Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  “There was never any reason to suspect that a microwave would not kill a cockroach. There is even less reason now,” he said “It blew up like a potato.”

  P

  PERPETUAL MOTION

  DEVICES

  Don’t work.

  R

  REFRIGERATOR

  You put a package of bologna into your refrigerator, and it gets cold. The question is: Where does the cold come from? The answer is: The cold doesn’t come from anywhere. The heat leaves. It goes into the air around the refrigerator. Here’s how it gets there.

  There are pipes in your refrigerator—you can sometimes see them in the freezer compartment. Flowing through these pipes is a liquid called a “refrigerant.” This is a special kind of liquid that evaporates—turns into gas—at a fairly low temperature, such as the temperature of your bologna. But to evaporate, a liquid must draw heat from somewhere. That’s why when you moisten your finger and wave it in the air, it feels cooler; the water is evaporating and drawing heat from your skin.

  So the refrigerant draws heat from the pipe it’s in, which in turn draws heat from the air around it, which in turn draws it from your bologna.

  The refrigerant now goes into a “compressor.” This is the thing you hear when your refrigerator’s running, and it sort of squeezes the refrigerant gas, which turns it back into a liquid. (Strange but true: If you compress a gas enough, it turns into a liquid.) The liquid, still under pressure, flows through pipes that are outside your refrigerator’s cold compartment—these are the pipes you can usually see behind the refrigerator. The liquid gives off heat—the heat it gets from inside your refrigerator—to these pipes, and they give it off into the room air. Your bologna is warming your house, just a little bit.

  The refrigerant, now that it has given up its heat, is ready to go back and get some more. It goes through a valve—sort of a trapdoor—back into the cold part of the refrigerator. As soon as it’s through the valve, it’s no longer being squeezed, so it quickly evaporates again, thus sucking up more heat, and the whole cycle repeats: get squeezed from gas back into liquid, give off heat, leave pressurized area, turn back into gas, suck up heat.

  Boys are 4 times more likely to stutter than girls.

  The cycle continues. It would be a very boring occupation, refrigerant.

  ROCKET LAUNCHERS,

  effects on weather

  Don’t be stupid.

  T

  TELEPHONE

  The incredible thing about telephones is not that people can instantly talk to each other across the continents, but that you can recognize the other person’s voice. Incredible that, somewhere along the suboceanic cables, or in the empty space between microwave transmission towers, your voice doesn’t become that of a robot, or a total stranger, someone from Boston, for example.

  The secret is inside the phone. It’s a metal plate called a diaphragm. This thing is a direct steal from nature’s design of the human eardrum. You hold the phone to your mouth and say something like, for example, “Honest, the check’s in the mail.” The sound of your voice ripples through the air in distinctive waves, molecules knocking each other along, a chain reaction of croquet balls. Your ripple pattern is different from everyone else’s; that’s what makes voiceprint I.D. an accurate tool.

  The sound hits the diaphragm inside a phone, raining down like sheets of rain. The metal plate just vibrates.

  But then comes the next trick: The metal plate is attached to a pack of carbon granules, like in certain cigarette filters. These granules have an electric current running through them. When the metal plate shakes, the granules jitter about, causing surges in the juice. The better the engineering of the phone, the more accurately your voice is translated into an electrical language. Like Morse code, this electrical message races along the phone lines at close to the speed of light, directed by switches and circuits that we here at the Encyclopedia Bathroomica do not understand and do not wish to learn about. The final miracle comes on the other end, where the whole process is reversed. The phone lines lead to a magnet inside your friend’s phone. As the electrical current hems and haws in the pattern of your voice, the magnet tugs at the metal diaphragm. The metal plate vibrates. Sound comes out of the phone. “Honest, the check’s in the mail.” Sounds like…you.

  There’s only one continent that has never seen a war: Antarctica

  TELEVISION

  When you watch TV, you are not watching a moving picture. You are watching a moving dot. But this is one mighty fast dot. It races back and forth in a blur, moving line by line from the top of the screen to the bottom, a total of 525 lines. It does this at roughly 21,600 miles an hour.

  The dot is actually a stream of electrons projected from the back of the TV to the inner surface of the picture tube, which is coated with phosphorus.

  Phosphorus glows when hit by a stream of electrons; the more torrential the stream, the brighter the spot. By varying the brightness of every dot on every line on your screen, the electron beam paints a picture with strategically clustered dots, the same way those computer portraits are done at the mall. Your picture tube paints a different picture on your screen 30 times every second.

  So why do you see it as “Seinfeld,” and not a series of stills? Think of those decks of cards you got as a kid, the ones that you could riffle with your thumb to make a moving picture. Same principle. The mind fills in the gaps.

  THERMOS

  The question is: How come soda keeps cold and coffee keeps hot? How does the Thermos know?

  The first thing to remember is that you must always capitalize the word Thermos, because it is a trademarked name for a “vacuum bottle.”

  Second, know that it is a container within a container. The inside container is a glass bottle. Between the bottle and the outer container is a No Man’s Land, with close to zero air molecules. A vacuum, almost. Vacuums don’t transfer heat very well. (If you don’t care why, skip to the last paragraph.)

  Billboard magazine’s #1 single of the 1970s was “You Light Up My Life” by Debby Boone.

  Heat is transferred in one of three ways: conduction, convection, and radiation. Conduction means, basically, molecules smacking into each other like dominoes, sending energy down the line. Since a vacuum means an absence of molecules, there are no molecules against which to smack, conduction doesn’t happen in a Thermos. Convection is when molecules cruise through traffic on their own, weaving and darting, trying to get across town; e.g., steam bubbles rising from the bottom of a boiling pot. But the inside of a Thermos is a solid: it keeps its molecules close to the vest.

  Radiation defies easy analogy. It’s kind of like…beauty. There’s a little bit of it in everything. The hotter the source, the greater the radiation. It comes at you in waves, piercing everything in its way, stone or flesh. Like light from the sun, it can leap across a vacuum. Like beauty, it can melt the coldest of hearts. There is no protection from the withering power of beauty, but with a Thermos you can put silver on the inside of the bottle, reflecting back some of the radiant energy from your coffee or soup or what have you, postponing the inevitable.

  ]So what happens is, the vacuum and silvered side combine to prevent heat from escaping from the inner container if it’s filled with something hot, and prevent heat from entering the inner container if it’s filled with something cold.

  TIME, LOST

  The year before 1901 A.D. was, of course, 1900 A.D. The year before 101 A.D. was, of course, 100 A.D.

  So what was the year before 1 A.D.? Zero A.D.? Was there ever a May 15, Zero A.D?

  No. Historians decided they just couldn’t cope with a Zero year. The historical record leaps from December 31,1 B.C. to January 1, 1 A.D.

  TOILET

  The humble toilet is too often the butt of indelicate jokes. We are going to do our best to refrain from infantile humor here, except to note, as we must, that the toilet was invented by a man named Thomas Crapper.

  With the possible exception of the clock,
Crapper’s porcelain pew is the most efficient household device that doesn’t require electricity.

  Niagara Falls was created by a glacier.

  Here’s an experiment to perform in the privacy of your own bathroom. Remove the top from your toilet tank. Now fish the curlers and tissues and hair spray and toothpaste and Comet from the bowl, where they have fallen. You should have removed them before lifting the cover. Now, look inside the tank. You’ll see three main things: a rubber stopper at the bottom of the water, a big hollow float at the top of the water, and a tall post connected to the float by a long arm. When you press the handle to flush, the stopper pops up out of a hole in the bottom of the tank, and water, pulled by gravity, rushes down into the bowl. When a bowlful of water (about five gallons) has gone through, the stopper is now hanging in air, and gravity pulls it back into the hole.

  Meanwhile, the air-filled float has sunk along with the water level, thereby opening a special valve (called a “ball-cock”) at the top of the tall post. This opening causes water to pour back into the tank from the house’s water pipes, until the float rises again to the top of the tank and shuts off the water.

  A very smooth system, until some object—for the sake of argument we will say a Cabbage Patch Doll—stops up the drain at the bottom of the bowl.

  Meanwhile, no one has informed the tank, which is continuing to flush water into the bowl, causing the water level to rise toward a disastrous spillover.

  Now that you know how a toilet works, you don’t have to stand in helpless horror. Lunge for the float at the bottom of the tank and lift it to the closed position. Then radio for assistance.

  TUNNELS, construction of

  How do they dig underwater tunnels? Do they work in scuba gear? And how do they pump the water out afterwards? And how do they protect against leaks that would flood and drown people?

  Easy. They dig real deep, under the riverbed.

  V

  VELCRO

  Hooks and eyes. It’s that simple. One strip is covered with tiny nylon hooks, the other with tiny nylon eyes. Invented by Swiss engineer Georges de Mestral in 1948 after he returned from a hunting trip and noticed thistle blossoms clinging to his pants. He looked under a microscope. The blossoms were covered with tiny hooks. Velcro comes from velours, velvet, and crochet hook.

  Until 1867, Alaska was known as Russian America.

  W

  WORDS, PRETENTIOUS

  Some capsule definitions of pompous, commonly misused terms:

  Existentialism. No God, no fixed human nature. Man on his own, responsible for self. This freedom to define his own life is the source of man’s dread.

  Metaphysics. The big questions. What is ultimate nature of being? Are people basically good or evil? Why am I always late?

  Entropy. Degradation of energy from order to disorder. The natural tendency of everything to degenerate. An ice cube, nice and symmetric, melts into a mess. So does the universe. All neatly put together with planets and stars and meteors all spinning around like clockwork, it is slowly getting messier and messier. Ultimately the galaxies will look like the floor under your refrigerator: nothing but fuzz. Things will be bleak indeed. Suffice it to say that this state is known as The Heat Death of the Universe. The good news is that you’ll never have to clean under your refrigerator again.

  Debenture. An IOU from a corporation to a person.

  WORLD, HISTORY OF

  One-celled life appeared on Earth about three billion years ago and fitfully evolved into different plants and animals. Human beings proved most adaptive, learning to control their environment as other creatures could not.

  After relying solely on hunting and gathering, Man started farming about 10,000 years ago. With their surplus food, they learned to sell. And shop. With their surplus time, they learned to write. So began civilizations. But civilizations were transitory, destroyed by external challenges, internecine tensions, political folly, and presumptions of divinity.

  The Greeks developed a remarkably modern society, replete with science, philosophy, dramatic performances, and democracy. The Greeks were routed by the Romans. The Roman empire spanned the West at the birth of Jesus, whose teachings inspired first a cult and then a revolutionary religion. Rome was sacked by barbarians, beginning a thousand years of disorder, poverty, and intellectual stagnation sometimes known as the Dark Ages.

  Aristotle called the wind “the dry sighs of the breathing Earth.”

  Meanwhile, in the East, a cerebral society was developing that revered age and wisdom but was slowed in its progress by a slavish devotion to custom and tradition. It was very mysterious to Westerners.

  A bubonic plague called the Black Death killed a third of Europe. Papal domination subsided, and monarchs consolidated their support through ambitious foreign wars and ostentatious patronage of the arts. The invention of the printing press contributed to the intellectual flowering known as the Renaissance. Mastery of ocean navigation expanded European influence to much of the world. Later, the Industrial Revolution increased wealth and dehumanized the workplace. European empires gradually declined as their colonies revolted. Shifts in the balance of power erupted in world war. Communist revolution swept through Czarist Russia. Fascist Germans, driven by master race hysteria, initiated another world war. The United States and the Soviet Union emerged as superpowers and have since fought proxy wars in poor nations. Meanwhile, in the East, China and Japan modernized, becoming less mysterious and more threatening to Western supremacy.

  The accelerated development of technology in this century has led to greater leisure time, a rise in service industries, a decline in reading in favor of television viewing, a fundamental alteration and general contamination of the environment, and the construction of vast arsenals of bombs powered by the force that holds atomic nuclei together. The long-term significance of these changes has been largely ignored.

  Q: What is the highest continent?A: Antarctica, with an average elevation of 8,000 feet.

  POLITICALLY CORRECT QUIZ ANSWERS (page 267)

  1. b) She objected to the play’s “blatant heterosexuality.” At a news conference, Brown announced that “until books, film, and the theater reflect all forms of sexuality,” she would not be “involving her tudents in heterosexual culture.” Other school officials talked about sacking her, calling the decision “ideological idiocy ”

  2. a) They renamed the town’s manholes “personholes.”

  3. a) They changed it to “Heaven-o.” The man behind the resolution, a local flea market owner named Leonso Canales, Jr., explained: “When you go to school and church, they tell you ‘hell’ is negative and ‘heaven’ is positive. I think it’s time to set a new precedent, to tell our kids that we are positive adults.”

  Employees at the county courthouse immediately began answering their phones with the new phrase. County officials called the greeting a “symbol of peace, friendship, and welcome in an age of anxiety.” But linguists called it bizarre. “Linguistically and historically, ‘hello’ has nothing to do with ‘hell,’” said one. “It stems from an old German greeting for hailing a boat.”

  4. c) Animal rights activists initiated a campaign to change the name of the town of Fishkill to something less “cruel.” Mayor George Carter scoffed at the idea. “I think if they’d look the word up, they’d find out what it means,” he told the press.

  5. a) Rev. Jerry Buckner of the Tiburon Christian Fellowship demanded that the jockeys be returned to their original color. Why? It turns out that from 1875 to 1900 black jockeys were American sports heroes. According to a story by Mike Dougan, in the San Francisco Examiner:

  Buckner says black lawn jockeys were intended to honor—not demean—the real black jockeys who dominated American horse racing in the latter part of the 19th century.

  “All of the original jockeys were black, and most people aren’t even aware of that fact,” he said. He noted that the first 13 winners of the Kentucky Derby—beginning with Oliver Lewis in 1875—were bl
acks who often owned the horses they rode.

  Those who protest the display of black lawn jockeys are “historically illiterate,” Buckner asserted.

  Average length of time a child watches an episode of “Sesame Street:” 8 minutes

  But that didn’t matter to people like Kerry Pierson, a black activist from nearby Mill Valley. According to Dougan,

  Pierson said that regardless of their origin, lawn jockeys have become for blacks a form of “degradation art.”

  “You usually find them at country clubs and private clubs. What they represent to black people is that when you pass through a portal where those little jockeys are, you are passing into the pre-Civil War era, and you can expect to be treated as such.”

  The landlord, caught in the middle, was at a loss. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. (We don’t know what he finally decided.)

  6. b) Apparently they weren’t happy about giving up their school mascot—a sketch of a frowning, belligerent midget, so they replaced three members of the school board. One of the board-members who was dumped, Diane Melbye, said simply: “I understand that people are desperately clinging to what they have known in the past, but the mascot is not appropriate.” But the dentist who’d spearheaded the recall vote responded that he was angry that “70-plus years of tradition [had been] taken away from us in 15 minutes.” He was one of the three elected to the school board.

  7. All of them.

  a) In September 1996, first-grader Jonathan Prevette was suspended for a day for “sexual harassment.” When his outraged parents took it to court, the case received worldwide publicity…and the school was widely ridiculed. Finally, after about six months, the U.S. Education Department exonerated Prevette and called on school officials to use “good judgment and common sense” in fighting harassment. The school changed the charge to “unwelcome touching.” Prevette’s comment: “See, I told them I was just trying to be friends!”