—National Post
An astronaut orbiting Earth can see as many as 16 sunrises and sunsets every 24 hours.
A ROOM WITH A FISH
Do you select a hotel for the amenities it offers? Well, forget mints on your pillow. Here are a few examples of how far some hotels will go to get you into their rooms.
HOTEL: Hotel Monaco, Chicago
AMENITY: Goldfish
ROOM SERVICE: The hotel is proud to be pet-friendly—so much so that if you didn’t bring one of yours, they’ll lend you one of theirs. (On your next visit you can even ask for a specific goldfish by name.)
HOTEL: Hotel Monasterio, Cuzco, Peru
AMENITY: Oxygen
ROOM SERVICE: Cuzco is the home of the famed Inca ruins at Machu Picchu and sits at about 10,890 feet above sea level. For the altitude-weary visitor, oxygen pumps are supplied. Every room has one.
HOTEL: The Clift Hotel, San Francisco
AMENITY: Live music
ROOM SERVICE: If you’re having trouble sleeping, this hotel has a string quartet on call. And they’ll come to your room at bedtime to play you a lullaby. (Cost: $1,000)
HOTEL: The Jailhouse Inn, Preston, Minnesota
AMENITY: Steel bars
ROOM SERVICE: The old Fillmore County Jail, built in 1869, was converted into a hotel in 1989. For $129 (starting rate) you can spend the night in an actual cell.
HOTEL: A proposed hotel in Bozeman, Montana
AMENITY: Grizzly bears
ROOM SERVICE: Plans for this hotel include rooms in underground caverns—that are also grizzly bear dens. You’ll get a TV, a kitchenette, and a one-way window to watch your roommates in their natural habitat.
Down to Earth: Caesar salad used to be known as “aviator’s salad.”
BOX OFFICE BLOOPERS
We all love bloppers…er…we mean bloopers. Here are some great ones from the silver screen.
Movie: The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
Scene: The film’s opening credits.
Blooper: This blockbuster won seven Oscars, but not for spelling. They misspelled the star’s name, Alec Guinness, as “Guiness.”
Movie: Clueless (1995)
Scene: A close-up shot of Cher’s (Alicia Silverstone) report card.
Blooper: The name on the report card is Cher Hamilton, not the character’s name, Cher Horowitz.
Movie: Vanilla Sky (2001)
Scene: Julie (Cameron Diaz) and David (Tom Cruise) are in the car. Julie goes crazy and drives it off a bridge.
Blooper: The exterior shot reveals there’s no one in the car.
Movie: Die Hard (1989)
Scene: When Sgt. Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson) crashes his squad car, his forehead is bleeding pretty badly.
Blooper: Throughout the remainder of the film, no evidence of the wound is present.
Movie: Double Indemnity (1944)
Scene: Fred MacMurray plays a bachelor.
Blooper: Then why is he wearing a wedding ring?
Movie: North by Northwest (1959)
Scene: In a restaurant, Eve (Eva Marie Saint) pulls a gun on Thornhill (Cary Grant).
Blooper: Just before the shot is fired, a boy sitting at a table in the background puts his fingers in his ears to muffle the sound of a gun he has no way of seeing…but obviously knows is there.
Model president: As a struggling actor, Ronald Reagan once posed nude as an artist’s model.
Movie: Twister (1996)
Scene: The story chronicles one of the biggest tornadoes in Oklahoma’s history.
Blooper: Most of the road signs are from Texas.
Movie: Shrek (2001)
Scene: Shrek (Mike Myers) and Fiona (Cameron Diaz) blow up some balloons and let them go.
Blooper: The balloons fly up in the air. (Okay, we know they’re fairy tale characters, but that doesn’t explain how they could exhale helium.)
Movie: Independence Day (1996)
Scene: Inside a tunnel, Jasmine (Vivica A. Fox) and her son, Dylan (Ross Bagley), escape through a service door just before they’re overtaken by a wall of fire. Then Jasmine calls the dog.
Blooper: Even allowing Hollywood its usual “artistic license,” the fact that Jasmine and Dylan make it out is barely plausible. But the dog? A shockwave is tossing cars like toys, yet somehow superdog manages to jump out of the way barely a few feet in front of it.
Movie: Kate & Leopold (2001)
Scene: Spectators on a bridge are waving American flags.
Blooper: The flags have all 50 stars… in 1876.
Movie: Pulp Fiction (1994)
Scene: Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) are in an apartment when someone bursts out of the bathroom and starts shooting at them.
Blooper: The bullet holes are in the wall before the gunman starts shooting.
Movie: Cocktail (1988)
Scene: Tom Cruise goes into the Regency Theatre in Manhattan and gets into a fight.
Blooper: It must have been a long fight—when he went into the theater, Barfly appeared on the marquee. When he exited, it was Casablanca.
A year’s worth of sap from a full-grown sugar maple tree will make only one-third gallon of syrup
MOTHER NATURE IS OUT TO GET YOU
When you hear the word “danger,” you probably think of slippery floors, shifty criminals, or busy intersections. These days, people tend to ignore the threats posed by the natural world. But after reading this article, you may decide not to come out of the bathroom—it’s a dangerous world out there.
B EWARE OF: Your backyard
EXPLANATION: Some common garden plants and shrubs can kill you if you eat them. These attractive but potentially fatally toxic plants include daphne, English ivy, fox-glove, hemlock, jonquil, mistletoe, morning glory, and yew. The list of plants that can leave you in a coma, paralyzed, or spasmodic is as long as your arm.
BEWARE OF: Golf courses and riverbanks
EXPLANATION: Each year about 100 people are killed in the United States by lightning strikes, and most of these unfortunate victims became targets while out enjoying golf or fishing. A typical lightning flash carries about 15 million volts, so you don’t want to be caught swinging a number 5 iron or a 20-foot fishing rod when a storm comes by. The National Weather Service recorded 3,511 deaths and 11,489 injuries from lightning strikes between 1959 and 1999. PGA advice to all golfers is to stop playing and seek shelter as soon as any storm approaches.
BEWARE OF: The woods
EXPLANATION: “Assassin bugs,” also known as “kissing bugs,” have been known to suck blood from the lips, eyelids, or ears of a sleeping human. There are various species that hang out in the woodlands and bushes of Africa, Central America, South America, and even North America. Most assassin bugs aren’t deadly to humans, but the Triatoma infestans makes up for it. Found mostly from Mexico to the south of Argentina, it can spread Chagas’ disease, which will kill a person in just a few weeks by weakening the nervous system, eventually causing a heart attack. Five thousand people die from Chagas disease each year.
BEWARE OF: Old baby rattles
EXPLANATION: Toy manufacturers once used castor beans as the noisemakers in baby rattles. They probably didn’t know that castor beans contain ricin, a protein that’s fatal to humans. Scientists estimate that, ounce for ounce, ricin can be 6,000 times more deadly than cyanide. A teeny bit of ricin, weighing no more than just one grain of salt, can kill an adult.
BEWARE OF: Jewelry
EXPLANATION: Another substance even more toxic than ricin is abrin. Abrin is found in jequirity beans, which are used in rosary necklaces. Just one seed can be fatal, yet this bean is often used to make necklaces in Mexico and Central America.
REST IN PEACE
In 1994 Alexandra Sergeyev and several of her co-workers chipped in to buy three tickets in a lottery to win an automobile. Mrs. Sergeyev gave one to her husband to put in a safe place; soon afterward he dropped dead from a heart attack. It wasn’t until after th
e funeral that she realized that
1) the ticket she gave her husband was the winning ticket
2) he put it in the pocket of his best suit
3) that was the suit he was buried in
Mrs. Sergeyev consented to have Ivan’s body exhumed, but when the authorities went to dig him up, they discovered the grave was empty…and that someone had already cashed in the winning ticket.
Police discovered that a ring of grave robbers had looted the grave, sold the casket back to an undertaker, and sold Sergeyev’s suit to a thrift shop. Someone apparently bought the suit, found the lottery ticket still in the pocket, and cashed it in. Mrs. Sergeyev was eventually awarded the automobile, but she never recovered her husband’s body—the thieves had sold it for animal feed.
Homebodies: 89% of Americans don’t have a valid passport.
IN MY EXPERT OPINION
Think the experts and authorities have all of the answers? Well, they do…but they often have the wrong ones.
“Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of the atom is talking moonshine.”
—Lord Rutherford, scientist and Nobel laureate, 1933
“No woman will in my time be prime minister.”
—Margaret Thatcher, 1969, 10 years before being elected prime minister
“I applaud President Nixon’s comprehensive statement, which clearly demonstrates again that the president was not involved with the Watergate matter.”
—George Bush, 1974
“No matter what happens, the U.S. Navy is not going to be caught napping.”
—Frank Knox, Secretary of the Navy, Dec. 4, 1941, 3 days before Pearl Harbor
“We’re going to make everybody forget The Beatles.”
—Bee Gee Barry Gibb, on his group’s 1976 movie, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which flopped
“No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris.”
—Orville Wright, 1908
“Novelty is always welcome, but talking pictures are just a fad.”
—Irving Thalberg, MGM movie producer, 1927
“Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.”
—Maréchal Foch, French military strategist, 1911
“I cannot conceive of anything more ridiculous, more absurd, and more affrontive to all sober judgment than the cry that we are profiting by the acquisition of New Mexico and California. I hold that they are not worth a dollar.”
—Daniel Webster, senator of Massachusetts, 1848
“It will be gone by June.”
—Variety, referring to rock ’n’ roll, 1955
“Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote.”
—President Grover Cleveland, 1900
The longest earthworm ever found was 22 feet from head to tail.
ELVIS BY THE NUMBERS
Elvis may have left the building, but his memory lives on… and on…and on. Here are tidbits from the BRI Elvis file.
Five Foods Served at Elvis’
Wedding Breakfast:
1. Suckling pig
2. Fried chicken
3. Oysters Rockefeller
4. Champagne
5. Wedding cake
Nine Songs Elvis Recorded But Never Released:
1. “Also Sprach Zarathustra”
2. “Fool, Fool, Fool”
3. “Funky Fingers”
4. “Love Will Keep Us Together”
5. “Mexican Joe”
6. “Nine-Pound Hammer”
7. “Oakie Boogie”
8. “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”
9. “You Are My Sunshine”
Seven Dogs Elvis Owned:
1. Baba (Collie)
2. Getlo (Chow)
3. Muffin (Great Pyrenees)
4. Sherlock (Basset Hound)
5. Snoopy (Great Dane)
6. Stuff (Poodle)
7. Teddy Bear of Zixi Pom-Pom (Poodle)
Thirteen Songs Elvis Sang in Concert, but for Which There Is No Known Recording:
1. “Bad Moon Rising”
2. “Blowin’ in the Wind”
3. “Chain Gang”
4. “Happy Birthday to You”
5. “House of the Rising Sun”
6. “I Can See Clearly Now”
7. “I Write the Songs”
8. “It Ain’t Me Babe”
9. “Jingle Bells”
10. “Lodi”
11. “Mr. Tambourine Man”
12. “Susie Q”
13. “That’s Amore”
The King’s Four Favorite Reading Materials:
1. The Bible
2. The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran
3. Captain Marvel comics
4. Mad magazine
Three Elvis Aliases:
1. John Burrows
2. Dr. John Carpenter
3. Tiger (his karate name in tae kwon do)
As of 2001, there were 43,429,000 single men in the U.S. and 50,133,000 single women.
FOR POSTERITY’S SAKE
Look around you. What do you see? A toothbrush, some deodorant, a digital watch, an Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader. They may look like everyday items to you, but to an archaeologist in the distant future, they’ll tell a fascinating story of what life was like at the beginning of the third millennium. They’re perfect for a time capsule.
TALES FROM THE CRYPT
The modern craze of saving things began when scientists opened the Egyptian pyramids in the 1920s. Dr. Thorn-well Jacobs, president of Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, was inspired by all of the valuable information society learned. He decided to create a similar vault of records and items to be opened by “any future inhabitants or visitors to the planet Earth.”
Jacobs called his swimming pool–sized container the “Crypt of Civilization.” It was sealed on the campus on May 28, 1940, with instructions not to open it until the year 8113. Jacobs didn’t just include a few everyday items in the crypt, but a collection he hoped would represent our entire civilization. There are over 640,000 pages of microfilmed material, hundreds of newsreels and recordings, a set of Lincoln logs, a Donald Duck doll, and thousands of other items. There is even a device designed to teach the English language to the crypt’s finders.
TIME AND AGAIN
Jacobs’s idea, published in a 1936 Scientific American article, created a new fad of “keeping time.” For the 1939 New York World’s Fair, Westinghouse Electric filled a seven-foot-long cylindrical vault with modern amenities and sealed it with instructions that it not be opened for 5,000 years. A company executive named G. Edward Pendray came up with a name for the highly publicized promotion: time capsule. The term entered the English language almost overnight. (He also invented the word laundromat.)
Westinghouse designed a second capsule for the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Here are just a few of the hundreds of included items:
Wishful thinking: The wishbone of the turkey used to also be known as the merrythought.
a bikini
a Polaroid camera
plastic wrap
an electric toothbrush
tranquilizers
a ballpoint pen
a 50-star American flag
superconducting wire
a box of detergent
a transistor radio
an electric watch
antibiotics
contact lenses
reels of microfilm
credit cards
a ruby laser rod
a ceramic magnet
filter cigarettes
a Beatles record
irradiated seeds
freeze-dried foods
a rechargeable flashlight
synthetic fibers
the Bible
a computer memory unit
birth-control pills
Also included was a bound “Book of Records.” Many scientists and world leaders put messages in the book. Albert Einstein wrote, “I trust that posteri
ty will read these statements with a feeling of proud and justified superiority.”
NOW WHERE DID I PUT THAT?
The International Time Capsule Society (ITCS) was formed in Atlanta in 1990. They believe that only a small fraction of time capsules will ever be recovered. Why? Partly because of thievery and partly because of secrecy. But mostly because of poor planning—people just plain forget where they buried it. The ITCS’s mission is to document every time capsule to give it a better chance of being opened someday. “People often think that in the future people are going to be more efficient than we are,” said ITCS co-founder Knute Berger, adding that it’s not so. “If we have incompetent bureaucracy, they will too. You have to plan for that.”
The ITCS has created a list of the 10 most-wanted time capsules. (Two have been found—here are the other eight.)
Q: How did the grand vizier of Persia keep his 117,000-volume library properly organized while traveling with it? A: He trained his camels to walk in alphabetical order
1. Bicentennial Wagon Train Time Capsule. This holds the signatures of 22 million Americans. President Gerald Ford arrived for the sealing ceremony in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, on July 4, 1976, but someone had already stolen it from an unattended van.
2. MIT Cyclotron Time Capsule. In 1939 a group of MIT engineers placed a brass time capsule beneath an 18-ton-magnet used in a brand-new, state-of-the-art cyclotron. It was supposed to be opened in 1989, but by then the cyclotron had been deactivated and the capsule all but forgotten. When the capsule’s existence was discovered, the brains at MIT had no clue how to get a time capsule out from underneath a 36,000-pound lid. They still don’t.
3. Corona, California, Time Capsules. The citizens of Corona have lost not just 1, but 17 time capsules since the 1930s. In 1986 they tried, unsuccessfully, to recover them. “We just tore up a lot of concrete around the civic center,” said a spokesperson.
Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader Page 37