In the year following a divorce, the average woman’s standard of living falls 73%; the man’s standard of living actually rises by 43%.
Male snow skiers are more likely to fall on their faces; female skiers are more likely to fall on their backs.
In one recent study, 36% of husbands surveyed said their wife “is like a god.” Only 19% of women said the same thing about their husbands.
Women cry about five times as much as men; a male hormone may actually suppress tears.
Americans spend $1.5 billion on toothpaste (and $680 million on mouthwash) every year.
ACCIDENTALLY X-RATED
A lot of money is made on X-rated films, books, etc. But what happens when somebody’s work unintentionally winds up X-rated? That’s actually a problem that some producers have to cope with. Here are a few examples.
ACCIDENTALLY X-RATED MOVIE
In 1969, the movie rating system was still new. The X rating hadn’t become a symbol of sexually explicit material yet—it just meant “adult subject matter.” So when the Motion Picture Association of America gave Midnight Cowboy—the story of a male prostitute’s (platonic) relationship with a down-and-out New York vagabond—an X rating, director John Schlesinger wasn’t upset. In fact, he approved of the rating: He considered the film’s subject matter too controversial for young audiences and didn’t want to have to warn them away from the theatres himself; plus, he was afraid that without an “adult” rating, people might show up at theaters thinking the film was a genuine Western.
What Happened: Midnight Cowboy became the first X-rated film to play in top-flight movie houses and the only one ever to win an Oscar (for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay). A few months after the film went into general release, the MPAA’s Rating Commission decided to reserve the X-rating for “non-quality” films and officially changed Midnight Cowboy’s rating to R.
ACCIDENTALLY X-RATED CARTOONS
According to Hollywood legend, cartoonists in nearly every major movie studio have amused themselves by inserting one or two bawdy frames into “family” cartoon classics. In the theater, the frames went by much too fast for anyone to notice. But the laserdisc player enables people to view films frame by frame, and since their arrival, a number of things the public was never meant to see have been found in cartoons, new and old.
For example, in an old cartoon called The Wabbit Who Came to Dinner, Bugs steps out of the shower and wraps a towel around himself. According to Bill Givens in his book Film Flubs II, “There’s a frame or two where an added bit of anatomy that you don’t see in other Bugs cartoons seems to appear between his legs.”
Twenty-three percent of Americans who study abroad go to England; 12% go to France.
When Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was released on video/laserdisc, Variety magazine spilled the beans with a detailed examination of the film. They came up with two specific scenes to look for:
Scene #1: At the beginning of the film, Roger Rabbit is filming a cartoon with diaper-clad Baby Herman. Roger ruins the scene and Baby Herman stomps off the set, passing under a woman wearing a dress as he leaves. She screams and jumps away as he passes beneath her. According to Variety, “On screen, [the scene] looks playful. Advanced frame by frame on laserdisc, it’s far from it.”
Scene #2: Jessica Rabbit, Roger Rabbit’s voluptuous wife, is riding through Toon Town in a taxi when the cab smashes into a lightpost. According to Variety, as Jessica is thrown from the cab she “spins in Kerrigan-like triple lutz fashion, with her trademark red dress hiking up. On the first scene, she appears to be wearing underwear. On the second spin, however, there are three frames which clearly show she’s wearing nothing at all.”
ACCIDENTAL X: REVENGE AND PRACTICAL JOKES
• In December 1994, a disgruntled video production worker of the UAV Corp., which distributes cartoon videos, added a two-minute scene from a movie called Whore to about 500 copies of the video, Woody Woodpecker and Friends No. 3015. The sabotage wasn’t caught until the tapes were already in stores; the company had to recall all 20,000 copies that had been distributed.
• When Mark Twain sent his manuscript for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the printers in the fall of 1884, they discovered that an engraved illustration of Uncle Silas “had been made to appear obscene.” The engraving was so offensive (to Victorian eyes, anyway) that it had to be removed and a new one created and substituted in its place, causing the American edition to miss the 1884 Christmas season entirely. Had the mistake not been caught, the printer said at the time, “Mr. Clemens’ credit for decency and morality would have been destroyed.” The end result: Huckleberry Finn was released in the U.S. two months too late for Christmas ...and two months after the British version hit the shelves in England.
True lies: 57% of Americans say they “look younger” than they are.
DUMB TV: THE
“FLYING NUN” QUIZ
It was one of the most ridiculous sitcom plots in TV history: An American teenager gives up her life as a beach bunny and becomes Sister Bertrille at the Convent San T anco, in Puerto Rico. Then she discovers that because she weighs only 90 pounds, wearing her order’s bulky coronet (nun’s hat) on windy days enables her to fly—a skill she uses to get into and out of trouble, fight crime, and occasionally assist the owner of a nearby casino. Believe it or not, “The Flying Nun” made a star out of 19-year-old actress Sally Field. Now in best BR tradition, we’ve decided to torture you with trivia questions about the show. But don’t blame us—this quiz was devised by John Dollison, for his book, Pope Pourri.
1. What was the inspiration for the show?
(A) A real-life incident involving a small nun and a big hat.
(B) A novel about a flying nun.
(C) The TV shows “Bewitched” and “I Dream of Jeannie.”
(D) Sally Field came up with the idea herself.
2. The part of Sister Bertrille was created for Sally Field...but she turned it down at first. Why?
(A) Fearful of scandal, the show’s producers insisted that Field take a vow of chastity while she was on the show.
(B) Field had bad memories from her years in parochial school
(C) Field thought the role would restrict her too much...and besides, she wanted to be a movie star, not a TV star.
3. What made her change her mind and take the role?
(A) An intense religious experience
(B) Her movie career bit the dust.
(C) Pope Paul VI phoned Field personally and urged her to take the role before studio executives offered it to Annette Funicello.
4. How did the other nuns on the show try to keep Sister Bertrille from flying?
Americans fill in 54 acres of crossword puzzle space every day.
(A) Reverend Mother Plaseato (played by Madeline Sherwood) tied lead weights around her feet.
(B) They gave her a set of extra-heavy rosary beads.
(C) They tried to bulk her up with huge, heavy meals whenever possible.
5. How did officials in the Catholic Church respond to the show when it first went on the air?
(A) They condemned it.
(B) They refused to take a public stand.
(C) They liked it—and actually saw it as a recruiting film for nuns.
ANSWERS
No, we won’t make you turn to the back of the book to find out the truth about Sister Bertrille. If you made it this far, you deserve a break.
1. (B) TV executive Max Wylie was flipping through a Doubleday catalog of recently published books one day in the mid-1960s looking for ideas for TV sitcoms. He came across a book called The Fifteenth Pelican, a story about a ninety-pound nun who could fly. Author Tere Rios got the idea for the book while travelling in 1955. “I saw a little Sister of Charity in her big white bonnet nearly blown off her feet in Paris,” she later told reporters.
Wylie pitched the idea to Harry Ackerman, creator of the “Bewitched” TV series. Another show of his, “Gidget,” had just gone off th
e air and he was looking for a new vehicle for Sally Field, the star of the show. “Bewitched,” a show about a friendly witch with magic powers, had been a huge success; so had “I Dream of Jeanie,” a show about a female genie with magical powers who marries an astronaut. Ackerman thought a similar show about a nun would be a hit...although he worried that giving a nun magical powers would be too controversial. So he stuck with The Fifteenth Pelican’s original premise and gave the nun special powers (brought on by high winds, her coronet, and the laws of aerodynamics) instead of magic ones.
The average Japanese drinks 4.8 gal. of liquor a year; the average American drinks 1.3 gal.
2. (C) “I didn’t want to play a nun,” Field told TV Guide in 1968. “You’re not allowed to kiss or show your belly button.” But that wasn’t her only objection: her previous TV show, “Gidget,” had fallen flat on its face, and Field mistakenly thought it was her fault. As TV Guide put it, “Sally came away with the feeling that she was somehow responsible for ‘Gidget’s’ flop and no one would tell her why....She left the studio ‘feeling defeated’...and embarked on a movie career, determined that TV should never darken her door again.”
3. (B) Field tried out for the part of daughter Elaine Robinson in The Graduate...but Katherine Ross got the part. Then she tried out for the role of Neely in Valley of the Dolls...and lost it to Patty Duke. All of a sudden, another TV series didn’t look so bad. “It was presumptuous to think I could step into movies,” Field later recalled. “‘Idiot,’ I told myself, ‘you’re not Liz Taylor!’ The Flying Nun’ would give me time to learn and still keep me in the public eye. So—I changed my mind.” (Money had a little to do with it, too. Studio executives cemented the deal by raising her pay from her $450-a-week “Gidget” salary to $4,000 a week.)
4. (B) Not your normal sitcom prop, but what do you expect?
5. (C) Studio executives were extremely worried about potential Catholic objections to “The Flying Nun” and went to great lengths to see that the church was not offended. They even gave special sneak previews of the pilot episode to high church officials all over the country, hoping to enlist their support for the show. “We just wanted to be sure the Catholic community dug it,” one of the show’s promoters told TV Guide in 1968....But their concerns were unfounded: Catholic Church officials loved the show and actually saw it as a much-needed recruiting film for nuns, whose numbers had been in decline since Vatican II. “The show is positioning nuns as human beings,” one official with the National Catholic Office for Radio and Television said. “Only the studio, the agencies and the sponsors were worried. I guess they thought Catholics might stop buying toothpaste.”
Or watching TV.
34% of U.S. men say meat makes up the largest portion of their diet; only 15% of women do.
Q & A:
ASK THE EXPERTS
More random questions...and answers...from America’s trivia experts.
SEEING THE LIGHT
Q: What is a hologram? How is it different than a regular picture?
A: “A hologram is a three-dimensional image produced with the use of laser light. Contrary to what you might think, when you look at something, you are not really viewing the object itself, but are instead looking at the light coming from the object. Because photographs are only able to record part of this light, the images they produce are limited to two dimensions. Using a laser, an object’s illumination can be completely recorded, enabling it to be reproduced later in three dimensions.” (From Ask Me Something I Don’t Know, by Bill Adler, Jr. and Beth Pratt-Dewey)
DELICIOUS QUESTION
Q: Why is New York called the Big Apple?
A: “It appears more than likely that jazz musicians deserve the credit. Musicians of the 1930s, playing one night stands, coined their own terms not only for their music...but also for their travels, the people they met, the towns they stayed in. A town or city was an “apple.” At that time a man named Charles Gillett was president of the New York City Convention and Visitors Bureau. Learning of the jazz term, he bragged, There are lots of “apples” in the U.S.A., but we’re the best and the biggest. We’re The Big Apple.’” (From All Those Wonderful Names, by J. N. Hook)
ABOUT YOUR BODY
Q: How heavy are our bones?
A: Our bones are a remarkable combination of strength and lightness. “In a 160-lb. man, only about 29 pounds—less than 20 percent—represent bone weight. Steel bars of comparable size would weigh at least four or five times as much.” (From Can Elephants Swim? compiled by Robert M. Jones)
The end of the Cold War? Forty-eight U.S. spy rings were uncovered during the 1980s
BURNING QUESTION
Q: What are first-, second-, and third-degree bums?
A: “Burns are always serious because of the danger of infection while the damaged tissues are healing. In a first-degree burn, no skin is broken, but it is red and painful. In a second-degree burn, the burned area develops blisters and is very painful. One must try to avoid opening the blisters. In a third-degree burn, both the outer layer of the skin and the lower layer of flesh have been burned. This is the most serious of the three types, as the possibility of infection is greatest.” (From How Does a Fly Walk Upside Down, by Martin M. Goldwyn)
BUSY THOUGHTS
Q: Why doesn’t a busy signal stop as soon as the person you’re calling gets off the phone?
A: “There’s both a technical and a business reason that you can’t just stay on the line and wait for the busy signal to stop. The technical reason is that the sound isn’t coming from your friend over there on the other side of town, it’s coming from the central switching office of the phone company. (The tone is generated by a gadget sensibly called the tone generator.) That said, the main reason you can’t stick on the line is that the phone company doesn’t want you to. You’re tying up a line. So get off the phone.” (From Why Things Are, Volume II, by Joel Aschenbach)
COLD FLASHES
Q: Why do people get headaches when they eat ice cream too fast?
A: “No one is quite sure what causes an ice cream headache (the official name for it). One likely guess is that it happens when ice cream (or other cold stuff) causes the blood vessels on the roof of your mouth to contract (i.e., shrink) a bit. Since the blood can’t flow through these vessels as quickly as before, it backs up into the head, causing the other blood vessels to stretch. The result: pain.” (From Know It All, by Ed Zotti)
BUT DON’T DRINK IT
Q: Which contains more lemon, Lemon Pledge or Country Time Lemonade?
A: According to The Hidden Life of Groceries, Lemon Pledge does.
Q: Where are the world’s largest sculptures? A: Mt. Rushmore.
PRIMETIME PROVERBS
More TV wisdom from Primetime Proverbs: The Book of TV Quotes by Jack Mingo and John Javna.
ON DOCTORS
Sophia: “How come so many doctors are Jewish?”
Jewish Doctor: “Because their mothers are.”
—The Golden Girls
ON EATING
“When a person eats fluffy eats, little cakes, pastry, and fancy little things, then that person is also fluffy. But when you eat meats and strong, heavy food, then you are also a strong person.”
—Dr. Kurt von Stuffer (Sid Caesar), Your Show of Shows
“The way prices are going up, pretty soon indigestion is going to be a luxury.”
—Larry, Newhart
ON EXPERIENCE
“I’m an experienced woman; I’ve been around....Well, all right, I might not’ve been around, but I’ve been... nearby.”
—Mary Richards, The Mary Tyler Moore Show
ON FAMILY
“Her origins are so low, you’d have to limbo under her family tree.”
—Minister (Eugene Levy), SCTV
ON FASHION
“There’s something neat about a sweater with a hole. It makes you look like a tough guy.”
—Beaver Cleaver, Leave It to Beaver
“If wom
en dressed for men, the stores wouldn’t sell much—just an occasional sun visor.”
—Groucho Marx, You Bet Your Life
ON BEING FAT
“I love my blubber. It keeps me warm, it keeps me company, it keeps my pants up.”
—Oscar Madison, The Odd Couple
Peter Marshall (the emcee):
“Jackie Gleason recently revealed that he firmly believes in them and has actually seen them on at least two occasions. What are they?”
Charlie Weaver: “His feet.”
—Hollywood Squares
Tired fact: During the work week, only 41% of Americans get 7 or more nightly hours of sleep.
LITTLE NAYIRAH’S
TALE
Do you believe everything you read or see in the news? Here’s a story that might shake you up. From It’s a Conspiracy!, by The National Insecurity Council.
Who could forget the pretty young Kuwaiti refugee with tears running down her cheeks? While America was deciding whether to go to war against Iraq, on October 10, 1990, little “Nayirah” testified before a televised congressional hearing. Quietly sobbing at times, the teenager told how she had watched Iraqi troops storm a Kuwait City hospital, snatch 15 infants from their incubators, and leave “the babies to die on the cold floor.” Americans were appalled. People across the country joined President Bush in citing the story as a good reason why America should go to war.
THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER
• As it turns out, Nayirah’s story was a lie. Doctors at the Al-Adan Hospital in Kuwait City, where the incident allegedly took place, said it never happened.
• Congressional representatives conducting the hearing took pains to explain that Nayirah’s last name was withheld “to protect her family from reprisals in occupied Kuwait.” Also untrue. In fact, the young woman was not a refugee at all: she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, and she likely wasn’t in Kuwait at all when the atrocities supposedly happened.
Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader Page 66