Taxiing an airplane is simple enough, even for people (like Mignet) with no flying experience. But rather than stop at the end of the runway as he’d been told, Mignet gunned the engine and tried to fly the plane. He managed to get airborne but not for long: moments later both he and the plane were on their backs in a nearby cornfield.
JUST PLANE NUTS
Mignet was sent back to his unit and punished for wrecking the plane. Maybe he never lived down the humiliation, or maybe he bumped his head harder than people thought. Whatever the case, he spent the rest of his life trying to prove that the accepted scientific principles of aviation were a sham, and that people who built planes were liars and con men. He set out to prove that ordinary people could build airplanes themselves, without any help from the so-called experts.
In 1928 he wrote an article titled “Is Amateur Aviation Possible?” for a French aviation magazine. The timing couldn’t have been better. Charles Lindbergh’s famous flight from New York to Paris in May 1927 had generated huge worldwide interest in aviation, and Mignet’s article told people exactly what they wanted to hear: that they could build their own airplane for next to nothing and learn to fly it themselves. “It is not necessary to have any technical knowledge to build an aeroplane,” Mignet wrote. “If you can nail together a packing crate, you can construct an aeroplane.”
The article generated so much attention that Mignet followed up with a second article, including diagrams that people could use to build an airplane he called the HM 8.
In 1959 sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke bet that man would land on the moon by June 1969. He won. (Or did he? See page 278.)
Like the first seven planes he’d designed (and given his initials), number 8 could not actually fly. But Mignet’s readers didn’t know that—and he wouldn’t admit it—and anyway he kept designing new planes, even after serious aviators banned him from local airfields.
By 1935 Mignet had progressed all the way to HM 14, which actually could fly a little. He named the aircraft Pou du Ciel (Sky Louse) and published his plans in a book called Le Sport de l’Air. The English edition was titled The Flying Flea. (Why name his creations after lice and fleas? Because, Mignet proudly explained, like his designs, these insects “made people scratch their heads.”)
ON A WING AND A PRAYER
Built from wood scraps, held together by nails and glue, powered by an old motorcycle engine, and resembling “a coffin with an outboard motor in front,” Mignet’s Sky Louse lacked many features of conventional airplanes—ailerons, rudder pedals, engine cowls—that were necessary for safe flight but that he found offensive. “I cut them out!” he exclaimed. “No more sheet metal which flies off or rattles!” Mignet did like wings, so he gave his plane an extra set behind the cockpit.
People in Europe and the United States bought copies of Mignet’s book by the thousands, and many of these enthusiasts built their own Sky Lice in their garages and barns. Thankfully, Mignet’s designs were so awful (and his admirers so inept) that not many of these planes ever left the ground. Those few pilots unlucky enough to take to the air soon learned that Mignet’s design had a fatal flaw—if they sent a Sky Louse into a steep enough dive, it either locked into the straight-down position or flipped upside down and locked into that position until the pilot ran out of gas or crashed.
Mounting casualties ended the Sky Louse craze by the late 1930s, but they didn’t kill the movement entirely. In fact, Mignet’s admirers are still at it: amateur aeronautic engineers in Europe, America, Australia, and New Zealand are still building—and flying—Flying Fleas today.
THE WHO?
Ever wonder how bands get their names? So do we. After some digging around, we found the stories behind these famous names.
GENESIS. Named by producer Jonathan King, who signed the band in 1967. He chose the name because they were the first “serious” band he’d produced and he considered signing them to mark the official beginning of his production career.
HOLE. Named after a line in the Euripides play Medea: “There’s a hole burning deep inside me.” Singer Courtney Love chose it because she says, “I knew it would confuse people.”
THE BLACK CROWES. Originally a punk band called Mr. Crowe’s Garden (after singer Chris Robinson’s favorite kid’s book). They later shortened the name and switched to southern rock.
AC/DC. Chosen because it fit the band’s “high-voltage” sound.
CREAM. Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker chose the name because they considered themselves the cream of the crop of British blues musicians.
THE CLASH. A political statement to demonstrate the band’s antiestablishment attitude? No. According to bassist Paul Simonon: “I was looking through the Evening Standard with the idea of names on my mind, and noticed the word clash a few times. I thought The Clash would be good.”
GUNS N’ ROSES. The band chose Guns N’ Roses by combining the names of two bands that members had previously played in: L.A. Guns and Hollywood Rose.
ELTON JOHN. Born Reginald Kenneth Dwight, he joined the backing band for blues singer Long John Baldry. Dwight later changed his name by combining the first names of John Baldry and saxophonist Elton Dean.
THE O’JAYS. Originally the Triumphs, they changed their name to the O’Jays in 1963 to honor Eddie O’Jay, a Cleveland disc jockey who was the group’s mentor.
“I’ve got all the money I need…if I die by 4 o’clock this afternoon.” —Henny Youngman
JANE’S ADDICTION. According to band legend, Jane was a hooker and heroin addict whom the band members met (and lived with) in Hollywood in the mid-1980s.
THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS. Named after an obscure 1971 B-movie starring George C. Scott and Joanne Woodward.
DAVID BOWIE. David Robert Jones changed his last name to Bowie to avoid being mistaken for Davy Jones of the Monkees. He chose Bowie after the hunting knife he’d seen in American films.
BAD COMPANY. Named after the 1972 Western starring Jeff Bridges.
THE POGUES. Began as Pogue Mahone, which is Gaelic for “kiss my arse.”
ELVIS COSTELLO. Born Declan MacManus, he changed his name at the urging of manager Jake Riviera. According to Costello: “It was a marketing scheme. Jake said, ‘We’ll call you Elvis.’ I thought he was completely out of his mind.” Costello is a family name on his mother’s side.
THE B52S. Not named after the Air Force jet. B52 is a southern term for tall bouffant hairdos, which the women of the band wore early in the band’s career.
THE POLICE. Named by drummer Stewart Copeland as an ironic reference to his father, Miles, who had served as chief of the CIA’s Political Action Staff in the 1950s.
MÖTLEY CRÜE. Comes from Motley Croo, a band that guitarist Mick Mars worked for as a roadie in the early 1970s. According to bassist Nikki Sixx, they changed the spelling and added the umlauts because they “wanted to do something to be weird. It’s German and strong, and that Nazi Germany mentality—‘the future belongs to us’—intrigued me.”
RADIOHEAD. Originally called On A Friday (because they could practice only on Fridays), EMI signed them in 1992. But EMI execs feared that On A Friday might be confusing to some. So the band quickly chose a new name. Their inspiration: an obscure Talking Heads song called “Radio Head.”
Order something else: Moray eel meat is poisonous.
THE LAST LAUGH: EPITAPHS
Some unusual epitaphs and tombstone rhymes from the United States and Europe, sent in by our crew of wandering BRI tombstone-ologists.
In Arizona:
Ezikel Height
Here lies young
Ezikel Height
Died from jumping
Jim Smith’s claim;
Didn’t happen at the mining site,
The claim he jumped, was Jim Smith’s dame.
Anonymous
Here lies a wife
Of two husbands bereft
Robert on the right,
Richard on the left.
In Kansas:
Ran for Sheriff, 1872
Ran from Sheriff, 1876.
Buried, 1876.
In England:
Will Smith
Here lies Will Smith
And, something rarish,
He was born, bred, and hanged,
All in the same parish.
In Mississippi:
Anonymous
Once I Wasn’t.
Then I Was.
Now I ain’t Again.
Jane Smith
Here lies Jane Smith, wife of Thomas Smith, Marble cutter.
Monuments of the same style, $350.
H. J. Daniel’s
Epitaph for His Wife
To follow you I’m not content.
How do I know which way you went?
In Vermont:
John Barnes
Sacred to the memory of my husband John Barnes
Who died January 3, 1803.
His comely young widow,
Aged 23, has many qualifications of a good wife,
And yearns to be comforted.
In France:
Anonymous
I am anxiously expecting you — AD 1827
Here I am. — AD 1867
Wood
Here lies one Wood
Enclosed in Wood
One Wood within another.
One of these Woods,
Is very good
We cannot praise the other.
In England:
William Wiseman
Here lies the body of W. W.
He comes no more
To trouble you, trouble you
Where he’s gone or how he fares,
Nobody knows & nobody cares.
In Pawtucket, R.I. (on a boulder):
William P. Rothwell, M.D.
This is on me.
Comic book quiz: Q. Who was Clark Kent’s high school sweetheart? A. Lana Lang.
AT THE AUCTION
What do you think the very first G.I. Joe is worth? How about Orson Welles’s Oscar for writing Citizen Kane? Elvis’s tooth? (How much are the answers worth to you?)
AMERICA’S FIGHTING MAN
What would you pay for the very first action figure ever made? When G.I. Joe’s creator, Don Levine, put it up for auction, he was certain it would fetch a lot—perhaps even break records.
The former Hasbro executive and Korean War veteran designed the toy in 1963 as a boy’s answer to Mattel’s Barbie Doll. And to make sure boys wouldn’t be too embarrassed to play with a doll, Levine coined the term “action figure.”
Forty years later, he decided to put his one-of-a-kind prototype, made of hand-painted ceramic plastic and wearing hand-sewn clothes and boots, up for sale at Heritage Comic’s auction at the 2003 Comic-Con convention in San Diego. He expected to get about $600,000—which would have been more than any toy ever auctioned.
How much did he get? Nothing. The few bids the toy received didn’t even meet the reserve price of $250,000. A disappointed Levine put it back in his display cabinet.
But wait! A month later, a comic book distributor named Stephen Geppi contacted Levine and offered him a whopping $200,000 for Joe #1. “I remember playing with G.I. Joe when I was a kid, and who’d have thought some 40 years later I would be buying the actual prototype,” Geppi said. “What a coup.”
AND THE LOSER IS…
In 1998 the American Film Institute rated Citizen Kane as the greatest American film ever made. Yet when the film was released in 1941, it won only one Academy Award—writer/director Orson Welles and co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz received an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
Knowing that it would be highly prized in any Hollywood memorabilia collection, Welles’s daughter Beatrice decided to put the Kane Oscar on Christie’s auction block in June 2003. Ronald Colman’s Best Actor Oscar for A Double Life netted a whopping $174,500 when Christie’s sold it in 2002, and the auction house estimated that the Kane Oscar might bring as much as $400,000.
Amharic, the language of Ethiopia, has an alphabet of 267 letters.
But everything came to a screeching halt when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences stopped the auction, citing an obscure 1951 Academy bylaw. They claimed that Beatrice Welles had no right to sell the Oscar because the bylaw stipulates that if an Oscar winner (or the winner’s heirs) ever offer the statuette for sale, it has to be offered to the Academy first…for $1.
The Plot Thickens
How was it possible that Ronald Colman’s family could sell their Oscar but Orson Welles’ daughter couldn’t sell hers, even though both prizes were awarded before 1951?
When Orson Welles died in 1985, the Kane Oscar was not among his effects. Believing it lost, his daughter asked the Academy for a replacement. They gave her one but made her sign a waiver promising to return it if she ever decided she didn’t want it.
Then in 1994, the original Oscar surfaced at Sotheby’s. It turned out that Welles had given the Oscar to cinematographer Gary Graver as a gift during the shooting of his unfinished film, The Other Side of the Wind, in 1974. Twenty years later, Graver, who had not signed a waiver (neither had Ronald Colman), sold the Oscar for $50,000 to Bay Holdings, who then auctioned it at Sotheby’s. When Beatrice Welles learned of the other statuette’s existence, she sued Graver and Bay Holdings and won.
Graver was not pleased. “He gave it to me and told me to keep it,” he said in a newspaper interview. “She never saw it before in her life. Orson had given it to me and she went to court and said, ‘I want it.’”
But Beatrice Welles got a taste of her own medicine when the Academy forced her to withdraw the Kane Oscar from the auction block. She is now stuck with two Oscars, her father’s original and the duplicate, together worth exactly…$2.
STAYIN’ ALIVE
In 1977, 23-year-old John Travolta strutted into disco history in the film Saturday Night Fever. Besides being a blockbuster hit—the film made $145 million at the box office—it also enjoyed critical success. Gene Siskel, the Chicago film critic known for his “thumbs up” TV show with Roger Ebert, declared it his favorite film. In fact, he loved the film so much that when the famous white polyester suit Travolta wore came up for sale at a charity auction in the 1980s, he leapt at the chance to own it. His final bid of $2,000 beat out Jane Fonda. The suit was his.
To ornithologists, the word lore refers to the space between a bird’s eye and its bill.
Though some chuckled at Siskel’s purchase, Siskel got the last laugh. In 1995 Christie’s sold the suit at auction for $145,500— the highest amount ever paid for an article of clothing at that time. Ironically, the record was broken in 1997 by the $225,000 paid for Princess Di’s blue velvet evening dress—the one she wore the night she danced with John Travolta at the White House.
* * *
OTHER CELEBRITY ITEMS UP FOR AUCTION
Elvis’s tooth. In July 2003, Flo and Jesse Briggs, owners of a hair salon in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, put the King’s tooth up for auction. The tooth purportedly once belonged to an old girlfriend, Linda Thompson (the Briggses got it from Startifacts, a company that sells celebrity memorabilia). Minimum bid for the tooth: $100,000. Number of legitimate bidders: 0. The tooth was pulled from auction.
JFK’s boxer shorts. Former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s personal secretary and her personal attendant auctioned off 300 “intimate” items belonging the Kennedys, including a yellowed pair of President Kennedy’s World War II Navy-issue cotton underwear. (No, not that kind of yellow.) They sold for $5,000. Also in the auction was a pair of JFK’s pajama bottoms, which went for $2,000.
Carly Simon’s secret. As part of a charity fundraiser, Simon offered to reveal who the song “You’re So Vain” was written about. The catch: She agreed to tell only the highest bidder…and he’s not allowed to tell anyone else. NBC exec Dick Ebersol paid $50,000 for the privilege (he also gets a live rendition of the song, a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich, and a vodka on
the rocks). Now he knows…and he’s not telling.
El norte: Norway consumes more Mexican food than any other European nation.
WEDDING TRIVIA
From the Bathroom Reader archives, here are a few tidbits about the best day in Mrs. Uncle John’s life.
Bridal shower. If a desperate bride’s stingy father refused to give his daughter a dowry, friendly townspeople would “shower” her with gifts, allowing her to marry the man that she wanted.
Largest number of people married at the same time. In 1995, 35,000 couples exchanged vows in Olympic Stadium in Seoul, Korea. The Reverend Sun Myung Moon presided over the ceremony.
The thriller’s gone. Actress Elizabeth Taylor has been married eight times (so far). Her most recent wedding took place in 1991 at the home of Michael Jackson. Jackson paid for it. Cost: $1.5 million.
Tying the knot. The phrase originated from the traditional girdle worn by Roman brides during the wedding ceremony. The girdle was tied together with hundreds of knots. (Untying the knots was the responsibility of her new husband.)
Longest engagement on record. 67 years, by a couple in Mexico City. (They were finally married in their 80s.)
White dress. In modern America, a white dress is commonly thought to be a symbol of purity, but originally it signified joy. In Japan, white is used for mourning, but Japanese brides can still wear it—to show they are “dead to their parents.”
Milk bath. To purify themselves before their wedding, Moroccan brides bathe in milk.
July 29, 1981.The wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana was televised. Over 58 million Americans tuned in…even though it was on at 4 a.m.
Most decadent decorations? For the 1850 wedding of his daughter, Louisiana plantation owner Charles Durand bought a shipload of spiders from China and released them along the mile-long road to his mansion. Then he brought in sacks of silver and gold dust from California. Using bellows, his slaves blew the dust onto the webs the spiders had built, creating a sparkling canopy, under which 2,000 guests walked to reach the altar that he’d built in the front yard.
Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader Page 11