Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader
Page 56
Grassl couldn’t enroll in school, he had trouble finding work, and a love affair soured, all leading to a severe depression. He left France and took a train to England, where he decided to commit suicide by drowning himself in the sea at Kent. He actually went into the water but then had second thoughts, and while he was wandering around town in a state of extreme emotional distress, he was discovered by police. Grassl claims that from the day he was picked up and throughout his stay at the hospital, he was under so much emotional stress that he could neither speak nor remember his name.
THE CODA
The “Piano Man” story was the hottest news story in Europe in the summer of 2005. So how could it be that Grassl’s worried parents never saw his picture on TV or in a newspaper? “I work hard every day, get up early in the morning to see to the cows, so I hardly ever get to read a paper,” Josef Grassl told reporters. “I do watch the news on television, but once I have seen the weather report, I switch it off.”
And here’s the amazing part: the “Piano Man” who had amazed the mental facility staff with his expert piano playing… hadn’t, really. He drew a piano and was allowed to play one, but no one in the media ever witnessed it—reporters merely interviewed hospital staff who had seen him play. Sensationalized news reports exaggerated the claims that he was a concert-level pianist. “The Piano Man” had never received any formal training and had never worked as a professional musician. He was an amateur, at best.
As of 2007, the German pianist who mystified England was studying French literature—not music—at a college in Switzerland.
Those “angelic” rays of sun beaming through clouds are technically called crepuscular rays.
eBAY: THE REAL STORY
How one man’s hobby became one of the most successful businesses in history.
MYTH-BAY
Here’s the legend of how eBay started: One evening in 1995, computer programmer Pierre Omidyar was talking to his fiancée, Pamela Wesley. She mentioned an old hobby, collecting and trading PEZ candy dispensers, and bemoaned the fact that she couldn’t find any collectors in her area to trade with. And at that moment eBay was born in Omidyar’s mind. The truth: That story was made up by a marketing engineer in 1997 to develop interest in the company. The real story is a bit more complicated…but just as interesting.
Pierre Omidyar was born on June 21, 1967, the only child of French-Iranian parents. At age six, he emigrated with his family from Paris to the United States so that his father could attend a medical residency at John Hopkins University. Young Omidyar was fascinated with computers from the moment he saw them. His first job: writing a program to catalog his school’s library (he was 16 and earned $6.00 an hour). “I was your typical nerd in high school,” Omidyar recalls. “Or geek—I forget which is the good one.”
GO WEST, YOUNG NERD
After graduating from Tufts University in Boston with a degree in computer science in 1988, Omidyar moved to Santa Clara, California, the heart of Silicon Valley and the Hollywood of the Internet Age. He worked as a programmer for a while, but then in 1991 he and some friends started Ink Development Corp., a “pen-based” computer company. (They’re the computers you operate by touching the screen with a penlike tool.) Over the next few years he led the company away from that and into what he believed was going to really take off one day: Internet shopping. He also came up with a new company name: “eShop.” It wasn’t eBay, or even close to it, but it was successful (Microsoft eventually bought it), and in the meantime, Omidyar was thinking up his own project: an Internet auction site.
Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it.—Chinese Proverb
Why an auction? Because Omidyar liked the idea of a place where professional middlemen and retailers were out of the way and regular people could buy and sell things directly from and to other regular people. And an auction not only gave buyers power that they couldn’t get in a store, it added some excitement: Display an item; let people start the bidding; when time runs out, the highest bidder gets the goods. It was the ultimate “free market.”
EBOLA-BAY
Over Labor Day weekend in 1995, with the project sufficiently developed in his head, Omidyar stayed home and wrote the programming code for an auction-based Web site. On September 3, “AuctionWeb” was launched. It was, he now admits, ugly, clunky, and awkward. And he didn’t even get a specific Internet address for it; he just added it as a page on the site he already had for his Internet-consulting business. The address of that site: ebay.com. Why? The consulting business was called Echo Bay Technology Group. (It wasn’t named after a real bay: “It just sounded cool,” he later explained.) He had tried to register it as “echobay.com,” but that was taken by a Canadian gold-mining company, so he shortened it and ebay.com was born.
At the time he launched the auction site, ebay.com had three different home pages. The first one took you to the consulting business; a link could then connect you to “San Francisco Tufts Alliance,” a Tufts University alumni group that his wife headed (he and Pamela had since married); another link then sent you to “Ebola Information”—a tribute to the deadly ebola virus. (Omidyar has a warped sense of humor.) From there you could finally get to AuctionWeb.
No money went into advertising. To generate interest, he relied solely on Internet message boards, where he posted links that simply said “free Web auction.” To his surprise, a lot of people clicked on the link—and started buying and selling stuff. First item sold: Omidyar’s broken laser pointer. It went for $14.83. By the end of its first year, thousands of auctions had taken place and more than 10,000 bids had been made.
Osama bin Laden, Avril Lavigne, and Tonya Harding have all had a computer virus named for them.
NOT SO FREE MARKET
Despite its early success, AuctionWeb was still a just hobby for Omidyar—he was still working as program developer—until his Internet service provider forced him to change from a private to a commercial account because of the amount of traffic the site was getting. That increased his overhead from $30 to $250 a month, so he decided to start charging users a small fee. He thought there would be a backlash from his regulars, but, to his surprise, he received few complaints. And soon checks began arriving in the mail, so many of them, in fact, that he had to hire his first employee to handle all the payments. By March 1996, Auction-Web’s monthly revenue was up to $1,000. By April it was $2,500. By May it was $5,000. By June it was $10,000—and Pierre Omidyar quit the last regular job he’d ever have.
SHE-BAY
AuctionWeb’s next employee was Jeff Skoll, a computer geek who also had a masters degree in Business Administration from Stanford University. Skoll’s first mission: Get rid of the ebola tribute and the other sites, and make AuctionWeb a stand-alone auction site. Omidyar protested, but, luckily for him, Skoll prevailed. Another good idea from the early days: the bulletin board. New users could post questions, which were answered by more experienced users, giving eBay its very own (free) tech support. One of the most popular bulletin board gurus was a man who called himself “Uncle Griff.” A curious questioner once asked him what he looked like. He responded, “I’m wearing a lovely flower print dress and I just got done milking the cows,” forever etching himself into eBay lore as their “cross-dressing bachelor dairy farmer who likes to answer questions.” He was so good and so respected that in the fall of 1996 Skoll asked him (his name was Jim Griffith, and he lived in Vermont) to help answer technical questions directly for eBay while of course keeping his cross-dressing persona alive on the bulletin board. Uncle Griff accepted—and became eBay’s first tech-support employee.
World’s oldest surviving boat: a 10-foot-long dugout from the Netherlands, dated to 7400 B.C.
THE GLOBAL YARD SALE
Everything about eBay seemed to be right for its time and place. Before eBay, someone who wanted to sell a collectible, antique, or electronic item of value had very few options—especially if they lived in the boondocks—which usually resulted in selling
it for much less than it was worth. Omidyar’s online auction changed that. It consolidated buyers and sellers into one connected marketplace, making location almost irrelevant (shipping prices notwithstanding). That meant sellers could get top dollar for their items, and collectors and buyers could more easily find the items they wanted. It was a hugely successful formula, and in 1998, just three years after starting the ebola-virus-linked free auction site, the company went public. On the first day the stock price shot up—and eBay was worth more than $2 billion. By 1999 it was worth more than $8 billion…and Omidyar had become one of the wealthiest people on Earth.
SELLING OUT
Lots of companies have good starts, but eBay made sure its success lasted. They constantly updated the site and its tools, making it slicker and easier to use by the month. Some of the most notable upgrades: In 1998 they added the “feedback” feature that allows users to rate sellers and buyers, letting other users know whether they’re dealing with a trustworthy person (and encouraging users to police the site at no cost to eBay); in 2002 they purchased the “e-commerce” company PayPal, which allowed for easier Internet payments (eBay gets an additional fee for each transaction); Omidyar and Skoll reached out to companies like Disney, GM, and major airlines to use the site to sell their products. That might seem like it goes against Omidyar’s “regular people” model—and it does—but it obviously didn’t hurt the auction site, and it made the company many more millions of dollars. On top of that they bought up competing sites—like Half.com and Rent.com—by the dozen.
GIVING BACK
As of 2008, nearly a billion people visit eBay annually, with an average of 12 million items up for sale at any given time. Omidyar himself is worth more than $7 billion. Today he and Pam devote most of their time to the Omidyar Network, a philanthropic organization that helps poor people around the world get into business—and they’ve pledged to give away all but 1% of their fortune over the next 20 years. “My mother always taught me to treat other people the way I want to be treated and to have respect for other people,” he says. “Those are just good basic values to have in a crowded world.”
Singapore’s highest point, a hill called Bukit Timah, is only 581 feet above sea level.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Some unusual epitaphs and tombstones from the United States and Europe, sent in by our crew of wandering BRI tombstonologists.
In England:
In Memory of Charles Ward This stone was not erected by Susan his wife. She erected a stone to John Salter her second husband forgetting the affection of Charles Ward, her husband.
In Massachusetts:
Nearby these grayrocks Enclosed in a box
Lies Hatter Cox Who died of smallpox.
In Scotland:
Here lies the body of Sarah, Wife of John Hayes.
The Lord giveth And the Lord taketh away Blessed be the name of the Lord.
In Ireland
Here lie the remains of John Hall, grocer The world is not worth a fig, & I have good raisins for saying so.
In Illinois:
Anonymous Cold is my bed, but ah I love it, For colder are my friends above it.
In Rhode Island:
Thomas Coffin He’s done a-catching cod And gone to meet his God.
In Scotland:
Here lies John Macpherson Who was a very peculiar person He stood six foot two without his shoe
And was slew at Waterloo.
In England:
Here lies the wife of Roger Martin She was a good wife to
Roger, that’s sartin.
In New York:
John Phillips Accidentally shot as a mark of affection by his brother.
In Mississippi:
Anonymous Here lies my wife in earthly mold, Who when she lived did naught but scold. Peace! Wake her not, for now she’s still, She had; but now I have my will.
In Colorado:
Anonymous He called Bill Smith a liar.
In Georgia:
Dr. J.J. Subers Been Here And Gone Had a Good Time.
Royale with Cheese: There are more than 1,000 McDonald’s restaurants in France.
IT’S IN THE CARDS, PT. II
When Uncle John read his fortune this morning, the ace of spades told him that you’d want more information about telling fortunes with playing cards than we gave you on page 284. We can’t fight fate, so here’s Part II.
TWO, THREE, AND FOUR OF A KIND
As we told you in Part I, the meaning of an individual card can change if it’s dealt upside down. The meaning of different combinations of cards in the Past, Present, Future, or Surprise piles will change in proportion to how many of the cards are dealt upside down. For example, in the case of three aces, if only one of the aces is upside down, the right-side-up qualities will predominate over the upside-down qualities. If two of the three aces are upside down, the upside-down qualities will predominate.
SEVENS
Pair of Sevens. Right-side up, two sevens could refer to the love that the subject and another person have for each other. If one or both of the cards are upside down: disloyalty, deceit, or regret.
Three Sevens. Right-side up: sadness brought on by sickness, the loss of friends, or deep remorse. Upside down: a minor ailment, or an unpleasant backlash following a period of great pleasure.
Four Sevens. Right-side up: schemes and traps set by angry, jealous opponents. Upside down: small triumphs over weak enemies.
EIGHTS
Pair of Eights. Right-side up: unexpected developments, which may include passing infatuations or trivial pleasures. Upside down: paying the price for foolishness.
Three Eights. Right-side up: love—the responsible kind—is in the air. Upside down: flirtation, dissipation, and foolishness.
Four Eights. Right-side up: a journey or a new position of responsibility having periods of both success and failure. Upside down: stability and tranquility.
Special Pair Combinations. The eight of diamonds paired with the eight of hearts symbolizes difficult tasks or a new suit of clothes. Paired with the eight of spades, it indicates sickness; paired with the eight of clubs, it refers to enduring love.
In the past 75 million years, the Earth’s magnetic poles have reversed 171 times.
NINES
Pair of Nines. Right-side up: happiness and wealth, or possibly a change of address. Upside down: small problems. If the nine of clubs is paired with the nine of hearts, an inheritance is forthcoming (or was, if it’s in the Past pile).
Three Nines. Right-side up: prosperity, happiness, and good health. Upside down: bad judgement, resulting in temporary financial reversals.
Four Nines. An unexpected development is coming. The amount of time that passes before the event takes place is proportionate to how many of the nines are upside down. If all four of them are, don’t hold your breath.
Five Nines. Poor eyesight. (There are only four nines in a deck.)
TENS
Pair of Tens. Unexpected good luck, perhaps relating to a change of occupation. If one of the tens is upside down, the good luck is not far off. If they’re both upside down, be prepared to wait awhile. A ten of diamonds paired with the ten of hearts signifies a wedding in the near future.
Three Tens. Financial ruin resulting from lawsuits. The amount of ruin is proportionate to the number of tens that are upside down.
Four Tens. Great wealth and success resulting from the task at hand. The number of obstacles between the subject and wealth and success is proportionate to the number of upside-down tens.
JACKS
Pair of Jacks. Loss of personal property resulting from schemes. If both jacks are upside down, the loss is imminent; if only one is upside down, you still have a little time to say goodbye to your stuff.
Three Jacks. Right-side up: problems caused by acquaintances and “friends,” possibly involving the smearing of the subjects reputation. Upside down: a physical conflict with a social inferior.
76% of American commuters drive t
o work alone
Four Jacks. Wild, noisy parties with plenty of food and drink. The more jacks that are upside down, the less enjoyable the party.
QUEENS
Pair of Queens. Secrets exposed following a confidential meeting between friends. One card upside down: a rivalry forms as a result of the meeting. Both cards upside down: bad behavior—the subject’s—that does not go unpunished.
Three Queens. A pleasant visit; the visitor could be anyone from a loved one to a perfect stranger. If one or more cards are upside down, you will be the subject of gossip or scandal. If all three cards are upside down, you could be involved in a physical altercation.
Four Queens. A social gathering or occasion of some kind; how unhappy you are at the event depends on how many of the queens are upside down. If they’re all right-side up, you’ll have a blast.
KINGS
Pair of Kings. Cooperation, good behavior, and wise decisions in business affairs bring great rewards. The number of obstacles to be overcome is proportionate to the number of upside down cards.
Three Kings. A difficult problem faced head-on. The difficulty of solving it is proportionate to the number of upside-down cards. If all three kings are upside down, the problem will remain unsolved.
Four Kings. Honors, promotions, and special treatment. With every card that is upside down, these goodies diminish in value but will arrive more quickly.
ACES
Pair of Aces. A coming together of some kind. A heart-and-club pair signifies a union entered into for good purposes; a diamond-and-spade pair signifies a union for bad purposes. The other combinations are more neutral. If one or both of the aces are upside down, the goal of the union, be it good or evil, will not be realized.