The Truth: The article was the brainchild of Metropolitan publisher Sean Patrick Reily, who later admitted it had been inspired by Mark Twain’s “petrified man” work.
How can you tell when a porpoise is searching for a mate? It swims upside down.
WEIRD CELEBRATIONS
One of Uncle John’s bathroom stalwarts is Stabbed with a Wedge of Cheese, by Charles Downey. There’s a lot of offbeat stuff in it, including info on these festivals.
THE ANNUAL FIRE ANT FESTIVAL
Location: Marshall, Texas
Background: Fire ants are red ants that swarm and bite—a real problem in South Texas. People in Marshall decided that since they couldn’t get rid of the ants, they might as well have some fun with them.
Special Events: Fire Ant Call, Fire Ant Roundup, and a Fire Ant Chili Cookoff in which entrants must certify in writing that their fixin’s contain at least one fire ant. The ending to the festivities is the Fire Ant Stomp—not an attempt to squash the ants, but an old-fashioned street dance.
THE INTERNATIONAL STRANGE MUSIC FESTIVAL
Location: Olive Hill, Kentucky
Background: Founded to honor people who make music from non-musical items.
Special Events: Every act is a special event. Performers have included:
• A Japanese trio playing “My Old Kentucky Home” on a table (upside down, strung like a cello), tea pot (a wind instrument), and assorted pots and pans (bongo drums)
• A 15-piece orchestra of automobile horns
• A seven-foot slide whistle requiring three people to operate it
• A “Graduated Clanger”—a system of ever-smaller fire alarm bells, played like a xylophone
THE ANNUAL CHICKEN SHOW
Location: Wayne, Nebraska
Background: Held the second Saturday in July, featuring a crowing contest for roosters, a free omelet feed for humans, and a chicken-flying meet, fully sanctioned by the International Chicken Flying Association.
It’s impossible to snore in the weightlessness of space.
Special Events: A “Most Beautiful Beak” contest, chicken bingo, and an egg drop (participants risk egg-on-the-face by trying to catch a raw egg dropped from a fully extended cherry picker). The National Cluck-Off selects the person with the most lifelike cluck and most believable crow. Another contest offers prizes to the man and woman who sport the most chicken-like legs.
THE WORLD GRITS FESTIVAL
Location: St. George, South Carolina
Background: World’s only celebration honoring the South’s staple food. Special grits dishes are offered for all meals of the day. Also featured are a grits mill, a grits-eating contest, and a grits cooking contest. The event was born when someone discovered that the 2,300 citizens of St. George went through about 1,800 pounds of grits a week.
Special Events: “The Roll-in-Grits Contest.” A kids’ wading pool is filled with hot water and several hundred pounds of grits, then stirred with a canoe paddle till done. Each contestant: 1) weighs in, 2) gets in the pool and wallows in it for seven seconds, 3) gets out and weighs in again. The object: To see how many pounds of grits can stick to your body. All-time winner had 26 pounds stuck to him.
THE UGLY PICKUP PARADE AND CONTEST
Location: Chadron, Nebraska
Background: In 1987, newspaper columnist Les Mann wrote an homage to his junker 1974 pickup, “Black Beauty,” claiming it was the ugliest truck on the planet. Irate ugly-truck owners wrote in, saying they could top him. So the first Ugly Truck Contest was born.
Special Events: Experts pick the Ugly Pickup of the Year. An Ugly Pickup Queen leads the three-block parade through town. Official rules: Trucks have to be street-legal, and over a decade old. They have to be able to move under their own power; a majority of the surface area has to be rust and dents; and, most important, they’ve got to have a good Ugly Truck name. Contestants get extra points for something especially ugly on their truck.
It takes around 200,000 frowns to create a permanent brow line
IN DREAMS….
People have always been fascinated by dreams. Where do they come from? What do they mean? D.H. Lawrence put it perfectly when he said, “I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts or my thoughts are the result of my dreams.” On occasion, art, music, and even discoveries and inventions have resulted directly from information received in a dream. Here are some examples.
THE SEWING MACHINE
Elias Howe had been trying to invent a practical lock-stitch sewing machine for years, but had been unsuccessful. One night in the 1840s, he had a nightmare in which he was captured by a primitive tribe who were threatening to kill him with their spears. Curiously, all the spears had holes in them at the pointed ends. When Howe woke up, he realized that a needle with a hole at its tip—rather than at the base or middle (which is what he’d been working with)—was the solution to his problem.
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE
Since childhood, novelist Robert Louis Stevenson had always remembered his dreams and believed that they gave him inspiration for his writing. In 1884, he was in dire need of money and was trying to come up with a book. He had already spent two days racking his brains for a new plot when he had a nightmare about a man with a dual personality. In the dream, “Mr. Hyde” was being pursued for a crime he’d committed; he took a strange powder and changed into someone else as his pursuers watched. Stevenson screamed in his sleep, and his wife woke him. The next morning he began writing down The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
INSULIN
Frederick Banting, a Canadian doctor, had been doing research into the cause of diabetes, but had not come close to a cure. One night he had a strange dream. When he awoke, he quickly wrote down a few words that he remembered: “Tie up the duct of the pancreas of a dog…wait for the glands to shrivel up…then cut it out, wash it…and filter the precipitation.” This new approach to extracting the substance led to the isolation of the hormone now known as insulin, which has saved millions of diabetics’ lives. Banting was knighted for his discovery.
Smallest town in the U.S.: Hove Mobile Park City, North Dakota, with a population of two.
LEAD SHOT
James Watt is remembered for inventing the steam engine, but he also came up with the process for making lead shot used in shotguns. This process was revealed to him in a dream. At the time, making the shot was costly and unpredictable—the lead was rolled into sheets by hand, then chopped into bits. Watt had the same dream each night for a week: He was walking along in a heavy rainstorm—but instead of rain, he was being showered with tiny pellets of lead, which he could see rolling around his feet. The dream haunted him; did it mean that molten lead falling through the air would harden into round pellets? He decided to experiment. He melted a few pounds of lead and tossed it out of the tower of a church that had a water-filled moat at its base. When he removed the lead from the water, he found that it had hardened into tiny globules. To this day, lead shot is made using this process.
THE BENZENE MOLECULE
Friedrich A. Kekule, a Belgian chemistry professor, had been working for some time to solve the structural riddle of the benzene molecule. One night while working late, he fell asleep on a chair and dreamed of atoms dancing before him, forming various patterns and structures. He saw long rows of atoms begin to twist like snakes until one of the snakes seized its own tail and began to whirl in a circle. Kekule woke up “as if by a flash of lightning” and began to work out the meaning of his dream image. His discovery of a closed ring with an atom of carbon and hydrogen at each point of a hexagon revolutionized organic chemistry.
JESUS (as many people think of Him)
Warner E. Sallman was an illustrator for religious magazines. In 1924 he needed a picture for a deadline the next day, but was coming up blank Finally, he went to bed—then suddenly awoke with “a picture of the Christ in my mind’s eye just as if it were on my drawing board.” He quickly sketched a portrait of Jesus
with long brown hair, blue eyes, a neatly trimmed beard, and a beatific look—which has now become the common image of Christ around the world. Since 1940, more than 500 million copies of Sallman’s “Head of Christ” have been sold. It has been reproduced billions of times on calendars, lamps, posters, etc.
Chief, the U.S. Cavalry’s last horse, died in 1968. He was 36.
UNCLE ALBERT SAYS…
Cosmic question: What would Albert Einstein think if he knew we consider his comments great bathroom reading?
“Only two things are infinite, the universe and stupidity—and I’m not sure about the former.”
“God is subtle, but He is not malicious.”
“‘Common sense’ is the set of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.”
“Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.”
“I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.”
“Try not to become a man of success, but rather, a man of value.”
“I experience the greatest degree of pleasure in having contact with works of art. They furnish me with happy feelings of an intensity such as I cannot drive from other realms.”
“To punish me for my contempt for authority, Fate made me an authority myself.”
“Why is it that nobody understands me, and everybody likes me?”
“A life directed chiefly toward fulfillment of personal desires sooner or later always leads to bitter disappointment.”
“My political ideal is that of democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual, and no man idolized.”
“Whatever there is of God and goodness in the Universe, it must work itself out and express itself through us. We cannot stand aside and let God do it.”
“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
“I am a deeply religious nonbeliever…This is a somewhat new kind of religion.”
“With fame I become more and more stupid, which of course is a very common phenomenon.”
Chickens are the only birds that have combs.
FLUBBED HEADLINES
These are 100% honest-to-goodness headlines. Can you figure out what they were trying to say?
Kids Make Nutritious Snacks
ENRAGED COW INJURES FARMER WITH AXE
Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge
BILKE-A-THON NETS $1,000 FOR ILL BOY
PANDA MATING FAILS; VETERINARIAN TAKES OVER
School taxpayers revolting
Eye Drops Off Shelf
HELICOPTER POWERED BY HUMAN FLIES
Circumcisions Cut Back
POPE TO BE ARRAIGNED FOR ALLEGEDLY BURGLARIZING CLINIC
City wants Dead to pay for cleanup
MOORPARK RESIDENTS ENJOY A COMMUNAL DUMP
Montana Traded to Kansas City
Area man wins award for nuclear accident
International Scientific Group Elects Bimbo As Its Chairman
Storm delayed by bad weather
LEGISLATORS TAX BRAINS TO CUT DEFICIT
DEAD GUITARIST NOW SLIMMER AND TRIMMER
Study Finds Sex, Pregnancy Link
Include Your Children When Baking Cookies
Trees can break wind
RANGERS TO TEST PEETERS FOR RUST
Cockroach Slain, Husband Badly Hurt
Living Together Linked to Divorce
ECUADOR’S PRESIDENT DECLARES HE’S NOT DEAD
LACK OF BRAINS HINDERS RESEARCH
Two Sisters Reunited After 18 Years At Checkout Counter
Man, Shot Twice in Head, Gets Mad
MISSOURI WOMAN BIG WINNER AT HOG SHOW
Teacher Dies; Board Accepts His Resignation
PANTS MAN TO EXPAND AT THE REAR
Siberia means “sleeping land.”
ANONYMOUS STARS
You’ve watched them work, you’ve heard them speak—but you’ve probably never heard their names. They’re the actors inside the gorilla suits, the voices of talking animals, etc. We think they deserve a little credit.
THE VOICE OF E.T.
• E.T.’s voice was created by combining the voices of three people, a sea otter, and a dog. But the person who spoke the most famous lines—“E.T. phone home” and “Be good”—was Patricia A. Welsh, a former radio soap opera star who’d only been involved in one other movie (Waterloo, with Robert Taylor, in 1940).
• By contract, she was forbidden to say her lines (which are copyrighted) even casually in conversation; Steven Spielberg said he “didn’t want kids to get confused about E.T.’s image.” Her name isn’t even listed in the credits.
DARTH VADER
• David Prowse is a 6′ 6″, 266-pound former heavyweight wrestling champion. George Lucas saw him in A Clockwork Orange and offered him his choice between two parts—Chewbacca or Vader. Prowse chose Vader because he didn’t like the idea of going around in a “gorilla suit” for six months.
THE “LOST IN SPACE” ROBOT
• Bob May, a stuntman, had a few small parts in a TV series called “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.” The producer, Irwin Allen, told May he was the right size for a part in a new TV series and asked if he’d be interested. May said yes; Allen said: “Fine, you have the part, go try on the robot costume.”
• Cast members goofed on May a lot. One time they locked him in the robot suit and left him there during a lunch break. He tried yelling, but no one was around…so he had a cigarette. Irwin Allen wandered in, saw smoke coming from the robot and thought it was burning up. He went to get a fire extinguisher while May yelled from inside the suit. Later, Allen decided he liked the effect and had May smoke a cigar in the suit for a story about the robot burning out.
James Earl Jones (Darth Vader’s voice), and David Prowse (who played him onscreen) never met.
MR. ED’S VOICE
• When “Mr. Ed” debuted in 1960, the horse’s voice was credited to “an actor who prefers to remain nameless.”
• TV Guide sent a reporter to the studio to figure out who it was. The reporter found a parking space on the “Mr. Ed” set assigned to an old 1930s movie cowboy named Alan “Rocky” Lane.
• Lane admitted it was his voice (he’d been too embarrassed to let people know). He dubbed Ed’s voice off-camera, while the horse was “mouthing the words.” A nylon bit concealed in Ed’s mouth made him move his lips.
R2-D2
• Kenny Baker, 3′8″ tall, was hired simply because he fit into the robot suit. “They made R2-D2 small because Carrie and Mark were small….My agent sent me down. They looked at me and said, “He’ll do!’”
• “I thought it was a load of rubbish at first. Then I thought, ‘Well, Alec Guinness is in it; he must know what’s going on.’”
THE VOICE OF THE DEMON IN THE EXORCIST
• Mercedes McCambridge, an Academy Award-winning actress, was a Catholic. So when she was offered the role, she was uncertain about whether to take it. She consulted Father Walter Hartke at Catholic University, and he approved.
• In the film, the demon’s voice is heard as Linda Blair vomits green gunk. According to one report: “A tube was glued to each side of Blair’s face and covered with makeup. Two men knelt on either side of Blair holding a syringe filled with the green stuff, ready to shoot on cue.”
• “McCambridge had to coordinate her sound effects with the action. A prop man lined up a row of Dixie cups in front of her containing apple pieces soaking in water, and some containing whole boiled eggs. McCambridge held the soft apple chunks in her jaws as she swallowed a boiled egg. On cue, in precise coordination with the screen action, she flexed her diaphragm and spewed everything on the microphone….‘It was hard,’ she said. ‘I sometimes had to lie down after those scenes.’”
Fish cough.
THE HISTORY OF ROCK: A QUIZ
How much do you know about the early days of rock ’n’ roll? Here’s a test to find out. Answers are cm page 492.
1. The song that made Elvis a mega-star was the 1956 smash “(You
Ain’t Nothin’ but a) Hound Dog.” How did he come up with it?
a) He used to sing it to his real hound dog, “Buster.”
b) He copied it from a Las Vegas lounge act.
c) He overheard a woman singing it in a Memphis bus station.
2. The flip side of “Hound Dog,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” was also a big hit. Elvis not only sang it, but co-wrote it with Otis Blackwell. How did Elvis and Otis wind up working together?
a) They were sitting next to each other on an airplane in 1955. To kill time, they started playing a rhyming game that turned into a hit song.
b) Otis was a nephew of Colonel Tom Parker (Elvis’s manager) and needed money to get married. Elvis co-wrote the song with him as a “wedding present.”
c) They didn’t. Elvis just insisted on getting a writing credit (and half the royalties) as his “reward” for singing the song.
3. In the 1950s, Pat Boone was known as a “cover artist”—which meant he copied black artists’ new songs and usually outsold them (because white artists’ records got more airplay). In 1956, he covered Fats Domino’s classic “Ain’t That a Shame.” How did he try to change it?
a) He tried to take the word “ain’t” out and replace it with “isn’t” because he thought it would reflect badly on his education.
b) He tried to slow it down. “It sounds too much like jungle music,” he explained.
c) He tried to turn the sax solo into a tuba solo because his parents were polka fans.
If you feed a wild moose often enough, it will begin to attack people who don’t feed it.
4. The Platters were one of the biggest vocal groups in the early days of rock. Their hits were often new versions of old standards. Their biggest hit was the 1955 version of Jerome Kern’s “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Kern was dead when the song was released, but his wife…
Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader Page 4