• If you eat your soup with a small spoon, then you are a “cautious connoisseur.” Not one to rock the boat, you’re pragmatic and take orders well. You work best behind the scenes. And without you, no project would ever be completed.
Estimated number of people who could be fed for a year by the food Americans waste in one day: 240,183.
LOVE, ICE CREAM STYLE
Looking for that special someone? According to Dr. Alan Hirsch, the neurological director of the Smell and Taste Research and Treatment Foundation in Chicago, knowing someone’s dessert preference can help you choose a potential mate. In his book What Flavor is Your Personality?, Dr. Hirsch reveals your “Ice Cream Romance Horoscope.” Bring it with you to the freezer section of your local grocery store next time you’re on the prowl.
• “If your favorite ice cream flavor is vanilla, you like to stay busy achieving your goals. Never one to waste time, you’d be happiest with another vanilla, someone as romantic and expressive as you.”
• “If double chocolate chunk is your first choice, you recognize the need for stability; so you’ll be most compatible with a stable, caring butter-pecan type or, if you’re feeling adventurous, a chocolate chip lover may motivate you to stay focused.”
• “Those who prefer strawberries and cream need someone to give them a sense of hope and optimism, so they’d be happy with chocolate chip lovers who can match their high standards, but do so with a lighter touch.”
• “If you love banana cream pie, you have many choices—you’re likely to be compatible with all other flavor favorites. You are such a good listener and so easy to be with that the other types seek your company, so you are never without a date.”
• “Chocolate chip lovers most enjoy their ice cream in the company of either butter pecan, who will identify with their high standards, or with the double chocolate chunk lovers, who appreciate their charming nature.”
• “Butter pecan lovers are most compatible with other butter pecan lovers because you both set such high standards that you can admire each other’s good taste. Besides, another butter-pecan type won’t be pestering you to express your feelings all the time.”
Watch your step: There can be more than a million earthworms in a single acre of land.
POP QUIZ
Radley Balko was studying a map of the United States created by a Caltech student named Alan McConchie when he noticed something strange: The map showed which states refer to carbonated beverages as “soda,” which ones call them “pop,” and which ones call them “Coke.” And it looked eerily similar to a map of the United States showing a breakdown of how each state voted in the 2000 presidential election—for Bush or for Gore.
Balko put the two maps together and made an amazing discovery: with a few exceptions, “pop” or “Coke” states went for Bush, and “soda” states went for Gore.
And even the exceptions make sense:
• Six “pop” states (Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington) voted for Gore. Why? They’re traditionally liberal.
• Three “soda” states (Virginia, Nevada, Missouri) voted for Bush. Why? The urban “soda” areas went for Gore, but there weren’t enough voters to beat out the rural parts of the states—all “Coke” and “pop” country—which went big for Bush.
• Florida is undecided about whether it’s a “Coke” state or a “soda” state. Along the panhandle, where they went for Bush, they drink “Coke.” But down in Miami, Palm Beach, and retirement areas they drink “soda”—and they voted for Gore. So who did they end up voting for? “Soda”…no, “Coke”…no, Bush.
Anomalies: Three “soda” states (New Hampshire, Alaska, and Arizona) went for Bush, and one “Coke” state (New Mexico) went for Gore. Balko can’t explain why, but he predicts the overall trend will become more pronounced by the next election.
“I say look for Bush to be ordering lots of ‘pop,’ or be seen with many a can of Coca-Cola come 2004,” he says, adding, “As for my analysis, go ahead and send my name to the Nobel committee.”
As big as they are, ostriches only have two toes on each foot. Most other birds have four.
HARD-BOILED
Here’s our tribute to some classic (and not so classic) Hollywood movies.
Burt Lancaster: “Why did you bolt your cabin door last night?”
Eva Bartok: “If you knew it was bolted you must have tried it. If you tried it, you know why it was bolted.”
—The Crimson Pirate
“My first wife was the second cook at a third-rate joint on Fourth Street.”
—Eddie Marr, The Glass Key (1942)
“When I have nothing to do at night and can’t think, I always iron my money.”
—Robert Mitchum, His Kind of Woman (1951)
Guy Pearce: “All I ever wanted was to measure up to my father.”
Russel Crowe: “Now’s your chance. He died in the line of duty, didn’t he?”
—L.A. Confidential (1997)
“I used to live in a sewer. Now I live in a swamp. I’ve come up in the world.”
—Linda Darnell, No Way Out
“He was so crooked he could eat soup with a corkscrew.”
—Annette Bening, The Grifters (1990)
“It looks like I’ll spend the rest of my life dead.”
—Humphrey Bogart, The Petrified Forest (1936)
Rhonda Fleming: “You drink-in’ that stuff so early?”
Bill Conrad: “Listen, doll girl, when you drink as much as I do, you gotta start early.”
—Cry Danger (1951)
“You’re like a leaf that the wind blows from one gutter to another.”
—Robert Mitchum, Out of the Past (1947)
“I’ve got an honest man’s conscience…in a murderer’s body.”
—DeForest Kelley, Fear in the Night (1947)
“I’d hate to take a bite out of you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic.”
—Burt Lancaster, Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
Peaches used to be known as “Persian apples.”
SNL PART III: EDDIE
When its tumultuous first era finally ended, Saturday Night Live had no big stars and no producer, but NBC wasn’t about to give up on it. (Part II is on page 199.)
SATURDAY NIGHT DEAD
In the summer of 1980, only a few months before the fall season started, associate producer Jean Doumanian was promoted—against Lorne Michaels’s departing advice—to executive producer. The remaining cast and writers, who agreed with Michaels that Doumanian wasn’t up to producing the show, also left. Could Saturday Night Live survive without any of its original talent?
Hundreds of wannabes tried to get on the revamped show. Doumanian’s plan, basically, was to “do what Lorne did” and find seven unknowns—three women and four men. She ended up with Gail Matthius, Denny Dillon, Ann Risley, Gilbert Gottfried, Joe Piscopo, and Charles Rocket, whom Doumanian envisioned as the new star. She still wanted an “ethnic”—so dozens of black and Hispanic comics were brought in to audition. One standout was a foul-mouthed, 19-year-old kid named Eddie Murphy. Doumanian had someone else in mind, but talent coordinator Neil Levy talked her into hiring him. Still, she only made him a featured player and limited his on-air time.
The ensuing season was bad, probably SNL’s worst. After the first new episode, Tom Shales echoed the public’s sentiments when he wrote, “From the 7 new performers and 13 new writers hired for the show, viewers got virtually no good news.” As the ratings began to sag for “Saturday Night Dead”—as it was being called—morale at Studio 8H hit an all-time low. No one could stand Doumanian or the show’s arrogant star, Charles Rocket, who sealed his fate by saying the F-word on live television. Both were fired in the spring of 1981.
MR. MURPHY’S NEIGHBORHOOD
Few other shows could have rebounded from such a debacle, but NBC still had faith in Saturday Night Live. Dick Ebersol replaced Doumanian. Knowing that recurring characters and biting commentary had propelled the show in
the 1970s, he set out to recapture that early magic. He fired the entire cast—save Murphy and Piscopo—and brought in new faces. Mary Gross and Tim Kazurinsky were recommended by their friend John Belushi. Young comedians Brad Hall, Julia-Louis Dreyfus (later of Seinfeld fame), and Gary Kroeger were brought in. John’s younger brother Jim Belushi, also a veteran comedy troupe performer, joined the cast reluctantly in 1983 (he hated being compared to John).
Why is a female shark’s skin twice as thick as a male’s? Males like to bite during “courtship.”
OTAY!
Ebersol’s first move: let Eddie loose. Murphy’s characters, such as Gumby, Buckwheat, and Mr. Robinson (an urban parody of Mr. Rogers), became as popular as Belushi’s samurai warrior and Radner’s Roseanne Roseannadanna from the original cast. Ebersol later admitted that “it would have been very difficult to keep the show on the air without Eddie.”
But Murphy’s growing stardom soon alienated the other performers, especially his friend Joe Piscopo, the show’s second-most-famous cast member. After starring in the hit film 48 Hours, Murphy became too big for the show, even television in general. He left after the 1983 season to make Trading Places with fellow SNL alum Dan Aykroyd. To this day, Murphy—not Dan Aykroyd or Bill Murray or Mike Myers—holds the record as the highest-earning former SNL cast member.
STAR POWER
In 1984, trying to fill the huge void left by Murphy’s absence, Ebersol did something new for SNL: he hired established names, hoping they would attract viewers. Billy Crystal’s Fernando (“You look mahvelous!”) and Martin Short’s Ed Grimley (“I must say!”) were funny, but they weren’t Murphy. And viewers wanted Eddie Murphy. In fact, the highest rated episode of the entire 1984–85 season was on December 15, when he returned to host the show. At the end of a difficult season, Ebersol had had enough. He quit.
Here we go again: no producer, low ratings. Would Saturday Night Live rebound? Of course it would! Turn to page 427 to find out how.
A $100,000 computer 20 years ago computed about as much as a $10 chip can today.
FREEDOM’S VOICE
Born a slave in 1817, Frederick Douglass secretly learned to read and write. He escaped slavery in 1838 and went on to become an acclaimed orator, newspaper publisher, abolitionist, and advisor to presidents Lincoln and Grant.
“Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.”
“There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong.”
“A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people.”
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
“The soul that is within me no man can degrade.”
“I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.”
“Men are whipped oftenest who are whipped easiest.”
“I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity.”
“You are not judged on the height you have risen but on the depth from which you have climbed.”
“Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants.”
“Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they certainly pay for all they get.”
“They who study mankind with a whip in their hands will always go wrong.”
“The simplest truths often meet the sternest resistance.”
“No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.”
The droplets in a sneeze can travel 12 feet and remain in the air for as long as three hours.
SO YOU WANT TO WIN A NOBEL PRIZE…
We told you about the history of the Nobel Prize on page 267. Now, how do you win one? Well, it turns out it’s not as simple as “make a major contribution to humanity”—THERE ARE RULES! Here are a few of them.
You can’t nominate yourself. Anyone who does is automatically disqualified. No exceptions.
• You must be alive. Nominating dead people has never been allowed, but until 1974 if you died after you were nominated—but before the winner was chosen—you could still win, even though you were dead. (Dag Hammarskjöld, for example, won the 1961 Peace Prize after he died in a plane crash.) In 1974 the rules were tightened up—people who die after they are nominated can no longer win, even if they’re the only person nominated.
• There are no runners-up. People who are alive when they are selected as the winner (usually in October or November) but die before the awards are handed out on December 10, are still considered winners, even though they’re dead. So if you come in second behind someone who drops dead before they pick up their medal, you still lose.
• You can’t win by default. What happens if you come in second behind someone who refuses to accept their Nobel Prize? Do you win…or at least get their prize money? Answer: No and no. When a person declines a Nobel Prize, they are still entered into the official list of Nobel laureates; the only difference is that they just get the annotation “declined the prize,” next to their name. The forfeited prize money goes back in the bank. Who says “no” to a Nobel Prize? Vietnamese politician Le Duc Tho declined it in 1973.
• There’s no such thing as a team effort. With the exception of the Nobel Peace Prize, which can be awarded to entire organizations, such as the International Red Cross (1917) or Doctors Without Borders (1999), no single prize can be awarded to more than three people. That’s true no matter how many people contribute to the endeavor. So if you and three of your friends find a cure for cancer next year, one of you is going to be out of luck. Of all the Nobel rules, this one is “probably the most damaging on a personal level,” says Dr. Paul Greengard, winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Medicine. “The scientific world is full of embittered team members who were left out.”
• Nobel Prize in Economics? What Nobel Prize in Economics? Alfred Nobel’s will stipulated five prizes: Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, and Peace. In 1968 the Nobel Foundation approved the addition of a prize for Economics, but it is awarded by the Central Bank of Sweden. Its official name is the “Central Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.” So even if you win it, Nobel purists will tell you that it’s not really a Nobel Prize. Only the five original categories are considered true Nobel Prizes. Adding insult to injury: If you do win the Economics Prize, they don’t engrave your name on the face of the medal like they do with other prizes—they just inscribe it on the outer rim.
• Prizes don’t necessarily have to be awarded every year. If war or some other problem makes it impossible for the prize committees to meet (as in World War I and World War II), or if the foundation just decides that nobody deserves an award that year, they don’t give them out. The Peace Prize has been withheld 19 times—more often than any other Nobel Prize.
• You don’t get a laurel. The term “Nobel Laureate” is just an expression. If you win a Nobel Prize, you get a gold medal, a diploma with your name on it, and a cash prize. If you want to wear a crown of leaves, you’ve got to make it yourself.
• Good news: If you do win, you will get more prize money now. Over the years, taxes, inflation, overly cautious investment strategies, two world wars, and the Great Depression ate into the Nobel Foundation’s assets. It wasn’t until 1991 that the prizes finally recovered their full value and were worth more than they were in 1901. Since then, their value has continued to rise; in 2000 the payout for each prize was about $1 million.
• More good news (and some bad news): If your government orders you to decline the Nobel Prize (as Hitler did to German winners after 1936), the Nobel Foundation will hold the award until you’re able to accept it—but you won’t get the cash prize
; that goes back to the Foundation.
A blue whale’s heart is as big as a compact car.
Did you hear the one about the guy who invented the door knocker? He won the “No Bell” prize.
LET’S PLAY PONG!
If you know anything about the pop culture of the 1970s, the name Atari is synonymous with video games. So what happened? Where did Atari go? Here’s the story.
THE GAMBLER
In the early 1960s, a University of Utah engineering student named Nolan Bushnell lost his tuition money in a poker game. He immediately took a job at a pinball arcade near Salt Lake City to make back the money and support himself while he was at school.
In school, Bushnell majored in engineering and, like everyone else who had access to the university’s supercomputers, was a Spacewar! addict. But he was different. To his fellow students, Spacewar! was just a game; to Bushnell, it seemed like a way to make money. If he could put a game like Spacewar! into a pinball arcade, he figured that people would line up to play it.
FALSE START
Bushnell graduated from college in 1968 and moved to California. He wanted to work for Disney but they turned him down, so he took a day job with an engineering company called Ampex. At night he worked on building his arcade video game.
He converted his daughter’s bedroom into a workshop (she had to sleep on the couch) and scrounged free parts from Ampex and from friends at other electronics companies. The monitor for his prototype was a black-and-white TV he got at Goodwill; an old paint thinner can was the coin box.
When he finished building the prototype for the game he called Computer Space, he looked around for a partner to help him manufacture and sell it. On the advice of his dentist, he made a deal with a manufacturer of arcade games, Nutting Associates. Nutting agreed to build and sell the games in exchange for a share of the profits, and in return Bushnell signed on as an engineer for the firm.
Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader Page 35