Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  WHERE THERE’S A WILL…

  Ben Franklin is famous for the maxim “A penny saved is a penny earned.” But for Ben, that was a lot easier in death than it had been in life.

  DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO

  For all his preaching about the importance of frugality, Franklin never practiced it. As U.S. ambassador to France in the late 1700s, he was living in Paris at taxpayer expense. And that expense ran to an astonishing $12,000 per year, including a collection of more than 1,000 bottles of the finest French wines and lavish gifts of carpets, fine china, and other luxuries that he sent to friends and loved ones back home. Spending money wisely, Franklin admitted in 1782, was “a virtue I never could acquire myself.”

  …at least not while he was alive.

  INVESTING IN THE FUTURE

  In 1785 a French mathematician named Charles-Joseph Mathon de la Cour wrote The Testament of Fortunate Richard, a parody of the folksy American optimism in Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack. In the parody, Fortunate Richard sets aside a small amount of money in his will with instructions that it be put to good use only after it has collected interest for 500 years.

  When Franklin read the story, rather than being offended, he wrote back to Mathon de la Cour thanking him for the idea. Sure enough, when the 83-year-old Franklin updated his will in 1789, he left £1,000 (about $4,400) to his hometown of Boston, and another £1,000 to Philadelphia, where he’d worked as a printer and made much of his fortune. (Why British pounds? They were still the most popular currency in the United States in the 1780s.)

  In the will, Franklin gave these specific instructions as to how his money should be managed over the next 200 years:

  • For the first 100 years, each city was supposed to lend the money out to apprentice tradesmen “under the age of twenty-five years,” to assist them in setting up their own businesses. (Franklin had set up his own printing business with money borrowed from two benefactors, and he wanted to repay the favor by doing the same thing for other tradesmen.)

  Only 1% of Americans say they are “much worse” at raising kids than their parents were.

  • The loans were to be repaid over 10 years with interest and the money lent right back out again.

  • Franklin estimated that after a century of earning interest, the Boston and Philadelphia funds would grow to £131,000 ($576,400) each.

  • For the second 100 years, Franklin’s will directed each city to spend 75% of the fund (about £100,000 or $440,000) on public works, and continue to lend out the remaining 25% as before.

  ROUND TWO

  Franklin estimated that over the second 100 years, the £31,000 ($136,400) in each fund would grow to £4 million at which point he wanted each city to turn over 75% of the money to its respective state—Boston to Massachusetts, and Philadelphia to Pennsylvania—to spend without restriction. Each city could keep the remaining 25% also to spend without restriction.

  Franklin died on April 17, 1790, at the age of 85. That would mean that the money came due in the 1990s…so what happened to it?

  WILL-POWER

  Both Boston and Philadelphia accepted Franklin’s money, but things didn’t go as Franklin had hoped. The will specified that the money had to be lent to apprenticed tradesmen. But the apprentice system faded away during the Industrial Revolution, and tradesmen increasingly went to work for large industrial companies instead of setting up their own shops.

  The number of loan applicants dropped sharply, even when the program was expanded to include tradesmen who weren’t apprentices. And the loans they did make were seldom repaid. By 1831 the Boston fund was averaging only one new loan a year.

  By the end of the first 100 years, nothing had worked out according to Franklin’s plan. The Boston fund was worth only 70% of what Franklin had expected, and the funds shrank even further because politicians were dipping in it to pay for “business trips.” In 1904, 75% of the fund was used to found a trade school called the Franklin Union, now known as the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology. The rest was loaned out and reinvested.

  Top 3 things men lie about on a date: 1) willingness to commit, 2) interest in more than sex and 3) income. More bad news: The prettier the date, the more likely the man will lie.

  Philadelphia’s fund fared even worse—it was only worth $173,000, less than half the value of the Boston fund. The city spent $133,000 on a museum called the Franklin Institute and continued lending the balance out for another 100 years, just as Franklin had instructed.

  STILL, NOT BAD

  A hundred years later, in 1991, the money in the Boston fund had grown to $5 million. The Philadelphia fund wasn’t as lucky: its investments had only grown to $2.2 million. Since the term of Franklin’s will had expired, all the money was to be divided up and spent. What happened to it?

  • After a legal fight, nearly all of the Boston funds—both the state’s share and the city’s—were donated to the Franklin Institute of Technology.

  • The state of Pennsylvania distributed its share of the money to community foundations and gave $165,000 to the Franklin Institute Museum.

  • Philadelphia Mayor Wilson Goode proposed spending his city’s share of the money on a huge party celebrating Franklin’s contributions. But so many people attacked that idea as being against the spirit of Franklin’s bequest that he backed off and appointed a panel of Franklin scholars to think of something better. They set up a scholarship program for graduating Philadelphia high school graduates who want to study crafts, trades, and applied sciences.

  Ultimately, Franklin got a lot of bang for his buck, and 200 years after his death, he finally proved that a penny saved really is a penny earned.

  A TALE OF TWO PRESIDENTS

  President Jimmy Carter had solar panels installed to heat water in the White House. President Ronald Reagan had them taken out.

  DEMOCRACY IN ACTION

  A democracy is only as weird as the people who participate in it—and you know what that means: anything can happen in an election. Here’s proof.

  DO OR DYE

  “During the 2002 campaign for Chancellor of Germany, the DDP news agency quoted an image consultant suggesting that Gerhard Schroeder, aged 58, should admit that he dyed his hair to keep it looking dark. It would be better, she suggested, for his ‘credibility.’ It became a campaign issue when members of the opposition Chistian Social Union party demanded a scientific test of his hair. ‘Someone who touches up his hair,’ said CSU leader Karl Josef Laumann, ‘also touches up statistics.’”

  —BBC News

  NAME CALLING

  “In 2001, the ruling Alliance of Democratic Forces party tried to manipulate the Bulgarian parliamentary election by having all parties using the name ‘Bulgaria’ banned from the election. Since the word ‘Bulgaria’ is a national symbol, they said, it should not be used for political purposes. Among their opposition: Bulgarian Socialist Party, Civic Party of Bulgaria, Empire of Bulgaria, and Forward Bulgaria! Common sense prevailed—the idea was later modified to pertain only to parties which have the designation ‘for Bulgaria’ as part of their name.”

  —AIM

  FLIP CITY

  “In Sultan, Washington, in 2001, Rob Criswell was trying to unseat incumbent Cindy Broughton in a very close race. Even after two recounts the result was still a 501–501 tie. So how did they determine the winner? State law dictates that tied races be called ‘by lot.’ Legally, they could have rolled dice, picked cards or drawn straws to determine the winner, but they flipped a coin. Broughton called heads. She lost.”

  —Seattle Times

  In 1995 Kellogg paid $2,400 to a man whose kitchen was damaged by a flaming Pop-Tart.

  SELLING OUT

  “What’s the value of a vote these days? If it’s a Canadian Alliance party leadership vote, the answer is $42. That’s what the bidding got up to on eBay after Montrealer Charlie McKenzie, alias ‘deep toke,’ put his first-round Alliance party leadership ballot up for auction. EBay stopped the sale
, saying it is against the rules to buy or sell anything that could determine the outcome of an election.

  “McKenzie originally paid $10 to join the party, with the intention of voting for a fringe candidate. But when party finance rules forced drag queen Enza out of the race, McKenzie decided to follow ‘the Dow of democracy’ and sell his vote to the highest bidder.”

  —Montreal Gazette

  DEAD HEAT

  “Incumbent U.S. Senator from Missouri, John Ashcroft (R), was left running against a dead man after his opponent, Governor Mel Carnahan (D), died in a plane crash three weeks before election day. By that time, it was too late to remove Carnahan’s name from the ballot.

  “Ashcroft held the lead in polls until Carnahan’s death threw the race into turmoil. On election day, no one could predict how the sympathy factor would play at the polls. The late governor’s wife, Jean Carnahan, used ads to make emotional appeals for ‘the values and beliefs that Mel Carnahan wanted to take to the United States Senate.’

  “Her ads worked. Ashcroft lost; Carnahan beat him by 41,000 votes.”

  —CNN

  UNION MAID

  “In 2002, workers in a Miami nursing home voted 49–37 to unionize. But the nursing home immediately filed an appeal with the National Labor Relations Board, claiming a series of voodoo signs may have spooked the facility’s large Haitian-American workforce into voting to organize. Workers testified at a hearing that they were frightened by seeing lines of pennies, half-empty water cups, and a pro-union empolyee twisting black beads in her hand before the vote.”

  —Bradenton Herald

  Better name? Greenwich mean time is also known as “Zulu time.”

  THE PROFESSOR’S “INVENTIONS”

  It’s one of TV’s eternal mysteries: Here he was stranded on Gilligan’s Island with no tools and no power. Yet the Professor was such a genius that he could invent virtually anything… except a boat. Stupefying. Well, here’s a list of some of the things he did invent.

  • Lie detector (made from the ship’s horn, the radio’s batteries, and bamboo)

  • Bamboo telescope

  • Jet pack fuel

  • Paralyzing strychnine serum

  • “Spider juice” (to kill a giant spider)

  • Nitroglycerine

  • Shark repellent

  • Helium balloon (rubber raincoats sewn together and sealed with tree sap)

  • Coconut-shell battery recharger

  • Xylophone

  • Soap (made from plant fats, it’s not really so far-fetched)

  • Roulette wheel

  • Geiger counter (that’s far-fetched)

  • Pedal-powered bamboo sewing machine

  • Pedal-powered washing machine

  • Keptibora-berry extract (to cure Gilligan’s double vision)

  • Pedal-powered water pump

  • Pedal-powered telegraph

  • Hair tonic

  • Pedal-powered generator

  • Various poisons and antidotes

  • Pool table (for Mr. Howell)

  • Lead radiation suits and lead-based makeup (protection against a meteor’s cosmic rays)

  Seawater is about 800 times more dense than air.

  WHAT’S ALL THE BUZZ ABOUT?

  Most people are afraid of bees—hey they sting. But bees aren’t merely pests—they’re an essential part of the ecosystem. Consider this: One-third of the average human diet comes from plants that depend on insects to pollinate them, and honeybees perform 80% of that pollination.

  BUSY AS A BEE

  Honeybees are real workhorses. A typical bee visits—and pollinates—between 50 and 100 flowers in a single foraging trip from the hive…and never visits the same flower twice. On average, a honeybee flies 500 miles over the course of its lifetime at an average speed of 15 mph—the human equivalent to traveling twice around the circumference of Earth. And they carry loads up to half their body weight while doing it. There’s one simple reason for all that activity: They’re collecting food.

  MOTHER NATURE’S PLAN

  Here’s how it works: Honeybees fly from flower to flower to collect nectar. At a flower, they use their proboscis, or long sucking mouth, to drink the flower’s nectar. They store the nectar in a special “honey stomach,” which sits next to their regular stomach, then fly back to their hive. Once back in the hive, they spit the nectar into one of the honeycomb cells. Other bees then suck it up and regurgitate it—a process that gets repeated up to 50 times. The combination of water evaporation and enzymes from the bees’ saliva creates honey.

  In the process of collecting nectar, honeybees also collect pollen. They do this by rubbing up against the flower’s anther—its male apparatus. Their body hairs brush the pollen into pollen “baskets,” which sit on the bees’ hind legs; some of the pollen also gets stuck to their body hair. Back in the hive, the pollen that’s stuck on their hair gets mixed with different types of pollen by brushing against other bees; outside the hive, it gets mixed by entering different flowers. Either way, the process contributes to cross-pollination—the fertilizing of one flower with pollen from another flower…which produces fruit.

  32% of managers say being “too young-looking” can make a salesperson’s job more difficult.

  THINKING AHEAD

  It also contributes to the bees’ diet. Honeybees eat both the pollen and the nectar they collect from flowers. The pollen provides their protein, fat, vitamins, and minerals for growth and reproduction; the nectar provides sugar for energy. Adult bees convert some of the pollen into a milk that they secrete from glands in their heads to feed to their larvae.

  And what do the bees do with their honey? They store it for use as food during seasons when flowers don’t bloom—winters in temperate climates; rainy spells or droughts in tropical climates. When lots of nectar-producing flowers blossom, bees store much more honey than they could ever eat.

  SWEET HARVEST

  Honey harvested by beekeepers is collected in at least two ways: liquid honey is extracted from honeycombs by machine; comb honey is collected while it’s still in the original wax combs made by the bees (this honey is less adaptable to cooking but is preferred by connoisseurs).

  I WANNA BEE AN ENGINEER

  Bees collect not only nectar and pollen but also water. They don’t drink the water—they use it to air-condition the hive on hot days by spreading it on every surface and fanning it with their wings. When a worker bee arrives back at the hive bearing a load of food, house bees meet it and take the food from him to be stored. Generally, returning bees bearing food are relieved of their loads immediately; those carrying only water have to wait. However, researchers once deliberately turned up the heat under a hive. As the temperature slowly and steadily rose, bees bringing water were greeted at once while those bringing food were ignored. So effective is the evaporative method of air-conditioning that a bee colony on a lava field kept their hive at a constant temperature of 97°F as the surrounding air temperature soared to 140°F.

  In 2002 runner Tom Johnson ran an 80-km. race against a horse… and beat it by 10 seconds.

  YAH-HAH, EVIL SPIDER WOMAN!

  Until recently, law required all movies made in Hong Kong had to have English subtitles. But producers spent as little on translations as possible… and it shows. These gems are from the book Sex and Zen & a Bullet in the Head, by Stefan Hammond and Mike Wilkins.

  “Take my advice, or I’ll spank you without pants.”

  “Fatty, you with your thick face have hurt my instep.”

  “You always use violence. I should’ve ordered glutinous rice chicken.”

  “Who gave you the nerve to get killed here?”

  “This will be of fine service for you, you bag of the scum. I am sure you will not mind that I remove your toenails and leave them out on the dessert floor for ants to eat.”

  “A normal person wouldn’t steal pituitaries.”

  “That may disarray my intestines.”

/>   “The bullets inside are very hot. Why do I feel so cold?”

  “Beware! Your bones are going to be disconnected.”

  “I am darn unsatisfied to be killed in this way.”

  “If you don’t eat people, they’ll eat you.”

  “She’s terrific. I can’t stand her.”

  “Darn, I’ll burn you into a BBQ chicken.”

  “I’ll cut your fats out, don’t you believe it?”

  “Sex fiend, you’ll never get reincarnated!”

  “How can I make love without TV?”

  “I got knife scars more than the number of your leg’s hair!”

  “Yah-hah, evil spider woman! I have captured you by the short rabbits and can now deliver you violently to your doctor for a thorough extermination.”

  “What is a soul? It’s just a toilet paper.”

  As of 2001, 2% of Americans still don’t have 911 service.

  THE COTTON WAR

  Here’s Part III of our story on Eli Whitney. (Part II starts on page 239.)

  NOT GONNA HAPPEN

  Eli Whitney’s cotton gin played a pivotal part in creating the pre–Civil War south as an economic power. Cotton had transformed the South from an underdeveloped, underpopulated wilderness into the home of America’s largest cash crop. It enriched not only the South, which grew it, but also the North, which had its own fledgling textile industry, and whose merchants shipped it to England.