a) It goes up. b) It goes down. c) It stays the same.
5. Try to solve this in your head: Take 1,000 and add 40 to it. Now add another 1,000. Now add 30. And another 1,000. Now add 20. Now add another 1,000. Now add 10. What’s the total?
Ask Virginia Woolf: Three percent of all English surnames are derived from animal names.
THE BIGGER THEY ARE…
Sometimes making big business decisions means making big blunders, as these folks found out.
BAD APPLE
In 1988 Apple Computers hired a small computer company from Virginia called Quantum Computer Services to develop an online service for their customers. It was to be called AppleLink Personal Edition and was set to come out in 1989. But before Quantum could launch the service, Apple changed their minds and terminated their contract. Bad idea. Quantum had negotiated in their contract that if Apple let them go, they got to keep the technology. They launched the service themselves in late 1989, with a new name…America Online.
STAR WARS: THE PUBLISHER’S MENACE
British book publisher Dorling Kindersley saw sales of its Star Wars books rise dramatically after the release of the movie The Phantom Menace in 1999. Elated company execs quickly ordered a huge printing for the Christmas sales season—and sold a whopping 3 million copies. The only problem—they had printed 13 million copies. Loss: $22.4 million. In January 2000, the already debt-plagued company admitted the mistake and CEO James Middle-hurst resigned. In March, the once-prosperous worldwide publisher was sold to media giant Pearson. (Note: Ten million books would make a stack more than 150 miles high.)
A TOBACCO COMPANY TELLS THE TRUTH!
In 2001 tobacco giant Philip Morris did a study of the effects of cigarette smoking for the leaders of the Czech Republic. The report they issued touted the “positive effects” that smoking has for government. It shortens people’s lives, they said, which means lower costs for pensions, housing, and health care for the elderly. The details of the report were supposed to be private, but somehow the press got hold of them and made them public. Result: A major public relations blow to a company that had just spent $100 million to boost its image. Philip Morris issued an apology to the Czech people and then canceled plans to make similar reports in four other nations.
On average, babies born in May are 7 ounces heavier than those born in other months.
A FINE ROMANCE (OR TWO)
In 1991 Random House editor Joni Evans thought she could cash in on the fame of TV’s Dynasty star Joan Collins and offered her a $4 million contract—with a $1.3 million advance—to write two romance novels. (Collins’s sister, Jackie, is a bestselling novelist.) Collins turned in manuscripts for The Ruling Passion and Hell Hath No Fury, but Evans thought they were terrible and wouldn’t publish them. Random House sued Collins but couldn’t get the advance money back. As if giving a huge advance to an unproven writer wasn’t a big enough blunder, Evans missed a clause put in the contract stipulating that Collins would be paid whether or not her manuscripts were published. Result: Collins ended up with $2.6 million of Random House’s cash for two books that never went to press.
IT’S NOT OK
Before she joined Random House (see item above), Evans was a senior editor at the publishing house William Morrow, where she committed another blunder in an otherwise successful career. When Morrow was approached about the paperback rights of a certain new author, she advised her boss against it, sure that the book would never sell. The price for the rights at the time was $10,000…three months later, the rights went for $675,000. The book was the groundbreaking self-help title I’m OK, You’re OK. It went to #4 on the New York Times Best Seller list in 1970 and has sold over 15 million copies since…most of them paperbacks.
LISTEN CAREFULLY
In November 2001, the privately owned Japanese company Dentsu, the world’s fourth largest advertising agency, decided to go public. They had the Wall Street firm UBS Warburg handle their initial public offering, and instructed the brokers to sell 16 shares at 610,000 yen ($4,925) each. But the brokers mistakenly listed 610,000 shares at 16 yen (about 13¢) each. Before they discovered the error, 65,000 of the shares had been sold. Warburg had to buy them all back on the open market. The exact amount of Warburg’s loss was undisclosed, but it was estimated to be as high as $100 million.
Q: What do you call the dent in the bottom of a champagne bottle? A: A kick (or a punt).
WINGING IT
Anyone who’s ever boarded an airplane has probably wondered how a 400-ton hunk of metal could possibly cruise through the air. Is it magic? No, it’s physics! Here’s a simplified explanation for all you porcelain pilots.
HOW ABOUT A LIFT?
The force that makes it possible for airplanes to fly is called lift. Lift is provided by the wings of an airplane. But how do the wings generate lift? There are two characteristics that help them get the plane off the ground:
1. The “Angle of Attack”
• If you’ve ever stuck your hand out of the window of a moving car, you already understand how the “angle of attack” works. If you tilt your hand so that the front edge of your hand is pointing upward, the air strikes the bottom surface of your hand and pushes it higher in the air.
• Changing the tilt of your hand so that the front edge is pointing downward has the opposite effect: the air strikes the top of your hand and pushes it down. By tilting the front edge your hand up and down, you can “fly” your hand up and down however you want. If this is difficult to understand, try it the next time you’re in a car.
• If you look closely at the wings on an airplane, you’ll notice that they’re tilted. The front edge—known as the leading edge—is slightly higher than the trailing edge. Aircraft manufacturers do this so that when the airplane is moving through the air, more air strikes the bottom surface of the wing than the top, pushing the wing upward and helping the plane to fly.
2. The Shape
If you were to look at a cross-section of an airplane wing, it would look something like this:
There are 132 Hawaiian islands.
The wing is shaped this way in order to take advantage of something called Bernoulli’s principle. Understanding the “angle of attack” is pretty easy, but Bernoulli’s principle is a little trickier:
• In 1738 Daniel Bernoulli, a Swiss mathematician, observed that when the velocity of a fluid increases, the pressure of that fluid decreases.
• You may not think of air as a fluid, but technically it is. So when air speed increases, air pressure decreases.
• Wings are shaped in such a way that the air that passes over the top surface of the wing moves faster than the air that passes underneath the bottom surface.
• That means that the air pressure underneath the wing is higher than the air pressure above it. This difference in pressure causes the air underneath the wing to literally press the wing upward in the air.
• Lift is measured the same way that weight is. If your airplane weighs 1,000 pounds, that means the wings have to generate more than 1,000 pounds of lift for the plane to leave the ground.
STRAIGHT TALK
So how does the shape of a wing make the air passing over it move faster than the air moving underneath it? Well, as we all know, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. And that’s the secret:
• The bottom surface of the wing is relatively flat and straight, but the top is curved. An air molecule passing underneath the wing travels a fairly straight path, which means it travels a shorter distance than an air molecule that passes over the top of the wing. But since it does it in the same amount of time, it’s actually moving at a slower rate than the molecule above the wing.
• This is where Bernoulli’s principle comes in: since the air passing over the top of the wing is traveling faster than the air traveling underneath the wing, the air pressure above the wing is lower than the air pressure underneath the wing. This difference in air pressure causes the wing to rise in the air, a
nd the plane to be able to fly.
U.S. organization with the most members: AAA—the American Auto Association. (46 million.)
FREE WITH PURCHASE
These days almost every retailer has some kind of loyalty program—frequent flyer miles, grocery store club cards, even low-tech cardboard punchcards at the local sandwich shop. But 100 years ago it all started…with trading stamps.
AREDEEMING IDEA
Back in 1896, a silverware salesman named Thomas Sperry was making his regular rounds of the stores in Milwaukee when he noticed that one store was having success with a unique program. They were rewarding purchases with coupons, redeemable for store goods. That gave Sperry an idea: why not give out coupons that weren’t tied to merchandise from a particular store, but were redeemable anywhere in the country?
With backing from local businessman Shelly Hutchinson, he started the Sperry and Hutchinson Company, and began selling trading stamps. Here’s how it worked:
• S&H sold stamps (they looked like small postage stamps, each with a red S&H insignia on a green background) to retailers.
• Retailers gave them to customers as a bonus for purchases, 10 stamps for each dollar spent.
• Customers collected the stamps in special S&H books until they had enough to trade back to Sperry and Hutchinson in exchange for merchandise like tea sets or cookware.
• Retailers who participated in the program hoped that customers would feel like they were getting something for free, which would entice them to continue to shop loyally at their stores.
• At first only a few stores across the country offered the stamps, but over the next 50 years, through economic recessions, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and two world wars, S&H’s popularity grew steadily.
POSTWAR FAD
Interest in trading stamps peaked in the 1950s. Why? More people lived in urban areas with more grocery stores to choose from. Bread, milk, and corn flakes are the same in every supermarket, so rival stores started looking for a way to set themselves apart from the competition. One way was by offering trading stamps.
Call a cab: According to statistics, yellow cars and bright blue cars are the safest to drive.
Collecting trading stamps seemed like a fun way to get great stuff without raiding the household budget. So, with their books full of stamps, postwar consumers got televisions, blenders, transistor radios, and the most popular item, toasters.
Trading stamps became so popular that gas stations, drugstores, and dry cleaners got in on the act, too. By 1964 S&H was printing three times as many stamps as the U.S. Post Office. At the industry’s peak in 1969, more than 80% of U.S. households were collecting stamps, and more than 100,000 stores were offering the most popular kind, Green Stamps. The S&H redemption catalog had the largest print run of any publication in the United States.
A WORLD OF STAMPS
Green Stamps were the best known, but there were many other brands of trading stamps in the 1960s. If you shopped at Piggly Wiggly’s, for instance, you’d get Greenbax, at A&P you’d get Plaid Stamps, at Kroger you’d get Top Value Stamps, and so on.
Stamps came in a rainbow of colors, too: Orange, Yellow, Red, Pink, Blue Chip, K&S Red, Triple-S Blue, Plaid, Gold Bond, Merchant Green, and World Green, to name a few. And they appeared under a dizzying variety of names: Top Value, Mor-Valu, Shur-Valu, King Korn, Regal, Big Bonus, Double Thrift, Buckeye, Buccaneer, Two Guys, Eagle, Gift House, Double “M”, Frontier, Quality, Big “W,” and many more.
The stamps had an actual cash value—if you brought in 1,000 stamps, S&H would cheerfully hand you $1.67. But no one cared about the stamps’ cash value when catalogs offered tempting merchandise like clock radios and Corningware. What else could you get for your stamps? Fur coats, purebred pets, European vacations, even life insurance policies. King Korn got a lot of publicity in 1969 by offering a work by classic 20th-century American painter Thomas Hart Benton for 1,975 books.
In fact, publicity-hungry trading-stamp companies—always looking for a way to get a leg up over their many competitors—were willing to negotiate with collectors to provide just about anything equal to the cash value of the collected stamps. Some of the more unusual items:
Mr. Mom: Male Malaysian fruit bats can produce milk.
• An eight-passenger Cessna airplane (paid for with Gold Bond stamps by a church congregation)
• A pair of gorillas (paid for with 5.4 million Green Stamps by an Erie, Pennsylvania, school who wanted to supply their local zoo)
• A donkey for an overseas church missionary
• An elephant (also intended for a local zoo)
• School buses, ambulances, and fire trucks
TAKING A LICKING
Eventually, trading stamps became victims of their own popularity. So many stores were giving them away that there was no longer any reason to shop loyally at one store.
The rampant inflation of the 1970s didn’t help, either. Businesses that gave trading stamps were perceived as charging higher prices. The 1973 oil embargo and gas shortage killed the program at gas stations, too, since consumers would shop at the gas station with the lowest price, not the station that gave Green Stamps.
But trading stamps didn’t die out completely. S&H had $1 billion in annual revenue in 1981 when the company was sold and continued limping along for the next 18 years. By 1999 fewer than 100 stores offered Green Stamps. That’s when Walter Beinecke, the great-grandson of founder Thomas Sperry, bought back S&H.
IF YOU CAN’T LICK ’EM…
Under Beinecke’s influence, S&H Green Stamps have been recast for the digital age—they’re now Greenpoints, with bar-coded cards customers swipe at the registers of participating stores. (Don’t worry, the company still redeems the old gummed stickers.)
Greenpoints offers 10 points for every dollar spent, just like it did in the 1960s. But goods are now valued accordingly. The leather wallet that cost one book of Green Stamps (1,200) now costs 9,600 Greenpoints. Four towels that could be bought with 1,200 Green Stamps cost 14,400 Greenpoints today. Camcorders go for 200,000.
The prizes consumers want have changed, too. People no longer want to redeem their points for towels or hair dryers—they’re more interested in digital cameras, movie tickets, gift certificates (for Burger King, Blockbuster, and Pizza Hut), and Greenpoints’ most popular redemption item, the George Foreman Grill (40,800). And if you have 13,800 Greenpoints, you can still get a toaster.
How does this make you feel? There are 10 inkblots on the standard Rorschach test.
FOOD SUPERSTITIONS
What can you do with food besides eat it? Drive evil spirits away, of course! People actually used to believe in these bizarre rituals.
Bake your cakes while the sun is rising, and do not throw away the eggshells until the baking is done.
Tossing coffee grounds under steps leading to the kitchen will rid the home of ants.
If you don’t spit out the seeds while eating a grape, the seeds will give you appendicitis.
Hold a buttercup under someone’s chin. If it casts a yellow shadow, that person loves to eat butter.
The sound of thunder will turn milk sour.
Hammer a peg or nail into a fruit tree that bears no fruit, and soon you will have some.
Tipping over a slice of cake on a plate while serving a guest is a sign of bad luck.
If you want your cabbages to flourish, plant them on St. Patrick’s Day.
Two yolks in an Easter egg is a good omen—you will be rich someday.
If you spot bubbles in a cup of coffee, try to spoon them up and eat them before they burst. If you succeed, you will receive money from an unexpected source.
It’s bad luck to gather blackberries after October 11.
If you love someone and want them to love you, give them an orange.
Onions mixed with ant eggs will cure deafness.
Eating the last piece of bread on a plate is bad luck—it will cause a bachelor to marry, or an
unmarried woman to stay unmarried.
Rum poured on the head cures baldness.
Bananas must be broken apart—never cut with a knife. Cutting brings bad luck.
Eating peaches gives you wisdom.
If you grow too much lettuce in your garden, your wife will never conceive children.
There are 24 flowers on every Oreo cookie.
KING OF CANADA
If politicians were awarded points for weirdness, there’d be plenty of competition…but this guy would win.
BLAND MASTER
William Lyon Mackenzie King was Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, leading Canada through most of the Great Depression and all of World War II.
Born in 1874 in Kitchener, Ontario, King studied law and economics at the University of Toronto and Chicago University. Inspired to go into government service by his mother’s tales of his grandfather, the rebel William Lyon Mackenzie, King became an astute politician and leader who made many lasting contributions to Canadian history.
In public he was an average-looking man who favored black suits with starched white collars. According to Canada: A People’s History, King was “dull, reliable and largely friendless.” When talking to the press or in Parliament, King was deliberately vague and opaque.
“It was hard to pin him down, to use his own words against him…because his speeches were masterpieces of ambiguity,” writes Canadian historian Pierre Berton. To the public he was a master politician and a symbol of stability.
But the public didn’t know about his private life.
BEHIND CLOSED DOORS
In those days, a politician’s private life really was private. Good thing for King, because behind his neutral facade, he was a first-class eccentric.
Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader Page 49