Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

—Chinese proverb

  Surf’s up: The level of the world’s oceans is 500 feet higher than it was 25,000 years ago.

  FLUNKING THE PEPSI CHALLENGE

  Lots of companies have ad campaigns that flop, but Pepsi seems to have more than its share. Here are a few classic bombs.

  KEEP ON TRUCKIN’

  For its “Pepsi 400” contest in the summer of 2001, Pepsi offered to send the holders of five winning tickets on an all-expenses-paid trip to Florida’s Daytona 400 auto race. One of the five would get to drive home in the grand prize, a brand-new Dodge truck; the other four would each get $375 worth of free gas. There was just one problem: contest organizers accidentally printed 55 winning tickets instead of five. Rather than risk alienating the winners—not to mention millions of Pepsi drinkers—Pepsi sent all 55 winners to Daytona, gave away five trucks instead of one, and spent $20,625 on free gas instead of $1,825. Estimated cost of the error: about $400,000.

  OVER-STUFFED

  In April 1996, Pepsi canceled its “Pepsi Stuff” merchandise giveaway campaign months ahead of schedule. Reason: Too many winners. The company underestimated how many people would redeem the points by 50%, forcing it to spend $60 million more than expected on free merchandise. “We’re outpacing our goals on awareness,” a company spokesperson explained.

  JET LAG

  Another disaster from the “Pepsi Stuff” campaign: 21-year-old John Leonard tried to redeem seven million award points for the Harrier fighter jet he saw offered in a Pepsi Stuff TV ad. The rules stipulated that contestants could buy points for 10¢ apiece, so that’s what he did. Leonard (who studied flawed promotions in business school) raised $700,000 to buy the required points and then sent the money to Pepsi, along with a letter demanding they hand over the $50 million jet. When Pepsi refused, claiming the offer was made “in jest,” Leonard filed suit in federal court. Three years later, a judge ruled that “no objective person could reasonably have concluded that the commercial actually offered consumers a Harrier jet.” Pepsi lucked out…case dismissed.

  Heavy! Water weighs more per unit of volume than wine does.

  THE KING OF (SODA) POP

  Even Pepsi’s biggest successes can become colossal flops. In 1983 they signed the largest individual sponsorship deal in history with pop singer Michael Jackson. It was a multi-year deal and Pepsi made millions from it…only to find itself linked to one of the most lurid scandals of the 1990s when Jackson abruptly cancelled his Pepsi-sponsored “Dangerous” tour in 1993. Jackson’s reasons for quitting: (1) stress generated by allegations that he had sexually molested a young boy, and (2) addiction to painkillers he took “to control pain from burns suffered while filming a Pepsi ad.”

  THE NAME GAME

  In 1983 another Pepsi contest ran into budget trouble when the company offered $5 per letter to any customer who could spell their own last name using letters printed on Pepsi bottle caps and flip tops. Pepsi hoped to control the number of cash prizes by releasing only a limited number of vowels…but it failed to take into account people like Richard “no vowels” Vlk, who turned in 1,393 three-letter sets and pocketed $20,985 for his efforts. Vlk, a diabetic who does not drink Pepsi, collected the letters by taking out classified ads offering to split the winnings with anyone who sent him a matching set. “I don’t even remember making one whole set myself,” he says. “I didn’t buy any Pepsi.” (The company got even by mailing him his winnings in $15 increments, one check for each winning set.)

  THEY CAN SEE CLEARLY NOW

  In 1992 Pepsi introduced Crystal Pepsi, an attempt to cash in on the booming popularity of see-through soft drinks like Clearly Canadian. Sales were less than half of what Pepsi projected, even after the company reformulated the product. Marketing experts point to two critical flaws that they say doomed Crystal Pepsi from the start: (1) customers balked at paying extra for a product that, because it was clear, was perceived to have fewer ingredients than regular Pepsi, and (2) after more than a century of conditioning, consumers want colas to be dark brown in color. “Clear colas are about as appetizing as brown water,” an industry analyst explains.

  A single mushroom can produce as many as 40 million spores in a single hour.

  TRUST ME…

  Call it doublespeak, call it spin, call it “a different version of the facts.” The truth is—it’s still a lie.

  TRUST ME… “I wouldn’t call it an accident. I’d call it a malfunction.”

  SAID BY: Dr. Edward Teller, “father of the hydrogen bomb,” referring to Three Mile Island, 1979

  THE FACT: It was a real accident—250,000 gallons of radioactive waste leaked out.

  TRUST ME… “Our one desire is that…the people of Southeast Asia be left in peace to work out their own destinies in their way.” SAID BY: President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964

  THE FACT: Maybe he meant “left in pieces”—the war in Vietnam was well underway and escalating.

  TRUST ME… “I have no more territorial ambitions in Europe.” SAID BY: Adolf Hitler, 1938

  THE FACT: Within two years of saying this, Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France.

  TRUST ME… “I would have never owned those ugly-ass shoes.” SAID BY: O. J. Simpson, in a 1996 civil lawsuit, denying he owned a pair of Bruno Magli “Lorenzos”

  THE FACT: A month later, 30 photographs were discovered that showed Simpson wearing the shoes at a 1993 Buffalo Bills game.

  TRUST ME… “The army is the Indian’s best friend.”

  SAID BY: General George Armstrong Custer, 1870

  THE FACT: He then wiped out most of the Sioux nation before being killed at Little Big Horn.

  TRUST ME… “As long as I own the Cleveland Browns, they will remain in Cleveland.”

  SAID BY: Brown’s owner Art Modell, 1993

  THE FACT: He moved the franchise to Baltimore in 1996.

  97 out of 100 Americans who buy engagement rings this year will buy one with a diamond.

  SHAKES’ TAKES

  Some hilarious lines from the late comedian Ronnie Shakes.

  “A lot of people wonder how you know if you’re really in love. Just ask yourself this one question: ‘Would I mind being destroyed financially by this person?’”

  “They say that hell is hot, but is it humid? Because I can take the heat; it’s the humidity I can’t stand.”

  “After twelve years of therapy my psychiatrist said something that brought tears to my eyes. He said, ‘No hablo ingles.’”

  “I was going to buy a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, and then I thought: What the hell good would that do?”

  “My doctor gave me two weeks to live. I hope they’re in August.”

  “I like life. It’s something to do.”

  “We live in a mobile home. Hey, there are advantages to living in a mobile home. One time, it caught on fire. We met the fire department half way.”

  “I spend money with reckless abandon. Last month I blew five thousand dollars at a reincarnation seminar. I got to thinking, ‘what the hell, you only live once.’”

  “I was an ugly baby. On my birth certificate there was a listing for ‘Probable Cause.’”

  “One question on hospital admittance forms really gets me. ‘Sex: Male or Female?’ Do I want to be in a hospital where they can’t tell the difference?”

  “As a teenager I just wanted to fit in, just be one of the boys. It was tough. I went to an all-black school. I went so far as to have them print my negative in the yearbook. I think it was the black teeth that gave me away.”

  “I wouldn’t mind being the last man on Earth—just to see if all of those girls were telling me the truth.”

  “I fear that one day I’ll meet God, He’ll sneeze, and I won’t know what to say.”

  Lead melts at a temperature of 620°F; tin at 446°F. Mix them together and they melt at 356°F.

  FADS

  Here’s a look at the origins of some of the most popular obsessions from days gone by.


  THE SMURFS

  Created by Belgian storybook illustrator Pierre “Peyo” Culliford in 1957, the Smurfs developed followings in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Scandanavia (where the blue creatures were known as Schlumpfe, Puffo, Pitufo, and Smolf, respectively), but they remained more or less unknown in the rest of the world.

  Then in 1978, British Petroleum launched an advertising campaign featuring the creatures, which it renamed the Smurfs for the English audience. The ads sparked a Smurf craze in England, prompting an American importer to bring them to America… where they caught the eye of the daughter of the president of NBC. Her enthusiasm prompted dad to order up a Saturday morning Smurf cartoon show for the network. The show became an enormous hit, turning NBC into a Saturday morning juggernaut and launching a Smurf craze in the United States. By 1982 the Smurfs were the biggest-selling toy merchandising line in the country, outselling even E.T. and Star Wars.

  “BABY ON BOARD” SIGNS

  In 1984 an executive recruiter named Michael Lerner decided to start his own consumer products business. The only problem: he couldn’t think of any products to sell. Lucky for him, an old college friend told him about a couple who’d just come back from a vacation in Germany, where they’d seen small signs suction-cupped to automobile windows warning motorists to drive carefully because a baby was on board. The couple wanted to start selling the signs in the United States.

  Lerner offered them a deal: If they would agree to let him market the signs, he would give them a royalty. Deal! Lerner founded a company called Safety 1st; by the end of 1985 he was selling 500,000 of the little diamond-shaped yellow signs a month. The couple made more than $100,000 for doing absolutely nothing.

  Soon imitators stole his idea and swamped the market with humorous signs like “Beam Me Up Scotty” and “Ex-Husband in Trunk.” Lerner couldn’t sue—he didn’t have a patent, but that wasn’t a problem: He just used his Baby On Board profits to branch out into other child-safety products. He eventually took Safety 1st public, and in April 2000 it sold to a Canadian company for $195 million.

  …together and they melt at 356°F.

  PAINT BY NUMBERS

  In 1952, a Detroit paint-company owner named Max Klein got together with an artist named Dan Robbins and formed Craft Master, a company that sold the world’s first paint-by-numbers kits. The kits consisted of numbered jars of paint and a rolled-up canvas (later cardboard) stamped with the outline of a painting; each section of the painting had a number that corresponded to a particular color of paint. Price, including paints and brush: $1.79

  So who did Klein and Robbins get the idea from? Leonardo da Vinci. “I recalled reading about da Vinci, and when he got large and complicated commissions, he would give numbered patterns to his apprentices to block in areas for him that he’d go back and finish himself,” Robbins explains. “It took two years to get off the ground; then they took off like a rocket.” By 1954 more paint-by-numbers paintings were hanging in American homes than were original works of art.

  At the peak of the fad, Craft Master was producing 50,000 kits a day. Their slogan was “Every man a Rembrandt.” Among the Rembrandts: Nelson Rockefeller, Ethel Merman, Andy Warhol, J. Edgar Hoover…and even President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

  SLOT CARS

  The world’s first toy slot cars were introduced by the Aurora Plastics Company in 1960. Aurora’s cars came with special slotted tracks that kept the cars on the road, thanks to a small projection under the car’s nose that inserted into the slot. Cost: $3.00 to $8.00 per car, or $20–40 for an entire racing set, which made them affordable for just about everyone. The cars went up to 600 mph in scale, and since the “drivers” were in continuous control of their vehicles’ speeds, the cars were more challenging—and more fun—to operate than toy cars had ever been.

  Because of all of this, the cars became hugely popular. Entrepreneurs built huge multilevel slot-car racing centers that competed with pinball arcades for America’s pocket change, and home enthusiasts spent $1,500 or more building their own elaborate speedways at home. In all, Americans spent $100 million on slot cars and tracks in 1963—more than they spent on model rail-roads—and by 1965 more than 3.5 million Americans were racing slot cars on a regular basis. For a time it seemed that slot cars might even become more popular than bowling, but the fad didn’t last long—sales dropped off sharply in 1967 and never recovered.

  Standard English: During his lifetime, Shakespeare’s last name was spelled 83 different ways.

  INSTANT TANS

  Dihydroxyacetone is a drug that’s used as an antidote for cyanide poisoning. It has a side effect: It stains human skin brown on contact. A sun worshipper named John Andre noticed this in the late 1950s and decided to mix the medicine with alcohol and fragrances and sell it as a self-tanning aftershave called Man-Tan. Andre sold $3 million worth of the stuff in 1960, giving both aftershave and suntan lotion companies quite a scare. They needn’t have worried: paint-on tans were just a flash in the pan, and sales “virtually disappeared” the following year. (Update: Man-tan is still gone, but thanks to the established link between sunlight and skin cancer, paint-on tans are more popular than ever.)

  SHMOOS

  In 1948 cartoonist Al Capp added a new character to his L’il Abner comic strip: the shmoo, a strange creature, described as “a cross between Casper the Ghost and a misshapen dinosaur.” In Capp’s comic-strip world, the shmoos were as much a part of the food supply as they were a part of the story line: they laid eggs, produced butter, and gave milk in glass bottles. If you broiled them, they turned into steak; if you boiled them, they turned into chicken.

  And if you made a toy out of them, manufacturers learned in the late l940s, they sold by the millions. Companies made fortunes selling shmoo ashtrays, clocks, piggy banks, pencil sharpeners, clothing, candy, and even shmoo meat products. By 1950 more than $25 million worth of shmoo items had been sold, yet for some reason, Capp decided to write the characters out of the story line. He created a “shmooicide squad” that gunned down every single shmoo in the strip, and the fad died out soon after that.

  The skin of a tiger shark is 10 times as strong as ox hide.

  A FAMOUS PHONY

  Most people have fantasized about being someone else, but few of us have actually done it. Here’s an amazing story of a man who pretended to be someone he wasn’t…and pulled it off.

  BACKGROUND: Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Jr. was one of the most prolific imposters in history. Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1921, the high school dropout had successfully passed himself off as a doctor of philosophy, a zoologist, a Trappist monk, a prison counselor, a biologist doing cancer research, a sheriff, a soldier, and a sailor by the time he was in his 30s.

  MOMENT OF “TRUTH”: His greatest ruse came during the Korean War when he used the identity of Dr. Joseph Cyr, and enlisted in the Royal Canadian Navy in 1951. He served aboard a destroyer off the Korean coast. Under intense battle conditions, Demara was the ship’s surgeon: he pulled teeth, removed tonsils, administered anaesthesia, and even amputated limbs. But most incredibly, after studying the procedure in a book, he successfully removed a bullet from a wounded soldier that was less than an inch from his heart. Onlookers let out a cheer as he completed the impeccable operation and saved the man’s life. In all his time as a doctor in Korea, he never lost a single patient.

  UNMASKED: His success turned out to be his undoing—photographs of the heroic doctor made it into Canadian newspapers. The real Dr. Cyr’s mother saw them and alerted authorites. Amazingly, no charges were filed; Demara had saved too many lives. A naval board of inquiry released him—with back pay. Demara was later arrested for posing as a teacher in the United States and served a six-month sentence. When asked why he did it, noting that he didn’t get rich from his escapades, he answered, “Rascality, pure rascality.”

  IMMORTALITY ACHIEVED: In 1961 Hollywood made a movie based on the Demara story, The Great Imposter, starring Tony Curtis and Karl Malden. Director
Robert Mulligan was a finalist for the Director’s Guild Award for the film. And Demara himself got a minor part in another movie: In 1960 he appeared in the melodrama The Hypnotic Eye. He played…the doctor.

  Number of documented deaths-by-piranha in human history: Not even one.

  THE MAN IN THE MASK

  Classical “Greco-Roman” wrestling can trace its roots all the way back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. But what about “professional” wrestling—the kind where costumed buffoons hit each other with folding chairs? How old is that? Older than you might think.

  WORLD-CLASS WRESTLING

  In 1915 some fight promoters organized an international wrestling tournament at the Opera House in New York. A rising American star named Ed “Strangler” Lewis headlined a roster of other top grapplers from Russia, Germany, Italy, Greece, and other countries. These were some of the biggest matches to be fought in New York City that year.

  There was just one problem: almost nobody went to see them.

  HO-HUM

  Wrestling, at least as it was fought back then, could be pretty boring for the average person to watch. As soon as the bell rang or the whistle was blown, the two wrestlers grabbed onto each other and then might circle round…and round…and round for hours on end, until one wrestler finally gained an advantage and defeated his opponent. Some bouts dragged on for nine hours or more.