Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Golden Plunger Awards

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  KNOT A PROBLEM

  To get real dreadlocks requires time and thought. As many people who love locks say, “It’s not a hairstyle, it’s a lifestyle.” Getting hair to lock on to itself so that it forms even, attractive coils takes effort.

  To get locked, you should definitely have a comb and some wax handy, and there are so many different ways of getting hair into locks—everything from back combing to perming to twisting—that you can probably find one to suit you. There’s even one way of creating dreadlocks that involves rubbing hair repeatedly in a circular motion with a wool sweater, though experts warn that this method won’t create the nicest-looking locks. Most sites and salons that specialize in dreadlocks can suggest reliable methods.

  Once your hair has been sectioned and knotted to a greater or lesser extent (depending on the hair’s length and texture), you need to take care of your “baby dreads” . . . waxing, twisting, and encouraging them along. The process can take weeks, months, or even more than a year. So it’s definitely not a style for the fad-oriented. (Those people are disparagingly referred to as “rentadreads.”) But once you’ve got the dreads, you’ll be in good company, sporting a hairstyle that’s adorned kings, queens, warriors, musicians, and even those counterculture kids up the street.

  MORE HIGH-MAINTENANCE HAIRSTYLES

  The Pompadour: Its name might be genteelly French—the high-tressed Madame de Pompadour was Louis XVI’s favorite mistress. But this hairstyle’s roots are in rockabilly. In the 1950s, edgy musicians started using hair cream to sculpt a ’do with slicked-back sides and a curled-over top; the more comb tracks, the better. It may not have made Elvis a King, but it definitely was his crowning touch.

  The Beehive: Sculpted to resemble the nosecone of a B-52 Stratofortress bomber plane (hence its nickname “B-52,” and the hairstyles of the 1980s band with that name), the beehive was born in the late ’50s and had its heyday the following decade, but “big hair” has survived in the South, along with big cans of hairspray. Margaret Vinci Heldt, an Elmhurst, Illinois, native and the creator of the beehive, once told CNN that she hoped the most famous contemporary beehive queen, Marge Simpson, had been named after her. (She wasn’t.)

  THE TEENAGER OF THE YEAR AWARD

  King Tut

  At the age of nine, he was a pharaoh. By 18 he was dead.

  Then he was forgotten for more than 30 centuries.

  THE BOY KING

  Tutankhaten was born in about 1341 B.C. His parents were Akhenaten (the pharaoh of Egypt) and Kiya, one of his wives. When Akhenaten died in 1332 B.C., Tutankhaten—at nine years old—became the king of Egypt. On being crowned, Tutankhaten married Ankhesenamun—his half-sister and the daughter of Akhenaten and his main wife, Nefertiti.

  King Tut didn’t make many (if any) important decisions, but his reign is notable for a measure enacted by his advisors. Official state business was conducted by Horemheb, the commander of the Egyptian military, and by Ay, his top advisor (who was also Ankhesenamun’s grandfather).

  Tut’s father, Akhenaten, had tried to replace the ancient Egyptian religious system of gods (including Ra, the sun god) with a single, previously minor god (Aten, a light-giving force that was an aspect of Ra). In fact, Akhenaten named his son Tutankhaten because it meant “the living image of Aten.” Two years into Tut’s reign, Horemheb and Ay restored the traditional religion, built new temples to worship Ra, and changed the young pharaoh’s name from Tutankhaten to the more widely known Tutankhamen, which means “living image of Amun.” (Amun was the god of air.)

  A CONDO MADE OF STONE

  In 1323 B.C., when he was just 18 years old, King Tutankhamen died. He left no heirs, so Ay, his top advisor and de facto ruler of Egypt, became the official ruler of Egypt . . . after he married Tut’s wife and his own granddaughter, Ankhesenamun.

  Because his reign was short and uneventful, Tut’s mummified body (inside an ornate sarcophagus) was relegated to a small, out-of-the-way tomb in the Valley of the Kings, home to all the pharaohs’ tombs. Over the years, stone chips that had crumbled off other tombs buried Tut’s. When the tombs in the Valley of the Kings were looted during the 11th century B.C., Tut’s was spared because nobody knew it was there.

  UNEARTHED

  So how did Tut become the most famous ancient Egyptian in the western world? The 1922 discovery of his nearly entirely intact tomb by British researcher Howard Carter was a major world event. Carter and his team took home lots of treasures for the British Museum, including Tut’s sarcophagus, a silver trumpet, lots of jewelry, three golden coffins, and a throne. Carter removed Tut’s burial mask—still the iconic image of the pharaoh and ancient Egypt as a whole—by peeling it off with scalding hot knives.

  The team also unwrapped the mummified corpse to remove the jewelry from his body. Tut had a large indentation in his head, apparently the result of a head trauma, which fueled speculation that he’d been murdered, most likely by the power-hungry Ay.

  REVELATION

  Some key details about Tut’s life and death came to light in 2005. A team of Egyptian scientists led by Dr. Zahi Hawass and radiologist Ashraf Selim performed a series of CT scans on King Tut’s mummified corpse. They were able to decipher what the boy king looked like: he was 5’11”, had an overbite, an elongated skull, and a slightly cleft palate. The team also discovered that the head trauma wasn’t caused by an injury—it was the result of a hole being drilled into his skull after death, likely by an embalmer who’d removed Tut’s brain.

  Selim and Hawass also pieced together how King Tut died. The scan revealed a series of fractures to his left thigh bone, likely caused during a fall, probably from a horse. Tut got an infection from the open wound and died of blood poisoning. Gangrene killed the pharaoh in just a few days. There was no evidence of foul play.

  Today’s King Tut’s body rests in its tomb in a museum in the Valley of the Kings. The corpse is unwrapped and sits in a climate-controlled glass case. Also on display: a computerized re-creation of what Tut’s face actually looked like, based on the 2005 CT scans.

  WHEN THEY WERE KIDS

  Tutankhamen was pharaoh of Egypt from the ages of 9 to 18. But he was just born into it. Here are some other young people who also did some remarkable things between those ages.

  9: Shirley Temple was already a millionaire.

  9: Future Admiral David Farragut (who coined the phrase “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead”) joined the U.S. Navy as a midshipman.

  10: Stevie Wonder signed with Motown Records.

  11: Keyboardist Herbie Hancock performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

  13: Mario Andretti started racing cars.

  14: Nadia Comaneci achieved a perfect 10 in gymnastics at the 1976 Summer Olympics.

  15: Isacc Asimov entered Columbia University.

  16: Albert Einstein began researching what became the theory of relativity.

  17: Pele scored the game-winning goal for Brazil in the World Cup title match.

  18: Samantha Larson completed her quest to climb the tallest mountains on all seven continents.

  THE TROJAN HORSE AWARD

  Häagen-Dazs

  Rich, creamy, and Scandinavian . . . right? Not! We’re

  giving this ice cream manufacturer a Trojan Horse

  Award for sneaky advertising.

  A BRONX CHEER FOR ICE CREAM

  The Bronx is home to Yankee Stadium and a world-famous zoo, but it’s not legendary for being the birthplace of a popular ice cream. It should be. Reuben Mattus, a Polish immigrant peddled his family’s homemade ice cream to Bronx restaurants and stores for more than 30 years before he came up with his fortune-making idea for the super-premium ice cream he christened with a nonsensical name.

  He introduced Häagen-Dazs in 1961, and at first, it came in only three flavors: vanilla, chocolate, and coffee. His ice cream was made with real (versus artificial) flavors and premium ingredients like real cream and expensive Belgian chocolate. He also added more butterfat and
incorporated less air to create a richer, denser ice cream. Reuben and his wife, Rose, invented the name while sitting on their couch at home; they thought a foreign named would give the ice cream an air of sophistication and elegance.

  Although it sounds spurious, Rose Mattus noted that the Danish-sounding name “Häagen-Dazs” was inspired by Duncan Hines—if you switch the “D” and the “H,” you come close to the ice cream’s name. In her 2004 memoir, The Emperor of Ice Cream, Rose also revealed that she and her husband chose Denmark for their ice cream’s “home country” because they respected how well the Danes had treated Jews during World War II.

  GIVE ME A SCOOP OF UMLAUT

  Convinced they had a winner, Reuben and Rose packaged their ice cream in cartons and marketed it around New York City. They even added a map of Denmark on the cartons to give the brand more foreign cachet. But anyone who speaks a Scandinavian language knows that Häagen-Dazs isn’t native to that geographic region. The words aren’t native to any region, really. They’re a dubious trick used to sell the ice cream. Only the savvy (or those who spoke Danish) noticed the deceit right away—the Danish language doesn’t use umlauts, those two dots above the letter “a.”

  From its small origins, the ice cream grew into a phenomenon. With no money for advertising, Rose personally visited bodegas and delis around New York to get owners to carry it. It took a few years, but Häagen-Dazs became a hit, first in New York City, and then beyond. By the early 1970s, people all over America were enjoying it, and rumors about the ice cream’s origin had already developed: some people believed that Frank Sinatra had discovered the ice cream overseas and introduced it to the United States. Häagen-Dazs was sold to Pillsbury in 1983 for $70 million; that company in turn sold it to General Mills.

  KEEPING COUNT

  All three original Häagen-Dazs flavors have the same calorie count: 270 calories per half cup. Decadent flavors like Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, Sticky Toffee Pudding, and Triple Chocolate up the ante calorie-wise, but not as much as Chocolate Peanut Butter—that’s the highest, with 360 calories in each half cup.

  After selling the company, Reuben and Rose Mattus stayed on as consultants to Pillsbury. Häagen-Dazs was the first to market premium ice cream bars in 1986. And Reuben and Rose continued to be pacesetters in the industry. In 1992, they introduced a low-fat brand that contains only 3 percent fat. (Häagen-Dazs has about six times more than that.) They named their new venture the Mattus Ice Cream Company.

  Reuben died shortly after that, at the age of 81 in 1994. Rose lived to 90 and passed away in late 2006. Their legacy lives on in a technology center they funded in Herzliya, Israel, just north of Tel Aviv. The Mattuses may have invented a fake Danish brand, but they definitely found their true flavor in the lives they lived.

  THE LOST TREASURE AWARD

  Murals by Hans Holbein and Diego Rivera

  We introduced you to the first lost treasure on page 116. Here are two

  more masterpieces that met their demise due to human involvement.

  LONDON’S BURNING

  Back in the mid-16th century, England’s Henry VIII—infamous for his wives, for his break with the Roman Catholic Church, and for establishing himself as the head of the new Church of England—desperately needed what a modern PR guy would call “rebranding.” He needed a new (and better) image to maintain his supremacy over England. His brandmaster? The great Flemish painter Hans Holbein the Younger.

  Holbein created “The Whitehall Mural”—a painting of Henry, his wife Jane Seymour, and his parents King Henry VII and Queen Elizabeth of York. In the mural, Henry stood in the foreground, dwarfing his father and looking directly at the viewer. Karel van Mander, writing in the early 17th century, described the painting: “[Henry] stood there, majestic in his splendour, [he] was so lifelike that the spectator felt abashed, annihilated in his presence.”

  The center panel of the mural contained a Latin verse that debated whether Henry was greater than his father and includes the following lines:

  But the son, born to greater things, drove out of his councils

  His worthless ministers and ever supported the just.

  And in truth, the overweening power of the Pope bowed to his resolve . . .

  The painting hung in England’s Whitehall Palace until 1698, when a maid left some laundry drying in front of a fire and the clothes ignited. The resulting blaze destroyed the palace—and the mural. However, only the original was lost. In 1667, a Flemish artist named Remigius van Leemput had made a copy of the Whitehall Mural, and that one is still around today.

  A ROCKY RELATIONSHIP

  By 1930, Mexican artist (and communist) Diego Rivera had achieved international recognition for his murals, and when the Rockefellers asked him to paint a mural for their new Rockefeller Center in New York City, he readily agreed. Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse had been offered the commission first, but were unavailable.

  The mural was to appear on the interior wall facing the plaza entrance of the RCA Building. Rivera proposed a 63-foot mural called “Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future,” and he worked feverishly on panels featuring two opposing views of society—capitalism on one side, and socialism on the other.

  But in May 1933, Nelson Rockefeller (grandson of John D.) was taken aback by an unexpected addition to the mural: a May Day parade of red-banner-waving socialists led by an unmistakable likeness of Vladimir Lenin. “The piece is beautifully painted,” Rockefeller wrote to the artist, “But it seems to me that [Lenin’s] portrait appearing in this mural might very seriously offend a great many people . . . As much as I dislike to do so, I am afraid we must ask you to substitute the face of some unknown man where Lenin’s face now appears.”

  Although the figure of Lenin had not appeared in his original sketches, Rivera refused to budge: “Therefore, I wrote, never expecting that a presumably cultured man like Rockefeller would act upon my words so literally and so savagely, ‘rather than mutilate the conception, I should prefer the physical destruction of the conception in its entirety, but preserving, at least, its integrity.’”

  The Rockefeller Center management team, which never had felt comfortable about Rivera’s involvement, reacted swiftly to his dare. He was ordered to stop work and paid his fee in full. Soon, demonstrations and letters of protest poured in, blaming the Rockefellers for an act of “cultural vandalism,” as Diego Rivera put it. Then, one night in February 1934, two of Rivera’s assistants noticed a dozen 50-gallon oil drums near the entrance to the RCA building. When they looked inside, they recognized the smashed-up shards of Rivera’s mural. The piece had been hammered off the walls on orders from the center’s management team. Rivera, who had returned home, retaliated by painting a replica of the mural at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City—and in it, he included both Lenin and Leon Trotsky.

  The incident marked the end of Rivera’s career as an international muralist. But over the next 25 years, he created a body of work that established him as one of the most important artists of the 20th century. Artistic integrity: Rivera—1. Rockefellers—0.

  TO KISS OR NOT TO KISS

  In the early 1990s, even though he was enjoying stardom on the sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Will Smith was ready to move into motion pictures. For his movie debut he chose the small flick, Six Degrees of Separation. An adaptation of a hit play, the film was based on the true story of a con man who earned the trust of several wealthy New Yorkers in the 1980s by claiming he was the son of actor Sidney Poitier. A talented group of actors, including Stockard Channing, Donald Sutherland, and Ian McKellan, starred in the movie. Smith played Paul, a young gay man who deceived his targets by displaying a vast knowledge about art, film, books, and culture.

  Smith had a problem with one of the scenes in the script: he didn’t want to kiss Anthony Michael Hall onscreen. His reluctance came from a conversation with Denzel Washington, who told him, “Don’t be kissing no man.” Smith t
ook the advice.

  Even without the kiss, the film was a critical success—Channing received an Oscar nomination. Smith has done all right since then, too, but he recently said that he regretted not doing the kiss. In 2004, he told Biography magazine, “My eyes weren’t open enough to see that this is a piece of work. This is not me, this is Paul Poitier. I think that I’m more mature now. I wish I had another shot at it.”

  THE ICE MAN COMETH AWARD

  Lewis Gordon Pugh

  He only began long-distance swimming at the age of 17, but Lewis

  Gordon Pugh didn’t waste any time breaking old records and setting

  new ones by plunging into some of the world’s chilliest waters.

  A REFRESHING DIP

  Pugh was born in England in 1969, but he grew up in South Africa, the scene of some of his earliest long-distance swimming feats. In May 1987, he was the first person to swim from Robben Island, South Africa, to Cape Town, a distance of 7.46 miles. In 1991, he broke the record for the fastest swimming time around Robben Island—the 6.21-mile swim took him only 3 hours and 42 minutes. Still, he was just warming up. Pugh returned to England to complete a maritime law degree and, while there, found time to swim the English Channel.

  Some of Pugh’s other swimming accomplishments include:

  • First person to swim the entire length of the River Thames in England (201 miles) in 21 days.

  • First person to swim across Africa’s Lake Malawi. According to Pugh, there were hippos and crocodiles on the lake’s edge, so he swam especially fast at the beginning and the end.