Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader
Page 37
Spain gets its name from “Spania,” the Carthaginian word that means “land of rabbits.”
TOP-RATED TV SHOWS, 1979–1984
More of the annual Top 10 TV shows of the past 50 years.
1979-1980
(1) 60 Minutes
(2) Three’s Company
(3) M*A*S*H
(4) Alice
(5) Dallas
(6) Flo
(7) (tie) The Jeffersons
(7) (tie) The Dukes of Hazzard
(9) That’s Incredible
(10) One Day at a Time
1980-1981
(1) Dallas
(2) 60 Minutes
(3) The Dukes of Hazzard
(4) The Love Boat
(5) Private Benjamin
(6) M*A*S*H
(7) House Calls
(8) The Jeffersons
(9) (tie) The Two of Us
(9) (tie) Little House on the Prairie
1981-1982
(1) Dallas
(2) 60 Minutes
(3) The Jeffersons
(4) (tie) Joanie Loves Chachi
(4) (tie) Three’s Company
(6) Alice
(7) (tie) The Dukes of Hazzard
(7) (tie) Too Close for Comfort
(9) ABC Monday Night Movie
(10) M*A*S*H
1982-1983
(1) 60 Minutes
(2) Dallas
(3) (tie) M*A*S*H
(3) (tie) Magnum, P.I.
(5) Dynasty
(6) Three’s Company
(7) Simon & Simon
(8) Falcon Crest
(9) The Love Boat
(10) (tie) The A Team
(10) (tie) NFL Monday Night Football
1983-1984
(1) Dallas
(2) 60 Minutes
(3) Dynasty
(4) The A Team
(5) Simon & Simon
(6) Magnum, P.I.
(7) Falcon Crest
(8) Kate & Allie
(9) Hotel
(10) Cagney & Lacey
1984-1985
(1) Dynasty
(2) Dallas
(3) The Cosby Show
(4) 60 Minutes
(5) Family Ties
(6) The A Team
(7) Simon & Simon
(8) Murder, She Wrote
(9) Knots Landing
(10) Falcon Crest; Crazy Like a Fox
What’s your favorite fruit? The most-consumed fruit in the United States is the coffee bean.
ONE TOUGH LAMA
BRI member Sid Morrison found this in Harper’s magazine, and sent it our way. We enjoyed it so much that we decided to reprint it.
Here’s how Harper’s introduced this excerpt: “From an interview with Pema Jones, a 13-year-old Tibetan lama, in the Spring issue of CyberSangha: The Buddhist Alternative Journal. Jones, who is known as Rinpoche (“Precious One”), was born in India to a Tibetan mother and an American father; he lived in a Tibetan monastery until he was 7. He now lives in Wyoming, and is one of the youngest Buddhist teachers in the United States. The interview was conducted by Chris Helm.”
Chris Helm: It must be hard enough to be a 13-year-old boy in America, not to mention a Tibetan lama. How do your friends and family treat your connection with the Dharma?
Pema Jones: It’s kind of weird. I have 2 older brothers, and they tease me about it. They call me “shrimpoche.” The kids at school don’t know I’m a lama. I would never tell them.
Helm: Why not?
Jones: I get dissed enough as it is just being Asian. They call me names like “nip” and “gook.” It’s not like when I was growing up in India. Everyone here in Wyoming is white. I consider it a good day when some goof in a pickup truck doesn’t try to run me over.
Helm: How do you deal with people trying to hurt you?
Jones: It’s pretty safe around here, but we Asians need to stick together. Some of my best friends in our gang are Chinese. It’s strange to have Chinese friends when my family has been treated so badly by the Chinese, but this is America—I gotta live here with my own karma. Some skinhead doesn’t care whether I’m Tibetan or Chinese. He just wants to stomp my head.
Helm: You’re in a gang?
Jones: It’s just for protection. It’s like if a guy threatens one of us, there’s nothing we can do on our own, but by getting a bunch of us together, we can defend ourselves. We don’t have guns, and we don’t do drugs or rob people. Can we talk about something else?
Helm: Sure. Do you like your students?
Babe Ruth wore a cabbage leaf under his baseball cap to keep cool during games.
Jones: Yeah, they’re all right. They’re kind of funny. It’s like, they say they come for the teachings, but when they get into the interview room, they talk about other stuff.
Helm: What other stuff?
Jones: They mainly talk about the opposite sex. Men talk about problems with their wives, and women talk about their husbands and boyfriends. I don’t get it. It’s like, I have little enough time as it is with school and Little League and my chores, and they want me to be a shrink or something. And I’m only 13! I mean, I’ve got girlfriends and all, but what do I know about relationships?
Helm: So what do you tell them?
Jones: I talked to my dad about it, and he gave me a stack of business cards from one of his friends, a psychologist. I just hand my students one of the cards when they start talking about relationships. I put my name on the back of the card, and whenever my dad’s friend gets a new client he takes me to Dairy Queen. It’s cool.
Buddhism is no big deal; it’s like being a doctor. There’s suffering, you diagnose it, give someone a prescription, and hope they go to the drugstore. No one in America wants to go to the store, though. They all want to be pharmacists and sit around discussing different types of medicine. What’s with that? Take some medicine and come back next week. I mean, don’t get me wrong—Buddhism is choice.
Helm: So you’re fully qualified to teach?
Jones: Sure. I mostly teach Tonglen, giving and receiving. It’s what I think works best at times when people are trying to kill you or too many changes are happening at once, which seems to be the case in this country. You’re basically a giant filter, like on an air conditioner. You suck in the bad air and breathe out the pure air. I see myself like an air-conditioning repair dude. I teach people how to filter and cool things down.
Helm: So if you can cool things down, why do you need to be in a gang?
Jones: It’s a samsara and nirvana thing. If some guy disses me I can just tell myself that he really doesn’t exist separate from me, you know? It’s like he’s dissing himself. That works fine. But what happens when he stops talking and starts beating on me? You need to be able to take care of yourself so you don’t get killed. We live in samsara, and spacing out about nirvana doesn’t help anyone.
60% of pets in Great Britain have some form of health insurance.
Helm: Don’t you see any contradiction in that? The Dalai Lama, for example, constantly teaches nonviolence, despite having been terribly oppressed all his life.
Jones: (laughing): Oh yeah, right. The Dalai Lama is an awesome old dude and a killer teacher. But he’s got, like, a dozen bodyguards around him when he’s traveling. What do you think would happen if some butthead pulls a gun on His Holiness? Do you think those dozen bodyguards will practice nonviolence or bust some karate move on him? No way, man. A bodyguard sees this dweeb with a gun and he’s gonna pop a cap in his ass.
****
AND NOW…Another Anonymous Star: MARNI NIXON
Starring roles: The singing voice of Deborah Kerr in The King and I (1956) and An Affair to Remember (1957), Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady (1964) and Natalie Wood in West Side Story (1961).
Background: One of the world’s most popular unknown singers, known as “The Ghostess with the Mostess.” Sang in movie choruses. Her career began when someone heard she had a talent for mimicking other people’s voices, and hired
her to dub Margaret O’Brien’s voice in the 1949 film Secret Garden.
Highlights: On her gift for mimicry: “It’s a combination of intuition and imagining what they sound like. You take it from the quality of their existing voices and facial structure. Audrey Hepburn’s speech pattern is much different from Natalie Wood’s, for instance. I would try to stretch the membranes in my mouth to approach a particular shape. I imagined I could somehow change the tone and quality.” Her hardest job: My Fair Lady.
• On dubbing: “Back then it was a dirty secret. I was threatened, you know. People told me if anybody knew, I wouldn’t work in this town again. And then it became an ‘in’ thing to know who was doing it. But now it’s not a big deal, and I hope I’ve had something to do with changing people’s attitudes about it.”
President James Garfield kept fit by juggling Indian clubs.
IS YOUR NAME YOUR DESTINY?
Ever met someone whose name matches their profession? Like a Dr. Bones, or an attorney named Ms. Law…or a guy named John who writes Bathroom Readers? It’s an interesting phenomenon that’s not—it turns out—all that uncommon. Here’s a Wall Street Journal article on the subject.
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
What’s in a name? Plenty, if it turns out to be your lot in life.
Once upon a time, the Butchers, the Bakers, and the Tailors took on names that advertised their professions. Today, business ought to be brisk for a hairdresser named Barbara Trimmer, for a chef named Susan Spicer—and for her younger brother, Tom Spicer, a specialty-herb broker. Life should be a song for Daniel Harp, who teaches music. “Consciously or unconsciously, they’ve got the essence of branding,” says Alan Brew, a corporate-name consultant.
BRANDED
But no. Talk to some of the aptly named people like Judge Aaron Ment, Connecticut’s chief court administrator, or Bob Crooks, a used-car salesman in Illinois—and you discover that being saddled with a vocationally appropriate or, in Mr. Crooks’s case, a slyly judgmental name, isn’t necessarily a blessing.
C. Martin Lawyer III, a legal-aid attorney in Tampa, Florida, tries to deflect the inevitable question before clients can even ask it: “My name is Martin Lawyer. Yes, I am an attorney. And, yes, Lawyer is my real name.” Even with that as prologue, some clients still don’t get it. One called his office demanding to speak to her attorney. When the secretary asked the attorney’s name, the annoyed woman responded: “I don’t know. He won’t tell me his real name. He makes me call him Mr. Lawyer.”
The potato and the tomato are more closely related than the potato and the sweet potato.
OCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS
“Sometimes I wonder if people don’t take me seriously enough,” says Dr. Glass-Coffin, whose maiden name is Glass and whose husband’s name is Coffin.
R. Bruce Money, a former banker and now a business professor at the University of South Carolina, says his first name is actually Richard, but he doesn’t use it because people might start calling him “Rich Money.”
Is it tempting to just legally change a troublesome name?
No way, sniffs John M. Hamburger, who says his family name predates the sandwich. But it is his fate to be president of a restaurant consulting and publishing firm in Roseville, Minnesota, and though he can trace his lineage back several generations to Germany, some people still break into nervous giggles when he makes business calls on restaurant companies.
FEIGNING INCREDULITY
Though he figures peoples’ reactions to his name are their problem, not his, he still has had to endure being called “Hamburg-lar” and “Cheeseburger.” But he has learned to turn the tables. When someone observes, “I bet you got a lot of jokes about your name as a kid,” Mr. Hamburger shakes his head, deadpan: “No, why would I?”
Are people with unusual monikers drawn to professions that suit their names? Lewis P. Lipsitt, a child psychologist and Brown University professor whose hobby is collecting names that fit, says he believes something is at work subconsciously. Beginning in childhood, having an unusual last name “could easily become a repeated reminder of an interest area that, by golly, could eventually become yours,” Dr. Lipsitt says.
TWO WAYS TO GO
Neal Goldsmith, a New York City psychologist, goes one step further. He speculates that people with job-related names may “either grow into or grow in opposition to” their names. “A man named Crook would be more likely than others to become either a cop or a criminal, and a person named Hamburger would be more likely to become a burger-joint owner or a vegetarian,” Dr. Goldsmith says.
Why is a jackknife called a jackknife? Because it was invented by Jacques da Liege.
But over and over again, people say their careers are just a coincidence. Reeve Askew, a chiropractor, Larry Bone, an orthopedic surgeon, and Shawn Buckless, a university fund-raiser, all agree that their names didn’t influence what they chose to do for a living.
Mr. Hamburger, the restaurant consultant, says that when he started out, he had a choice between working for a computer company and a restaurant company. “I chose the restaurant because it paid more,” he says.
Mr. Roach, [a Terminix] inspector, says the name-job connection might seem fishy, but it’s just a fluke. Still, both his mother and his brother also work for Terminix. “Destiny,” he says, “works in strange ways.”
*****
APPROPRIATE AUTHORS
A list of honest-to-goodness real books and their
your-name-is-your-destiny authors, from Russell Ash
and Brian Lake’s Bizarre Books.
A Treatise on Madness, by William Battie, M.D. (1768)
The Cypress Qarden, by Jane Arbor (1969)
Motorcycling for Beginners, by Geoff Carless (1980)
Diseases of the Nervous System, by Walter Russell Brain (1933)
The Abel Coincidence, by J. N. Chance (1969)
Your Teeth, by John Chipping (1967)
The Boy’s Own Aquarium, by Frank Finn (1922)
Illustrated History of Gymnastics, by John Goodbody (1983)
Running Duck, by Paula Gosling (1979)
Writing with Power, by Peter Elbow (1981)
How to Live a Hundred Years or More, by George Fasting (1927)
Causes of Crime, by A. Fink (1938)
Riches and Poverty, by L. G. Chiozza Money (1905)
Crocheting Novelty Potholders, by L. Macho (1982)
The Skipper’s Secret, by Robert Smellie (1898)
It takes three minutes for a fresh mosquito bite to begin to itch.
ALPO AND GREEN SLIME
“The world of pizza is a world full of anger, anxiety and anchovies” says pop historian Tim Harrower. Literary scholar Gwen Foss invested years of research to create a glossary of pizza-maker’s slang in an issue of Maledicta, the International Journal of Verbal Aggression. Here’s some of the more colorful lingo:
Alpo: Italian sausage, also known as dog food. Puppy Chow, Kibbles ’n’ Bits, and Snausages.
Beef darts: A game played during slow times, in which employees hurl bits of raw beef against the walls.
Birthday cake: A pizza with way too many items on it.
Blue quarters: Another kitchen game in which coins are heated in a 550°F oven until they turn blue.
Bondage pie: A pizza with S and M (sausage and mushrooms).
Carp: Anchovies, also known as guppies and penguin food.
Cheese off!: A friendly expletive meaning “Go away!”
Crispy critter: A burnt pizza.
Edgar Allen pie: A pizza with PO (pepperoni and onions)
Flyers and fungus: Pepperoni (because raw slices fly like Frisbees) and mushrooms.
Green slime: Green peppers, especially those that become slippery and slimy. Also known as lizards and seaweed.
Hemorrhage: Pizza with extra tomato sauce.
Master-baker: An oven tender.
Panty liner: The absorbent cardboard placed under a pizza when it’s boxed.
Shroomers: Mushrooms.
Spoodle: A saucing tool that looks like a combination spoon/ladle.
Starver: A customer who orders a pizza then tells the driver that they didn’t order one but offers to buy it at a discount.
Vulture pie: A pizza “with too many problems to send out to a customer,” fit only as food for vultures—or employees.
Zap zits: Pop the bubbles in a pizza crust as it cooks.
Quitting smoking can reduce the amount of sleep you need each night by as much as an hour.
BASEBALL CURSES
Athletes are notoriously superstitious. But these “curses” are just fun…Right?
THE CURSE OF WRIGLEY FIELD
Curse: The Cubs will never make it to a World Series again
Origin: “As the story goes, the late Bill Sianis, founder of the Billy Goat’s Tavern, tried to bring his pet goat into Wrigley Field [during the World Series] in 1945,” wrote Mike Royko in the Chicago Tribune. “He was turned away because the goat smelled. That’s when the curse was placed…and they haven’t been in a World Series since.”
The curse at work: Most years since 1945, the Cubs haven’t even been in contention for a National League pennant. The club hasn’t put together consecutive winning seasons since 1972.
• They finally won a division championship in 1984 and took the first two games in the best-of-five playoff series with the Padres. Then they lost three straight.
• They went back to the playoffs in 1989 and lost again.
• In 1997, the Cubs gave a beer company permission to use the curse as part of an ad campaign. They opened the season with a record-breaking 0-14 losing streak, their worst start in 121 years.
Status: Curse-lifting has been attempted on a number of occasions. The then-current owner of the Billy Goat Tavern once went on “The Tonight Show” with a goat; it didn’t work. In Royko’s column, he blamed the “curse” on racism. The Cubs were slow to bring in black players in the late ’40s, he said, which doomed them to poor teams in the ’50s. Weird coincidence: Royko’s column on the Cubs’ curse was the last he ever wrote. He died shortly after.
THE CURSE OF THE BAMBINO