IRS fact: 20 million taxpayers a year wait until April to begin filling out their tax returns.
REALLY SCARY
“The Outer Limits’” producer Joseph Stefano also wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film, Psycho.
TRUE CONFESSIONS
Instructions given to Outer Limits writers: “Each play should have one splendid, staggering, shuddering effect that induces awe, wonder, tolerable terror, or even merely conversation and argument.”
THE CONTROL VOICE
An announcer named Vic Perrin supplied the narrator’s voice (“There is nothing wrong with your television set...Do not attempt to adjust the picture...) Here’s the sort of thing viewers heard him say every week:
Here, in the bright, clustered loneliness of the billion, billion stars, loneliness can be an exciting, voluntary thing, unlike the loneliness man suffers on earth. Here, deep in the starry nowhere, a man can be as one with space and time; preoccupied, yet not indifferent; anxious, yet at peace. His name is Joseph Reardon. He is, in this present year, thirty years old. This is the first time he has made this journey alone...”
OUR FAVORITE EPISODES
“The Architects of Fear.” Robert Culp, a scientist, is selected by idealistic cronies to frighten the nations of Earth into uniting against a common enemy. The plan: He’ll be transformed into a monster, land a flying saucer at the U.N., and threateningly announce he is from the planet Theta. Instead, the saucer crashes off course, and he’s shot by a bunch of hunters.
“The Man Who Never Was Born.” Reardon, a time traveler, discovers that in the year 2148 the human population has been wiped out by an alien germ which was nurtured by a man named Cabot. So he and a disfigured humanoid from the future travel back in
“In the year 2000, Twinkies from 1973 will still be fresh.”
—Conan O’Brien
63% of shopping-mall Santas have a college degree...and 29% are fluent in sign language.
PROMOTIONS
THAT BACKFIRED
When companies want to drum up some new business to get favorable publicity, they sponsor promotions. But sometimes things don’t work out as planned. The businesses wind up with angry customers and egg on their face. Here are three promos that companies wish they could take back.
RADIO DAZE
The Promotion: On April 6, 1994, KYNG-FM radio in Fort Worth, Texas, announced that it had hidden $100 worth of $5 and $10 bills in books in the fiction section of the Fort Worth Central Library. The station said it organized the publicity stunt “to boost public interest in the library.”
What Happened: The station expected only about 30 people to show up and look for the cash, but when a rumor surfaced that there was $10,000 hidden in the books, more than 500 people descended on the library looking for the loot, sparking a near riot in the fiction section.
Backfire! “Books were sailing, and elbows were flying, and people were climbing the shelves,” the library’s spokesperson told reporters. “To a librarian, that’s sacrilege.” More than 3,500 books were knocked off the shelves in the process, and hundreds were damaged. KYNG apologized for the incident, agreed to pay for the damaged books, and reimbursed the library for the time the librarians spent putting them back on the shelves.
PEPSI HITS THE SPOT
The Promotion: In 1993, Pepsi launched their “Number Fever” contest promotion in the Philippines. It promised instant cash of up to 1 million pesos ($37,000) to contestants who held bottle caps with the correct 3-digit winning number.
What Happened: Thanks to a “computer software glitch,” the company accidentally printed and circulated 800,000 caps bearing the number 349...and on May 25, 1992, that number was selected at random as the winning number. Thousands of winners came forward to collect their prizes. Pepsi admitted its mistake, but agreed to pay only $18 to anyone holding one of the caps. They called it a “goodwill” gesture.
74% of U.S. teens believe in the supernatural...and 16% believe in the Loch Ness monster.
Backfire! Pepsi spent about $10 million paying off more than 500,000 people...but many of the winners refused to cooperate. They were really angry. The Chicago Tribune reported in August 1993:
Irate winners rioted at some of the plants. Others attacked bottling plants and delivery trucks with grenades and firebombs. At least 37 trucks have been burned in such attacks and a bottling plant stopped operation because of grenade damage. A teacher and a 5-year-old girl died when a grenade bounced off a truck and exploded near a crowd on a street.
THE REAL THING
The Promotion: In the summer of 1990, Coca-Cola launched the largest consumer promotion in its history—a $100 million ad campaign featuring 750,000 high-tech “MagiCans.” These seemingly ordinary 12-ounce cans of Coke actually contained millions of dollars in cash and prizes. “When a buyer pops the top,” the Wall Street Journal wrote, “a device rises through the opening in the can and displays legal tender—anywhere from $1 to $100—or a scroll of paper, redeemable for prizes. To give the cans the feel of the real product, Coke has partially filled them with chlorinated water.”
What Happened: In May, an 11-year-old Massachusetts boy opened a defective MagiCan and drank the water. His mother thought the can had been tampered with because it was filled with “a clear liquid...tasting and smelling like cleaning solution.” She called the police...who found the malfunctioning prize-delivery mechanism and a soggy $5 bill.
Backfire! Coke—trying to save the promotion—ran full-page ads in newspapers, warning consumers not to drink the contents of prize-filled cans. They included a toll-free number, so people could report defective cans. But the bad publicity (and potential for lawsuits) spread. By the end of May, more than 20 malfunctioning cans had been reported. Then experts pointed out that “the labeling on some Coke cans could be illegal, because the cans contain prizes instead of the real article.” On June 1, citing adverse publicity, Coke cancelled the campaign.
Most effective deterrent to house break-ins: “A noisy dog,” thieves say.
JOE McCARTHY’S JOKE
In the early 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy had Americans believing that Red Agents were infiltrating the U.S. government. The result was one of the biggest witch-hunts in American history. But according to It’s a Conspiracy! by The National Insecurity Council, McCarthy lied. Here’s the part of the story you may not have heard.
On February 9, 1950, Joe McCarthy, a rumpled, ill-shaven junior senator from Wisconsin, made a Lincoln’s Birthday speech to a Republican women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia. No one—not even McCarthy—considered it an important appearance. Yet that speech made Senator Joseph McCarthy the most feared man in America.
Waving a piece of paper before the group, McCarthy declared, “I have here in my hand a list of 205 names made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist party, who are nevertheless still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”
Republicans had been calling Democrats Communists for years. But before this, it had just been political name-calling—no one had claimed to know exactly how many Communists were supposedly in the government. This was a paranoid nation’s worst nightmare come true; McCarthy’s speech made headlines. By the time he had given a similar speech in Salt Lake City and returned to Washington, D.C., newspapers from coast to coast had repeated his charges as fact and the country was in an uproar.
The McCarthy Era—an American inquisition that ruined the lives of thousands of innocent citizens accused of being Communists, Communist dupes, or Communist sympathizers—had begun.
THE McCARTHY ERA
• Although he never substantiated his charges, McCarthy’s influence grew rapidly. As chair of the Permanent Investigations Sub-Committee of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, he presided over a witch-hunt for Communists. Americans from all walks of life were challenged to prove their loyalty in an atmosphere of panic and paranoia.
How do they count them? There are one
trillion atoms in a grain of salt.
• Fear became his most potent weapon. “Many of those who came before McCarthy, as well as many who testified before the powerful House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), were willing to point fingers at others to save their own careers and reputations,” writes Kenneth Davis in Don’t Know Much About History. “To fight back was to be tarred with McCarthy’s ‘Communist sympathizer’ brush....In this cynical atmosphere, laws of evidence and constitutional guarantees didn’t apply.”
• For four years, McCarthy was as powerful as anyone in Washington. He forced President Eisenhower to clear appointments through him; the president even instituted loyalty programs for people in government, to prove that he, too, was tough on Communism.
THE TRUTH ABOUT MCCARTHY
But did McCarthy and his cronies really believe there was a Communist conspiracy...or was it just an attempt to gain power? There are plenty of suspicious facts to consider:
• Early in 1950, McCarthy told friends he needed a gimmick to get reelected. He was in political hot water with voters because he had introduced no major legislation and had been assigned to no important committees. Newspaper correspondents in the capital had voted him “the worst in the Senate.”
• According to Frederick Woltman, a friend of the senator’s, McCarthy had made up the number of Communists on the spur of the moment during his Lincoln’s Birthday speech—and had just as promptly forgotten it. Caught off-guard by the outcry, McCarthy and his advisors wracked their brains for some lead as to what he had said in the Wheeling speech. “He had no copy...he could not find the notes....The Senator’s staff could find no one who could recall what he’d said precisely.”
• That may be why every time McCarthy counted Communists, he came up with a different number. The day after the Wheeling speech, he changed the number from 205 to 57 “card-carrying Communists.” A week later, he stated before a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee that he knew of “81 known Communists.” The number changed to 10 in open committee hearings, 116 in an executive session, 121 at the end of a four-month investigation, and 106 in a June 6 Senate speech.
It takes a shark about a week to grow a new set of teeth.
When asked, “Joe, just what did you have in your hand down there in Wheeling?” McCarthy gave his characteristic roguish grin and replied, “An old laundry list.”
• He was able to keep up the charade for so long because he would attack anybody who questioned his accuracy. For example: When the majority leader of the Senate asked if the newspaper accounts of his Wheeling speech were accurate, McCarthy replied indignantly, “I may say if the Senator is going to make a farce of this, I will not yield to him. I shall not answer any more silly questions of the Senator. This is too important, too serious a matter for that.”
J. EDGAR HOOVER IN THE BACKGROUND
• According to Curt Gentry in J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets: “On returning home from his speaking tour, McCarthy called J. Edgar Hoover and told him he was getting a lot of attention on the Communist issue. But, he admitted, he had made up the numbers as he talked...and he asked if the FBI could give him the information to back him up.” William Sullivan, who later became third in command at the FBI, protested that the Bureau didn’t have sufficient evidence to prove there was even one Communist in the State Department.
• Hoover—completely ignoring the FBI’s charter—assigned FBI agents to gather domestic intelligence on his ideological enemies, poring over hundreds of Bureau security files to help support McCarthy’s charges. According to Gentry, Hoover did even more: “He supplied speechwriters for McCarthy...and instructed him how to release a story just before press deadline, so reporters wouldn’t have time to ask for rebuttals. Even more important, he advised him to avoid the phrase ‘card-carrying Communist,’ which usually couldn’t be proven, substituting ‘Communist sympathizer’ or ‘loyalty risk,’ which required only some affiliation, however slight.”
McCARTHY’S DOWNFALL
When McCarthy began attacking Eisenhower and the army in 1954, Hoover sensed that his own job might be in danger and ordered FBI aides not to help the senator further. Poorly prepared, McCarthy tried to bluff his way through the televised army hearings, but this time he failed. Americans saw him as a bully and a liar, and the press turned on him. In Dec. 1954, McCarthy became the fourth member in history to be censured by the U.S. Senate.
There really is an insect called the love bug. It spends 56 hours—more than ½ its life—mating.
DOUBLE-CROSS IN
THE DESERT?
Was Jimmy Carter just unlucky, or was his plan to rescue the Iranian hostages sabotaged?
On November 4, 1979, mobs in revolutionary Iran stormed the U.S. Embassy in Teheran and took 53 Americans hostage. For the next six months, President Jimmy Carter tried to gain the hostages’ release by negotiating with the Iranian government. Finally, frustrated with the lack of progress and concerned about deteriorating political conditions in Iran, Carter ordered a military rescue of the hostages on the night of April 24, 1980.
THE RESCUE PLAN
• The mission, code-named Operation Eagle Claw, was spearheaded by roughly 100 members of Delta Force, a crack team chosen from all four U.S. military services.
• It was a complicated plan:
Four C-130 cargo planes with most of the Delta Force flew from a military base in Egypt to Desert One, a remote area in eastern Iran. There, they were to rendezvous with eight helicopters coming from an aircraft carrier stationed near the mouth of the Persian Gulf.
The commandos were to board the helicopters and fly to Desert Two, located fifty miles from Teheran. There they would meet with U.S. and Iranian operatives, then be transported by truck into the capital city.
At the embassy the team would storm the walled compound and free the hostages.
PROBLEMS
• From the first, things went wrong. “Two of the helicopters experienced problems en route...and at the desert landing a third experienced a severe hydraulic malfunction.” (The New York Times)
• Other sources claim that two other helicopters became “clogged with desert sand.” (Covert Action)
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote nine books in 1939. He was paid a total of $33 for them.
• Since there weren’t enough choppers to get the troops to Desert Two, the mission was aborted. But then, even more disaster struck: one of the helicopters collided with a cargo plane and exploded. The Americans fled, leaving behind wrecked aircraft and top-secret documents. There were eight American casualties.
• Carter was forced to admit failure. “The President has ordered the cancellation of an operation in Iran that was under way to prepare for a rescue of our hostages,” the White House announced. “The mission was terminated because of equipment failure....The President accepts full responsibility.”
SUSPICIOUS FACTS
• According to The New York Times, “the breakdown of three of eight helicopters in a single operation is disturbing. Aircraft industry experts said they could not account for the high percentage of breakdowns and estimated the actuarial figures at 1 in 10,000.”
• The manufacturer, Sikorsky, was also baffled: A company spokesperson said the helicopters were “routinely fitted with engine air-particle separators designed to exclude sand.” Had the filters been removed?
• Many analysts thought the mission ill-conceived. “Ninety men, no matter how well trained and armed, could not storm a fortress, which is what the embassy has become, against a determined garrison of militants.” (The New York Times)
• One of the support crew at Desert Two was a marine officer, Oliver North. He was later assigned to work with Major General Richard Secord on a second rescue mission.
WAS IT A CONSPIRACY?
Was the hostage rescue mission sabotaged?
Some people suspect it was—possibly in a plot by Reagan supporters to discredit Carter. Conspiracy theorists point out that the helicopters
could have been sabotaged by a single person removing engine filters or puncturing a hydraulic line. But as intriguing as it would be to link Oliver North to another conspiracy, so far there’s no evidence either way. In fact, it’s probably fortunate that the rescue failed where it did. Had Delta Force besieged the embassy, the hostages might well have been executed by their captors.
The “first electronic computer” was built in 1889 for the U.S. Census Bureau.
SHEER SHANDLING
A few thoughts from the man with the original “bad hair day” comedian Garry Shandling.
“The mirror over my bed reads, ‘Objects appear larger than they are.’”
“I’m dating a women who, evidently, is unaware of it.”
“I’m not kinky, but occasionally I like to put on a robe and stand in front of a tennis ball machine.”
“I once made love for an hour and fifteen minutes, but it was the night the clocks were set ahead.”
“Oysters are supposed to enhance your sexual performance, but they don’t work for me. Maybe I put them on too soon.”
“After making love I said to my girl, ‘Was it good for you, too?’ And she said, ‘I don’t think this was good for anybody.’”
“They should put expiration dates on clothes so we would know when they go out of style.”
“I’m not thrilled about flying....We don’t know how old the airplanes are and there’s really no way for us to tell, ’cause we’re laymen. But I figure if the plane smells like your grandmother’s house, get out. That’s where I draw the line.”
“I’m dating a homeless woman. It was easier to talk her into staying over.”
“I can’t believe I actually own my own house. I’m looking at a house and it’s two hundred grand. The realtor says, ‘It’s got a great view.’ For two hundred grand I better open up the curtains and see breasts against the window.”
Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader Page 62