A company called Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment filed a lawsuit against YouTube in 2006 because its website, utube.com, was getting bombarded by so much Internet traffic that its servers crashed.
Fact. The website youtube.com ranks third after google.com and facebook.com. The site paypal.com ranks thirty-second, and, just in case you were wondering (I was), taco.com ranks around 3,162,932nd.
Thirty-five hours of video content per minute means that it would take you five and three-quarters years of watching nonstop in order to see everything that is uploaded to YouTube in one day.
Bullsh*t! The first video was uploaded to YouTube on April 23, 2005. Still on the site, it is called “Me at the Zoo” and features YouTube founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo.
Roundhay Garden Scene is the name of the earliest surviving motion picture ever recorded. Filmed in 1888 at 12 frames per second, it is indeed two seconds long and depicts four people walking around in a garden.
Fact. YouTube and Universal Tube settled their dispute in 2007. Universal Tube now hosts ads on the site utube.com, which presumably adds quite a bit of revenue to its coffers.
BUGS BUNNY!
Bugs Bunny got his name from a 1945 Brooklyn Heights ferryboat that several animators took on a daily basis. Brooklyn Heights had the nickname “Bugtown,” often shortened to “Bugs,” and the three local ferries were known colloquially as Bugs Bunny, Bugs Blimpie, and Bugs Boxcar.
From the character’s inception to 1989, Bugs Bunny was voiced by Mel Blanc. Blanc was also the voice of Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and Barney Rubble from The Flintstones.
“Mutiny on the Bunny,” “Water, Water Every Hare,” “Hare and Loathing in Las Vegas,” “Hare-Abian Nights,” and “People Are Bunny” are all real Bugs Bunny cartoons.
Bullsh*t! I totally made all of that up.
Bugs Bunny got his name from Ben “Bugs” Hardaway, who was an animator and storyboard artist during animation’s golden years. He drew an initial sketch of the rascally rabbit, and other members of the studio referred to it as Bugs’s Bunny as it was passed around. The name stuck, and the possessive ’s was eventually dropped.
The first incarnation of Bugs Bunny appeared, nameless, in the cartoon Porky’s Hare Hunt in 1938.
Fact. Known as the “man of a thousand voices,” Blanc was indeed the voice of Bugs, Daffy, Porky, and Barney, not to mention Tweety Bird, Mr. Spacely (from The Jetsons), Captain Caveman, Speedy Gonzalez, Sylvester the Cat, Foghorn Leghorn, Yosemite Sam, Pepé Le Pew, and Wile E. Coyote.
Fact. They are, and so are “Apes of Wrath,” “Hare-Way to the Stars,” “Now Hare This,” and “A-Lad-In His Lamp.”
THE MOUSTACHE!
The longest moustache ever recorded belonged to Badamsinh Juwansinh Gurjar of India. It was measured in 2004 to be a mind-boggling 12½ feet long.
The Fu Manchu was named after Ching-kuo Manchu (whose nickname among the American military was “Fu Manchu,” meaning “Lord Manchu”), the chairman of Nationalist China from 1928 to 1931, who sported a substantial beard.
Every two years, a different city hosts the World Beard and Moustache Championships, which feature delightful competitions in diverse categories such as “Hungarian moustache,” “Dali moustache,” and “freestyle full beard.” Historically, Team Germany has been dominant, but Team USA has recently been taking titles.
Fact. Gurjar’s mighty moustache earned him a Guinness World Record.
Currently, the longest moustache belongs to Ram Singh Chauhan, also of India, and measures 11½ feet long.
Bullsh*t! The Fu Manchu moustache was named after Fu Manchu, a fictional character. He was invented by British author Sax Rohmer for a series of novels in the first half of the twentieth century, including The Mask of Fu Manchu and The Island of Fu Manchu. The character went on to be immortalized in film and popular culture. Fu Manchu was a despicable villain of the highest order, and has long been controversial, with many critics arguing that he represented a racist Chinese stereotype.
The chairman of Nationalist China from 1928 to 1931 was Chiang Kai-shek, a clean-shaven man.
Fact. The competition began in the early ’90s in southwestern Germany. With the advent of the Internet, the championships grew each year. Typically, the event is held in Europe, but the 2009 competition took place in Anchorage, Alaska, and Team USA won a number of events. These days the WBMC is the self-described “premiere event in the sport of bearding.”
SUPERMAN!
When the character of Superman was first conceived by Jerry Siegel in 1933, he was a vagrant named Bill Dunn who is given telepathic powers by a mad scientist. This Superman was an evil, bald, ruthless villain.
Superman in his now-ubiquitous hero form first appeared in Action Comics #1 in 1938. The cover featured Superman lifting a car over his head. In 2010 a copy of Action Comics #1 in good condition sold on the Internet for $1 million.
The first feature film to star Superman was 1982’s Superman: The Movie, starring Christopher Reeve as the Man of Steel.
Fact. Jerry Siegel first published a short story called “The Reign of the Super-Man” about the power-hungry Dunn, which was inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas of the Übermensch, which is often translated as the “above-human,” the “overman,” or the “superman.” The story was illustrated by Joe Shuster, and Shuster and Siegel would go on to recast Superman as the hero we know today.
The villain Lex Luthor bears a lot of similarities to this original idea of Superman.
Fact. As of 2010, there were only about 100 copies of Action Comics #1 in existence, and most of those were not in good condition. The copy in question had a quality rating of 8 out of 10, which means it was in “very fine” condition.
A million dollars might sound like a crazy price for a silly comic book, but some experts believe it’s actually a good investment. With so few copies in existence, the value should continue to rise.
Some diehard Superman fans think the comic book belongs in a museum.
Bullsh*t! Superman: The Movie came out in 1978, and was the second feature film about Superman. The first was the black-and-white 1951 movie Superman and the Mole-Men, which starred George Reeves as the superhero from Krypton.
SUPERCALIFRAGILISTIC-EXPIALIDOCIOUS!
“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” is the longest word in the English language to appear in major dictionaries during the past several decades.
There were versions of the word “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” in popular culture before it appeared in the 1964 movie Mary Poppins as a song title. Gloria Parker and Barney Young wrote a song in 1951 called “Supercalafajalistickespeealadojus.” The writers of the Mary Poppins song stated they heard a version of the word while boys at summer camp and that it was phrased “super-cadja-flawjalistic-espealedojus.”
Dutch finger-style guitarist Eltjo Haselhoff recorded a solo acoustic guitar version of the Mary Poppins song “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” for the 2009 album Poppin’ Guitars: A Tuneful of Sherman. The album also features the songs “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” and “Let’s Get Together.”
Bullsh*t! The word, at thirty-four letters in length, has appeared in most major dictionaries, and came awfully close to being the longest. It has been beaten regularly, however, by the thirty-five-letter word “Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia,” which means the fear of long words.
Scientific and technical words can get very long: The forty-five-letter word “pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis,” which describes a lung condition, is the longest word to appear in major dictionaries over the last few decades.
Fact. Parker and Young actually filed a copyright-infringement suit against Wonderland Music, the publisher of the “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” song from Mary Poppins, but they were not successful. The judge ruled in favor of Wonderland because it was proven in court that many variants of the word were known prior to either song’s publication.
Brothe
rs Richard and Robert Sherman, who wrote the song for the Disney movie, stated that they learned a version of the word while at summer camp in the Adirondacks in the 1930s.
Fact. Eltjo Haselhoff was one of several artists who recorded songs for the album. Australian guitarist Nick Charles recorded “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” also from Mary Poppins. Mark Hanson recorded “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” from the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and Prairie Home Companion guitarist Pat Donohue recorded “Let’s Get Together” from The Parent Trap. (Not to be confused with Let’s Stay Together by Al Green, which would be quite out of place on this album.)
THE IPOD!
The iPod got its name from a freelance copywriter named Vinnie Chieco, whose inspiration was the sci-fi movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. The iPod launched in 2001.
All iPods are manufactured in the U.S. in Cary, North Carolina, by ProFox Industries. ProFox is purported to be one of the best companies to work for in the United States, with on-site healthcare, childcare, and a 66,000-square-foot gym.
Apple has sold about as many iPods as there are people in the United States.
Fact. When Chieco caught his first glimpse of the white iPod, he thought of pods connecting to a spaceship, and recalled the line from 2001: “Open the pod bay door, Hal!”
The 2001 launch was not, however, the first time the consumer world had encountered a product of that name. “IPOD” was first trademarked in 1991 for office furniture by the Chrysalis Corporation. It was trademarked by two separate companies for two kinds of software in 1999, and it was trademarked for Internet kiosks in 2000.
Now Apple holds all the rights to the word “iPod.”
Bullsh*t! Our iPods, iPhones, and iPads are manufactured in Taiwan by a company called Foxconn. Foxconn is constantly mired in controversy due to allegations of horrible working conditions. In 2010 alone, eighteen Foxconn workers attempted suicide.
Cary is not home to a company named ProFox, but software maker SAS is headquartered there. Employees of SAS enjoy on-site healthcare and childcare, a 66,000-square-foot gym, a beauty salon, and car cleaning. Fortune named SAS number one on its “100 Best Companies to Work For” list for two years running.
Fact. There are 308 million people in the United States, give or take a million, and Apple has sold more than 300 million iPods to date.
JAZZ!
The word “jazz” comes from the Swahili word juzi, which means “dream.”
Jazz historians generally agree that the first jazz record ever made was “Livery Stable Blues” from the Original Dixieland Jass Band. The record came out in 1917, and included the title song as well as “Dixie Jass Band One-Step.”
Jelly Roll Morton, born in 1885, claimed to have invented jazz. Some of his famous jazz recordings include “Black Bottom Stomp,” “Burnin’ the Iceberg,” “Red Hot Pepper,” “Freakish,” and “Creepy Feeling.”
Bullsh*t! The Swahili word juzi means “the day before yesterday,” and the Swahili word for “dream” is ndoto. Jazz can trace its roots to the arrival of African slaves in the United States, but few of them would have spoken Swahili, since it is from East Africa, and the American slave trade primarily preyed on West Africa.
The exact etymology of the word “jazz” remains unknown. By 1912 the word was in use as slang, though not necessarily in reference to music. By 1915 the word was being used to describe Chicago music.
Fact. The 1917 single was the first major recording of music that referred to itself as jazz (or “jass,” in this case) and arguably the first jazz record. Ragtime and blues, genres that are part of jazz history but generally regarded as separate from jazz, had already been recorded extensively.
The Original Dixieland Jass Band was entirely made up of white musicians.
Fact. Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe was born into a Creole community in New Orleans in 1885. During his childhood he became a highly skilled ragtime pianist, and at age fourteen he took a job playing piano in a brothel. It was there that he took on the stage name Jelly Roll Morton, “jelly roll” being a slang term at the time for female genitalia.
He was notorious for his larger-than-life persona and his frequent assertions that he invented jazz.
CHAPTER 3
Everything Edible
I remember learning about the four basic food groups in elementary school. It was so simple, even a third grader could understand it: Just eat equal parts meat, fruits/vegetables, grains, and milk, and you’re certifiably healthy. Except that it was total bullshit.
I’m a proud former Texan, a meat-lover, and a master at the grill, but even I recognize that as long as you’re protein-conscious, meat is far from mandatory. I love ice cream as much as the next guy, but dairy is not, and has never been, an essential part of a healthy diet. In fact, most people in the world are lactose-intolerant to some degree.
Were we in the dark ages in the ’80s and ’90s when we believed that meat and milk should account for half of our diets? No. As it turns out, scientists never truly believed that. While creating the four basic food groups, the USDA was heavily influenced by America’s cattle ranchers and dairy farmers and their powerful lobbies. I love our ranchers and farmers, but it’s probably not a good policy to take nutrition advice from the people selling the food.
Do you know more than the next guy about the food we eat? Turn the page and find out.
COCA-COLA!
“The World’s Most Delicious Drink,” “More Bounce to the Ounce,” “Gotta Have It,” and “Be Sociable” were all Coca-Cola slogans at one time.
The first formula of Coca-Cola, called Pemberton’s French Wine Coca, was alcoholic and meant to be medicine.
Coca-Cola sells more than 3,000 different products in more than 200 countries. Minute Maid, Glacéau (VitaminWater), Powerade, Odwalla, Nestea, Hi-C, Mr. Pibb, and Dasani are all Coca-Cola brands. Lesser-known Coca-Cola brands include Jaz Cola, Love Body, and Water Salad.
Bullsh*t! Those were all Pepsi slogans.
Some of my favorite Coca-Cola slogans are “It Had to Be Good to Get Where It Is,” “The Pause That Refreshes,” and “Enjoy.” But the best one from all time is the Coca-Cola slogan from 1906: “The Great National Temperance Beverage.”
Fact. Pharmacist John Pemberton created the medicinal tonic in the late nineteenth century. Not only was it alcoholic, but it also included cocaine as a major ingredient. At the time, cocaine was used as a medicine frequently, and its harmful and highly addictive qualities were not yet popularly known. By the time he called it Coca-Cola, Pemberton had removed alcohol from the recipe but kept the cocaine.
Over the years, as the recipe was refined, and cocaine became vilified, the amount was reduced bit by bit, until it only had the merest trace. The beverage was cocaine-free by 1929.
Coca-Cola still contains specially prepared cocaine-free extracts of the coca leaf. The extracted cocaine is sold for “medicinal” purposes.
Fact. Coca-Cola is all over the globe in thousands of permutations.
Jaz Cola is specifically marketed to the Philippines. Love Body is a tea drink in Japan that is supposed to be good for women’s health. Water Salad is also marketed in Japan.
Personally, I think Water Salad would do well here in the States.
THE TOMATO!
Tomatoes are members of the genus Solanum, which also includes potatoes and eggplants. They are in the family Solanaceae, which includes chili peppers, tobacco, and petunias. Most parts of most of the plants in Solanum and Solanaceae are poisonous to humans.
In the 1973 case Nix v. Hedden, the Supreme Court was charged with the task of determining whether the tomato was a fruit or a vegetable. It sided with the botanist, Murphy Nix, declaring the tomato to be officially a fruit.
The first ever genetically modified food crop to be successfully commercialized and brought to market was a biotechnology-produced kind of tomato called the Flavr Savr.
Fact. The Solanaceae family is informally known as the nightshade family. Atropa belladonna, or deadly nightshad
e, is part of the family.
Plants in Solanaceae and Solanum are generally rich in alkaloids, which in some cases can be desirable nutritionally, and in others can be downright fatal. The green parts of a tomato plant contain the alkaloid tomatine, which is toxic to humans.
Bullsh*t! Nix v. Hedden did occur, although in 1893, and the Supreme Court was indeed asked to decide whether the tomato was a fruit or a vegetable. The ruling, however, was that the tomato is a vegetable.
The case occurred because of a nineteenth-century law that required tax to be paid on imported vegetables, but not fruit. The Supreme Court acknowledged that, in botanical terms, tomatoes are fruits, but decided that tomatoes are vegetables based on their typical use and popular perception. (Our country has a long history of major branches of government ignoring science.)
Fact. Scientifically, the Flavr Savr was a success. Researchers at Calgene Inc. managed to introduce an inhibitor to tomatoes that would prevent them from producing the enzyme that causes the fruit to soften over time. The resultant tomatoes, Flavr Savr tomatoes, stayed firm for much longer, and were available in supermarkets in the U.S. in the early ’90s.
Commercially, Flavr Savrs didn’t last. It seems the expense of producing them and the growing public sentiment against genetically modified foods were insurmountable hurdles.
RICE!
California is the U.S.’s leading producer of rice. In 2008, the state churned out over 800 million pounds of rice. Second and third place go to Florida and Texas, respectively.
Fact. Fact. Bullsh*t! Page 6