Uncle John’s Briefs
Page 27
Why don’t we eat turkey eggs? Mostly because, proportionately, they lay far fewer than chickens.
CARD-PLAYING
SUPERSTITIONS
Over the centuries, card players have come up with all sorts of strange superstitions
to help them win—and elaborate explanations for why they’re losing. (Ignoring,
of course, the possibility that they’re just bad card players.)
GOOD LUCK
• Blow on the cards or spit on them, preferably when no one is looking. (Remember to wipe up any excess spit, so no one knows you’ve fouled them.)
• Wear an article of dirty clothing when you play cards, especially when you play poker. The dirt helps keep evil at bay.
• Stick a pin in your lapel, or in a friend’s lapel.
• There’s one lucky card in each deck. If you can figure out which card it is, touch it with your index finger before the game begins.
• If you’re sitting at a table made of wood, choose a seat that lets you lay your cards with the grain instead of against it.
• Whenever you’re on a losing streak, tilt your chair up on its forelegs and twist it three times. This works best if you twist following the path of the sun—i.e., from east to west.
• If twisting doesn’t help, rotate the chair so the back faces the table, then sit astride it so that you’re facing the seat back.
• If you’re sitting astride your chair and still losing, try sitting on a handkerchief, or walk clockwise three times around the table. (If you still lose, switch to a new deck of cards or consider taking up dominos.)
• If you see a hunchback on the way to your game, that’s good luck. Don’t touch the hump—just seeing the hunchback is all it takes.
BAD LUCK
• Don’t sing or whistle during a card game. It’s unlucky (not to mention annoying).
In Britain, judges first began wearing black robes in 1714 to mourn the death of Queen Anne.
• Don’t pick up any of your cards until all the cards have been dealt, and when you do pick them up, use your right hand.
• Never, ever let someone hover over you and look at your cards, unless that person never plays cards. If they never play cards, then standing over you may actually bring you luck. People who bring you luck are known as “mascots.”
• Don’t sit with your legs crossed—it “crosses out your luck.”
• Never play cards in a room with a dog in it.
• Never let anyone place their foot on the rung of your chair. On the other hand, if you want to give bad luck to someone who’s beating you, put your foot on the rung of their chair.
• Never play cards with a cross-eyed man or woman. (This superstition dates back to the days when people thought that cross-eyed people could see the cards of the people sitting next to them.)
MORE BAD LUCK
• Never play cards on a bare table. (Bring felt or a tablecloth, preferably green, with you…just in case.)
• Don’t lend money during a card game. Don’t borrow it, either.
• If you are dealt a steady succession of black cards, it means that you or someone in your family will die soon.
• If you’re a pilot, coal miner, soldier, fisherman, or sailor, you should never carry playing cards on your person. If you do and bad luck occurs—a storm or an enemy attack, for example—throw the cards as far away from you as you can to get rid of the bad luck.
LUCKY AND UNLUCKY CARDS
• The four of clubs is “the devil’s bedstead.” Discard it unless you absolutely need it. If you’re dealt the four of clubs in the first hand of the game, throw down the cards and leave the game—you’ll have nothing but bad luck.
• Dropping any card on the floor is bad luck, but dropping one of the black aces is worst of all. If you drop a black ace, leave the game immediately. Nobody recovers from luck that bad.
According to experts, the best badminton shuttlecocks are made from the left wing of a goose.
LADIES, BEHAVE
YOURSELVES
Women, you can follow these antique rules of
etiquette…or just laugh at them.
“Immoderate laughter is exceedingly unbecoming a lady; she may affect the dimple or the smile, but should carefully avoid any approximation to a horse-laugh.”
—The Perfect
Gentleman (1860)
“Sending out a letter with a crooked, mangled or upside-down stamp is akin to letting your lingerie straps show.”
—Good Housekeeping’s Book
of Today’s Etiquette (1965)
“Fingernails are another source of feminine excess. The woman who goes about her daily avocations with blood-red finger-nails is merely harking back to the days of savagery, when hands smeared with blood were a sign of successful fighting.”
—Things That Are
Not Done (1937)
“It’s a great idea to file your fingernails in the street car, bus, or train. It’s certainly making the most of your time. The noise of the filing drowns the unpleasant noise of the wheels. But it is the act of an ill-bred person. Who but an ordinary person would allow her epithelium to fly all over? I think that one might as well scatter ashes after a cremation, around the neighborhood.”
—Manners for Millions (1932)
“The perfect hostess will see to it that the works of male and female authors be properly separated on her bookshelves. Their proximity, unless they happen to be married, should not be tolerated.”
—Lady Gough’s Etiquette (1863)
“No matter what the fashion may be, the gloves of a well-dressed woman are never so tight that her hands have the appearance of sausages.”
—The New Etiquette (1940)
“Don’t affect a lisp or talk baby talk. Somebody will probably kill you sometime if you do.”
—Compete! (1935)
One of the first programs to be broadcast by radio was a British yacht race (1898).
“A lady-punster is a most unpleasing phenomenon, and we would advise no young woman, however skilled she may be, to cultivate this kind of verbal talent.”
—Collier’s Cyclopedia
of Commercial and
Social Information (1882)
“Girls, never, never turn at a whistle, to see if you are wanted. A whistle is usually to call a dog.”
—Good Manners (1934)
“A beautiful eyelash is an important adjunct to the eye. The lashes may be lengthened by trimming them occasionally in childhood. Care should be taken that this trimming is done neatly and evenly, and especially that the points of the scissors do not penetrate the eye.”
—Our Deportment (1881)
“If a man must be forcibly detained to listen to you, you are as rude in thus detaining him, as if you had put a pistol to his head and threatened to blow his brains out if he stirred.”
—The Gentlemen’s Book “of
Etiquette and Manual
of Politeness (1860)
“Still less say of anything which you enjoy at table. ‘I love melons,’ ‘I love peaches,’ ‘I adore grapes’—these are school-girl utterances. We love our friends. Love is an emotion of the heart, but not one of the palate. We like, we appreciate grapes, but we do not love them.”
—The American
Code of Manners (1880)
“Never use your knife to convey your food from your plate to your mouth; besides being decidedly vulgar, you run the imminent danger of enlarging the aperture from ear to ear. A lady of fashion used to say that she never saw a person guilty of this ugly habit without a shudder, as every minute she expected to see the head of the unfortunate severed from the body.”
—Etiquette for
the Ladies (1849)
“Certain daring necklines have a paralyzing effect on the conversation and even on the appetite of the other dinner party guests, who hope to see a little more than is already revealed and would love to change places with the waiter, who has a particularly st
imulating view.”
—Accent on Elegance (1970)
“Large hats make little women look like mushrooms.”
—Everyday Etiquette (1907)
Studies prove: A human voice really can shatter glass.
STATUE RATS
They’re called “flying carp,” “winged weasels,” “scum of the sky,”
“park lice,” and “winged infestation.” Lawyers? No, pigeons.
They don’t get much respect, but maybe they should.
There’s more to them than you might think.
• Pigeons were first domesticated by the ancient Egyptians more than 5,000 years ago.
• Pigeons can see clearly for 25 miles and hear wind changes hundreds of miles away.
• Pigeons mate for life and share parenting duties. The father sits on the eggs during the day, the mother at night.
• Pigeons are the only birds that don’t have to lift their heads to swallow water.
• Passenger pigeons were once the most numerous birds in the world. Ornithologist John J. Audubon recorded seeing a single flock in 1808 that he calculated to be 150 miles long, numbering over two billion birds. By 1914 hunting and deforestation had led to the total extinction of the birds.
• Ever seen a baby pigeon? You probably have: young pigeons grow extremely fast. They may weigh more than their parents by the time they’re only four to six weeks.
• In the 17th century, pigeon droppings were used to tan hides and to make gunpowder.
• Homing pigeons were used in both world wars to carry messages between troops and headquarters. They had a 98% success rate in missions flown.
• Racing pigeons have been clocked at 110 mph.
• Only mammals produce milk, right? Wrong. Pigeons make “pigeon milk,” an extremely nutritious secretion from the “crop,” a chamber at the bottom of the esophagus. Both parents make it and feed their young with it.
• Racing pigeons are bred for speed. In 1992 champion racer Invincible Spirit was sold for over $130,000.
• Why do pigeons live in cities? One theory: They are descended from rock doves, cliff dwellers that live near the Mediterranean. Urban structures mimic those ancestral cliffs.
Q: What is the largest animal that ever lived on Earth? A: Not a dinosaur—it’s the blue whale.
WHEN CELEBRITIES
ATTACK
Stars are often at their funniest when they’re attacking other stars.
“I’m not a Julie Andrews fan, no. I’m a diabetic.”
—David Janssen
“Prince looks like a dwarf that fell into a vat of pubic hair.”
—Boy George, on Prince
“Marlon [Brando] is the most overrated actor in the world.”
—Frank Sinatra
“Zsa Zsa the-Bore. Did I spell that right?”
—Elayne Boosler
“If Kathleen Turner had been a man, I would have knocked her out long ago.”
—Burt Reynolds
“Jeremy Irons has no sex appeal….He’s perfect for horror movies—or science fiction. He’s an iceberg with an accent.”
—Andy Warhol
“Where else but in America could a poor black boy like Michael Jackson grow up to be a rich white woman?”
—Red Buttons
“Charlton Heston—a graduate of the Mt. Rushmore school of acting.”
—Edward G. Robinson
“Peter O’Toole looks like he’s walking around just to save the funeral expenses.”
—John Huston
“Sylvester Stallone’s got two bodyguards who look exactly like him walking around on the beach, so I guess he figures that cuts the odds of being assassinated to one in three.”
—Jack Lemmon
“I am fascinated by Courtney Love, the same way I am by someone who’s got Tourette’s syndrome walking in Central Park.”
—Madonna
“In truth, he’s [Michael Caine] an overfat, flatulent, 62-year-old windbag, a master of inconsequence now masquerading as a guru, passing off his vast limitations as pious virtues.”
—Richard Harris
State with the highest cremation rate: Nevada, at 65%. Lowest: Alabama, at 4.5%.
ASK UNCLE JOHN:
THE HUMAN BODY
Answers to every question you ever had about physiology, provided
that every question you ever had is one of these three.
Dear Uncle John: What is all this about “left-brained” and “right-brained” people? Does it have a basis in reality? Or is it the new astrology?
The answer is yes to both. The human brain is largely composed of two hemispheres, the left and the right, each of which is better at certain tasks. Generally, the left side of your brain is the part that handles most of the “logical” aspects of thinking and processing, while the right side handles a lot of the “creative” processes. So, for example, you do math with your left brain, but you do improv dance numbers with your right. People who are better at logical, reality-based thinking are said to be “left-brained,” while people who excel at creative tasks are said to be “right-brained.” So there is some truth to the “left-brain, right brain” theory. But people tend to grossly oversimplify the concept, which makes it like astrology: Whatever scientific underpinnings there are to their understanding of the subject are overwhelmed by miscomprehension of it.
For one thing, no one is wholly “left-brained” or “right-brained”—almost every human is adept at skills from both sides of the hemispheric menu. In addition, not every brain works the same way. More than 75 percent of people predominately use their left hemisphere for language skills—but that still leaves a large chunk of people who have language skills in the right hemisphere, or in both hemispheres. Also, many people erroneously believe that your “handedness” correlates to which side of your brain predominates—so if you’re left-handed, you’re right-brained (the hemispheres are in charge of the opposite sides of the body). But that correlation doesn’t hold up, either—there are plenty of left-handed math geeks and right-handed artists.
In Europe, a moose is known as an elk, and an elk is known as a wapiti.
Dear Uncle John: Why is your heart on the left side of your body?
It’s not. Crack open an anatomy book (or alternately, if you’re a doctor, crack open a human chest), and you’ll notice that the heart is more or less in the middle of the chest, nestled between the lungs. What makes people think the heart is to the left is that the heart’s left ventricle, a chamber that pumps blood, is larger than the right ventricle. This gives the heart its left-leaning shape, so that the heart intrudes farther into the left side of the body than to the right. It also gives the sensation of the heartbeat coming from left of center.
And why is the left ventricle so much larger than the right ventricle? It’s because of where the ventricles are pumping blood. The right ventricle receives deoxygenated blood that’s just come from the body and sends it off to the lungs to get oxygen. Since the lungs are right next to the heart, it’s not a very long trip, and not that much effort is required. The left ventricle, however, is sending the now-oxygenated blood to all the rest of the body, which requires more force to get the blood to where it needs to go.
Dear Uncle John: Do “double-jointed” people actually have two sets of joints?
No. “Double-jointedness”—the ability to bend your thumbs, elbows, or other joints at odd or extreme angles—is a condition known in medical circles as joint hypermobility syndrome. It’s not that these people have more joints than the rest of us do; it’s simply that their joints are more flexible. And while “joint hypermobility syndrome” sounds like a disease, most of the time it’s fairly harmless. Doctors say that somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of children have hypermobility (which is something that anyone who has ever been in a classroom of third-graders knows already), and most of these kids will lose their hyperflexibility over time. Hypermobility often runs in families, and occurs more often in women
than in men.
In fairly rare cases, joint hypermobility can be a symptom of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a class of ailments that includes weakened connective tissues at the joints, as well as other phenomena such as hyperelastic skin. People who have hypermobile joints may also be more susceptible to pulls, sprains, dislocations, and other more serious ailments such as scoliosis (curvature of the spine). Finally, a recent study published in the Journal of Rheumatology suggests that people who are double-jointed may be slightly more susceptible to fibromyalgia (a pain disorder affecting the muscles and bones) and chronic fatigue syndrome.
Kelsey Grammar sings and plays the piano on the theme song to Frasier.
NEW PRODUCTS
Just when you think everything that could possibly be
invented has already been invented, along comes
something like rejection-letter toilet paper.
TRUTH IN ADVERTISING
Say, what’s that suspicious looking device? It’s the “Suspicious Looking Device!” A darkly humorous response to the increased fears of terrorism in recent years, the SLD is a red metal box with dotted lights, a small screen, a buzzer, and whirring motor. What does it do? Nothing. It’s just supposed to appear suspicious.
I WISH…FOR AN FTC INVESTIGATION
A company called Life Technology Research International has created the seemingly impossible: a magical wishing machine. You simply speak into the microphone on the Psychotronic Wishing Machine to tell it what you want…then sit back and wait a few days for your wish to come true. Just make sure the machine is on—LTRI says that the wish is far less likely to ever come true if the machine is turned off while the wish is still being “processed.” Nevertheless, results are still not guaranteed. How does it work? “Conscious human interaction and energy fields.” Cost: $499.
GET YOUR MOTOR RUNNIN’
For the cat owner who has everything: A California man has invented the Purr Detector. It’s a small motion detector and light embedded inside a cat collar. Whenever the cat purrs, the collar glows. It’s only available by mail order, so if you need to know if your cat is purring before the Purr Detector arrives, you can always use your ears.