He filed his class-action suit in 2007 in the wake of what the press called “Spygate.” At a Jets home game, Belichick’s coaching staff was caught secretly videotaping Jets coaches in an attempt to learn their plays. Mayer sought $185 million, to be divvied up between every Jets season ticket holder who paid to watch any home game against the Patriots since 2000, when Belichick became head coach. During the trial, the judge asked Belichick’s lawyer, “Do you think someone would pay that kind of money for tickets if they knew in advance it wasn’t a fair game?” The lawyer replied, “Given what I know about professional sports, yes.” He then added, “Every spectator that goes to a game expects there will be rules infractions.”
THE VERDICT: Apparently cheating is an expected part of the game. Mayer lost. He appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case. But Belichick didn’t get off scot-free: The NFL fined him $500,000 and his team $250,000, plus they were stripped of a first-round draft pick.
THE PLAINTIFF: Quentin Tarantino, Oscar-winning Hollywood screenwriter (Pulp Fiction)
THE DEFENDANT: Alan Ball, Oscar-winning Hollywood screenwriter (American Beauty)
THE LAWSUIT: The press called it the “Angry Birds” case. Tarantino, who is Ball’s neighbor in Southern California, complained that for two years, starting in 2009, Ball’s pet macaws made “obnoxious pterodactyl-like screams” to the point where Tarantino couldn’t concentrate on writing his new film script. (It’s a spaghetti Western called Django Unchained.) Ball, who created the HBO shows Six Feet Under and True Blood, attempted to quiet down his exotic birds. He even built a soundproof aviary, but then just couldn’t bring himself to keep them caged. By then, Tarantino had had enough. In March 2011, he sued Ball to have the birds removed for good.
THE VERDICT: The case was settled out of court. Details were few, but it seems that the macaws have been muffled, which has allowed Tarantino to finally finish his script. His lawyer calls it “the best script Quentin’s ever written.” (No word on whether any angry birds get a dose of Western justice in the film.)
NY’s Adirondack Park covers 6 million acres, more than Yellowstone and Yosemite combined.
MR. TROLOLO
Our final installment of “Viral Videos” features a Web phenomenon four decades in the making.
Internet Star: Eduard Khil (pronounced “Hill”), 74, a pop singer from St. Petersburg, Russia
The Story: Famous in Russia since the 1960s, Khil was virtually unheard of in the United States until 2009. Then someone posted a video from a 1976 Russian TV show in which he lip-syncs to his 1966 hit song—“I Am Glad Because I Am Finally Returning Back Home”—on YouTube.
The video is strangely compelling: Wearing a brown polyester suit with a yellow tie, Khil slowly strolls onto a cheesy orange-and-yellow set, bouncing in time to the cheesy bossa nova music. He seems almost robotic as he smiles the entire time and waves to nobody in particular. But what makes it truly unique are the nonsense lyrics Khil sings in his operatic baritone. Sample: “Yaya-yaya-ya yaya-ya yaya-ya / Oo oo oo oo / ahh EEEE! / Trololololo!”
What Happened: Khil is now known on the Web as “Mr. Trololo,” and his video and its dozens of parodies have amassed tens of millions of hits. Even a 2009 video of Khil watching Youtube parodies of himself (and commenting on them in Russian) got half a million views. American fans started a Facebook page urging him to come out of retirement and tour again, but he said he has no plans to perform live. However, Khil did post a video response thanking everyone for the renewed interest in a 40-year-old song. He also has a request that “all the people of the world” contribute actual lyrics to the song, and “we will all sing together.” Overjoyed by his newfound stardom, Khil told his fans, “Thank you for getting this supply of cheerfulness and optimism while listening to this melody.”
Bonus: Why doesn’t the song have any actual words? Khil’s lyricist did write some—about a cowboy from Kentucky longing for his woman (who is at home knitting him some stockings)—but Soviet sensors banned the lyrics, so Khil recorded it with the nonsense words instead. (Uncle John’s challenge: Watch Mr. Trololo online and then try not to sing the melody out loud.)
In a day, your brain uses the amount of energy contained in 2 large bananas.
HIGH CULTURE
Using marijuana for recreational purposes is illegal almost everywhere in the world, which is why some people go to Amsterdam and other cities in the Netherlands where smoking pot is legal in specialized “coffee shops.” That has led to a misconception that drugs are legal there. They’re not—it’s a divisive political issue with a long, complicated history. Here’s the real story about what you thought you knew about Amsterdam.
AHISTORY OF TOLERANCE
Before the year 1600 or so, the progressive, commercial and artistic centers of Europe were unquestionably Paris and Florence. The Netherlands was regarded as a boring backwater with little to offer. But then the Netherlands came into its own. An influx of new ideas and technology heralded the Dutch Golden Age, a period of excellence in both art (“the Dutch masters” such as Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Frans Hals) and commerce. The city of Antwerp grew into Europe’s leading financial center, and the Dutch East India Company, the first international corporation (and the biggest in history until the 20th century), dominated world goods trading and led European powers in the colonization and commercialization of the New World.
Like America in the Industrial Age, the Netherlands in the 17th century was the land of opportunity. Tens of thousands flocked there, from skilled workers to financiers to religious refugees. The influx of people helped run the country’s new, powerful economic machine, so the Dutch government didn’t respond to religious and ethnic diversity the way other western European countries had. (England persecuted Catholics and Spain persecuted Jews.) Instead, they tolerated it. In a concept called pillarisation, laws were passed to allow people of any ethnic or religious background to hold office. The idea of adapting to change through tolerance (and legislation) would come to define the nation’s cultural and political mindset into the 20th century.
THE BEAT GOES ON
Maybe because the country went through so much turmoil in the 1800s and 1900s—occupations by Napoleon and Hitler, respectively—tolerance gave way to permissiveness in the years after World War II. Laws decriminalizing prostitution, doctor-assisted suicide, homosexuality, and abortion were passed in the Netherlands in the 1950s, decades before the issues were even discussed in polite company in other first-world countries.
It would take a jumbo jet about 120 million years to fly across the Milky Way galaxy.
Along with such relaxed (or progressive) attitudes came an increase in the use of recreational drugs—similar to the way the chaotic social and political climate of the late ’60s led to increased drug use in the United States. Despite the fact that possession of the drug could result in a prison sentence, marijuana use became increasingly common among Dutch youth. At the same time, use of harder drugs such as heroin was on the rise, and the government’s attention began to turn toward that problem. Without the time or resources to combat marijuana—and given the country’s tradition of tolerance—police began to turn a blind eye to marijuana use, and the drug’s image began to soften. Result: In 1971 marijuana possession was downgraded to a misdemeanor offense.
THE FLOODGATES OPEN
That didn’t make marijuana completely legal, though—adults could possess the drug, but it was still illegal to smoke it in public. Entrepreneurs in the nation’s largest city, Amsterdam, decided to push the limits of the law by opening “coffee shops” that sold coffee...and marijuana. As a gray area between private and public, the shops invited controversy and were routinely raided by police. But they were never shut down.
This was the pattern for years in Amsterdam. The number of shops grew, and the number of police raids declined. Once again, tolerance won out: In 1976, lawmakers enacted a series of sweeping new marijuana laws. Outright legalization wasn�
�t an option because as a member of the United Nations, the Netherlands was legally obligated to fight drug trafficking. The Dutch government skirted that agreement by using a strict coffee-shop model. Marijuana would be legal to sell and consume specifically at the coffee shops, but there were rules: Minors were forbidden to enter the shops, advertising was illegal, and limits were placed on both the amount of marijuana that could be sold to customers and the amount a shopkeeper could keep on the premises at any time.
In the 1920s, the Raggedy Ann doll was used as a symbol by the anti-vaccination movement.
SNUFFED OUT
One problem with rules: They only work if people follow them. A handful of shops openly flouted the laws by selling harder drugs, such as cocaine and heroin. Other European governments began to criticize the Netherlands publicly for ignoring its United Nations anti-drug-trafficking pledge. Dutch citizens weren’t happy either; people living in Amsterdam and Rotterdam grew tired of putting up with “drug tourists” from Europe and the United States. By 1995 the government was ready to act again...and this time they didn’t choose tolerance. They shut down half of the Amsterdam coffee shops (that amounted to more than 100 businesses). And a controversial measure in Rotterdam closed all coffee shops within 250 meters of a school, reducing the number of shops in that city by 25 percent.
Despite the crackdown, tolerance lives on. The Dutch don’t seem to want to completely ban marijuana—a 2008 proposal by one Dutch lawmaker to recriminalize it, which would close all coffee shops, failed to gain support. But tolerance goes only so far. In June 2011, the national government passed a law banning noncitizens from setting foot in coffee shops altogether. That will make them “locals only” private clubs that require membership. Amsterdam’s reputation as the “Las Vegas of Europe” may be coming to an end...unless you’re Dutch.
9 OTHER NAMES FOR A MULLET
Ape drape
Hockey hair
Business in front, party in back
Neck warmer
Camaro hair
Beaver paddle
Mud flap
Kentucky waterfall
Long Island iced tease
Southernmost point in the United States: Ka Lae, on Hawaii’s Big Island.
DON’T TELL THE KIDS!
Think writers of magical tales that enchant children are all sweetness and light? Margaret Wise Brown hunted rabbits and collected their severed feet while writing The Runaway Bunny, Ian Fleming wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang between James Bond thrillers, and Maurice Sendak modeled the monsters in Where the Wild Things Are on his Brooklyn relatives whose bad teeth and hairy noses he detested. Here’s the dark side of other famous kid-lit authors.
AUTHOR: Kay Thompson
CLAIM TO FAME: In 1955 Thompson wrote Eloise, a tale about a pampered, mischievous little girl who lives with her British nanny, her dog Weenie, and her turtle Skipperdee in the penthouse of New York City’s elegant Plaza Hotel. Eloise and its three sequels (along with a lucrative line of dolls, records, toys, luggage, and clothing) made Thompson a media star.
THE DARK SIDE: Thompson, who’d had a meager career as a singer, actress and songwriter, finally achieved stardom with Eloise and she had no intention of sharing the spotlight with anyone. From the beginning, she insisted that her name be on every Eloise book, above the title, as on a marquee. When she heard a rumor circulating that Eloise was based on her goddaughter, Liza Minnelli, Thompson snapped, “I am Eloise!” She was equally put off by the attention her collaborator, Hilary Knight, was receiving for his illustrations. She responded by cancelling the nearly finished fifth book in the series and blocking further printing of the Eloise sequels, putting Knight in dire financial straits. (After Thompson died in 1998, the books were re-released, and Knight started receiving royalties once again.)
AUTHOR: Shel Silverstein
CLAIM TO FAME: Silverstein wrote several books that became children’s classics, including The Giving Tree, a bittersweet fable about the relationship between a boy and a tree. Since its publication in 1964, the book has sold more than five million copies and has been translated into 30 languages.
THE DARK SIDE: Before he started writing kids’ books, Silverstein was a full-time cartoonist for Playboy magazine. His work had a decidedly adult—even raunchy—air to it. So when his friend, illustrator Tomi Ungerer, suggested he write for children, Silverstein brushed him off. But Ungerer was persistent and pointed to his own career: In addition to children’s books, his output included political, antiwar, and even erotic works.
First government-owned presidential automobile: Teddy Roosevelt’s 1909 Stanley Steamer.
Ungerer introduced Silverstein to his editor, Ursula Nordstrom. She liked to publish “good books for bad children,” and thought Silverstein would be a perfect fit. So in 1963, she published his first effort: Lafcadio, the Lion Who Shot Back—the story of a lion who ate a hunter, learned to shoot the dead hunter’s gun, joined a circus, and then returned to Africa with a group of humans to hunt lions. The next year, Silverstein came out with The Giving Tree, an equally morbid, but (literally) sappier tale of a tree that loves a boy so much, it sacrifices itself down to its stump to keep him happy. The book caused quite a stir. Some saw it as a story of a beautiful relationship; others, as a worst-case example of self-destructive love. At a Giving Tree symposium in 1995, Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard opined, “Tree’s qualities would make her a terrible mother—a masochist who, quite predictably, has raised a sociopath.”
AUTHOR: Laura Ingalls Wilder
THE STORY: In 1932 Wilder published Little House in the Big Woods, the first in a series of books based on her pioneer childhood. The Little House books spawned a multimillion-dollar franchise of spinoff books, mass merchandising, and a long-running television show.
THE DARK SIDE: Wilder is listed as the author of the Little House books that made her famous, but it appears that she had a lot of help from her daughter, Rose Ingalls Lane. Lane was an accomplished writer whose work appeared in Harper’s, Saturday Evening Post, and Ladies’ Home Journal, and her short stories were nominated for O. Henry Prizes. Though Lane suffered bipolar bouts that resulted in her losing confidence in her work, she discovered that she could still perform as an editor and ghostwriter during those times. She ghosted several bestselling books by celebrity “authors” who either credited her for “editorial assistance” (Charlie Chaplin) or with the line “As told to Rose Wilder Lane” (Henry Ford). Lane’s formidable skills have kept generations of literary detectives trying to figure out how much she actually contributed to her mother’s books. Laura Ingalls Wilder was a treasure trove of stories about early prairie living, but her first attempt to write them down, an autobiography titled Pioneer Girl, never found a publisher. So, in 1930, Lane began a collaboration that would turn her 65-year-old mother into a household name, and leave her in the shadows. Scholars have found substantial evidence that Lane read, edited, and revised her mother’s work on every one of the Little House books. But if she acted as her mom’s ghostwriter, it’s a secret mother and daughter took to their graves.
Oldest government building in the US: the Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe, NM (1610).
AUTHOR: Roald Dahl
THE STORY: With sales of more than 100 million books, Dahl ranks as one of the world’s bestselling fiction authors. Many of his works have been turned into major motion pictures, including Matilda, The Witches, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and James and the Giant Peach, the story of a boy whose parents are eaten by a runaway rhinoceros, leaving him stuck living with his horrible aunts, Sponge and Spiker.
THE DARK SIDE: When Roald Dahl was nine years old, his parents sent him from their home in Wales to St. Peter’s, a boarding school in Somerset, England. The school offered an excellent education, along with regular canings by the headmaster for such minor infractions as eating or talking during class. His teachers graded him harshly, including one who wrote that Dahl “persistently writes words meaning the exact opposite of wh
at is intended.” Homesick for his family back in Wales, Dahl felt abandoned, alone, and at the complete mercy of cruel adults. Given this history, it’s no surprise that horrid grown-ups and abandoned kids appear in almost all of his children’s books. But—as it it turns out—Dahl could have given Sponge and Spiker a few lessons in how to be nasty. Sometime in the 1970s, he reportedly advised novelist Kingsley Amis to start writing children’s books. “That’s where the money is,” he told Amis.
“I don’t think I enjoyed children’s books much when I was a child,” Amis replied. “I’ve got no feeling for that kind of thing.”
“Never mind,” said Dahl. “The little bastards’d swallow it anyway.”
Octopuses have no bones.
ADIDAS VS. PUMA,
PART III
Adidas and Puma created the modern athletic-shoe industry in the late 1940s and dominated it into the 1980s. Then everything went “swoosh.” Here’s Part III of our story. (Part II is on page 352.)
THE LIGHT STUFF
The constant battles between Adidas and Puma, and the battles within both companies, distracted them from a larger threat posed by a onetime University of Oregon track-and-field coach named Bill Bowerman and his former athlete Phil Knight.
Bowerman was a lot like Adi Dassler: He liked to tinker with shoe designs. He thought ordinary athletic shoes, like the ones made by Adidas and Puma, were too heavy. He believed that if shoes were lighter, his athletes would be able to run faster. So in the early 1970s he invented a shoe he called the Waffle (so-named because he made the shoe’s revolutionary urethane sole in his wife’s waffle iron).
Phil Knight’s company, Blue Ribbon Sports, imported Tiger brand athletic shoes from Japan. But he wanted his own line of shoes, and he thought Bowerman’s Waffle design had promise. He arranged for some of his Japanese suppliers to manufacture Waffles in their factories. Knight considered naming the new brand Dimension Six, but an employee suggested naming it after the winged goddess of victory in Greek mythology, Nike. That sounded better. In time Knight would rename the entire company Nike...but only after he’d paid a graphic design student named Carolyn Davidson $35 to come up with a logo—the Nike “Swoosh.”
Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® Page 53