Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  Lord Stanley had the trustees present the trophy the first year, 1893, to the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association, which had won an ameteur tournament. Then they arranged for an actual championship game between his hometown Ottawa team and Toronto. But the game never took place.

  Ottawa was considered the best team, but the trustees insisted they play a “challenge game” since it was a “challenge cup.” They also insisted that the game be played in Toronto. Ottawa refused to do it. So the trustees declared the Montreal AAA the first Stanley Cup champions in 1893 without a playoff.

  PLAYOFFS BEGIN

  The first official Stanley Cup playoff game took place on March 22, 1894, when Ottawa challenged Montreal in the Montreal Victoria Arena before 5,000 fans. Montreal got to keep the Cup, winning the game 3–1.

  Lord Stanley’s announcement and his order of a small silver cup would mark the beginning of what would become Canada’s national sport…and a game still played internationally more than a century later.

  Marcel Marceau’s greatest-hits album consisted of 40 minutes of silence, followed by applause.

  THE STRANGE TRAIL OF THE STANLEY CUP

  Okay you just read about the origin of the Stanley Cup…but that’s only the beginning. The Stanley Cup has an unusual history.

  STANLEY CUP FACTS

  • In 1919 the Spanish flu struck the Montreal Canadiens. They offered to play the last scheduled game with substitutes, but their opponents, the Seattle Metropolitans, declined, and for the only time in history, nobody won the Cup.

  • In 1924 the trustees started putting more than just the team names on the cup. Today it is the only trophy in professional sports that has the names of winning players, coaches, management and club staff engraved on it.

  • In 1927, after decades of being a multi league championship, the cup came under the exclusive control of the NHL.

  • It got bigger: With each winner, a new ring was added to the lower portion of the cup. By the 1940s, it was a long, tubular trophy nearly three feet high. In 1948 it was reworked into a two-piece trophy with a wider base. In 1958 it was reworked again and got the five-ring, barrel-like shape it has today. It now weighs 35 pounds.

  • In 1969 the original bowl was retired to the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto because of its fragile state. A silversmith in Montreal made an exact replica—down to scratches, dents—and bite marks—which is awarded today.

  • There’s one name crossed out. Peter Pocklington, the owner of the 1984 champion Edmonton Oilers, put his dad’s name on it. The NHL wasn’t amused, and covered it with “XXXXXXX.”

  • There were 2,116 names on the Stanley Cup as of May 2002.

  • Seven women have their names engraved on the Stanley Cup.

  • The cup is actually out of compliance with Lord Stanley’s wishes—he wanted it to be a trophy for amateur athletes only.

  First animal to be ejected from a supersonic jet:

  ROWDY GAME, ROWDY TROPHY

  Since each winning player and even the management gets to take the Stanley Cup home for a day, it has seen its share of wild times. Here are a few of the more notorious escapades:

  • After the Ottawa Silver Seven won the Stanley Cup in 1905, one of the partying players boasted he could kick it across the Rideau Canal. The drunken group went home and groggily remembered the incident the next day. Luckily, the canal was frozen over. When they went back, the cup was sitting on the ice.

  • In 1907 the Montreal Wanderers wanted their team picture taken with the Cup. After the photo session, the team left the studio—and forgot the Cup. It stayed there for months until the photographer’s housekeeper took it home and grew geraniums in it.

  • In 1924 the cup-winning Montreal Canadiens went to Coach Leo Dandurand’s house for a late-night party. The car carrying the Cup got a flat, and the players put the Cup on the side of the road while they changed the tire. Then they drove off…without it. When they got to Dandurand’s house, Mrs. Dandurand asked, “Where’s the Cup?” They realized what they’d done and went back. Incredibly, the Cup was right where they’d left it.

  • Muzz and Lynn Patrick found the Cup in their basement in Victoria, B.C., in 1925. (Their father was the coach of the championship Victoria Cougars.) The boys etched their initials onto the Cup with a nail. Fifteen years later, they got their names on it for real—as members of the 1940 champion New York Rangers.

  • When the New York Rangers won the Cup in 1940, the players celebrated by urinating in it.

  • The Cup was stolen from the Hockey Hall of Fame twice in the late 1960s. One of the thieves threatened to throw it into Lake Ontario unless the charges against him were dropped.

  • In 1962 the Montreal Canadiens were playing the defending champions, the Chicago Blackhawks. During one of the games, a Montreal fan went to the Chicago Stadium lobby display case where the Cup was kept, took the Cup out of the case, and walked away. He almost made it to the door when he was stopped by a security guard. Later, he said he “was taking the Cup back to Montreal, where it belongs.”

  • Chris Nilan of the 1986 champion Montreal Canadiens photographed the Cup with his infant son in it. He said, “His butt fit right in.”

  • A player on the 1987 champion Edmonton Oilers (purported to be Mark Messier) took it to a strip joint across the street from the rink and let everybody drink out of it. (It happened again in 1994 when the New York Rangers won. Mark Messier was also on that team.)

  • In 1991 the Cup turned up at the bottom of Pittsburgh Penguin Mario Lemieux’s swimming pool.

  • In 1994 Mark Messier and Brian Leetch took the cup on The Late Show with David Letterman. There it was used in a sketch called “Stupid Cup Tricks.”

  • In 1996 Sylvain Lefebvre of the Colarado Avalanche had his daughter baptized in it.

  • Rangers Brian Noonan and Nick Kypreos brought the Cup on MTV Prime Time Beach House, where it was stuffed with raw clams and oysters.

  • The Rangers took the Cup to fan Brian Bluver, a 13-year-old patient awaiting a heart transplant at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. According to his father, Brian “smiled for the first time in seven weeks.”

  • The Cup was once used as a feed bag for a Kentucky Derby–winning racehorse.

  … a bear, in 1962. (It parachuted safely to Earth.)

  UNCLE JOHN’S DUBIOUS ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

  Winner: Dr. Jukka Ammondt, professor of literature at Finland’s University of Jyväskylä

  Achievement: Not content with translating several of the King’s greatest songs into Latin (“It’s Now or Never” became “Nunc Hic Aut Numquam”) Dr. Ammondt recorded an album of Elvis Presley songs in ancient Sumerian—a language spoken in Mesopotamia around 4000 B.C. (“Layoff of my blue suede shoes” translated as “My sandals of sky-blue, do not touch.”)

  Brace yourself: Orthodontic braces were invented in 1728.

  SALMAN RUSHDIE

  Words of wisdom from one of the world’s great writers, Salman Rushdie.

  “If somebody’s trying to shut you up, sing louder and, if possible, better.”

  “Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems—but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems incredible.”

  “What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”

  “I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.”

  “The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas—uncertainty, progress, change—into crimes.”

  “Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.”

  “Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom’s existence.”

  “Fundamentalism isn’t about r
eligion. It’s about power.”

  “In the world of prophecy, angels bring you messages, they bring you the news. And I suggest that what we have now instead of angels is television. We watch television to get the message.”

  “It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.”

  “When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the remedy.”

  “The only way to stop terrorism is to say ‘I’m not scared of you.’”

  “Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.”

  Stiff as a board: Wood frogs freeze solid in winter and thaw back to life in spring.

  FOR SALE BUY OWNER

  We’re back with one of our favorite features. More proof that some of the funniest things in life aren’t necessarily meant to be funny.

  In an office: “Would the person who took the step ladder yesterday please bring it back or further steps will be taken.”

  On the door of a photographer’s studio: “Out to lunch: If not back by five, out for dinner also.”

  Outside a new town hall: “The town hall is closed until opening. It will remain closed after being opened. Open tomorrow.”

  Outside a London disco: “Smarts is the most exclusive disco in town. Everyone welcome.”

  In a safari park: “Elephants Please stay in your car”

  Outside a photographer’s studio: “Have the kids shot for Dad from $24.95.”

  At a railroad station: “Beware! To touch these wires is instant death. Anyone found doing so will be prosecuted.”

  In a department store: “Bargain Basement Upstairs”

  In an office building: “Toilet out of order. Please use floor below.”

  Outside a Burger King: “Now Hiring Losers”

  In Cape Cod: “Caution Water on Road During Rain”

  In Pennsylvania: “Auction Sunday—New and Used Food”

  Next to a red traffic light: “This light never turns green”

  Outside a house: “For Sale Buy Owner”

  At a McDonald’s: “Parking for Drive-Thru Service Only”

  In Massachusetts: “Entrance Only Do Not Enter”

  Also in Massachusetts: “Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg”

  Seven thousand U.S. troops invaded Grenada in 1983. They received 8,612 medals for their efforts.

  AN EXPLOSIVE IDEA

  The Nobel Prizes are perhaps the most respected awards on Earth. They’re awarded every December 10, the anniversary of the death of their creator and namesake, Alfred Nobel. Here’s a look at the man and his medals.

  STRONG STUFF

  In 1846 an Italian chemist named Ascanio Sobrero stumbled onto the formula for a powerful liquid explosive that he called pyroglycerine. Soon to become known as nitroglycerine, the substance was several times more powerful than black powder or any other explosive known to scientists at the time.

  But nitroglycerine was also terribly unstable. It was difficult to make the stuff without blowing yourself up in the process, and it was just about impossible to transport it safely. A bump in the road, a change in air temperature, even prolonged exposure to sunlight was enough to trigger an explosion. Yet there was no easy way to detonate nitroglycerine in a controlled, predictable fashion. As far as Sobrero was concerned, nitroglycerine was more trouble than it was worth, a laboratory curiosity with no practical value.

  WORTH A TRY

  But nitroglycerine was powerful—and there was a lot of money to be made if someone could work the bugs out. So, in the late 1850s, a bankrupt Swedish munitions manufacturer named Immanuel Nobel decided to try in the hope that nitroglycerine would restore his family fortune.

  Success would come at a terrible price: In 1864 Nobel’s 20-year-old son, Emil, died in an explosion while experimenting with nitroglycerine. In spite of setbacks, though, Nobel’s older son, Alfred, kept plugging away, moving his workshop to a barge in the middle of a lake after the Swedish government forbade him from rebuilding the one that had blown up. In 1865 the 32-year-old Alfred made a breakthrough—he invented the detonating cap. Instead of trying to set off the nitroglycerine directly, he got the idea of detonating a small amount of explosives—usually gunpowder or fulminate of mercury—and using the shock waves from that explosion to set off the nitroglycerine.

  DOWN TO EARTH

  That took care of the detonation problem, but nitroglycerine was still very unstable and dangerous to work with. Nobel solved that problem in 1866, when he came upon the idea of mixing nitroglycerine with an inert, porous type of earth called kieselguhr. The kieselguhr soaks up the nitroglycerine and forms a malleable, puttylike “plastic” explosive that can be molded into any shape—sticks, for example—and dried into solid form, which is much stabler than liquid nitroglycerine. Nobel named his new explosive dynamite, after dynamis, the Greek word for “power.”

  BACK IN BUSINESS

  Nobel’s timing could not have been better. The mid to late 1800s was an era of unprecedented public works projects, as countries all over the world constructed bridges, tunnels, dams, roads, railroads, mines, harbors, and canals. Dynamite was up to eight times more powerful than black powder, so wherever there was solid rock to be blasted through, it became the explosive of choice.

  The military applications of dynamite were obvious, and although Nobel had pacifist tendencies, where profits were concerned, he was decidedly apolitical; he gladly sold explosives to just about any combatant who asked for it. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), for example, he made a killing—both figuratively and literally—selling explosives to both sides.

  NOBEL’S SUR-PRIZE

  Nobel became one of the wealthiest men in Europe, and his name became a household word. But if he assumed that wealth and fame would also bring him respect, he received what must have been a rude awakening when his brother Ludwig died in 1888. As we told you in Uncle John’s Absolutely Absorbing Bathroom Reader, many newspapers mistakenly assumed that Alfred was the one who had died and wrote scathing obituaries attacking him as a merchant of death and “bellicose monster” whose contributions to science “had boosted the bloody art of war from bullets and bayonets to long-range explosives in less than 24 years.”

  Makes sense: Jersey cows come from Jersey, an island in the English Channel.

  When Alfred Nobel died—this time for real—from a cerebral hemorrhage on December 10, 1896, the world was shocked to learn the details of his will: With the exception of a few small personal bequests, all of his assets were to be liquidated and the resulting cash invested in interest-bearing securities. Each year, the interest earned would be divided into five equal amounts and “awarded in prizes to those persons who shall have contributed most materially to benefit mankind during the year immediately preceding.” The awards would be presented in five categories: Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, and Peace.

  So, why did Alfred Nobel, “merchant of death,” instruct that his estate be used to fund a Peace Prize? “Most of Nobel’s biographers,” writes Burton Feldman in The Nobel Prize, “feel that he was greatly influenced by his brother Ludwig’s death—or rather, the inaccurate obituaries that followed it.”

  PRIZE FIGHTERS

  Today the annual award of the Nobel Prize is taken for granted, but in 1896 the picture was far less clear. For one thing, Nobel’s relatives were determined to fight his will so that they could claim a share of the estate. Not only that, the French government wanted to claim Nobel as a legal resident so that it could tax the estate. Either contest to Nobel’s bequest would have left little money remaining for prizes. Both the Nobel family and the French government were eventually beaten back, but other questions remained.

  The will stipulated that the prize winners would be chosen by the Swedish Academy of Sciences (Physics and Chemistry); the Karolinska Medical Institute (Medicine); and the Swedish Academy (Literature). The Peace Prize winner would be chosen by a committee of five persons appointed by the Norwegia
n Parliament. Would these organizations even agree to take up the tasks Nobel assigned them? The will said that all of the money would go toward prizes, but made no mention of how the organizations would be compensated, if at all, for their work. If even one of the parties balked, the entire will would be voided and the Nobel Prizes would never come to pass.

  In 1897 it was finally decided that 20% of the interest income would go toward expenses; the remaining 80% would be awarded as prizes. That did the trick—on June 11, 1898, the last holdout, the Swedish Academy of Sciences, approved Nobel’s will. The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901, on the fifth anniversary of Nobel’s death.

  No wonder the lines are so long: 14 of the world’s 20 busiest airports are located in the U.S.

  BAD PRESS IS GOOD PRESS

  So how did the Nobel Prizes become so famous? They were the most valuable prizes of the day, but that alone isn’t responsible for their fame. The credit goes to Marie Curie.

  Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre, shared the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics for their pioneering work in the discovery and study of radioactivity. When Pierre died in an accident in 1906, Marie carried on their work. A few years later, in 1911, she was being considered for a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, for discovering the radioactive elements radium and polonium.

  At the same time, Curie was caught up in a public scandal involving her affair with French physicist Paul Langevin, who was married and had four children. All of the tawdry details of the romance—including death threats, duels, and steamy passages from the couple’s stolen love letters—were published in newspapers across Europe for the world to see. And then she won her second Nobel Prize.