Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  Gyrojet rocket rounds, by comparison, were not filled with loose gunpowder. They contained a carefully shaped piece of solid rocket fuel. The rocket fuel was ignited by a primer, just like ordinary ammunition, but that’s where the similarity ended. The rocket fuel burned for a short period of time instead of exploding in an instant, and expelled the resulting hot gas through four tiny holes in the base of the rocket. These holes, which served the same purpose as rocket nozzles, were slightly angled so that the escaping gases would cause the rocket to spin rapidly enough to keep it on a straight course as it blasted out of the gun barrel.

  ROCKET SCIENCE

  So why even bother with rocket guns when ordinary handguns were perfectly good for the task? One of the limitations of a traditional handgun is that the bullet stops accelerating the instant it leaves the barrel, and loses speed and power from then on. Not so with the Gyrojet—each rocket burned for 1/10th of a second. That may not sound like much, but in that short time the rocket could travel a full 60 feet, gaining speed and power all the while. It was as if the gun barrel was 60 feet long instead of just a few inches. At a distance of 70 yards, a rocket round fired from a Gyrojet gun struck the target at greater speed and more than twice as much force as an ordinary .45 caliber bullet. Bonus: The Gyrojet could be fired underwater…or in outer space.

  THE GUN OF THE FUTURE

  The Gyrojet had plenty of other advantages, too. It takes a pretty big explosion of gunpowder to send an ordinary bullet on its way, so handguns have to be built out of very strong, very durable, and very heavy materials in order to contain those explosions. Since Gyrojet rocket fuel burned instead of exploding, and the burning did not need to be contained within the gun, the Gyrojet handgun could be built with almost any lightweight material, including aluminum and even plastic. And with no empty cartridges to expel from the gun after firing, Gyrojets were also mechanically simpler than most typical handguns, which further reduced their weight, complexity, and cost of manufacture.

  Another drawback of ordinary handguns is that they have a powerful “kick” or recoil when you shoot them—a by-product of the powerful explosion. The kick causes the gun to jerk sharply after each shot, and you have to re-aim the gun before you can fire again. With no explosion, the Gyrojet had almost no kick—you could fire one shot after another in rapid sequence, until all six of the rockets contained in the gun’s magazine were launched.

  AND NOW THE FINE PRINT

  So why didn’t the Gyrojet banish the ordinary handgun into oblivion like the musket and the blunderbuss before it? Because even though the Gyrojet offered the promise of a science-fiction weapon of the future, what it actually delivered was something more akin to a gun in a Saturday morning cartoon.

  Sure, the Gyrojet had a lot of power at a distance of 70 yards, but at point-blank range it was useless. The rocket had so little power before it got up to speed that if you shot it at someone standing right in front of you, there was a very good chance that the rocket would bounce right off their chest. And not that anyone was ever foolish enough to try it, but the Gyrojet was probably the first gun in history that really did allow you to defend yourself against it by sticking your finger in the barrel to block the rocket…just like cartoon characters do.

  MORE BAD NEWS

  From the prototype onward, poor design and poor quality control also meant that as many as 20 percent of the early rocket rounds had flaws. Some never ignited; others launched only after you cocked and fired the gun twice. If a rocket did fail to ignite on the second try, there was no way of telling whether it was genuinely dead…or a slow-burner that would suddenly ignite as you tried to remove it from the gun. The company’s own literature advised Gyrojet owners to remove dud rockets from the gun only “after a 10-second waiting period” if it didn’t launch on the second attempt. Wait 10 seconds before clearing and reloading your weapon? In a combat situation? When other people are shooting at you?

  Even when the rocket round did ignite properly, there was no guarantee that it would even build up enough thrust to exit the barrel of the gun. Many rockets jammed in the barrel and flamed out. Of those that did manage to exit, some had flawed nozzles that caused them to travel in a circular, corkscrew path instead of flying straight to the target.

  WHAT A LOAD

  Any one of these flaws by itself could have meant the difference between life and death in a firefight. And the problem was made worse by the fact that the Gyrojet was both time-consuming and cumbersome to load. Most semiautomatic handguns have a clip that allows you to load eight or more bullets at the same time. Revolvers can be reloaded quickly using a device called a speed loader. The Gyrojet, on the other hand, required the user to feed individual bullets into the spring-loaded magazine one at a time, all the while taking care to keep a thumb pressed down on top of the inserted bullets. If the user’s thumb happened to slip, the spring popped the rockets up and out of the gun, almost like toast out of a toaster—another huge disadvantage in combat.

  Even the Gyrojet’s strongest selling points, its high speed and power at great distances, worked against it. The Gyrojet rockets were designed to exceed the speed of sound, but as an accelerating object approaches the speed of sound, there is a great deal of turbulence that can deflect it from its course. This often caused Gyrojet rockets to miss distant targets entirely. In other words, the gun was too weak to be effective at close range and too inaccurate to be effective at long range.

  THANKS, BUT…

  When the Gyrojet hit store shelves in the mid-1960s, gun owners who were used to the heft of ordinary handguns thought it felt (and looked) like a toy gun. That didn’t stop MB Associates from charging $100 for it—as much as an ordinary revolver. And the rockets themselves sold for about $1.35 apiece, far more than ordinary bullets. The Gyrojet quickly developed a reputation as a gun that everyone wanted to shoot, just out of curiosity…but nobody wanted to own. Collectors with money to burn bought them for their novelty value, but shooters never took them seriously, and by the early 1970s they were gone.

  If you were one of the few to buy a Gyrojet in the 1960s, you made a good investment: Today they range in value from $1,500 for the most common handgun models to $5,000 or more for the rarer carbine and rifle models. And if you still have some of the rockets lying around, think twice before you shoot them off—today those tiny $1.35 rockets are worth more than $100 each.

  GOODBYE, HOLLYWOOD

  Sometimes your job—no matter how successful you are or how fulfilling

  it once was—just doesn’t do it for you anymore and you’ve got to quit

  and do something else. It can happen to anyone, even actors.

  GRACE KELLY

  One of the most glamorous actresses of Hollywood’s Golden

  Age, Kelly was a movie star for just four years: from 1952 to 1956. In that time, she appeared in such classics as High Noon, Dial M For Murder, To Catch a Thief, High Society, and The Country Girl, for which she won an Oscar. But in 1956, she married Prince Rainier of Monaco, the tiny but wealthy principality in the South of France, and became Princess Grace. Rainier thought appearing in movies was beneath a princess, so Kelly gave up her acting career. She never left the limelight, however, and remained a tabloid fixture until her death in a car accident in 1982.

  KAL PENN

  Penn is best known for his starring roles in the two cult Harold and Kumar movies, and in 2007 he joined the cast of the popular TV medical drama House. But in an April 2009 episode, Penn’s character shocked audiences when he killed himself. The reason: Penn had decided to leave the show (and acting) for politics. He’d accepted a job in the Obama administration as associate director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, where he became the president’s liaison to Asian, Pacific Islander, and arts groups.

  GLENDA JACKSON

  This British actress was one of the most acclaimed movie stars of the late 1960s and early 1970s, starring in controversial films (Sunday Bloody Sunday), comedies (A Touch of Class),
and dramas (Women in Love). She even won two Oscars for best actress. In the late 1980s, Jackson became concerned about the direction in which conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher was taking the country. So in 1992, Jackson gave up acting and ran for a seat in the House of Commons…and won. In Parliament she focused on transportation issues, earning an appointment as junior minister of transportation in 1997. After unsuccessfully running for mayor of London in 2000, Jackson returned to the House of Commons, where she continues to serve as a member of Parliament.

  BOBBY SHERMAN

  Sherman became a teen idol with his role as an 1870s logger on the 1968–70 TV series Here Come the Brides. He parlayed the role into a successful singing career and earned six gold records for songs like “Easy Come, Easy Go” and “Little Woman.” But it was while filming an episode of the 1970s medical drama Emergency! in 1974 that Sherman realized what he really wanted to do: real-life emergency response. Since leaving acting, Sherman has been a volunteer Los Angeles police officer, a first-aid class instructor, a paramedic, and a deputy sheriff in San Bernardino County, California.

  ANDREA THOMPSON

  As a character actress, Thompson co-starred on several television dramas in the 1980s and 1990s, including Falcon Crest, Babylon 5, and JAG. In 1997 she landed a leading role as Detective Jill Kirk-endall on the hit series NYPD Blue. Then suddenly, at the end of her third season on the show in 2000, Thompson quit to follow a new career: TV journalism. And she did it the hard way, working her way up. She took a job as a reporter at a local Albuquerque, New Mexico, television station before moving on to CNN Headline News in 2001 and to Court TV in 2002.

  DOLORES HART

  Hart made her first film appearance in the 1956 Elvis Presley movie Loving You. It made her a star, and she appeared with Presley again the following year in King Creole. After starring in The Pleasure of His Company on Broadway in 1959, Hart returned to movies, making the teen hit Where the Boys Are, followed by Come Fly With Me. And that was it. In 1963, finding Hollywood “needlessly competitive and negative,” the 24-year-old Hart joined the Regina Laudis Abbey in Bethelehem, Connecticut, and became a nun. She eventually became the prioress (person in charge) of the convent. Bonus: Still a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Hart gets to vote for the Oscars each year. (She is the only member of AMPAS who is a nun.)

  WORST TEAMS EVER

  On page 37, we told you about some of the most dominating performances in sports history. Here���s the other side of the story: the teams who suffered the most miserable seasons in the history of their sports.

  WORST HOCKEY TEAM

  It’s not just, “Who had the most losses in a single season?” National Hockey League standings are calculated by points—two for a win, one for a tie, zero for a loss. So the season’s worst team is the one that racks up the fewest points. The all-time worst was the 1974–75 Washington Capitals, with 21 points. Their record: 8 wins, 5 ties, and 67 losses. Only once in NHL history has another team come close: the 1980–81 Winnipeg Jets, who won 9 games and lost 57 (but racked up a relatively impressive 14 ties).

  WORST FOOTBALL TEAM

  In the 1970s, the NFL played a 14-game season. In 1976, its first year in existence, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers went 0-14 and became the first team ever to lose every game of the season. The next season, they weren’t much better at 2–12. The following year the NFL went to a 16-game schedule, and it took 30 more years for a team to lose every single one of them: the Detroit Lions, who achieved a “perfect” 0–16 record in 2008.

  WORST BASKETBALL TEAM

  Only once in a full NBA season has a team won fewer than 10 games—the 1972–73 Philadelphia 76ers, who finished the season with a 9–73 record. That dismal year included three of the longest losing streaks in NBA history. The Sixers opened the year with a 14-game losing streak, had a 20-game losing streak midseason (a record at the time), and ended the season by losing 13 consecutive games.

  WORST COLLEGE FOOTBALL TEAM

  Prairie View A&M University’s football team, the Panthers, won five national titles in the 1950s and ’60s. But between 1990 and ’98, they lost 80 straight games, the worst losing streak ever for a college team. And the worst year of the streak was 1991, in which the Panthers’ opponents scored an average of 56 points per game, while PVAMU scored 48 points…for the entire season. PVAMU did win the final game of the 1998 season, and the following season they doubled their wins—finishing with a record of 2-9.

  WORST MODERN BASEBALL TEAM

  The New York Mets joined the National League in 1962. While first-year teams normally don’t do well, the rookie Mets set a new standard: 40–122. They finished more than 60 games behind the pennant-winning San Francisco Giants. The record was nearly toppled in 2003 when the Detroit Tigers amassed a 43–119 record.

  WORST COLLEGE BASKETBALL TEAM

  Generally speaking, the more academically prestigious a college is, the worse its sports teams are. (Alumni contributions go to research labs, not football arenas.) Case in point: the well-funded CalTech (California Institute of Technology). The CalTech Beavers men’s basketball team plays in the NCAA’s Division III, and over 11 years from 1996 to 2007, they didn’t win a single game. That’s a 207-game losing streak, the longest in North American history in any sport, collegiate or otherwise.

  WORST OVERALL PRO SPORTS TEAM

  Comparing every NFL, NHL, NBA, and MLB team, the one with the worst overall lifetime record is the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers. Including their previous incarnations as the Buffalo Braves (1970–78) and the San Diego Clippers (1978–84), there are only 3 seasons out of 40 in which they have won more games than they lost. The Clippers’ all-time record: 1,146 wins and 2,020 losses, for a won-lost percentage of .362. No other pro team even dips below .400.

  Luck never gives; it only lends.

  —Swedish proverb

  MUSHROOM READER

  The study of mushrooms is called mycology. Here’s more mushy trivia.

  • Mushrooms reproduce by launching microscopic “spores”—airborne seedlike structures—into the air. There are probably 10,000 spores in the air around you right now, many of which will land in wet dirt and grow into mushrooms.

  • Mushrooms eat by extending tiny tubes called hyphae into their food (like dead wood). This injects an acid into the food that dissolves it into a soup, which then travels back up the hyphae to the mushroom.

  • 90% of mushrooms purchased in the U.S. are white, or “button,” mushrooms.

  • Mushroom Capital of the World: Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Farms and businesses in and around the town produce half of all American mushrooms.

  • September is National Mushroom Month.

  • Every year about 40 people in the United States die from eating wild mushrooms they didn’t think were poisonous.

  • MSG, the flavor-enhancing chemical often added to Chinese food, is a synthetic form of glutamic acid, found naturally in mushrooms.

  • Of the 10,000 known species of mushrooms, only 250 are edible.

  • Wild mushrooms were eaten in ancient Egypt and ancient Rome, but mushrooms weren’t cultivated until the 1600s, in France. Mushrooms weren’t cultivated in the United States until around 1890.

  • Most expensive mushroom: truffles—they cost hundreds of dollars per pound. A fungus of oak and hazel trees, they grow only underground. Truffle hunters have to use trained pigs or dogs, usually Dachshunds, to sniff them out. Pigs, however, tend to eat the truffles when they find them.

  • Murder by mushroom: Czar Alexander I of Russia, King Charles V of France, and Pope Clement VII were all killed when they ate poison mushrooms.

  YOU CALL THAT ART?

  If dogs can play poker, then why can’t trees paint pictures?

  ARTIST: Michael Fernandes

  THIS IS ART? Fernandes placed a banana on the windowsill of an art gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and titled it Banana. Each night during July 2008, Fernandes replaced the banana w
ith a slightly greener one to represent the “reversing of the aging process.” Two collectors put holds on the work. “You do realize it’s a banana, don’t you?” gallery owner Victoria Page asked them. Instead of actual fruit, however, the winning bidder received photographs of the bananas. Price: $2,500.

  ARTIST’S STATEMENT: “Like bananas, we humans are also temporal, but we live as if we are not.”

  ARTIST: Tim Knowles

  THIS IS ART? Although Knowles props up the canvas and attaches the pens to the tips of the branches, it’s the willow trees that do the work…and the oaks, sycamores, and so on. Guided by the wind, the trees paint delicate patterns that, to the unsophisticated eye, look like random scribbles on a canvas. The British artist has sold his works for thousands of dollars in galleries all over the world.