Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  STEPHEN F. WHITMAN

  In 1842 Whitman opened a small shop in Philadelphia, where he made and sold fine candy. The company grew as Whitman made innovation after innovation. (For example, in 1856 he introduced the first confection ever packaged in a printed box.) But their biggest contribution to candy culture: the Whitman’s Sampler, introduced in 1912. Executives and designers worked long and hard to arrive at exactly the right image for the sampler box: an embroidery-look logo that suggested a “sampler” of chocolates. (It was also the first candy box to be wrapped in cellophane.) Within three years the sampler was Whitman’s biggest seller and the nation’s most popular box of chocolate. The design changed over the years—brighter colors, an overhanging “French” edge, a hinged lid—but it remains basically the same. According to the company, someone buys a Whitman’s Sampler box every 1.5 seconds.

  Phobos, the larger of the two Martian moons, is only about 15 miles across.

  DUNCAN HINES

  Before Internet searches and the hundreds of travel books that are now available, how did travelers know where to eat and sleep in a city or town they’d never been to? There were only two reliable sources: Adventures in Good Eating: a Guidebook to the Best Restaurants along America’s Highways (1936) and Lodging for a Night (1938), both by Duncan Hines.

  In the 1930s, Hines, a salesman for a Chicago printer, traveled the country by car with his wife Florence, keeping detailed notes about every place they visited—the cleanliness, safety, atmosphere, service, value, and quality of the food. For Christmas in 1935, instead of holiday cards Hines sent his friends a list of his favorite eating spots—167 restaurants in 30 states and the District of Columbia. So many people asked for copies of the list that he decided to write Adventures in Good Eating. His opinion was considered completely trustworthy because he always paid for his own meals and lodging and allowed no advertising in his books. Later in his career, he created “Recommended by Duncan Hines” signs and charged restaurants and inns a small fee for the privilege of displaying them (which he monitored and controlled carefully). The presence, absence, or removal of a sign could make or break an establishment: many thousands of travelers ate and slept only at places approved by Duncan Hines.

  Respect for Hines was so great that in 1950 an entrepreneur named Roy Park came up with the idea of making Duncan Hines a “name brand,” and licensed a line of products that included ice cream, pickles, dinnerware, cookbooks, and most famously, cake mixes. Park sold it to Proctor & Gamble in 1956; when Hines died in 1959, the line had expanded to more than 100 products.

  The tokay gecko uses its tongue to clean its eyes.

  IRONIC, ISN’T IT?

  There’s nothing like a good dose of irony to put the problems of day-to-day life into proper perspective.

  YIELD TO ONCOMING IRONY

  • While driving the WDJT news van out to Wisconsin’s Big Muskego Lake on a Sunday afternoon in January 2007, 27-year-old Susan Wronsky thought she was traveling on an icy road. She was actually driving on top of an iced-over channel that ran parallel to the road. The vehicle broke through the ice and came to rest in the mud on the bottom of the five-foot-deep waterway. The van was totaled, but Wronsky escaped without injury. At the time of the accident, she was covering a story on how to drive safely in icy conditions.

  • In the early 1990s, in an effort to convince people to drive safely, British transportation officials placed dozens of signs along the notoriously dangerous A1 highway, displaying the number of road casualties over the previous year. In 2008 the signs were removed. Why? They were distracting drivers and—according to some officials—leading to more road casualties.

  CUT-AND-PASTE IRONY

  In 2008 University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) student Akshay Thusu was assigned to help write the school’s new honor code. After it was posted on the Internet for review, many people pointed out that a few key sections of the honor code had been plagiarized—they were exact replicas of honor codes from other schools. (Even the definition of “plagiarism” was plagiarized.) Thusu blamed the goof on an “oversight.”

  ENVIRONMENTAL IRONY

  Richard Treanor and Carolynn Bissett, a married couple in Sunnyvale, California, are concerned about the environment. They point to the grove of eight redwood trees they planted in their backyard as proof. Their neighbor, Mark Vargas, is also concerned about the environment. He installed solar panels on his roof. One problem: Treanor and Bissett’s redwoods have grown so tall that they block the sun from hitting Vargas’s roof, rendering his expensive solar panels nearly useless. After asking the couple several times to cut down the trees (they refused), Vargas contacted Santa Clara County officials, who cited “California’s Solar Shade Control Act,” which protects solar panels from shade. Treanor and Bissett were informed that they must remove their trees because, according to the Act, the redwoods have become an “environmental hazard.”

  The odds of having quadruplets: 1 in 729,000.

  FILESHARING IRONY

  The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has claimed that music filesharing Internet sites violate the copyrights of musicians, thus cutting into their royalties. After numerous legal battles, the RIAA was awarded nearly $400 million in damages from people who ran the file sharing sites. Yet so far none of that money has been paid to the artists whose copyrights were violated in the first place. So some of these acts (such as the Rolling Stones, Van Halen, and Christina Aguilera) have threatened legal action, but the RIAA says it doesn’t have the money—they used it to pay their massive legal bills.

  UNSINKABLE IRONY

  In 2008 a water main broke in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, sending a deluge into the SportsWorks building, which was hosting a high-profile museum exhibit. The water didn’t harm the exhibit (thanks to the building’s sloped floors), although it did shut it down for a few days. What was the exhibit that proved unsinkable? A collection of artifacts from the Titanic.

  SHINY UNHAPPY PEOPLE

  Ian Down, 42, of London, England, took some pictures of himself in a photo booth and handed them in with the necessary paperwork when he applied for a passport. The passport clerk looked at the photos…and refused to accept them. Why? Because the glare from Down’s bald head was too shiny. The clerk instructed Down that he had to get a new set of photos made, and they had to be glare-free. “It was a little embarrassing,” said Down.

  Greek philosopher Pliny the Elder believed that the souls of the dead resided in beans.

  ODD SUPERHEROES

  But are they really any odder than a guy who wears his red underwear over his blue tights or a guy who shoots goo out of his wrists?

  BOUNCING BOY. First appearing in a 1961 Action comic, Chuck Taine drank what he thought was a bottle of soda, but it was really a “super-plastic fluid” that gives him the ability to turn into a gigantic bouncing ball. He even gets to join the Legion of Superheroes (sidekicks of Superboy) along with other uniquely powered characters, such as Matter-Eater Lad (his superpower: he can eat anything).

  ZSAZSA ZATURNNAH. By day, Ada is the meek owner of a beauty salon in a small town in the Philippines (where the comic originates). At night, he eats a piece of magic rock and transforms himself into Zsazsa, a muscular, curvaceous, crime-fighting woman.

  SUPER PRESIDENT. On this 1967 cartoon show, American President James Norcross gets caught in a “cosmic storm” and gains the ability to turn himself into steel, water, stone, or electricity.

  SUPERDUPONT. Satirizing French stereotypes, this 1972 French-made superhero is a snooty, mustachioed Frenchman who wears a beret, carries a baguette, drinks red wine, and smokes Gauloise cigarettes. He flies around foiling the schemes of an enemy organization called “Anti-France.”

  LEECH. His parents abandoned him at birth because he had green skin and hollow eyes. Even his superhero friends (Leech is a minor character in X-Men comics) avoid him because his power is to negate the powers of those around him.

  AQUANUS. An Indonesian version of Aqu
aman, he can breathe underwater and communicate with fish. But he can do something Aquaman can’t—he can shoot rainbows from his belt.

  GENERATION TESLA. In this 1995 Serbian comic, inventor Nikola Tesla transports himself to another dimension and reani-mates a bunch of dead people and gives them all superpowers.

  About 150 injuries per year are attributed to dustpans.

  THE DA VINCI

  OF DETROIT, PART III

  How big an impact did Harley Earl have on car design? Even today, auto stylists in Detroit still utter the phrase, “Our father, who art in styling, Harley be thy name.” Here’s the final installment of our story. (Part II is on page 269.)

  REINVENTING THE WHEELS

  If there’s one person responsible for the evolution of what we think of as an “antique” car into one that begins to resemble what we think of as a modern car today, it’s Harley Earl. When he arrived at GM in 1927, mass-produced cars still had a sort of thrown-together look, because that was how they were made: Partially assembled cars rolled along a quickly moving assembly line, and autoworkers raced to attach one component after another—a hood over the engine, fenders and a running board on the frame, headlights on the fenders, and so on, until the car was finished. The trunk of the car was exactly that—little more than a steamer trunk attached behind the passenger compartment.

  Earl thought that a car should look like a single, unified whole, not just a bunch of components attached to each other, and he began to impart his vision on GM cars. One by one, the distinguishing features of antique cars began to fall away: Boxy shapes and sharp corners gave way to the curves and smooth, flowing lines of Earl’s streamlined bodies. Headlights and fenders were integrated into the bodywork, and so was the trunk—from now on, it would be a trunk in name only. And the spare tire would no longer be bolted to the rear or mounted on one of the running boards (Earl got rid of those, too); it would be hidden inside the trunk.

  LOW RIDERS

  Earl liked to explain that his purpose from the very beginning was to make cars lower and longer, if for no other reason than he thought oblong shapes were more pleasing to the eye than the short, boxy cars that were common when he was starting out. Just as he had with the 1927 LaSalle, Earl began lengthening the wheelbase (the distance between the front and rear wheels) of the cars he worked on. This created enough space between them to lower the passenger compartment so that the occupants were cradled more or less between the front and rear wheels instead of on top of them, which is where people had ridden since the horse-and-wagon days. In addition to making the car look nicer, lowering the passenger compartment made for a smoother ride.

  The scientific name for hairs standing on end because of fright is piloerection.

  WHAT A CONCEPT

  The changes that Harley Earl brought to automobiles were dizzying, especially to an auto-buying public that had seen very little change in automobiles since their invention. But Earl was careful to introduce his changes gradually, never making more in a year than he thought customers could adjust to. He had an exquisite sense of just how much he could get away with without alienating potential buyers, and he fine-tuned his judgment by producing the auto industry’s first concept cars, which he used to preview his designs with the public and test whether they went too far.

  THE HIDEOUT

  Earl didn’t spend a lot of time at the drafting table himself; instead, he oversaw a network of 17 different design studios, including one for each division of GM and 12 other special studios that made up the Art & Color Division. (Earl renamed it the Style Section in 1937.) He did his thinking in a hidden office he called the “Hatchery,” which had blacked-out windows, no telephone, and a phony name on the door so that no one would disturb him there. He came up with the overall strategic vision for his cars, and then worked with the different design studios to bring his ideas to life. An excellent critic of other people’s work (which didn’t always make him the easiest guy to work with), he pushed and prodded and preached and praised until the designers working under him brought his dreams to life, exactly as he’d envisioned them. (Kind of like Uncle John.)

  In the process, Earl oversaw the design of virtually every Chevrolet, Oakland (renamed Pontiac in 1932), Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac designed between 1928 and 1959. The 1949 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, Cadillac’s first pillarless hardtop, with no roof support pillar behind the front doors to obstruct the driver’s vision. The 1953 Cadillac Eldorado and Oldsmobile Fiesta, with the first wraparound windshields. The 1959 Chevy El Camino, General Motors’ combination sedan and pickup truck (hey, nobody’s perfect), produced in response to the successful Ford Ranchero. All these GM cars, and all the others, too—Harley Earl styled each one.

  According to Crayola, American kids between the ages of 2 and 8 spend 28 minutes a day coloring.

  DREAM MACHINES

  A true son of Hollywood, Earl thought of his cars as pieces of entertainment. He wanted people to derive pleasure by looking at them, and he wanted driving them to be a dream. “I try to design a car so that every time you get in it, it’s a relief—you have a little vacation for a while,” he liked to say.

  For all the changes Earl made to his cars, in his early years at GM they still managed to be shaped like cars. But in the 1940s and ’50s, his designs became ever bolder, as he drew obvious inspiration from locomotives, airplanes, torpedoes, and eventually even atomic missiles and rocket ships. Airplanes and rockets have tail-fins because they need them—they’d crash without them. The tail-fins (inspired by the Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter plane) that Earl introduced to automobiles, beginning with the 1948 Cadillac, served no functional purpose at all. Earl couldn’t give GM customers a real jet plane or rocket ship to the moon, but he could make them feel like they were flying whenever they got behind the wheel of one of his cars.

  Thanks in large part to Earl’s influence, the American automobile was no longer just a means of transportation. More than ever, it became a status symbol and an object of desire. People didn’t buy cars just because they needed them; they bought them because they had to have them, a feeling that lasted until they traded it in on the next model (which they also absolutely had to have).

  MR. DETROIT, MR. WORLD

  Earl worked for GM for 30 years, from 1927 until his retirement in 1958 after overseeing the development of the 1959 models. If your dream car was built by GM in that period—a 1957 Chevy Bel Air convertible, perhaps—you have Earl to thank for it. If your dream car hails from the same era but was built by Ford or Chrysler, or even MG or Citroën, you may still have him to thank for it because his designs proved so successful that virtually every other car company in the world adopted his methods, all the way down to the clay mock-ups he pioneered while he was still building cars for Hollywood film stars. Many of the best-looking cars produced by other automakers were designed by Earl-trained stylists who were lured away from GM.

  Have you? 50% of Americans admit they have run a red light.

  Few of these designers were able to repeat their mentor’s success, and without GM’s enormous profits, few of the smaller American auto companies, including Kaiser-Frazer, Hudson, and Nash, could keep up with the pace of annual model changes. They either merged with other struggling companies, or went under. Given GM’s problems in recent years, it’s easy to forget that by the early 1960s more than half of all cars sold in the United States were made by GM, with Ford and Chrysler divvying up the rest. In those days, GM’s biggest fear was being broken up by the federal government for being a monopoly—in that sense, the company was actually selling too many cars for its own good.

  TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE

  On Earl’s watch, GM cars became ever bigger, ever longer, ever heavier, ever chrome-ier, and yet toward the end of his career even he apparently began to realize that being bigger, longer, and heavier had its limits. After a trip to a sports car race in 1951, Earl came away so impressed with the enthusiasm that the drivers had for their autos that he talked GM into buildi
ng the company’s first-ever two-seater sports car—the 1953 Corvette, which was substantially smaller than most other GM cars made that year.

  By the late 1950s, the story goes, Earl couldn’t help but notice as he walked from the parking lot into his office that many of his young designers had taken to driving smaller cars—lots of Corvettes, of course, but also Porsches, Triumphs, Fiats, MGs, and even Volkswagen Beetles, whose most appealing feature to VW buyers was that they weren’t anything at all like the cars being sold by Detroit. Small cars were likely to play a big role in the future, Earl thought, and as he approached retirement he pushed GM to begin building more small cars so that fans of these little imports would also have a range of domestic cars to choose from.

  Earl succeeded in bringing the Corvette into production, but his theory that smaller cars were the wave of the future did not win much acceptance at GM. After he retired in 1958, his successors continued grinding out one gas-guzzling land yacht after another, even as the Ford Edsel, described by one historian as the “Titanic of Automobiles,” flopped in 1957 (taking $250 million of Ford’s money with it) and sales of the Volkswagen Beetle—and other small cars like it—continued to climb year after year.

  The Netherlands has about 10,500 miles of bicycle lanes, complete with their own traffic lights.

  END OF THE ROAD