Uncle John's Fully Loaded 25th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (Uncle John's Bathroom Reader)
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WHICH MEANING CAME FIRST?
1. WORD: Bank MEANINGS:
a) a financial institution
b) a river’s edge
2. WORD: Bat MEANINGS:
a) a flying mammal
b) to flutter one’s eyelashes
3. WORD: Cordial MEANINGS:
a) sincere, friendly
b) a medicine or drink
4. WORD: Maroon MEANINGS:
a) a dark reddish-brown
b) to strand, as on a desolate island
5. WORD: Moor MEANINGS:
a) a person from North Africa of mixed Arab and
Berber descent
b) marshy land
6. WORD: Fluke MEANINGS:
a) a whale’s tail
b) a stroke of good luck
7. WORD: Quarry MEANINGS:
a) hunters’ prey
b) a pit from which stone is excavated
8. WORD: Hail MEANINGS:
a) freezing rain
b) to call from afar
9. WORD: Hawk MEANINGS:
a) to sell or peddle
b) to clear one’s throat
10. WORD: Trip MEANINGS:
a) a hallucinatory drug experience
b) to release a switch or catch
11. WORD: Hip MEANINGS:
a) informed (“I’m hip.”)
b) a cheer (“Hip hooray!”)
12. WORD: Magazine MEANINGS:
a) a munitions storehouse
b) a periodic publication
13. WORD: Mummy MEANINGS:
a) an embalmed body
b) a term for “mother”
14. WORD: Porter MEANINGS:
a) a dark beer
b) a person hired to carry
15. WORD: Squash MEANINGS:
a) a popular vegetable
b) to crush
16. WORD: Yank MEANINGS:
a) an American
b) to tug or pull
* * *
RANDOM BOOK FACTS
• Before parchment, Europeans wrote on thin peels of bark. The word “book” is derived from bog, the Danish word for birch, the preferred writing bark in Denmark.
• Only writer to turn down the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: Sinclair Lewis, for Arrowsmith in 1926. He thought that the prize should be given to books that celebrate American ideals and that Arrowsmith was critical of them.
• First e-book reader on the market: the Sony Bookman in 1992. (It flopped.)
• About 50 percent of adults read five or more books a year. About 25 percent don’t read any.
• Most prolific author: Brazilian novelist José Carlos Ryoki d’Alpoim Inoiue. He published 1,058 novels between 1986 and 1996—about one every three days.
• St. Jerome is the patron saint of librarians; St. John is the patron saint of book sellers; St. Christopher is the patron saint of bookbinders.
• What is a book, exactly? In 1950 the United Nations defined one as “a non-periodical literary publication containing 49 or more pages, not counting the covers.” (Oh.)
71% of Americans believe the government knows more than it is telling us about UFOs.
PUT A CORK IN IT!
New technology isn’t always better.
CORK CONDITIONS
For centuries, wine bottles have been capped with cork stoppers made from the bark of Quercus suber (also known as the cork oak tree), which grows primarily near the Mediterranean Sea, in countries such as Portugal, Spain, Tunisia, Italy, Algeria, and Morocco. The hardy yet springy material is ideally suited for the job of preventing air and toxins from entering a bottle, without decomposing or interacting with the wine.
But cork is not perfect. Between 1 and 10 percent of all wines with cork stoppers fall prey to “cork taint,” which occurs when a natural mold inside a cork causes a chemical reaction that results in trichloroanisole, or TCA for short. When this happens, wine develops a musty odor that experts compare to the scent of wet newspapers. It will also taste vinegary or bitter and, more often than not, become discolored. In short, it is undrinkable.
NEW STOPPERS
The obvious solution to cork taint: Use different materials. And winemakers have been experimenting with other ways to seal bottles for decades, for both quality control and cost savings.
• Plastic corks. First introduced in the mid-1950s for cheaper wines, they are now fairly common, but come with their own set of drawbacks. First off, they can start letting small but steady streams of air leak into bottles after only 18 months—which is fine if a wine is sold and consumed quickly, but for wines that are left to age and improve, that’s disastrous. Second, they’re more difficult to open than cork closures, and using them to reseal a bottle can be an exercise in frustration. Perhaps most damning: Because they’re made with chemicals, synthetic corks can give wines a slight chemical flavor. Nevertheless, wines sealed with plastic corks have a failure rate of only 1 percent.
• Aluminum screw caps. What they lack in elegance, they more than make up for in practicality. For one thing, they’re a cinch to open and they don’t require a corkscrew. Plus, these closures (widely adopted by Australian winemakers in the 1970s) make preservation easier for both the public and producers. The caps do an excellent job of keeping out oxygen by forming a tighter seal than tops made from cork, thus improving a wine’s aging potential. The failure rate is about 0.5 percent. And wine drinkers can simply screw the top back on after pouring a glass. Disregarding some slight change in taste that they give to wines made from sauvignon blanc grapes, switching to screw caps should be a no-brainer for winemakers, right? Wrong—and cork advocates are not about to go down without a fight.
First African-American billionaire: Robert L. Johnson, who started the BET cable network.
CORK CONSTITUENCY
While many large-scale wine operations have given up on cork stoppers, plenty of their competitors are sticking with them. Advocates argue that the statistics on cork taint are overblown. Corks too often get the blame, they say, for wines that are stored improperly or were not very good to begin with.
Fans of cork also contend that harvesting the stuff is an environmentally friendly practice. The manufacturing process for cork tops yields low carbon emissions, especially compared to the industrial operations involved with the production of synthetic corks and screw tops. It’s also cheaper to make corks than it is to manufacture and mold closures out of plastic or aluminum. Furthermore, purists claim, it’s more environmentally sustainable. Cork oak trees are easy to grow and live a long time, and harvesting the cork bark is done with little or no environmental damage.
Need another reason to love corks? It’s hard to overlook hundreds of years of tradition…and the satisfying “POP” a cork makes when it’s pulled from a bottle of wine.
* * *
FEELING GROOVY
Skeletal remains show that ancient Viking warriors filed horizontal grooves into their front teeth to signify their rank. Evidence shows that some grooves may have been filled with dye. This may explain why a famous Danish king was called “Harald Bluetooth.”
Valentine “conversation heart” candies have a shelf life of 5 years.
MUSICAL FLOPS
They can’t all be “singular sensations.” Here are a few musicals—each with impressive pedigrees—that went dark shortly after their debuts.
ANNIE 2: MISS HANNIGAN’S REVENGE
Annie, the Broadway musical based on the classic comic strip Little Orphan Annie, debuted in 1977 and ran for nearly six years at the Alvin Theatre. It inspired a successful film in 1982 and thousands of stage productions around the world. Despite the fact that there had never been a truly successful sequel to any stage musical, Annie was such a hit that the decision to make a sequel seemed like a no-brainer. So with a book, music, lyrics, and direction by the same team that had created Annie, Annie 2: Miss Hannigan’s Revenge debuted at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. in December 1989. “We’re very well liked in Washington,” the d
irector told reporters. “I have a feeling we’ll take Washington by storm.” They didn’t. Reviews for preview shows were terrible, one reviewer calling it “witless and belabored.” But producers were determined to make it work. They cut an hour from the three-and-a-half show and had the composers rewrite the entire score in time for a March 1990 Broadway debut. It still didn’t work. The show never opened on Broadway; it was shuttered after four weeks in Washington.
ANNIE WARBUCKS
Somehow, the failure of Annie 2 didn’t stop producers from making another attempt at an Annie sequel in 1993. Annie Warbucks, a heavily rewritten version of Annie 2, takes place immediately after Annie. The plot: When a Child Welfare commissioner orders Daddy Warbucks to either get married or lose custody of the cute orphan, the billionaire scrambles to find a bride. This version received solid reviews and did very well during an off-Broadway run. It was all set to debut on Broadway in January 1994…until the show was abruptly cancelled with only a single day’s notice. Why? Investors learned the show couldn’t be moved to Broadway in time to qualify for the Tony Awards, so they pulled its funding.
If you met one person per second, it would take over 200 years to meet everyone now living.
THE BEST LITTLE WHOREHOUSE GOES PUBLIC (1994)
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas was a Broadway hit in the late 1970s and ran for 1,700 performances, which led to a film version starring Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton in 1982—the top-grossing movie musical of the 1980s. Peter Masterson and Carol Hall, who wrote the music for the original, signed up to write the music and lyrics and score for the sequel. The premise: Miss Mona, the madam of the whorehouse, is lured out of retirement to save the Las Vegas brothel Stallion Fields after the IRS comes after them for millions in back taxes. Mona, the hookers, and the Feds come up with a way to raise the money—they decide to sell shares in the whorehouse on the Stock Exchange.
The show opened on May 10, 1994, at New York’s Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. It flopped. The bizarre mixture of high finance lingo and low-brow sex talk was a hard sell, as was the decision to have one actor to simultaneously play two characters based on Siegfried and Roy (one side of his body was Siegfried, the other Roy). “It’s too dopey to be effective as political satire, too tame to qualify as raunch,” said one critic. The musical closed after 16 performances.
LESTAT (2006)
This one seemed like a sure bet. The source material, the phenomenally successful Vampire Chronicles series by Anne Rice (which includes Interview With the Vampire) was rich with gothic characters and storylines reminiscent of the Broadway smash, Phantom of the Opera. Elton John and lyricist Bernie Taupin came on board to write the score, following their critically-acclaimed collaboration on The Lion King and Billy Elliot. After a hugely successful pre-Broadway run in San Francisco, the producers felt Lestat was almost ready to sink its teeth into the Great White Way. For Broadway, they decided to cut many of the San Francisco staging’s elaborate special effects (such as ghostly film projections) along with several songs. The result was, as the New York Times put it, “a musical sleeping pill.” Lestat was staked through the heart after only 39 performances.
Only puppet in history to testify before Congress: Sesame Street’s Elmo.
“NO REGERTS”
Some people find fame by winning an Oscar, running the world’s fastest mile, or getting elected president. Others get photos of their misspelled tattoos posted all over the internet. Here are some of our favorites.
“Get Rich Our Die Tryin”
“Happyness Comes No Matter Rain or Shine”
“Last of a Dieing Breed”
“My Mom Is My Angle”
“Poporn”
“Go Whereever The Wind Takes You”
“Imermanence is Forever”
“Music Are The Words I Cant Speek”
“Success is a Procss”
“Only God Will Juge Me”
“Oylmic Torch Bearer”
“It’s Get Better”
“Dance Like Noone Is Watching”
“Black Sabbaht”
“Your The Pettle Petal* To My Rose”
“Tragdey/Comedy”
“Strenth & Courage”
“[Bleep] the Systsem”
“You Only Life Once”
“What Didn’t Killed Me Made Me Stronger!”
“No Regerts”
“Belife Makes Things Real”
“Stanley Cup Champians”
“Tomarrow Never Knows”
“Ill Keep Apart of You With Me & Every Where I Am There You’ll Be”
“Live is Hard/Don’t Give Up”
“…Are You Jalous¿”
“Everyone Elese Does”
“Sweet Pee”
“Ledgends Live On”
“My Love Runs Deeper Then My Wounds”
“See You At The Cossroads”
“Too Liggett To Quit”
“Your Next”
Eating .001% of your body weight in salt is enough to kill you.
TOILET PAPER IN THE NEWS
TP is such a “regular” part of our daily lives that it’s bound to end up in the news once in a while.
FILM ROLL
Starring in eight different Harry Potter films over the years has made actor Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry, a millionaire many times over. But not all of that money comes from the movies. Warner Bros. licenses Radcliffe’s image for use on toys, children’s clothing, and countless other products sold worldwide. Radcliffe gets a slice of the profits from the sale of this merchandise…including, apparently, a certain flushable bathroom product sold in Thailand. “I’ve heard my face is on toilet paper, but I haven’t seen it and I don’t know if it’s much of a compliment,” he told the Sun newspaper in 2011.
ROCK ’N’ ROLL
In 1980 the British music company EMI auctioned off memorabilia it had accumulated during its many years in the recording business. Some items were from the company’s Abbey Road studios, where the Beatles recorded their famous album of the same name. A Beatles fan named Barry Thomas went to the auction hoping to buy a souvenir from the Fab Four days. He found one: Thomas paid £85 (about $200) for a roll of studio toilet paper that the Beatles had refused to use during their Abbey Road recording sessions. Why? The paper was too “hard and shiny.” Plus EMI’s initials were stamped on every sheet (probably to deter theft). After the band complained, studio manager Ken Townsend provided them with toilet paper more to their liking…but kept the offending roll as a souvenir, until he let EMI auction it off. More than 30 years later, Thomas still owns the roll. He keeps it—and a letter of authenticity signed by Townsend—in a custom display case. In 2011 he tried to have it appraised on the Antiques Roadshow, but “they couldn’t price such an odd object,” he says. The only fair estimate of its value is the £1,000 ($1,500) a Japanese collector offered him for a single square. No dice. Thomas couldn’t bring himself to tear a sheet from the roll. “It’s such an original and unique thing,” he told the Daily Mail newspaper. “People have the memories and the signed records and pictures and stuff, but no one else can say they have a toilet roll John Lennon rejected.”
World’s most boring hobby? An arenophile collects sand.
ROLLING ON THE RIVER
In July 2011, a truck driver hauling eight gigantic rolls of toilet paper to a processing plant that makes them into consumer-sized rolls lost control of his big rig on a curvy stretch of U.S. Highway 12 in Idaho. The truck hit the guardrail and overturned, dumping the toilet paper into the Lochsa River. The huge rolls, which weighed 8,000 pounds dry, swelled to 30,000 pounds each as they became saturated with river water. Even worse (at least as far as the cleanup was concerned), toilet paper is designed to disintegrate in water. The crew made such a mess hauling the two least-saturated rolls of toilet paper out of the river that the rest of the cleanup was postponed until the middle of August, when the river level had dropped enough for the other six rolls to dry out. Then the cleanup crews
returned, wrapped the rolls in fine mesh to keep them from falling apart, and hauled them out of the river with a tow truck.
THE TAX ROLLS
In March 2011, Omaha, Nebraska, mayor Jim Suttle made headlines around the world when he proposed a national tax on toilet paper to pay for federally mandated improvements to state and local sewer systems. The 10 percent tax would have increased the price of every roll of toilet paper by about a dime, had it ever been implemented. It wasn’t: Even as Suttle was proposing the idea (which he’d read about when it was turned down in Oregon), he reversed his position mid-sentence, perhaps when it dawned on him that he’d have to run for re-election as The Man Who Taxed Toilet Paper. “I heard about it and said, ‘Well, this is simple. Let’s put it on the table,’” he told the Omaha World-Herald. “That doesn’t mean I endorse it.”
THE ROLL OF GOVERNMENT
In March 2012, every agency of the city government of Trenton, New Jersey—including city hall, the police and fire departments, a water plant, and a number of senior-citizens centers—came within a day or two of running out of toilet paper, thanks to a budget fight between the mayor and the city council. The trouble began in September 2011, when the council rejected a request to spend $4,000 for a year’s worth of hot-drink cups. That invalidated the contract for all of the city’s paper purchases for the fiscal year…including toilet paper. Mayor Tony Mack removed the cups from the contract and resubmitted it, but legal technicalities and objections, including complaints that Mack wasn’t doing enough to stop city employees from stealing the TP, killed the contract again and again. In mid-March, when the city government was down to its very last box, the council finally voted to buy more.