It’s possible that the toilet that sent the U-1206 to the bottom of the Atlantic may have saved the surviving 46 members of the crew. Though Winston Churchill later admitted that “the only thing that ever frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril,” by the summer of 1943 the Battle of the Atlantic had turned decisively in favor of the Allies, who were now able to sink the U-boats faster than the Germans could replace them. The odds of a German submariner surviving the war were slim: 75 percent of the entire U-boat fleet was sunk during the war, and 30,000 of the submarine service’s 40,000 crew members went to a watery grave with them.
Thanks, perhaps, to a malfunctioning toilet, the U-1206’s 46 surviving crew members were not among them.
* * *
AN UNAPPEALING TALE
Even after World War II and the end of food rationing, exotic and imported foods were hard to come by in England. Shortly after the end of the war, Laura Herbert managed to find three bananas at a London market, one for each of the children she had with famed writer Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited). When he found the bananas, Waugh sat the children down and showed them the bananas. Then, he carefully covered the bananas in whipped cream and sugar…and ate them all in one sitting, all by himself.
Most frequently recycled items before the 20th century: bones.
LOCAL HEROES
Right place + right time + cool head = life saved.
MILKING IT
Truck driver Michael Coyle’s boss describes him as “easygoing and never in a hurry.” But he didn’t waste a second when his 18-wheel milk tanker came upon a serious accident in Fermanagh, Ireland, in April 2011. Coyle saw a wrecked car that was on fire…with two men trapped inside. Coyle pulled his truck up next to the accident, ran to the back of his tanker, unscrewed the valve, and then sprayed the flaming car with milk until the fire went out. Victims of a hit-and-run collision, the two men were rushed to the hospital with serious injuries, but were reported to be in stable condition.
LOVE, HERTZ
Firefighters were already planning to honor Gus Hertz as a hero for his save on Wednesday when they found out he did it again on Thursday. The two incidents occurred in June 2012 while Hertz—a 37-year-old bank employee from Roanoke, Virginia—was vacationing with his wife and kids in St. Petersburg, Florida. In the first save, Hertz saw a car careen off the road and land in the Gulf of Mexico. He swam out to the car and pulled the driver to safety. A day later Hertz was fishing in his boat when he saw a small plane crash in the water. He sped over and rescued the two occupants before the plane went under. Both times, Hertz left the scene before the press could interview him, but firefighters found out who he was and gave him a commendation. “I was just in the right place at the right time,” said Hertz humbly. “Dumb luck.”
LITTLE RUNAROUND
Ivan Teece was riding on the upper level of a double-decker bus in London when he noticed a crowd on the side of the road gathered around a distraught woman. She was yelling, “My baby’s not breathing!” Then Teece saw the baby. It was blue. And no one was doing anything to help. On a whim, the 24-year-old airport worker yelled for the bus to stop, jumped down the stairs, and ran over to the mother. “It’s going to be okay,” he told her. Then he gently took the infant in his arms and started running toward a nearby medical center. The baby was still blue. “There was a moment when I thought she was going to die in my arms,” said Teece. “But then I heard a gasp of air and then she was groaning.” Doctors discovered that the baby, 10-month-old Summer Hodgson, had tonsillitis, which had blocked her airways.
There are 223 pyramids in Sudan, twice as many as there are in Egypt.
PHYSICS TO THE RESCUE
A Boeing engineer named Duane Innes was driving in Seattle, Washington, in 2010 when he was nearly sideswiped by another car. Innes sped up and looked into his rearview mirror and saw that the other driver was unconscious. And they were approaching a busy intersection at high speed. Innes knew there was only one way to prevent a catastrophe. “Basic physics,” he later told the Seattle Times. “If I could get in front of him and let him hit me, the difference in speed would just be a few miles an hour, and we could slow down together.” So Innes let the other car rear-end his minivan. Then he decelerated slowly and brought both vehicles to a stop on the shoulder. The other driver, 80-year-old Bill Pace, had lost circulation and passed out. It turned out that Pace is somewhat of a hero himself: He’s a retiree who volunteers for the Special Olympics. Said Innes: “For all the good that Bill has done, he’s probably deserving of a few extra lives.”
CATCH ME IF YOU CAN
Kristen Beach, 21, of Medford, Oregon, was standing outside her apartment building in July 2012 when she saw a two-year-old boy hanging from the ledge of a three-story building. Beach (who has a two-year-old of her own) ran over and positioned herself underneath the crying child, whom the press identified as Freddy. “I said, ‘It’s okay, baby. If you fall, I will catch you!’” Then, after a few tense moments, little Freddy let go and fell 30 feet into Beach’s outstretched arms. Her knees buckled from the impact, and she fell to the ground but was able to hang on to the child. (Freddy’s mom was charged with child neglect.) Beach was in a daze when questioned by reporters. “I still can’t believe that happened.”
* * *
“Soldiers fight and the kings are heroes.” —The Talmud
A real train crossing a bridge was blown up for the ’57 film The Bridge on the River Kwai.
“I’LL HAVE THE HUSBAND AND WIFE LUNG SLICE”
In China, menus in restaurants frequented by Western tourists are carefully translated into English and easy to understand. But if you eat where the locals eat, you may experience a phenomenon known as “Chinglish”—translations that are incomprehensible and often hilarious.
BONE APPÉTIT
Translating Chinese into English is made difficult because 1) many Chinese symbols are pictographs, or graphic depictions of the words they denote, and 2) pictographs are combined to create symbols for new words. The word “calf,” for example, combines the symbols for “cow” and “boy.” That’s how “cowboy leg” finds its way onto some menus where leg of veal is served.
Chinese symbols can also mean more than one thing. The character for “dry” (one of the two symbols used in the name for the dry pot style of cooking) can also mean “do.” In English “do” can be a slang term for…well, this book is G-rated, so we can’t really spell it out. But that’s why, when a dish called “dry-pot rabbit” is on the menu, the English translation sometimes describes the rabbit performing an intimate act on the cooking pot that, had it involved another bunny instead of the cook pot, would have increased the population of rabbits in the vicinity.
GOOD EATIN’
How would you translate buffalo wings into Mandarin? How about corn dogs, ladyfingers, tater tots, toad-in-the-hole, or spotted dick (two English pub favorites)? It’s easy to see where misunderstandings can arise. The Chinese, it turns out, also love colorful idiomatic names. According to legend, a popular tofu dish called Bean Curd Made by a Pockmarked Woman really was created by such a woman. And because a Sichuan dish of minced pork on bean-thread noodles looks like ants climbing a tree, that’s what it’s called. So sometimes even when a dish is correctly translated, it can seem pretty odd to the uninitiated.
Sad fact: A single cup of ice cream has more cholesterol than 10 glazed donuts.
Here are some real examples of items found on menus in China:
Salty Egg King
Steams the
Vegetable Sponge
Beauty Vegetables
Blow up a Flatfish with No Result
Bacteria
Dictyophore
Wu Chicken
Ginger Burping
Milk (hot)
Sydney and White
Tree Fungus Braise
Pig Heart
Elder Brother the Ground Is Second
The Palace
Quick-Fries Dices
Chick
en Powered
Hand Pills to
Fight Pork (handmade pork balls)
Wood Mustache
Meat
Steamed Red Crap with Ginger
Pot Zhai Double Dong Belly
Government Abuse Chicken
Fishing Fans to Burn Dry Sausages
Plaster w/Coconut Juice
Strange Flavor Noodles
Spiced Salt Blows
Up Pig Hand
The Black Fryings the Breeze Ball
Health Demolition Tofu Recipe
Husband and Wife Lung Slice
West the Flower Fries the Rib a Meat
Open Space Pfiddlehead Stewed Meat
Chicken Rude and Unreasonable
Dishes with Human Pickles
Decayed Thick Gravy Fillet
Peasant Family Stir-Fries Flesh for a Short Time
Carbon Burns Fresh Particularly Most
Good to Eat Mountain
Strange Flavor of Inside Freasuse
A Previous Small
Fragrant Bone in Garlic in Strange Flavor
The Incense Burns Screw
The Farmer Is Small to Fry King
Man Fruit Braise the North Almond
Slippery Meat in King’s Vegetables in Pillar
Big Bowl Four Treasure Frog
A West Bean Pays the Fish a Soup
Some schnoz! An elephant’s trunk can hold up to 4 gallons of water.
MUSIC ON TV
Music-based shows have been a part of television almost from the beginning. Here’s a look at a few of the biggest musical shows of all time.
TOAST OF THE TOWN (June 20, 1948). The program that would later become The Ed Sullivan Show—a cultural institution watched by millions of Americans from all walks of life in the 1950s and ’60s every Sunday at 8:00 p.m.—began humbly. One of TV’s first variety shows, Toast of the Town was hosted by Sullivan, a New York entertainment columnist. Fewer than a million people even had television sets at the time, most of them in New York City, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh. The show’s first act was comedy duo Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, then Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II took the stage and talked about their new Broadway musical South Pacific, followed by the first singer to perform on the show—nightclub singer Monica Lewis (sister of the show’s producer, Marlo Lewis). She sang a song called “I Could Kiss You For That.”
AMERICAN BANDSTAND (September 22, 1952). The show’s precursor, Bandstand, debuted on Philadelphia TV station WFIL on September 22, 1952. Airing 2:30–4:30 p.m. weekdays, it was a showcase for promotional films of pop and big-band music acts and sometimes an in-studio guest, hosted by local disc jockey Bob Horn. That format didn’t bring in viewers, so after two weeks Horn revamped the show to make it more like his radio show—he played hit records and showed teenagers dancing to them. It was a smash. The on-air DJ who cued up the records was another local, 33-year-old Dick Clark.
In 1956 Horn got arrested for DUI (ironic, considering he was the face of WFIL’s anti-drunk-driving campaign) and was fired. That was Clark’s big break. He became the host of Bandstand and immediately made changes. First thing he did: put more rock ’n’ roll music on the show. Then he integrated the dancers—marking the first time blacks and whites appeared on a dance floor together on TV. Clark also wanted to take the show national, so he personally drove film of the show to ABC executives in New York. In 1957, when the network asked its affiliates for pitches for new afternoon programs, Clark successfully lobbied for Bandstand, which became American Bandstand. It debuted on August 5, 1957, as a 90-minute daily show. First in-studio guest: R&B singer Billy Williams, who sang his #3 hit cover of Fats Waller’s “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter.” (It had a good beat, and you could dance to it.)
Average speed of a dart hitting a dartboard: 40 mph.
Over its 30-year life, American Bandstand played tens of thousands of records and hosted hundreds of singers and groups, spreading and helping popularize rock ‘n’ roll. With the arrival of cable and music video networks MTV and VH1 in the 1980s, American Bandstand started to become passé. When ABC wanted to cut the show to a half hour in 1987, Clark refused, and took the show into syndication, then to the USA Network. It went off the air for good in 1989, by which time Clark was a media mogul and one of the most famous people in the world. Through Dick Clark Productions, he created and hosted a number of game shows, radio shows, TV shows, and an annual New Year’s Eve special for ABC. Clark and fellow DJ-turned-media-mogul Ryan Seacrest worked on reviving American Bandstand in 2005. It failed to come together, but one element, a national dance contest, became the Fox summer series So You Think You Can Dance?
THE LAWRENCE WELK SHOW (July 2, 1955). After four years of broadcasting only in Los Angeles, the showcase for “Champagne music” (mostly polka) went national. The first song was an accordion duet featuring Welk and the show’s staff accordionist, Myron Floren, performing “The 12th Street Rag.”
Each episode had a theme, such as “Songs From World War II” or “Down Mexico Way,” and Welk and his “Musical Family” of singers and musicians would wear appropriate costumes. The show was never a hit with younger audiences, but it was a Top 10 show among Americans over 50, because it featured older music—never the rock or R&B that dominated American pop charts in the ’60s and ’70s. When ABC cancelled the show in 1971, Welk took it into syndication, where it ran until 1982. In 1986 an Oklahoma public TV station picked up the rights to the show and made it available to public stations nationwide. Many still air reruns of The Lawrence Show in its old time slot, Saturday at 7:00 p.m.
For music from TV in the ’60s and ’70s, turn to page 280.
While he was writing The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck went through 60 pencils a day.
THE DOPE ON ROPE
This article has a real good twist.
According to Merriam-Webster, rope is “a large stout cord of strands of fibers or wire twisted or braided together.” If it isn’t made from strands twisted or braided together, then it isn’t properly “rope.”
Rope is also referred to as cordage. Cordage below " in diameter—twine and clothesline being examples—isn’t considered true rope. Cordage above " in diameter is.
Before the invention of plastic, materials used to make rope ranged from plant sources, (palm trees, hemp, flax, grasses, cotton) to silk, animal hides, hair, and intestines.
Twisted rope, also known as “laid rope,” is made in three steps: 1) fibers are twisted into yarn; 2) lengths of yarn are twisted together in the opposite direction into strands; and 3) the strands are twisted in the opposite direction into rope. These opposite-direction twists create tension, which holds rope together and adds to its strength. Twisted rope generally uses a few strands—three is very common—and the strands can be quite thick.
Braided rope is made by braiding (rather than twisting) thin strands together. There are many different patterns, each having distinct advantages of strength, durability, and flexibility. It’s common to use from 8 to 32 strands in a single rope.
The oldest evidence of rope-making dates to roughly 17,000 years ago. The decayed remains of a rope about ¼" in diameter, made from two twisted strands of an unknown plant fiber, were found in one of the famous cave paintings in Lascaux, France.
By about 10,000 years ago, rope was being used by people in most parts of the world. Like the wheel, it became one of the vital tools in the advancement of civilization.
Some examples of rope tools that drastically changed the lives of ancient people: lassoes and snares for hunting, nets for fishing, cattle-harness lines for pulling plows, rope-and-pulley systems that allowed for the hoisting of heavy objects, and the many rope tools used in shipping, such as sail rigging and mooring lines.
Largest city in Europe: Paris, with a population of about 10 million.
Ancient Egyptian drawings show people using simple tools to make twisted rope. Further drawings show that ropes were used extensively in the bu
ilding of the pyramids.
In 2005 archeologists digging in caves on Egypt’s Red Sea coast discovered dozens of neat coils of well-preserved grass-fiber rope, each about an inch in diameter and 100 feet long. They had been stored in the caves by sailors more than 4,000 years ago.
At least 500 years ago, the Incas made rope bridges as part of their road system through the Andes.
By the 12th century, European ropemakers used rope-walks—long narrow buildings, some several hundred feet long—where strands could be fully laid out. This allowed the ropemakers to avoid unwanted twisting and knotting as the ropes were being made. The first American ropewalk was built in 1635 in Salem, Massachusetts.
Rope is also made from metal. You’ve probably seen “wire rope,” or “cable,” on suspension bridges.
More than half of all rope manufactured today is used in shipping-related industries. On boats and ships, ropes are called “lines.”
According to the Tug of War International Federation—official tug of war competitions use only rope made from Manila hemp. (It’s actually made from the leaves of the abacá, a type of banana plant native to the Philippines). Primary reason: Manila rope is resistant to both stretching and snapping.
Largest rope ever: the rice-straw ropes (against TWIF rules!) made for the annual “Great Tug of War” in Okinawa. The rope for the 2012 event was 4.5 feet thick, 656 feet long, and weighed more than 80,000 pounds. It took several thousand people to move it.
Uncle John's Fully Loaded 25th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (Uncle John's Bathroom Reader) Page 14