Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader
Page 39
AROUND THE WORLD
• 60% of Australians say they feel perfectly comfortable “relieving themselves in front of their partners,” according to a 2007 survey conducted by the New Zealand Herald.
• Only 20% of Canadians say they’d fish their cell phone out of the toilet if it fell in, according to a 2007 survey by Microsoft.
• Nearly 1 in 3 South Koreans polled in 2008 say they have a TV in the bathroom; 65% say they talk on the phone. (No word on how many watch TV while talking on the phone.)
• Top five reasons British women give for ending relationships with men, according to a survey by the dating Web site Cupid-bay. com: 1) He doesn’t wash his hands after using the bathroom; 2) He farts too much; 3) His feet smell; 4) He leaves toothpaste in the sink; 5) He doesn’t clean the bathtub after using it.
• Top five reasons British men give for ending relationships with women: 1) Her friends are annoying; 2) She talks too much; 3) She shops too much; 4) Her new (short) haircut looks terrible; 5) She hates pets/would never buy his mates a round.
ROCK ’N’ ROLL DIARY
Gossip and trivia from pop music.
RADIOHEAD. Bucking the tradition of rock groups trashing hotel rooms, Radiohead actually does the opposite. Not only do they clean up their own rooms, but they once snuck back into a hotel after checking out to clean up a room that their opening band had trashed.
THE WHITE STRIPES. Before he was a rock star, Jack White repaired furniture. At 21 years old, he even started his own business, called Third Man Upholstery. (His slogan: “Your furniture’s not dead.”) Although White enjoyed the work, he wasn’t into the business aspect of it, which began to suffer when his clients stopped taking him seriously. Why? According to White, he’d write poetry inside their furniture and write his invoices in crayon.
HAWKWIND. The ’70s progressive-rock band was playing an outdoor concert during a rainstorm. As part of their theatrical act, singer Nik Turner dressed up in a frog costume and ran onto the stage. On this particular day, however, the stage was muddy and Turner slid all the way across, over the edge, and into a muddy puddle on the ground (just like a real frog).
JOHN & YOKO. In 1969 Lennon and Ono released the avant-garde Wedding Album. Side 1 featured 22 minutes of the couple yelling each others’ names. Side 2 featured recordings of the couple on their honeymoon. According to the book Rock Bottom, “The album caused great hilarity when it was reviewed by a London journalist who was sent an advance copy, in the form of two single-sided discs. Sadly, he didn’t realize that some record companies distribute test pressings in this form, and commented that he preferred the two sides which contained an electronic hum.”
THE COMMODORES. How did they get their name? In 1968 keyboardist William King put on a blindfold, opened up a dictionary, and placed his finger on a random word. “We lucked out,” King recalled. “We almost became the Commodes!”
CLASS ACTS
To balance out heavy classes like advanced calculus, medieval literature, and organic chemistry, many schools offer a few oddball courses like these.
Zombies in Popular Culture. “The history, significance, and representation of the zombie in horror and fantasy texts. Final projects foster thoughtful connections between students and the zombie.” (Columbia College, Chicago)
Whiteness: The Other Side of Racism. “While racism disadvantages people of color, it provides benefits to whites. By examining the other side of racism—whiteness—we can see the advantages in education, health care, and employment that white people continually accrue.” (Mount Holyoke College, MA)
Learning From YouTube. “What can YouTube teach us, and is this how, what, and all we’d like to learn?” (Pitzer College, CA)
Popular “Logic” on TV Judge Shows. “The seminar will be concerned with identifying logical fallacies on Judge Judy and The People’s Court and why such strategies are so widespread. It is not a course about law or ‘legal reasoning.’” (U. C. Berkeley)
Tightwaddery. “On a theoretical level, we will consider how living frugally benefits your mind, your body, your relationships, your community, and the environment. On a practical level, we will sharpen haggling skills.” (Alfred University, NY)
The Science of Superheroes. “Have you ever wondered if Superman could really bend steel bars? Would a gamma ray accident turn you into the Hulk? In this seminar, we discuss the science (or lack of science) behind many famous superheroes.” (U. C. Irvine)
Far Side Entomology. “The course is designed to introduce you to the humanistic side of entomology by utilizing the humor of Gary Larson as paradigms of human-insect interactions. The ‘cartoon’ format normally provides an anthropomorphic view of insects. This can be an incredibly rich venue as an introduction to the more serious aspects of insects and their relevance to human activities.” (Oregon State University)
THE CORVETTE HITS THE ROAD
On page 136, we told you how Chevrolet got the Corvette and how the
Corvette got its name. Here’s how the first models made it into the hands of
consumers…and how they very nearly became the last Corvettes ever built.
THE PARTS BIN SPECIAL
The full-size clay model of the Corvette was, in terms of style, ahead of its time and a sight to behold. But it was still a two-seater sports car, and there was a limit to the amount of money GM was willing to spend on a class of vehicle that made up less than a quarter of one percent of all auto sales in the United States. Bob McLean had the unenviable task of building the Corvette using as many existing Chevrolet parts as possible—in other words, he had to build a sports car out of non-sports-car parts. Using preexisting parts did, however, offer one advantage: Chevy could bring the car to market much more quickly than if it had been engineered from scratch.
Harley Earl had a lot of muscle at GM, but even he couldn’t pry a V-8 out of Cadillac, Buick, or Oldsmobile, so jealously did the executives of those higher-end divisions guard their turf. The Corvette would have to settle for Chevrolet’s standard six-cylinder engine, the 150-horsepower Blue Flame, also known as the “Stovebolt Six.”
The Corvette was a very low car for its day, with the roofline a good foot lower than that of other cars. This made it too low to use Chevy’s three-speed manual transmission, so the two-speed Powerglide automatic transmission was used instead. They used standard Chevrolet drum brakes and suspension, and a chassis that had been modified from an ordinary sedan. Power steering was out—instead, the Corvette got a large, 17” steering wheel that was easy to turn at slow speeds.
BELLE OF THE BALL
In those days, GM previewed its designs for new cars in a traveling car show called Motorama. Before a new model was put into production, a single concept car was built by hand and displayed at the show. Then, if the car was well received by the public, GM would gear up to manufacture it for sale. To save time and money, the body panels of the hand-built Corvette show car were made of fiberglass—literally plastic reinforced with glass fibers—instead of steel.
READY OR NOT
Chevrolet had a sense that the Corvette would be a hit when it made its debut at Motorama in January 1953, but the public reaction to the show car surpassed even their expectations. When was the last time you wrote a letter to an auto company? A complimentary letter? More than 7,000 people who saw the Corvette at Motorama wrote Chevrolet to tell the company that they would buy a Corvette if the company ever offered them for sale—and this was at a time when the entire U.S. market for sports cars was just over 11,000 cars a year. In fact, the response was so enthusiastic that Chevrolet rushed the Corvette into production to ensure that at least a few hundred of the cars would make it onto showroom floors before the year was out.
Initially the plan had been to manufacture the cars’ body panels out of steel, not fiberglass, just like every other car made by the big domestic automakers in the 1950s. But supply disruptions caused by the Korean War prompted GM to gamble on fiberglass and begin manufacturing what woul
d become the first-ever high-volume, mass-produced car with an all-fiberglass body.
START YOUR ENGINES
Three hundred cars were manufactured for the 1953 model year. Because the fiberglass body panels proved to be so different from the steel the autoworkers were accustomed to, all 300 had to be assembled by hand, just like the Motorama show car. And like the Motorama car, they were beautiful—bright red interiors, bodies painted “Polo White,” stylish wraparound windshields, headlights covered with chromed metal mesh to protect against stones, wide oval grilles with 13 chrome “teeth,” and a convertible top hidden beneath a rear deck lid so that the exquisite, flowing lines of the car weren’t disrupted by the clutter of the folded top.
For publicity purposes, Chevrolet set aside all 300 of the 1953 Corvettes for celebrities and VIPs. Ordinary customers would have to wait for the 1954 Corvette, now just a few months away and virtually unchanged from 1953, except that in addition to Polo White, it would be available in Pennant Blue and Sportsman Red.
If you were lucky enough to buy one of those ’53 Corvettes (sticker price: $3,498), and you managed to hold onto the car all these years, you must be very glad that you did. As the first of what would become the most successful line of sports cars in automotive history, those 1953 Corvettes have soared in value over the years. Today one in good condition can sell for more than $300,000 at auction—more than three times the price of a new Corvette. (The 1954s can fetch as much as $130,000.)
CORVETTE EMPTOR
Those 1953–54 Corvettes are still a joy to look at, and considering how much they’re worth, it’s hard to believe how disappointing they were to the thousands of fans who’d waited months to buy one. They were beautiful, to be sure—especially if you stood back far enough—but the cars had so many problems that almost everyone found something to hate about them, including the automotive press. “The amazing thing about the Corvette is that it comes so close to being a really interesting, worthwhile and genuine sports car, yet misses the mark almost entirely,” Road & Track magazine wrote.
Sports car enthusiasts were turned off by the underpowered six-cylinder engine, and they despised the automatic transmission, which not only offered poor performance but also denied roadster drivers their God-given right to a stick shift. The suspension that had been borrowed from an ordinary sedan felt like it had been borrowed from an ordinary sedan, and so did the brakes.
NO LOCKOUTS
Ordinary drivers who might not have been bothered by poor performance still found plenty about the 1953–54 Corvettes to scare them away from showrooms. For one thing, the cars were surprisingly lacking in standard amenities. No power steering? People were used to that. But no roll-down windows? The Corvette had “side curtains”—clumsy plastic panels that had to be removed and stored in bags in the trunk when not in use.
The 1953–54 Corvettes didn’t even have exterior door handles—you had to reach into the car and open the door using the inside handle. That was fine when the top was down, but when the top was up and the side curtains were in place, such as, say, during a rain storm—when you had to get into the car right now—getting the door open was a hassle. It also meant that the car couldn’t be locked securely if it was parked outside.
(FIBER)GLASS HOUSES
But the biggest problem of all was the fiberglass body panels—62 in all—that Chevrolet had gambled on without knowing what it was getting into. Fiberglass was a relatively new material in the 1950s and had never been used on a mass-produced car before. And as Chevy learned (to its dismay), fiberglass still had plenty of bugs that had to be worked out.
Chevrolet and its subcontractors had yet to figure out a way to manufacture the panels to a standard, uniform thickness. As a result, the pieces fit together terribly. The doors, hood, trunk, and rear deck lid could be out of alignment by as much as half an inch, and when they stuck out that far they not only spoiled the car’s flowing lines, they created huge gaps that were impossible to seal against rain and water on the road.
Painting the fiberglass was another nightmare. There were air bubbles in the fiberglass panels and in the material used to bond them together. When the cars were painted and placed in giant ovens to dry, the bubbles expanded and popped, ruining the paint job. Each popped bubble had to be sanded down and repainted, with no guarantee that the problem wouldn’t happen again. Some cars that were painted multiple times never did get a decent, unblemished coat of paint. After several failed attempts, they were just shipped to Chevy dealers the way they were.
THANKS…BUT NO THANKS
Soon word of mouth surrounding the Corvette was so bad that the company couldn’t even find 300 VIPs willing to buy one. Then, when the 1954s became available, so many buyers complained about the poor quality of their Corvettes that some Chevy dealers stopped taking orders for the cars. More than a thousand unsold 1954s piled up on the Corvette factory grounds, prompting Chevrolet to delay production on the 1955 Corvette until all the 1954s were sold. Result: Only 700 Corvettes were manufactured for the 1955 model year.
THUNDERSTRUCK
By now the Corvette was such a disaster that GM was seriously considering killing the whole program. So what saved it? The 1955 Thunderbird, Ford’s answer to the Corvette. Ford had been secretly working on its own two-seater convertible since 1952, when Franklin Q. Hershey, Ford’s head of styling, saw a picture of the Corvette show car at a dinner party and ordered his employees to come up with some kind of a response. Ford higher-ups killed the project in late 1952, but when the Corvette show car made its huge splash at Motorama in January 1953, the Thunderbird was revived—in other words, the car that saved the Corvette was itself saved by the Corvette.
Introduced to the public in September 1954, the 1955 T-Bird was everything the Corvette wasn’t: It was powerful, with a V-8 engine instead of an underpowered six-cylinder engine, and it offered buyers a choice of either a three-speed manual transmission or a three-speed automatic. It had roll-up windows, exterior door handles and locks, and it was made of steel, not fiberglass. It wasn’t really a sports car—Ford called it a “Personal Luxury Car”—but it was beautiful and a lot of fun to drive.
Ford set out to sell 10,000 T-Birds in 1955 and ended up selling more than 16,000. It probably would have sold a lot more than that, had the factory been able to build them fast enough.
CAN’T QUIT NOW
The Thunderbird proved that a two-seater convertible could be successful, if it was built correctly. Its strong sales were a big blow to Chevrolet’s pride. Now that the T-Bird was a success, dumping the Corvette was out of the question. Killing it would be an admission of defeat, an acknowledgement that Ford knew how to make a two-seater and GM, the world’s largest automaker, did not.
The Corvette was safe…for the time being.
Part III of the story is on page 429.
RUSSELL’S RUMINATIONS
Some cynical words of wisdom from Bertrand Russell (1872–1970),
a philosopher, mathematician, and Nobel Prize-winning author.
“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.”
“It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence to support this.”
“We still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man.”
“Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.”
“The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.”
“A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.”
“Every man is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.”
“Anything you’re good at contributes to happiness.”
“Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the b
eginning of wisdom.”
“To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.”
“Freedom is the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.”
“If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances, it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.”
“It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly.”
“I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.”
SAME CO.
For whatever reason—a changing marketplace, a negative image,
a lawsuit—well-known, long-established companies sometimes