You never know what’s going to happen to you, right? Like, you might get stuck on that seat, have to call 911 and wind up in the next edition of the Bathroom Reader...or you might find you’ve got one of these conditions. Don’t laugh—it could happen to YOU!
FOREIGN ACCENT SYNDROME
When: April 1993
Where: Worcester, Mass.
Headline: Car Wreck Leaves American Speaking Like a Frenchman
News Report: “A 46-year-old Massachusetts man walked away from a car accident with an unexpected problem: he spoke with a French accent.
“‘At first it bothered me very much because I can’t make myself well understood,’ said the man, who asked not to be identified, in a phone interview. He said he had no experience with a foreign language and had never even traveled farther than New Jersey from his home in Worcester.”
MARY HART DISEASE
When: July 11, 1992
Where: New York City
Headline: TV Co-Host’s Voice Triggers Seizures
News Report: “A neurologist reports in today’s New England Journal of Medicine that a woman got epileptic seizures by hearing the voice of ‘Entertainment Tonight’ co-host Mary Hart.
“Symptoms included an upset feeling in the pit of her stomach, a sense of pressure in her head, and mental confusion. ‘It was very dramatic,’ said her doctor, who studied the seizures. ‘She would rub her stomach, hold her head, and then she would look confused and out of it.’
“The woman has not had any major seizures of this type since she stopped watching the syndicated TV show.”
Q. Who designed Italy’s national flag? A. Napoleon.
VGE—VIDEO GAME EPILEPSY
When: April 1991
Where: America and Japan
Headline: A Case of Nintendo Epilepsy
News Report: “On screen the aliens get zapped and enemy helicopters crash and burn. But people playing video games do not expect to get hurt. Most do not, but a few wind up with a case of video game epilepsy (VGE).
“A team of Japanese neurologists recently described the problem in an issue of Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology. They looked at five boys and two girls, ages 4 to 13, who suffered from headaches, convulsions and blurred vision while playing games. The convulsive responses lasted only a few minutes and, in some cases, happened only during a particular scene in a particular game.
“Parents can prevent VGE. A letter in the New England Jounral of Medicine reports a similar incident of ‘Nintendo epilepsy’ in a 13-year-old girl. The doctor discussed the options with her and the parents: abstention from Nintendo or anti-convulsion drugs.
“The family chose the drugs, since they felt she would not be able to resist Nintendo’s lure.”
...AND NOW FOR SOME “STRANGE DEATHS”
February 30. When Augustus Caesar became emperor, February had 29 days in regular years and 30 days in leap years. Though the calendar had 365 days, leap years came every three years—which gradually threw the calendar out of sync with the movement of the sun. Augustus fixed this, ordering that leap years come every four years instead. While he was at it, he decided to add a day to August, the month named after him. So he shortened February to 28 days, and lengthened August to 31 days.
Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania. Jim Thorpe was one of the world’s most famous athletes. But he was penniless when he died in 1953. His estate couldn’t pay for the memorial his widow felt he deserved, so she asked his home state, Oklahoma, to foot the bill. When they refused, she offered to bury him in any U.S. town that would change its name to Jim Thorpe. The people of Mauch Chunk accepted the offer, and the town became Jim Thorpe, PA.
Q. What’s the only animal on Earth with only one ear? A. The praying mantis.
DOROTHY PARKER SEZ...
Wisecracks from one of America’s all-time sharpest female wits.
“Hollywood money isn’t money. It’s congealed snow, melts in your hand, and there you are.”
“You can lead a horticulture ...but you can’t make her think.”
“If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end—I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”
“Wit has truth in it. Wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.”
“The only ism Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.”
“The two most beautiful words in the English language are ‘check enclosed.’”
“That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: ‘Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgement.’”
“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly; it should be thrown with great force.”
“Most good women are hidden treasures who are safe because nobody looks for them.”
“I misremember who first was cruel enough to nurture the cocktail party into life. But perhaps it would be not too much to say, in fact it would be not enough to say, that it was not worth the trouble.”
“Excuse me, everybody, I have to go to the bathroom. I really have to telephone, but I’m too embarrassed to say so.”
“One more drink and I’d have been under the host.”
“You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks.”
“The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant and let the air out of the tires.”
“His voice was as intimate as the rustle of sheets.”
“These young writers...are worth watching. Not reading; just watching.”
The Swiss spend more money per capita on insurance than any other nation.
CANDY BITS
It occurs to us that reading this stuff is sort of like getting a sugar rush from candy, only you’re consuming empty calories of addictive information, which fill you up quick but leave you still craving more. An “info-rush.”
REESE’S PEANUT BUTTER CUPS. H. B. Reese was an employee of the Hershey Chocolate Company. In 1923 he quit and opened his own candy factory in the same town.
KRAFT CARAMELS. During the Depression, Joseph Kraft started making caramels. He didn’t particularly like candy; he just needed another dairy product for cheese salesmen to carry on their routes. The product succeeded because grocers needed a summer substitute for chocolate, which melted in the heat.
JUJUBES. Named after the jujube berry, which grows in the tropics. It isn’t clear why—the jujube isn’t an ingredient in the candy.
PEZ. Invented in 1927 by Eduard Haas, an Austrian antismoking fanatic who marketed peppermint-flavored PEZ as a cigarette substitute. The candy gets its name from the German word for peppermint, Pfefferminz. Haas brought the candy to the U.S. in 1952. It bombed, so he reintroduced it as a children’s toy, complete with cartoon heads and fruity flavors that kids liked. One of the most secretive companies in the United States, PEZ doesn’t have a company archivist or historian—and won’t even disclose who currently owns the company.
POP ROCKS. In 1956, a General Foods chemist named William Mitchell was looking for a way to make instant carbonated soda pop by trapping carbon dioxide in hard candy tablets. One afternoon he popped some nuggets he was experimenting with into his mouth...and felt them pop. No one at General Foods could think of a use for the substance, so it was shelved for almost 20 years. But in 1975 it was introduced as Pop Rocks—and became the hottest selling candy in history. Between 1975 and 1980, more than 500 million packets were sold... and then in 1980 they were suddenly withdrawn from the market. Reason: A pervasive urban myth—that “Mikey” of Life Cereal fame had washed down a handful of pop rocks with a bottle of soda and exploded—turned concerned parents against the product. Pop Rocks were re-introduced in 1987, but sales never recovered.
21,203 Japanese citizens were arrested for “the illegal sale or abuse of paint thinner” in 1993.
EAT YOUR VITAMINS!
You’ve heard about vitamins since you were a little kid—but how much do you really know about them (besides the fact that they come in little pills)? Here’s some food for thought, from BRI member Joh
n Dollison.
BACKGROUND: The cells in your body are constantly converting digested fats, proteins, and carbohydrates into energy, new tissue, and bone cells. Unfortunately, they can’t perform this task alone—they need help from certain catalyst chemicals that your body can’t produce (or can’t produce in sufficient quantities). You have to get these chemicals—called vitamins—from food.
VITAMIN HISTORY
• Long before scientists unlocked the chemical code of vitamins, it was generally understood that eating certain foods would prevent specific diseases. One example: In the 18th century people discovered that adding citrus fruits to their diet could prevent scurvy, a disease whose symptoms included internal hemorrhaging and extreme weakness. In the 19th century, it was proven that substituting unpolished rice for polished rice would prevent beriberi, whose symptoms include paralysis and anemia.
• No one understood the relationship between these foods and the diseases they prevented until 1906, when the British biochemist Frederick Hopkins proved that in addition to proteins, carbohydrates, fats, minerals, and water, foods also contained what he called “accessory factors”—substances that the body needed to convert food into chemical forms that the body could use.
• In 1911 Casimir Funk, a Polish chemist, discovered that the beriberi-preventing substance in unpolished rice was an amine, a type of nitrogen-containing compound. Funk understood that the amine was vital to proper body function, so he named it “vitamine” (for “vital amine”).
• A year later he and Hopkins proposed the Vitamin Hypothesis of Deficiency, which theorized that the absence of a particular vitamin in the diet could lead to certain diseases. By depriving animals of different types of foods in strictly controlled experiments, scientists identified a number of these substances.
48% of Americans say they’d donate the organs of deceased relatives without their permission.
• But they still didn’t understand their chemical makeup, so they couldn’t give them proper scientific names. Instead, they just called them all vitamines, and kept them separate by assigning a different letter of the alphabet to each new substance they discovered. They soon realized that many of the vitamins weren’t amines at all—but by that time, the word “vitamine” had become so popular that they couldn’t change it. So they just dropped the “e.”
VITAMIN BASICS
• Scientists divide vitamins into two different types: water-soluble (the B-complex vitamins and vitamin C), and fat-soluble (A, D, E, and K).
• Your body can’t store water-soluble vitamins very well, so if you eat more than your RDA, or Recommended Dietary Allowance, most of them pass out of your body in your urine. That’s why it’s important to eat them every day.
• Fat-soluble vitamins are more easily stored: Your liver tissue can store large amounts of vitamins A and D, and vitamin E is stored in body fat and reproductive organs.
KNOW YOUR VITAMINS
Vitamin A (retinol).
Sources: Animal fats and dairy products, green leafy vegetables, and carrots.
Why it’s needed: Because it is a component of the pigment in the retinas of your eyes, vitamin A is necessary for good vision. It also helps keep the immune system healthy, and is necessary for the proper functioning of most organs.
Vitamin B complex (B1 [thiamine], B2 [riboflavin], B3 [niacin and niacinamide], B5 [pantothenic acid], biotin, folacin, and B12 [cobalamin]).
Sources: All meats, cereals, grains, green vegetables, dairy products, and brewer’s yeast.
Why they’re needed: B vitamins are necessary for healthy skin and for the normal operation of a number of cell processes, including digestion, respiration, blood cell and bone marrow production, and metabolism. They’re also needed by the nervous system.
That’s slow: The average drop of Heinz ketchup leaves the bottle travelling at 25 miles per year.
Vitamin C (ascorbic acid).
Sources: Fresh fruit and vegetables, especially citrus fruit and tomatoes.
Why it’s needed: Vitamin C helps your body heal wounds and bone fractures, build tendons and other tissues, and absorb iron. It’s also needed for healthy teeth, gums, and blood.
Vitamin D.
Sources: Your skin produces it when exposed to sunlight; also found in eggs, butter, and fish that have fat distributed through their tissue (salmon, tuna, sardines, oysters, etc).
Why it’s needed: Your body uses Vitamin D to regulate its absorption of calcium and phosphorus, which makes it essential for proper bone and cartilage formation.
Vitamin E.
Sources: Green, leafy vegetables, wheat germ oil, margarine, rice.
Why it’s needed: Vitamin E is one of the least understood vitamins, but it is known to be necessary for proper reproduction and prevention of muscular dystrophy in laboratory rats. It may also affect neuromuscular functions.
Vitamin K.
Sources: This vitamin is not made by the body itself, but by organisms that live in your intestinal tract. Also found in yogurt, egg yolks, leafy green vegetables, and fish liver oils.
Why it’s needed: It enables your body to synthesize the proteins required for the proper clotting of blood. Also helps reduce excessive menstrual flow in women.
HEALTHY HINTS
• It’s a good idea to wash your vegetables before you eat them—but don’t soak them. You’ll lose a lot of the water-soluable vitamins (B and C) if you do.
• If you don’t eat fresh vegetables within a week of buying them, you’re better off buying frozen vegetables. Fresh vegetables lose their vitamins over time, and after about a week in your refrigerator they have fewer vitamins than frozen ones. And frozen veggies almost always have more vitamins than canned vegetables.
Male moths can smell female moths from as far as seven miles away.
MYTH AMERICA
Some of the stories we recognize today as American myths were taught as history for many years. This one, about the “father of our country,” was reverentially passed down for more than 150 years.
MYTH: Young George Washington chopped down a cherry tree. When his father found the demolished tree and asked who was responsible, George stepped forward and said, “I cannot tell a lie, father—I did.” The elder Washington was so moved by George’s honesty that he didn’t punish his son.
BACKGROUND: It’s hard to believe today, but as late as the 1950s, this tale was still being taught in school as fact. It first appeared in a biography of Washington written by Parson Mason Locke Weems, called The Life of George Washington with Curious Anecdotes: Equally Honorable to Himself and Exemplary to His Young Countrymen. Here’s the original version of the story:
“George,” cried his father, “do you know who killed this beautiful little cherry tree yonder in the garden?” This was a tough question: and George staggered under it for a moment; but quickly recovered himself: and looking at his father, with the sweet face of youth brightened with the inexpressible charm of all-conquering truth, he bravely cried out, “I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie, I did it with my hatchet.” — “Run to my arms, you dearest boy,” cried his father in transports, “run to my arms; glad am I, George, that you killed my tree: for you have paid me for it a thousand fold. Such an act of heroism in my son is more worth than a thousand trees, though blossomed with silver, and their fruits of purest gold.”
THE TRUTH: Weems made it up. The book was first published in 1800—and was a huge best-seller in its time—but the story about the cherry tree didn’t show up until the fifth edition, in 1806. Weems’s only supporting documentation was his own statement that the tale was “too true to be doubted.”
Weems didn’t claim to be much of a historian to begin with; he was just capitalizing on an obvious market. “There’s a great deal of money lying in the bones of old George,” he reportedly told his publisher.
Heavy thought: Your skin accounts for 16% of your body weight.
SIBLING RIVALRY
Brothers
who go into business together don’t always stay close. In fact, going into business with a relative might be the best way to lose a family. Here are four classic cases.
ADIDAS / Adolf & Rudolf Dassler
Background: According to Everybody’s Business, “Adolf and Rudolf Dassler were the sons of a poor laundress who grew up in the tiny Bavarian milltown of Herzogenerauch, near Nuremburg. Before World War II, they started a factory there to make house slippers, then branched to track shoes and soccer boots.”
Rivalry: “They had a violent falling out and after the war went their separate ways. Rudolf left Adidas and started a rival athletic shoe company, Puma. Before long Adidas and Puma—both headquartered in Herzogenerauch—were battling head-to-head all over the world. When Adolf died in 1978, the two brothers hadn’t spoken to each other in 29 years.”
GALLO WINE / Ernest, Julio & Joseph Gallo
Background: Ernest, Julio, and Joseph Gallo inherited the family vineyard in 1933 when their father murdered their mother and then committed suicide. Twenty-four-year-old Ernest and 23-year-old Julio used their inheritance to start the Gallo Winery. At the same time, they raised their teenage brother, Joseph, who went to work for them as a vineyard manager when he was old enough. After toiling for his brothers for 18 years, Joseph bought a nearby ranch. He grew grapes (which he sold to the Gallo Winery) and raised cattle.
Rivalry: In 1983, Joseph expanded his dairy operation to include Gallo cheese...but his brothers said he was infringing on their trademark, and in 1986 they sued him. Joseph retaliated with a countersuit, claiming that his share of his father’s inheritance entitled him to of the winery. The fight was nasty. During the trial, the winemakers accused Joseph of “running a rat-infested cheese plant”; Joseph shot back that his brothers specialized in making cheap wine for drunks. Ernest and Julio won both suits.
The average American kid aged 5-17 has three cavities—down from 11 during the 1940s.
Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader Page 39