263: Bed-wetter
463: Paranoid personality
627: Reached upper age limit
KCO: Family’s only surviving son
258: Ineptitude
290: Desertion
KLG: Financial irresponsibility
280: Fraudulent entry into armed forces
LGJ: Disapproval of request for extension of service
318: Conscientious objection
311: Illegal alien to the U.S.
JFB: Underage at time of admission to service
HLK: Unsanitary habits
464: Schizoid personality
LFN: Physical disability existing prior to service
41A: Apathy; lack of interest
221: Pregnancy
440: Concealment of prior arrest record
256: Homosexual
JRB: Admission of bisexuality
41E: Obesity
BLF: Drug use
GMG: Alcoholism
GMF: Sexual perversion
JLB: Discreditable incident involving a civilian
JLJ: Shirking
KNL: “For the good of the Service”
The 2010 U.S. Census cost $13 billion, or $42 per American.
OBSCURE 1960s FADS
Sure, you’ve heard of lava lamps, Nehru jackets, yo-yos, pop art, op art, paper dresses, and bell-bottoms. But here are a few crazes of the 1960s that may have escaped you.
PIANO WRECKING (1963)
As part of his nightclub act in the 1930s, Jimmy Durante would play a few songs on a piano...and then slowly rip the instrument apart with his bare bands and throw the chunks out into the crowd. Audiences loved this bizarre bit of performance art. More than three decades after Durante did it, wrecking pianos became a fad in the engineering department at Derby College of Technology in England. Six-man teams used tools such as axes, sledgehammers, and crowbars to break a piano into pieces so tiny that they could be passed through a 20-cm hole (that’s a little less than eight inches), competing to see who could do it the fastest. The fad spread to Cal Tech in Pasadena, California, where the Piano Reduction Study Group deconstructed a piano in just 10 minutes, 44 seconds. Engineering students at Wayne State University in Detroit beat that record with a time of 4 minutes, 51 seconds. But why wreck a piano into tiny bits? Like earlier weird college fads such as phone-booth stuffing or goldfish swallowing, it probably helped to blow off steam built up from the rigors of academia. Or, as Robert Diller of Cal Tech told Time in 1963, “It has psychological implications which are pretty clear to us. It’s a satire on the obsolescence of today’s society.” The fad died out by the mid-’60s, replaced with a far more pressing college pastime: protesting the Vietnam War.
COLORING BOOKS FOR ADULTS (1961)
The TV show Mad Men has kindled nostalgia for the booming corporate culture of the 1960s. But as it was actually happening, in 1961, Chicago advertising writers Marcie Hans, Dennis Altman, and Martin Cohen came up with a way to viciously satirize it: They wrote and drew The Executive Coloring Book. It looked like a children’s coloring book, but instead of cowboys and barnyard animals, it pictured men in suits sitting behind desks, and had sarcastic captions like “This is my suit. Color it gray or I will lose my job,” and “This is my desk. It is mahogany. Important people have mahogany desks. My walls are mahogany, too. I wish I were mahogany.” The idea was a lark and an inside joke, so the three creators paid for a small print run of just 1,600 copies. They sold out in a week. By the end of the year, they’d sold a staggering 300,000 Executive Coloring Books. In 1962 a slew of “adult coloring books” hit the market, mocking subjects like bartenders, the United Nations, John F. Kennedy, and psychiatrists (“My analyst says I am confused and abstract. Color me confused and abstract”). Before the novelty wore off at the end of 1962, a million adult coloring books had been sold.
The dwarf planet Pluto was named by Venetia Burney, an 11-year-old British schoolgirl.
SCOPITONE (1960)
Panorams, jukebox-like machines that played three-minute films of jazz musicians performing (called “soundies”), were popular in bars in pre-World War II France. After the war, using surplus military parts and equipment, a company called CAMECA tried to bring back the concept, only with color film. It took the company’s technicians 15 years to figure out how to rear-project a moving image to a TV screen, but they finally released their Scopitone “video jukebox” in 1960. About the size of a refrigerator, it offered a choice of 36 film clips, each a staged, lip-synced performance of a popular song, much like modern music videos. The first clips, distributed to French bars, restaurants, and movie theaters, featured French pop stars such as Johnny Hallyday, Juliette Greco, and Serge Gainsbourg. As Scopitones moved into West Germany, England, and the United States, stars like Neil Sedaka, Debbie Reynolds, and Dionne Warwick (warbling “Walk on By” while lying on a white bearskin rug) signed on. By 1964 more than 500 Scopitones had popped up around the United States, primarily in resort hotels, cocktail lounges, and bowling alleys (as well as hundreds more by knockoff companies Colorama, Color-Sonics, and Cinebox). Scopitones were phenomenally popular for the better part of 1964...until rock acts like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones started to dominate pop culture. Scopitone, meanwhile, could only manage to sign “stars” like Buddy Greco, Ethel Ennis, and Frank Sinatra, Jr. But Scopitone’s biggest mistake: They placed their machines in bars—where young rock and pop fans weren’t allowed. Scopitone went out of business in 1969.
Brain food: Everything a giant squid eats passes through its brain on the way to its stomach.
SECRETS OF THE AVOCADO
Inside that textured green skin, it’s ripe with mystery. It’s an “evolutionary anachronism.” It’s not a vegetable, and not exactly your typical fruit. It’s an acquired taste that most Americans still resist. Meet the avocado.
HAVING A BALL
The avocado came from South America, so it’s not too surprising that the Nahuatl language of the ancient Aztecs gave us its name, derived from ahuacatl. Besides referring to the fruit, the word had another meaning: “testicle,” which also isn’t too surprising, considering the fruit’s shape and texture. Although “guacamole” doesn’t really sound like “avocado,” the two words share a root: Guacamole comes from the Nahuatl ahuacatl-molli, which means “avocado sauce.” (The fact that it also means “testicle sauce” is probably not something we want to dwell on.)
BEEN THERE, DUNG THAT
Biologists suggest that it’s a lucky accident the avocado is still with us, because it evolved to fill a niche in an ecosystem that went extinct eons ago. As with many fruits, the avocado developed as a mutually beneficial trade-off with animals. The tree provides tasty food, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch—the plant’s price for its fruit is mobility for its seeds. How does that work? The seeds of the fruit are typically small enough to pass through the digestive systems of the animals that eat it. The seeds are often bitter, sometimes even toxic enough to cause nausea. So animals rarely chew them more than once, but instead learn to swallow them whole. The seeds exit the digestive system intact, as waste, and end up planted in the animal’s nutrient-rich dung.
There’s no reason to believe that the avocado was an exception to this rule. It’s unlikely that the plant species’ survival was ever meant to depend on humans poking its seed with toothpicks and suspending it in water to get it to sprout. But that begs the question: What animal in South America is big enough to eat a avocado whole and poop out its oversize pit?
It would take about 33 million people holding hands to span Earth at the equator.
ANIMANIACS
The answer, of course, is that there is none. Not anymore, anyway. As with the mango and the dodo fruit, the plant’s animal partner is no longer with us, making it what scientists call an “evolutionary anachronism.” Long ago, South America was ruled by megafauna, giant animals that lived until humans arrived and apparently hunted them to extinction, around 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. For milli
ons of years South America was an island, not yet connected to North America, allowing for richly diverse evolution of animals such as the glyptodon, an armadillo the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, and the sleek macrauchenia (“long neck”), a 10-foot-long grass eater that looked like a cross between a horse, a camel, a giraffe, and a svelte elephant. Then there were the giant ground sloth, 20 feet long and weighing five tons, and the gomphothere, an oversize elephant-like creature that might have roamed South America as recently as 9,000 years ago. All four are prime candidates for being the avocado’s co-evolutionary pals. But if the fruit hadn’t turned out to be tasty to humans, it may well have gone the way of the glyptodon and the gomphothere.
AVOCADO FACTS
• Good For You. Avocados are full of nutrients and cholesterol-lowering monounsaturated fat. However, the fruit, leaves, pit, and skin have been documented as harmful—and sometimes deadly—to many animals, including cats, dogs, rabbits, birds, horses, goats, rabbits, cattle, rodents, and fish. But not all parts are poisonous to every animal. While the fruit can kill birds, at least one pet food manufacturer has added avocado pulp and oil to its line of cat and dog foods as a coat conditioner, without any known ill effects.
• What Hass Got Rot? There are dozens of avocado varieties. The most common by far is the Hass avocado, accounting for about 80 percent of all cultivated avocado trees worldwide. And all of them are descended from the cuttings of a single tree owned by Rudolph Hass, a mail carrier who lived in La Habra Heights, California. In 1935 Hass noticed that the tree of unknown lineage produced great fruit year-round, so he patented it and sold its cuttings. (His original tree died of root rot in 2002.)
Yours for the taking: The asteroid 3554 Amun, which will cross Earth’s orbit in 2020, contains an estimated $20 billion worth of metals.
• Production. Of America’s avocado crop, 90 percent comes from California. Of those, 60 percent come from San Diego County. How many avocados can a typical commercial tree produce each year? About 500, totaling 200 pounds of fruit. But don’t expect to see any advertisements for “tree-ripened avocados.” The avocado is unusual in that it won’t ripen on the tree. Avocados can be kept mature but unripe for weeks or even months by leaving them on the tree or refrigerating them until they arrive at their retail destination. After only a few days at room temperature, they ripen into the semi-squishy state that consumers want.
• Fruits or Vegetables? Based on the fact that avocados grow on trees, you’d assume that the avocado is classified as a fruit. That’s correct. But what kind of fruit? According to the University of California, it isn’t like most tree fruits—apples, pears, or peaches—it’s a “single-seeded berry.”
• Hernando Cortés, Food Critic. Native American populations have been cultivating avocados for thousands of years. When he wasn’t busy looting and destroying cities, conquistador Hernando Cortés took the opportunity to try an avocado in Mexico. He wrote: “In the center of the fruit is a seed like a peeled chestnut. And between this and the rind is the part which is eaten, which is abundant, and is a paste similar to butter and of very good taste.” Not everyone agrees. Only 41 percent of American households consume avocados.
• What’s in a Name? In 1960 the British retail chain Marks & Spencer tried introducing avocados to English consumers. Figuring the name was too foreign-sounding, the store marketed the fruit as “alligator pears.” Unfortunately, its customers thought of pears as being something you made into a dessert...the culinary results were disastrous. After numerous complaints about inedible “alligator pear” tarts and pies, Marks & Spencer decided “avocado” wasn’t such a bad name after all.
IT’S SCIENCE!
Thoughts on the joys and frustrations of scientific discovery.
“Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The task is not to see what has never been seen before, but to think what has never been thought before about what you see every day.”
—Erwin Schrodinger
“The whole of science consists of data that, at one time or another, were inexplicable.”
—Brendan O’Regan
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny...’”
—Isaac Asimov
“A good scientist is a person in whom the childhood quality of perennial curiosity lingers on. Once he gets an answer, he has other questions.”
—Frederick Seitz
“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”
—Galileo Galilei
“Science is simply common sense at its best—rigidly accurate in observation and merciless to fallacy in logic.”
—Thomas Huxley
“There are many hypotheses in science that are wrong. That’s perfectly all right; they’re the aperture to finding out what’s right.”
—Carl Sagan
“Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.”
—John Dewey
“The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”
—Neil deGrasse Tyson
“The greatest discoveries of science have always been those that forced us to rethink our beliefs about the universe and our place in it.”
—Robert L. Park
“Only those who see the invisible can do the impossible.”
—Bernard Lown
A 2007 earthquake lifted up the entire island of Ranogga, in the Solomon Islands, by 10 feet.
FAMOUS AND BROKE...
Just because you’re known by millions or you’ve changed history doesn’t mean you’re going to have any money in the bank.
GEORGE McGOVERN retired from politics in the 1980s, after 18 years in the U.S. Senate and an unsuccessful run for president. In 1988 he bought and began operating a 150-room hotel in Connecticut. In 1991, just three years after it opened, the inn closed and McGovern filed for bankruptcy. He said that the cost of meeting governmental regulations and dealing with frivolous lawsuits drained him and the hotel financially.
BERNHARD GOETZ shot four men in the New York City subway in 1984, claiming they’d threatened him with a screwdriver and tried to rob him. He was acquitted for that, but served 250 days in jail for carrying an unlicensed handgun. One of the muggers, Darrell Cabey, filed a civil suit against Goetz for the shooting, which left Cabey paralyzed. Cabey won a $43 million judgment. Goetz filed for bankruptcy in 1996, listing Cabey and his own lawyers as his primary creditors.
JAMES W. MARSHALL was a New Jersey carpenter who moved to California in the 1840s, hoping to find a better life. There, while working at Sutter’s Mill (he was a partner in the sawmill), he discovered the gold that started the California Gold Rush. Lots of people got rich, but Marshall didn’t. Not only that, the sawmill went out of business because all his employees left to hunt for gold. Marshall was penniless when he died in 1885.
ELIOT NESS won fame as the 27-year-old government agent who put gangster Al Capone in prison in 1931 on tax evasion charges. After that, things soured for Ness: His wife left him, he started drinking, he started a couple of failed businesses, and he got fired from a job at an alarm company for drinking too much. A 1947 run for mayor of Cleveland was his attempt to straighten things out—not only did he lose, but it left him with six figures of campaign debt. Bankrupt, Ness died of a heart attack in 1957.
Dinosaur ants, the world’s oldest known ant species, can grow to over an inch long.
FOUR NICE STORIES
Every now and then, we like to lock our inner cynics in a box and share stories with happy endings.
TOGETHER AGAIN
It was 1921. In a one-room schoolhouse in rural Wisconsin, two third-graders became “sweethearts.” But after the school year ended, Mac McKitrick and Lorraine Beatty lost contact with each other...for 85 years. Then, in 2009, they were reunited through
family members (their brothers had become friends). The two lovebirds instantly remembered each other and picked up right where they left off: McKitrick proposed, Beatty said yes, and the newlyweds moved in with each other at an Illinois retirement home. “I still picture Lorraine as my third-grade sweetheart,” said McKitrick. “I’ve carried that in the back of my mind for all those years.”
JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS
An 84-year-old retiree named Don Ritchie has saved 160 lives over the past 50 years. How? By convincing people not to kill themselves. Ritchie doesn’t work at a suicide hotline, though; he lives across the road from a seaside cliff in Sydney, Australia, called “The Gap”—one of the country’s most notorious spots for suicides. Every day, Ritchie keeps an eye on the ledge from his living room window. If he sees someone who appears to be in despair, he walks over and starts talking to them. Ritchie’s approach is low-key: He smiles and asks the person if they’d like to come over for tea. Then Ritchie tells them they still have a chance to reconsider their decision. A few haven’t taken his advice, but most have. (Ritchie’s job before he retired: selling life insurance.)
In Peru, it is considered lucky to wear yellow underwear on New Year’s Day.
A BONDING EXPERIENCE
In December 2010, Mike Rodgers, an employee at Blue Grass Recycling in Burlington, Kentucky, was sifting through the contents of a bin that hadn’t been emptied for several months. Near the bottom, he found 23 U.S. savings bonds with face values ranging from $50 to $500. Rodgers did some research online and discovered that the bonds, purchased in 1971, were now worth $22,000. Rodgers could have tried to cash them in himself, but instead decided to try and find the owner...which turned out to be very difficult. He found the identity of the woman who had purchased the bonds, Martha Dobbins, but she had been dead for nearly 20 years. Rodgers then began looking for the other person named on the bonds: Robert Roberts. To his dismay, he discovered there were hundreds of “Robert Roberts” in the United States. But he figured that only one would know who Martha Dobbins was, so he started e-mailing and calling every Robert Roberts he could find. He met with dead end after dead end. Finally, after more than a week of searching, Rodgers found his Robert Roberts a few days before Christmas. Roberts, 82, lived in Florida; Dobbins was his mother. “I had taken care of her for several years before she died,” Rodgers explained, “but she never said anything about any bonds.” When Roberts received the bonds in the mail, he tried to give Rodgers a reward, but Rodgers refused, saying he did it because “it was the right thing to do.”
Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® Page 21