Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  PUT A SOCK IN IT

  Remember the Pets.com sock puppet? He appeared in 2000 in TV commercials for the online pet store and was wildly popular. He showed up on Good Morning America and floated in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade as a 36-foot balloon. Unfortunately, Pet.com’s concept—selling pet supplies over the Internet—wasn’t as popular as the puppet. After little more than a year, Pets.com was gone…and so was $100 million in start-up funds.

  Flop-Flip: And the sock puppet? He reappeared in 2002 in ads for 1-800-BarNone, a company that offered loans to people with bad credit, and has written an autobiography, Me By Me.

  BEERZ IN THE HOOD

  In June of 1991, G. Heileman Brewing Company, makers of Colt 45, came out with a new beverage: PowerMaster, a malt liquor with a 5.8% alcohol content (the average American beer has 3.5%; most malt liquors have 4.5%.) Black community leaders immediately protested, charging that the product was aimed specifically and irresponsibly at urban African Americans. For proof, they pointed to the billboard ads for the beverage that were popping up in black neighborhoods. The protests quickly spread around the country, and by July the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms ruled that the “Power” in PowerMaster had to go. A beer’s name, they said, cannot reflect the strength of its alcohol content (even though they had approved the name just a month earlier). Heileman was forced to pull PowerMaster, at a marketing loss of more than $2 million.

  Original name for the Bank of America: the Bank of Italy.

  Flop-flip: A year later, the brewer quietly introduced Colt 45 Premium, a malt liquor with a 5.9% alcohol content. The can was black with a red horse on it—the same design as PowerMaster.

  HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL

  Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. spent 10 years and tons of money developing a “fountain of youth” drug designed to slow the aging process and keep people feeling young and vital well into old age. Initial research showed promise, prompting the company to pour even more money into the project. The reasoning was obvious: if it worked, the drug could make them millions, or even billions of dollars. In 2001 an independent testing lab performed a study that Pfizer executives expected would vault the drug toward FDA approval…but it didn’t work out that way. The study actually concluded that people who took the “fountain of youth” drug had about the same results as those who’d taken sugar pills. By June 2002, the project had been canned. Cost of the decade of work: $71 million.

  FELT TIP FOLLIES

  In late 2001, Sony Music came out with a “copy-proof” CD. It was a much-heralded step toward preventing the piracy of their artists’ music, which they claimed hurt sales. Sony spent millions developing the technology and in the first few months of 2002 shipped more than 11 million of the discs. But by May the innovation proved to be a total flop. Word had spread like wildfire on the Internet that the high-tech copy-proofing could be thwarted…by scribbling around the rim of the CDs with an 89¢ felt-tip marker.

  * * *

  “Wise men learn by other men’s mistakes, fools by their own.”

  —Anonymous

  Buenos Aires has more psychoanalysts per capita than any other city in the world.

  KIBBLE ME THIS

  What would Porter the Wonder Dog have eaten 200 years ago, before there was Alpo or Dog Chow? Here’s the history of the multi-billion-dollar dog food industry.

  CHOW DOWN

  • More than 2,000 years ago, Roman poet and philosopher Marcus Terentius Varro wrote the first farming manual. In it he advised giving farm dogs barley bread soaked in milk, and bones from dead sheep.

  • During the Middle Ages, it was common for European royalty to have kennels for their hounds. Kennel cooks would make huge stews, mostly grains and vegetables with some meat or meat byproducts—the hearts, livers, and lungs of various livestock.

  • Dogs in common households had meager diets. They were fed only what their owners could spare. A normal domesticated dog’s diet consisted of crusts of bread, bare bones, potatoes, cabbage, or whatever they could scrounge on their own.

  • In the 18th century, farm dogs, which had to be fairly healthy to do their jobs, were regularly fed mixes of grains and lard. In cities, you could make a living by searching the streets for dead horses, cutting them up, and selling the meat to wealthy dog owners.

  • There were exceptions: The very wealthy, throughout history, have fed their pet dogs fare that was much better than what most humans ate. In the 1800s Empress Tzu Hsi of China was known to feed her Pekingese shark fins, quail breasts, and antelope milk. European nobility fed their dogs roast duck, cakes, candies, and even liquor.

  LUXURY FOOD

  Then in the mid-1800s, as the Industrial Revolution created a growing middle class with more money and more leisure time, pets began to be regarded as “luxury items” by everyday folk. Result: pet food became more closely scrutinized.

  More pets and more money meant a new profession: veterinary medicine. It was officially founded in the United States in 1895, but many self-styled experts were already giving advice on dog diets. Many said that dogs needed to be “civilized,” and since wild dogs ate raw meat, domesticated dogs shouldn’t. (That advice influenced the pet food industry for decades after.)

  Snapping your fingers is called a fillip.

  In the late 1850s, a young electrician from Cincinnati named James Spratt went to London to sell lightning rods. When his ship arrived, crew members threw the leftover “ship’s biscuits” onto the dock, where they were devoured by hordes of waiting dogs. That gave Spratt an idea. “Ship’s biscuits,” or hard tack, were the standard fare for sailors for centuries. Flour, water, and salt were mixed into a stiff dough, baked, and left to harden and dry. The biscuits were easily stored and had an extremely long shelf life, which was important in the days before refrigeration. And they looked a lot like today’s dog biscuits.

  Spratt had the idea that he could make cheap, easy-to-serve biscuits and sell them to the growing number of urban dog owners. His recipe: a baked mixture of wheat, beet root, and vegetables bound together with beef blood. When Spratt’s Patent Meal Fibrine Dog Cakes came on the market in 1860, the pet-food industry was born. Spratt’s Dog Cakes were a hit in England, so in 1870 he took the business to New York…and began the American pet food industry.

  A GROWING TREND

  Others followed in Spratt’s footsteps:

  • In the 1880s, a Boston veterinarian introduced A.C. Daniels’ Medicated Dog Bread.

  • The F. H. Bennett Biscuit company opened in 1908, making biscuits shaped like bones. Bennett also made the first puppy food, and was the first to package different-sized kibble for different breeds.

  • In 1931 the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) bought Bennett’s company and renamed the biscuits Milkbones. Then they hired 3,000 salesmen with the specific goal of getting Milkbones into food stores—and the national consciousness. For the first time, dog biscuits were part of regular grocery shopping.

  • In 1922 Chappel Brothers of Rockford, Illinois, introduced Ken-L Ration, the first canned dog food in the United States. It was horse meat. In 1930 they started sponsoring a popular radio show, The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin. Ken-L Ration became such a success that by the mid-1930s they were breeding horses just for dog food and slaughtering 50,000 of them a year.

  Many restaurants in France allow dogs and even offer special menus for them.

  AW, DRY UP

  By 1941 canned dog food had a 90% share of the market…until the United States entered World War II and the government started rationing tin and meat. Then dry dog food became popular again.

  In 1950 the Ralston Purina Company started using a cooking extruder to make their Chex cereal. Here’s how it worked: ingredients were pushed through a tube, cooked under high pressure, and puffed up with air. This allowed Chex to stay crisp when milk was added.

  At about the same time, manufacturers were getting complaints about the appearance, texture, and digestibility of dry dog food. Puri
na’s pet food division borrowed an extruder from the cereal division and experimented with it in secret for three years. The result: Purina Dog Chow. Dogs loved it, it digested well, and it quickly became the number one dog food in the nation—and still is today.

  NO PEOPLE FOOD FOR YOU

  In the early 1950s, Ken-L Ration made the jump from radio to TV advertising, running commercials on wholesome shows like The Adventures of the Ozzie and Harriet. (“This dog food uses only USDA, government-inspected horse meat!”)

  In 1964 the Pet Food Institute, a lobbying group for the now-gigantic pet food industry, began a campaign to get people to stop feeding their dogs anything but packaged dog food. They funded “reports” that appeared in magazines, detailing the benefits of processed dog food, and even produced a radio spot about “the dangers of table scraps.”

  The dog food industry was spending an incredible $50 million a year on advertising. Commercials centered around the “beef wars,” with competing companies all claiming to have the most pure beef. (Bonanza star Lorne Greene did a TV commercial for Alpo…holding a sirloin steak.)

  In the 1960s and 1970s, factors such as increased numbers of breeds and rising crime rates made dog ownership skyrocket. By 1975 there were more than 1,500 dog foods on the market.

  Today, more than 1,600 square miles of soybeans, 2,100 square miles of corn, and 1.7 million tons of meat and poultry products are made into pet food every year. There are more than 65 million dogs in the U.S., and pet food is an $11 billion industry…and growing.

  Drew Barrymore’s first acting role: A commercial for Gaines Burgers. (She was 11 months old.)

  COOL BILLIONS

  There are 1,000,000,000 reasons to read this page.

  • If you had $1 billion and spent $1,000 a day, it would take 2,740 years to spend it.

  • One billion people would fill roughly 305 Chicagos.

  • It took from the beginning of time until 1800 for the world’s population to reach one billion, but only 130 years more for it to reach two billion—in 1930.

  • One billion people lined up side by side would stretch for 568,200 miles.

  • First magazine in history to sell a billion copies: TV Guide, in 1974.

  • More than one billion people on Earth are between the ages of 15 and 24.

  • One Styrofoam cup contains one billion molecules of CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons)—harmful to the Earth’s ozone layer.

  • Nearly one billion Barbie dolls (including friends and family) have been sold since 1959. Placed head to toe, the dolls would circle the Earth more than three times.

  • To cook one billion pounds of pasta, you’d need two billion gallons of water—enough to fill nearly 75,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.

  • The first billion-dollar corporation in the U.S. emerged in 1901—United States Steel.

  • The ratio of billionaires to the rest of the U.S. population is 1 to 4.5 million.

  • A single ragweed plant can release a billion grains of pollen.

  • One teaspoon of yogurt contains more than one billion live and active bacteria.

  • The first year in which the U.S. national debt exceeded $1 billion was 1863.

  • There are about one billion red blood cells in two to three drops of blood.

  • It’s estimated that by 2005 there will be more than one billion cell phone users.

  • Earth’s oceans will completely disappear in about one billion years due to rising temperatures from a maturing sun.

  Soak up this fact: Sponges form an amazing 99% of all marine species.

  DUMB JOCKS?

  Sports stars say the darnedest things. Are they trying to be funny…or just not all there? You be the judge.

  “My wife doesn’t care what I do when I’m away as long as I don’t have a good time.”

  —Lee Trevino

  “Be sure to put some of them neutrons on it.”

  —Mike Smith, baseball player, instructing a waitress on how to prepare his salad

  “This taught me a lesson, but I’m not sure what it is.”

  —John McEnroe

  “I want all the kids to do what I do, to look up to me. I want all the kids to copulate me.”

  —Andre Dawson, Chicago Cubs outfielder

  “They shouldn’t throw at me. I’m the father of five or six kids.”

  —Tito Fuentes, baseball player, after getting hit by a pitch

  “That’s so when I forget how to spell my name, I can still find my clothes.”

  —Stu Grimson, hockey player, on why he has a photo of himself above his locker

  “I’ve won on every level, except college and pro.”

  —Shaquille O’Neal

  “I could have been a Rhodes Scholar, except for my grades.”

  —Duffy Daugherty, Michigan State football coach

  “People think we make $3 million and $4 million a year. They don’t realize that most of us only make $500,000.”

  —Pete Incaviglia, baseball player

  “If history repeats itself, I think we can expect the same thing again.”

  —Terry Venables, professional skier

  “After a day like this, I’ve got the three Cs: I’m comfortable, I’m confident, and I’m seeing the ball well.”

  —Jay Buhner, outfielder, after a perfect 5-for-5 day

  “Just remember the words of Patrick Henry—‘Kill me or let me live.’”

  —coach Bill Peterson, giving a halftime pep talk

  Huh? The following statement is true. The previous statement was false.

  CELEBRITY RUMORS

  Oh, those poor celebrities. Just because they’re out in the public eye, people want to make up weird stories about them. At the BRI we hear rumors about celebrities all the time, and we decided to look into some to see if they were true.

  RUMOR: Movie critic Gene Siskel, half of TV’s Siskel and Ebert, was buried with his thumb pointing upward (“Two Thumbs Up” was the Siskel and Ebert trademark), as he’d requested in his will.

  HOW IT SPREAD: From a UPI news story that began circulating over the Internet shortly after Siskel’s death in February 1999. “Gene wanted to be remembered as a Thumbs-Up kind of guy,” Siskel’s attorney was quoted as telling the wire service.

  THE TRUTH: The “news” article is fake. It was probably intended as a joke, but at some point people started passing it around as if it were true. Just to be safe, though, reporters at Time Out New York obtained a copy of Siskel’s will from the Chicago court where it was filed. Their finding: “There are no digit-placement requests in the critic’s last wishes.”

  RUMOR: Vanna White of Wheel of Fortune fame starred in a stage version of The Diary of Anne Frank. Her performance was so bad that when the Nazis came in the house, people in the audience stood up and shouted, “She’s in the attic!”

  HOW IT SPREAD: By word of mouth and on the Internet.

  THE TRUTH: Another example of a story that started out as a joke but came to be passed along as true. White has never played Anne Frank on stage, on TV, in the movies, or anyplace else. Over the years, the “She’s in the attic!” story has been attributed to numerous actresses of questionable talent, including Pia Zadora.

  RUMOR: Cher had her lowest pair of ribs surgically removed to make her waist look slimmer.

  HOW IT SPREAD: In 1988 Paris Match magazine published a story claiming that she’d had the procedure done. From there the story was published in newspapers and magazines all over the world. (Jane Fonda, Tori Spelling, Janet Jackson, and even Marilyn Manson are rumored to have had the same procedure.)

  The Roma (derogatorily called “Gypsies”) began wandering in the 11th century, originating from India.

  THE TRUTH: Neither Cher nor anyone else could have the procedure done even if they wanted to, because no such procedure exists. Cher got so fed up with the rumor that she sued Paris Match (they retracted the story). She even hired a physician to examine her for evidence of the “procedure” (there was none) and
release his findings to the public. It didn’t do any good—the rumor persists to this day.

  RUMOR: Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner used to place a number of small stars on the cover of his magazine to indicate how many times he’d slept with that month’s cover girl. If he found her satisfactory, he placed them inside the “P” of the magazine’s mast-head. If he was disappointed, he placed them next to the “P.”

  HOW IT SPREAD: By word of mouth from one fantasizing Playboy reader to another. The story was helped along by the fact that from 1955 until 1979, there really were a series of small stars on the cover, sometimes inside the “P”…and sometimes alongside it.

  THE TRUTH: The stars were marketing codes—Playboy was published in several different regional editions, and the company used different numbers of stars to identify the different editions. The stars were always printed in a dark color. If the cover was a dark color, the masthead was white and the stars went inside the “P.” But on a light-colored cover, the stars went alongside it.

  RUMOR: Iron Eyes Cody, the famous “crying Indian” of the Keep America Beautiful anti-littering ad campaign of the 1970s…was actually Italian.

  HOW IT SPREAD: By word of mouth. Cody, who died at the age of 94 in 1999, went to his grave insisting his father was a member of the Cherokee tribe and his mother was full-blooded Cree.

  THE TRUTH: When reporters from the New Orleans Times-Picayune went to Cody’s hometown of Kaplan, Louisiana, in 1996 to check birth records, they found that he’d actually been born Espero DeCorti, to Italian immigrant parents. DeCorti assumed Indian identities in the 1920s to get jobs in Hollywood westerns. Once “Iron Eyes” became a Native American, he never stopped pretending. As DeCorti’s half-sister May Abshire remembered of their childhood, “He always said he wanted to be an Indian.”