen presence standing right behind him that he began turning his chair to face the hallway so that he would see anyone who tried to sneak up. The children developed an aversion to spending time in their playroom on the top floor of the house, Mrs. H. remembered: “In spite of their rocking horse and toys being there, they begged to be allowed to play in their bedroom.”
RING RING
By December Mrs. H and the children were so worn out that she decided to take them on a short vacation while Mr. H remained at home. The break worked wonders for Mrs. H and the kids, but poor Mr. H was more tormented than ever. Strange and unexplained noises disturbed his sleep at night, making it impossible for him to get any rest. “Several times he was awakened by a bell ringing, but on going to the front and back doors, he could find no one at either,” Mrs. H said. “Also several times he was awakened by what he thought was the telephone bell. One night he was roused by hearing the fire department dashing up the street and coming to a stop nearby. He hurried to the window and found the street quiet and deserted.”
In early January, Mrs. H and the children returned home, but no sooner were they back inside the house that the trouble started again. The children came down with colds—which normally would necessitate remaining indoors, especially in the winter. But their symptoms seem to lessen when they went outside, only to recur when they came back into the house. Soon Mrs. H, like her husband, was awakened at night by strange noises—the sounds of doors slamming, pots and pans being thrown around the kitchen, and heavy footsteps climbing a staircase behind the wall in her bedroom. “There was no staircase behind the wall,” Mrs. H. wrote.
The live-in servants weren’t spared the house’s torments, either. During the day they had the feeling that someone—or something—was following right behind them, on the verge of reaching out and grabbing them as they went about their duties. At night they, too, were awakened by strange noises: tinkling and rattling china, heavy footsteps walking on the upstairs floors, and furniture being dragged across floors and shoved up against doors.
Then came the apparitions.
Who (or what) was responsible for the H family’s horror? Turn to page 354 to find out.
IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED, TRY TRY TRY TRY TRY TRY TRY TRY TRY TRY TRY TRY TRY TRY TRY TRY TRY TRY TRY TRY TRY TRY TRY TRY TRY AGAIN
All that Ramchandra Katuwal wanted was a happy marriage. But his first wife, whom he married in 1985, left him for another man. So Katuwal, whose job is to carry heavy loads for people across the steep Nepalese terrain, found another woman and married her. “My second wife also ran away,” he said, “and the third one, too.” He tried again…and again…and again…and by 2001 he’d been married 24 times in 16 years, give or take a wife or two (Katuwal says he’s lost count). He believes that they all left him because he’s poor and his job pays very little, so he finally gave up and declared that he would never marry again. But he couldn’t even keep that vow, and soon after married a 23-year-old woman named Sharada—her first, his 25th. “A house is not a house without a wife!” said a proud Katuwal.
RICE IS NICE
More than three billion people eat it every day.
RICE TO SEE YOU
What is rice? It’s a grain, technically a member of the grass family, of which there are more than 100,000 varieties. It’s also the staple food for about half of the world’s population.
Carbon-dated evidence shows that a wild variety of rice was being cultivated on the banks of the Yangtze River in China as far back as 8,000—and possibly even 11,000—years ago. Around the year 5,000 BCE, as settled communities began to appear in Asia, rice was developed into a domestic crop. Scientists think that rice cultivation occurred simultaneously across various parts of central and southeast Asia, eventually extending to China, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, India, Korea, Japan, Myanmar, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Indonesia.
By 800 BCE, rice was grown in the Middle East, by 700 CE in Spain, and by the 1400s in Italy and France. In 1694 rice was successfully cultivated in the New World in what is now South Carolina, a few decades after the Spaniards brought it to South America. Today it’s grown in 110 countries, on every continent except Antarctica, in a variety of climates and conditions.
HOW DOES RICE GROW?
Rice can be grown on dry uplands, on land fed only by rainfall, or in flood-prone fields of deep water, but 75 percent of the world’s rice is grown in paddies—level land covered with a shallow layer of water. In most of Asia, where farming is generally not mechanized, it’s a labor-intensive crop cultivated by hand. The seeds are germinated, and 30 to 50 days later the seedlings are transplanted—one at a time—into the paddies. Weeds are pulled by hand; fertilizer is spread by hand. Aft
er three more months, the rice is mature, and the fields are drained to let the ground dry out before the grain is harvested (by hand). The grasslike stalks are cut and then threshed to separate the grains from the stalks, and the grains are dried. Each dry grain is still covered with a hard husk that protects the kernel inside; these grains are called “paddy rice” or “rough rice.” In the final step of the harvesting process, the paddy rice is milled to remove the husks.
KNOW YOUR RICE
• Brown rice. Any variety of rice can be “brown,” because brown rice is simply rice with only the outer husk removed. It’s more nutritious than white rice because it still has the bran layers that contain minerals and vitamins, especially the B-complex vitamins, but very little brown rice is eaten worldwide. Brown rice is perishable because of the high oil content in the bran and the germ. Maximum shelf life: only about six months.