GENERAL TSO’S CHICKEN: The sweet-and-spicy deep-fried chicken dish is credited to Peng Chang-kuei, a chef from Hunan, China, who named it after a Qing Dynasty military hero from Hunan. Peng first made it in Taiwan in the 1950s. He opened a restaurant in New York City in the early 1970s, and the dish has been a Chinese restaurant staple ever since.
FRANGIPANE: This almond-based pastry filling was imported to America from Belgium in the 1800s. The name is traced to 16th-century Italian nobleman Mutio Frangipani, who created a perfume which included oils from the flowers of the plumeria tree, now commonly known as the frangipani tree. The almond pastry was said to have a similar scent, so it got the name too.
JERK CHICKEN: Also called “Jamaican” jerk chicken, this spicy dish combines the influences of the island’s native, Spanish, and African populations. The cooking process known as “jerking” involves marinating meat or fish in a mix of spices—the key being pimento berry (Americans call it “allspice”) and habanero chili—and then slowly cooking/smoking it. “Jerk” comes from the word charqui, Spanish for dried meat, from which “jerky” is also derived.
YAKITORI: Most commonly yakitori is skewered and barbecued chicken (the word means “grilled bird” in Japanese), but other meats and fish are often substituted. They’re flavored with either salt or a mix of soy sauce, sugar, and mirin—sweet rice wine. Yakitori has been a luxury item since the 1600s, became extremely popular after World War II, and it made its way from Japan to the U.S. in the 1960s.
iHave (money): The iDiamond Ear is a $6,400 set of diamond-studded earphones.
HIBACHI: The word has been part of the English language since the 1860s, but the mini-barbecues didn’t become popular until the 1970s. A Japanese hibachi, meaning “fire bowl,” is a round container, often made from clay, in which charcoal was burned—but they were used to heat rooms, not cook food. The Japanese grill that most Americans would recognize as a hibachi is called a shichirin. It’s been suggested that shichirin was too hard for English speakers to say…so they were called “hibachis” instead.
OXTAIL SOUP: A type of “soul food” still popular in parts of the American South, this is a stewlike soup based around beef tails. Similar stews have been eaten around the world for many centuries; the American variety most likely has its roots in an English dish of the same name.
UDON NOODLES: You’re probably familiar with the thick, chewy wheat noodles commonly served in Japanese restaurants. They’re actually Chinese in origin, and, according to legend, were brought to Japan by a Buddhist monk in the 8th century. They were introduced to Americans when the country’s first Japanese restaurants opened in San Francisco in the 1880s.
REVIEWS OF THE BEATLES ON
THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW, FEBRUARY 1964
“They wear sheep-dog bangs. The sound of their music is one of the most persistent noises heard over England since the air-raid sirens were dismantled. It’s high-pitched, loud beyond reason, and stupefyingly repetitive.”
—Newsweek
“The Beatles are 75 percent publicity, 20 percent haircut, and five percent lilting lament.”
—New York Herald Tribune
“Their musical talent is minimal. Their weird hairstyle is merely a combination of the beehive and the ‘little moron’ hair-do.”
—Washington Star
“Imported hillbillies who look like sheepdogs and sound like alley cats in agony.”
—Washington Post
Fat fact: The average American gains one pound during the holiday season.
GUILT BY ASSOCIATION
More words that only seem naughty…but are actually quite nice.
Titration: The practice of gradually adjusting the dose of a medication until the desired affect is achieved.
Organ meat: The internal organs (eyes, lungs, brain, etc.) of a butchered animal. Depending on the animal, the organ, and the culture, it’s either considered a delicacy or tossed out in the trash.
Barfi: An Indian dessert made from condensed milk cooked in sugar, and often flavored with fruit. It’s also known as “Indian cheesecake.”
Pista Barfi: Barfi flavored with pistachio nuts.
Drip Dickey: A brand of “wine collar” that fits over the neck of an opened bottle to prevent the wine from dribbling down its side.
Cockaleekie: A soup from Scotland. The two main ingredients: 1) a game bird, or cock, and 2) an onion-like vegetable called a leek.
Homogamy: A marriage between people who are culturally similar to one another.
Shittah: A species of acacia tree that features prominently in the Old Testament: The Ark of the Covenant is said to be made of shittim, or wood harvested from a shittah tree.
Decocker: The part of a firearm that allows you to uncock the weapon safely, without risk of it going off.
Great Tit: The largest member of the tit family of songbirds, native to Asia and Europe.
Assiette: French for “dinner plate.” It can also mean a selection of cold cuts served on a just such a plate.
Horny-handed: Someone whose hands are calloused from physical labor is said to be “horny-handed.”
Spanker: The rear-most sail on a square-rigged sailing ship. (Modern racing sailboats have a spanker called a “blooper.”)
Laywoman: A woman who is training to become a Catholic nun, but who has not yet completed the process.
Crapulent: Sick from eating or drinking to excess.
Gun control: In 1882 a Texas cattle association banned cowboys from having six-shooters.
THE PORTMANTEAU
MOVIE QUIZ
A portmanteau is a word that results from two other words being combined. (Example: WALL-E + E.T. = WALL-E.T.) So, here’s a wordplay game we came up with: We took two movies and made portmanteaus of their titles. Can you guess the movies, and their combined titles, based on these combined plots? Answers are on page 536.
1. A ragtag group of Midwestern teenagers (Jennifer Gray, C. Thomas Howell) band together, get their dads’ guns, and fight off a surprise aerial attack from Russian Communist zombies who want to eat their delicious teenage braaaaaains.
2. A corporate axeman (George Clooney) spends most of his time flying around the country from one office to another, terminating redundant employees. Disenchanted, he thinks he might want to settle into a life of more permanence, when he falls in love with a golden retriever that plays basketball.
3. Stuck in both a dead-end telemarketing job and a loveless marriage with a career-driven wife (Annette Bening), a suburban man (Kevin Spacey) has a midlife crisis and falls in love with a fur-covered, animated monster (voice of Robby Benson) who lives in a castle full of talking candlesticks and teapots, and just may be a kind-hearted prince under that gruff exterior.
4. Billionaire industrialist Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) builds a metal suit that gives him superhuman powers, and uses it to create a new identity for himself: Don Quixote, an elderly knight who wanders the medieval Spanish countryside in search of adventure (while singing “The Impossible Dream”).
5. A little girl (Abigail Breslin) and her eccentric family pile into an old Volkswagen microbus to attend a beauty pageant three states away. The surprising “talent” she shows off in the contest: the ability to quickly and efficiently clean up a room after deaths and homicides.
Barbie’s first car: A pink 1962 Austin-Healey.
6. A young assassin (Uma Thurman) is left for dead on the eve of her wedding, and after emerging from a coma, she begins a mission of revenge against those who tried to kill her, and claim the daughter she’s never met. First up: two dumb, metal-head teenagers (Alex Winter, Keanu Reeves). Can she catch them as they travel through time trying to find historical figures who will help them write the term paper they need to graduate?
7. Grotesque alien beings crash land in South Africa and are detained in a walled, prison-like ghetto of Johannesburg until one night when a few violently break out to enjoy a sexually charged series of romantic encounters with Mickey Rourke.
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8. A suburban mother (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her daughter (Lindsay Lohan) magically trade bodies and experience life through the other’s eyes, before they put on hockey masks and team up to murder amorous teenagers at a summer camp.
9. A 1960s rock and roll band called the Wonders rises to fame on a single hit, but break up when they are forced to play a concert in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn on the hottest day of the year, getting caught in racially-fueled riots and arsons.
10. A man (Ben Stiller) tries to win the heart of his true love (Cameron Diaz), competing with a sleazy private investigator and an NFL quarterback. He’s assisted by a British nanny (Julie Andrews) who is practically perfect in every way.
11. An army of Spartan soldiers marches into battle to defeat their sworn enemy: a horde of adorable black-and-white spotted puppies.
BONUS THREE-MOVIE QUESTION: The head of a New York organized crime family (Marlon Brando) must contend with a son who does not wish to enter the family business, all the while having to deal with the many mishaps in the lead-up to the wedding of his daughter (Elizabeth Taylor) to a monster (Boris Karloff) that was made by a German scientist out of reanimated corpse pieces.
Nothing to sniff at: The perfume industry’s annual awards are called the FiFis.
SHORT STORY: THE MINI
For more than 40 years the Mini was one of the most recognizable cars on Earth. But because it wasn’t sold in the U.S. after 1969, few Americans were familiar with it. That changed in 2001, when BMW introduced a modern version to the U.S. market. Here’s the story of the little car that started it all.
OUT OF GAS
In July 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. Though the canal is on Egyptian soil, in 1956 it was controlled by Britain and France. Four months later, Britain, France, and Israel tried to regain control of the canal by invading Egypt. But the invasion was opposed by both the United States and the U.S.S.R., and it failed. Even worse for Britain and France, Saudi Arabia cut off oil supplies to the two countries to punish them for the invasion. The resulting shortages sent the price of gasoline soaring in the United Kingdom, forcing the British government to ration supplies. Many drivers were limited to just 12 gallons, about a single tankful, per month.
THINKING SMALL
That sent the British auto industry into a slump, and consumers switched to tiny gas-sipping vehicles, many of them imported, which were derisively called “bubble cars.” The Messerschmitt Kabinenroller (“Cabin Scooter”), for example, was just that: A three-wheel enclosed scooter with a one-cylinder, two-stroke engine like a lawn mower’s. The BMW Isetta, described by one critic as resembling an “egg on roller skates,” was built like a refrigerator: The entire front end served as the car’s only door—you opened it just like a refrigerator, and climbed in.
Bubble cars drove purists crazy. Leonard Lord, head of the British Motor Corporation—the parent company of Austin, Morris, MG, and other makes—was outraged that motorists should be forced to drive such cheap, uncomfortable vehicles. He told his engineers to drive those “bloody awful bubble cars” off the road by building “a proper miniature car” that motorists would be proud to drive.
12% of American men say they never use their car’s turn signals. 44% tailgate to try to speed up the car in front of them.
Lord wanted the car, soon to be called the Mini, to be no more than 10 feet long, 4 feet wide, and 4 feet in height—the minimum amount of space he judged would be necessary to hold four passengers plus a small amount of luggage. He wanted it to have a “proper” four-stroke, four-cylinder engine, and the “proper” number of wheels—four. Adding to the challenge, he wanted it built entirely out of existing mechanical parts, since there was no money available to design new ones.
LITTLE BIG MAN
The man that Lord put in charge of the Mini, Alec Issigonis, may have been the only British auto executive who would even have had a chance at pulling off such a feat. The son of Greek refugees from Turkey, in the late 1940s Issigonis led the design team that created the hugely successful Morris Minor, a car already well on its way to becoming the first British car to sell a million units.
The Minor was a fairly small car by the standards of the day, but it was surprisingly roomy inside, which was one of Issigonis’s trademarks as a designer—he had a knack for squeezing the maximum amount of interior space out of any car he worked on.
Safety was another important part of his design philosophy: “I make my cars with such good brakes, such good steering, that if people get in a crash it’s their own fault,” he liked to say. Considering how tiny the Mini was expected to be, roominess and safety were going to be very high priorities indeed.
SIDEWAYS
Working out of a special studio set apart from the rest of the company, Issigonis, an automotive engineer named Jack Daniels, and seven other staffers set to work. Issigonis and Daniels had worked together on the Minor, and as they developed the design for the new car, they drew heavily from a prototype they’d built a few years earlier. That car had front-wheel drive and a “transverse” engine—the engine block was rotated 90° to give it a left-to-right orientation, instead of the standard front-to-back of the time.
Front-wheel drive improved the car’s performance, and it also eliminated the need to run a driveshaft the length of the car from the engine (in front) to the rear wheels, which saved space, weight, and cost. The transverse engine also saved a lot of room—because the engine was installed sideways, it could be squeezed into just a few feet of space under the hood.
Back when Issigonis and Daniels first proposed their sideways-engined, front-wheel drive Minor, their superiors rejected such an unconventional and seemingly risky design. But now that reducing space, weight, and cost were so important in making the new car a success, suddenly the design didn’t seem so risky after all.
PUTTING IT TOGETHER
The Mini team managed to squeeze the transverse engine and a 4-speed manual transmission into just 18 inches of space, which left 8½ feet for the passenger compartment, if Lord’s goal of keeping the car under 10 feet in length was to be met. (The Volkswagen Beetle, by comparison, was just under 13½ feet long.)
Because interior space was at such a premium in so tiny a car, Issigonis gave it a very boxy shape to provide the driver and passengers with as much room as possible. To limit the wheel wells’ intrusion into that space, he pushed the wheels out to the four corners of the car. And to keep those wells as small as possible, he used the tiniest wheels ever used in a production automobile: just 10 inches in diameter, smaller than a dinner plate. In such tight confines there was no room for a standard spring suspension, either, so small rubber cones called “doughnuts” were used instead, which gave the car a very stiff ride.
The car windows did not roll up and down—you slid them open and closed by hand, which saved on the weight and expense of window hardware. No radio was installed, and neither were seat belts (few cars of the era had them). But Issigonis, a chain-smoker, made sure the car had an ashtray.
SMALL WONDER
Issigonis wanted the Mini to have a 948cc engine that would have given the car quick acceleration and a top speed of more than 90 mph. But he worried that it might be too powerful for ordinary drivers to handle, so he had a couple of engineers take the car for a test drive. They flipped the car. Issigonis replaced the engine with an 848cc engine. New top speed: 72 mph. That might not sound like much, but the Mini was faster than just about any other small car of the day, including the VW Beetle, which had a top speed of 68 mph. That, combined with the stiff suspension and the placement of the wheels at the four corners of the car, gave it go-kart-like handling that was absolutely thrilling. BMC head Leonard Lord realized it the first time he took the prototype out for a test drive in July 1958: He was gone only five minutes before he roared back to the plant at top speed, braked sharply, and jumped out of the car. “Build it!” he ordered. The first production Minis rolled off the assembly line
in early 1959.
There are no Cubans on Facebook. (Private Internet access is banned in Cuba.)
LITTLE INTEREST
As fun as the Minis were to drive, it took them a while to catch on. They were, after all, tiny. Compared to ordinary British cars, they looked pretty silly. They were also noisy, spartan, and underpowered by big-car standards. Even the car’s low price—£500, or about $1,400—may have put buyers off. How good could a car that small and that cheap really be?
But as more people experienced the thrill of driving one, word of mouth began to spread and demand surged. BMC sold 116,000 Minis in 1960, not bad for the car’s first full model year, and sales climbed quickly from there, passing 157,000 in 1961. The introduction of the Mini Cooper, a suped-up racing Mini designed by Formula One racing legend John Cooper in July 1961, followed by the even sportier Mini Cooper S in 1963, generated even greater interest, pushing sales past the 240,000 mark for 1964. (John Cooper was paid £2—around $5.40—for every Mini Cooper sold, just for the use of his name.) Sales remained strong through the rest of the decade, finally peaking in 1971, when more than 318,000 Minis were sold.
NO CLASS
Within just a year or two of its introduction, the Mini became the car to be seen in for British film stars, the London “in crowd,” and celebrities around the world. Peter Sellers bought one, so did Mick Jagger, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Bridget Bardot, all four of the Beatles, and at least one of the Monkees. King Hussein of Jordan owned one, so did Princess Grace of Monaco. Prince Charles learned to drive in his, and he wasn’t alone—in the years to come more British subjects would learn to drive in a Mini than in any other car. In this most class-conscious of societies, here was Britain’s first (and probably last) truly classless car—everybody wanted to own one, and almost anybody could afford to buy one. No British car before or since has had the Mini’s widespread appeal. Few cars have enjoyed the long life that it had: There were plenty of improvements over the years to be sure (roll-up windows were standard after 1969, heaters after 1974), but the same basic car stayed on the market from 1959 until the year 2000. In that time it sold more than 5.3 million cars—that’s an average of nearly 2,500 cars a week, every week, for 41 years.
Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ Page 35