A woman in Vancouver, British Columbia, called 911, reporting a plane crash she and her son witnessed near their home. “We sent all our cars down there,” said Corporal Steven Han of the RCMP, “thinking there was a small plane that had crashed.” Turns out it had been a small plane—a four-foot-long toy plane. The owner of the remote-controlled device told police he’d had engine trouble. News of the “plane crash” made it to several local media outlets before the mistake was corrected.
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LONGEST MOVIE TITLES OF ALL TIME
• Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead Part 2: In Shocking 2-D (1991)
• The Fable of the Kid Who Shifted His Ideals to Golf and Finally Became a Baseball Fan and Took the Only Known Cure (1916)
• Homework, or How Pornography Saved the Split Family from Boredom and Improved their Financial Situation (1991)
• The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Green Grasshopper and the Vampire Lady from Outer Space (1965)
• Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
• Revelations of a Sex Maniac to the Head of the Criminal Investigation Division (1972)
Surprising but true: The bottom of the Grand Canyon is above sea level.
APRIL FOOLS!
Don’t look now, but your fly is open. Made you look! Here are some classic April Fools jokes.
HUMOR UNDER FIRE. On April 1, 2003, twelve days after the start of “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Iraqi ambassador to Russia, Abbas Khalaf Kunfuth, stepped before a group of international reporters and read from what he claimed was a Reuters news bulletin. “The Americans have accidentally fired a nuclear missile into British forces, killing seven.” The room fell into stunned silence; then Kunfuth shouted, “April Fools!”
D-U-INTERNET. In its April 1994 issue, PC Computing magazine reported that Congress was considering a bill to make it illegal to surf the Web while under the influence of alcohol, and attributed the action to the term “Information Superhighway.” “Congress apparently thinks being drunk on a highway is bad,” the magazine said, “no matter what kind of highway it is.” So many people took the story seriously—and flooded Capitol Hill with angry calls—that Senator Pat Leahy and other politicians mentioned in the article had to publicly deny the story.
EMERGENCY CHAT. On April 1, 1994, a prankster released a fake Associated Press news story claiming that a company called Century Communications was launching a new phone service to help pay for the cost of installing the 911 emergency service. “The 911 Chatline” would let callers “choose an area of the country, listen to 911 emergency calls, and discuss the details of the emergencies with each other as they happen…before police have even arrived.”
BARD BUCKS. In 2000 the Motley Fool investment newsletter announced that William Shakespeare’s investment portfolio had been discovered among his remains and had been earning dividends and interest since his death in 1616. The Fool reported that the Bard had invested the equivalent of $100 in 1585 and had earned 6% per year. Current value of the portfolio: $18.7 billion.
Shocking news: There are about 500 species of fish capable of producing electricity.
SOFTWARE TO KEEP YOU UP NIGHTS. In April 1992 Apple Computer announced that it was releasing an extension for its Macintosh operating system called “Caffeine Manager,” that would allow Macs to network with coffee makers and soda machines. “Users and programmers alike now can immediately have access to a wide variety of commercial beverages form their desktop, all with the familiar Macintosh mouse-driven interface,” the announcement read.
COME ON BACK. While Glenn Howlett, general manager of community services in London, Ontario, was on vacation in 2003, three other city officials sent him a gag letter dated April 1 saying the deadline for the report he’d been working on had been pushed up and was now due in two weeks. Howlett cancelled the rest of his vacation and flew home to finish the report. The stress caused heart palpitations that eventually forced him into early retirement. When Howlett learned the letter was a joke, he filed a lawsuit that ended up costing the city $75,000 to resolve.
YOU’VE GOT MAIL. In April 1999, Red Herring magazine ran an article about an entrepreneur named Yuri Maldini who had invented a way to send e-mails telepathically. When the interviewer asked Maldini how big the market for such an application would be, he paused and then replied, “I just e-mailed you my answer.” Later that afternoon the interviewer checked his e-mail and, sure enough, there it was: “It’s going to be huge, simply huge.”
TRAFFIC REPORT. On April 1, 1991, the London Times reported a British government plan to ease traffic congestion on the M25, the highway that circles London, by forcing all traffic to move in one direction. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, they said, traffic would travel clockwise around the city; on Tuesdays and Thursdays, it would travel counterclockwise; and on weekends traffic would be allowed to travel in both directions, as before. The BBC was taken in by the ruse and broadcast interviews with irate motorists in the village of Swanscombe, Kent, who complained bitterly that on Tuesdays and Thursdays their 5-mile shopping trips to nearby Dartford would now be 127 miles long.
Q: What do you call a bear with no teeth? A: A gummy bear.
JARGON.COM
A few origins to help you brush up on your Web-cabulary.
MODEM: It’s short for “MOdulator-DEModulator.” Modulation refers to the process of converting the digital language that computers “speak” into the analog language of telephone lines. Demodulation is the reverse. (That high-pitched warbling sound modems make is digital language being translated into analog language.)
PHISHING: Refers to people who “fish” the Internet using e-mails designed to acquire sensitive information such as credit card numbers and passwords. It was first used in the mid-1990s to describe people who used false data to get free AOL accounts, which they would then use to steal other members’ data for criminal purposes. Today it refers to any similar online scheme. The altered spelling comes from “phreaking,” a 1970s term for schemes that manipulated phone systems in order to get free long-distance service.
SURFING: A librarian named Jean Armour Polly (a.k.a. “Net Mom”) wrote an article entitled “Surfing the Internet” for the University of Minnesota’s Wilson Library Bulletin in 1992. That’s the first published use of the phrase, and she is usually credited with coining it. But it had been used before—some people referred to “information surfing” on an early version on the Internet called the Usenet system in 1991. Why “surfing”? It may simply have come from “channel surfing” on TV, but some insiders claim it’s actually an homage to Vinton Cerf (pronounced “surf”), a computer engineer considered one of the fathers of the Internet.
COOKIE: Cookies are small packets of data that are transferred to your computer when you visit a Web site. They’re used for storing information—your name, password, and shopping habits, for example—that your computer can access quickly if you revisit the site. The term originated in the 1970s with one of the earliest operating systems, UNIX (which is still in use today), which used “magic cookies” to identify users and make using the system faster.
The scientific term for left-handedness is sinistrality. Right-handedness is dextrality.
SPAM: There are many theories about the origin of using the word “spam” to describe bulk or junk e-mail. One says that people on a very early, very slow, network communications system known as BITNET used to annoy each other by sending files containing the words to Monty Python’s “Spam Song,” and the term came to mean any similarly annoying use of the Internet. Another version says that a user on the popular mid-1980s system BBS (Bulletin Board System) claimed to be posting photographs of nude women. BITNET was also a very slow system, so downloading a photo could take up to an hour. And in this case, it wasn’t a photo of a naked woman—it
was of a photo of a can of Spam. However the term originated, by the late 1980s it was common to say “someone spammed me.”
PING: To “ping” a computer is to send it an “echo request” message and see how long it takes to respond, thereby testing how good the Internet connection is. The code that allows “pinging” was written by programmer Mike Muuss (he also helped create the architectural program CAD) as a freeware tool. He named it “ping” after the submariners’ term for a sonar signal.
BLOG: Short for “weblog,” a type of Web site where entries are made similarly to a personal diary or journal (or log), covering a wide variety of subjects, from politics to sports to knitting. The term “weblog” was coined December 17, 1997, by blog pioneer Jorn Barger on his site, Robotwisdom.com. Fellow pioneer Peter Merholz at Peterme.com is credited with shortening it to “blog” in 1999, saying, “I’ve decided to pronounce the word ‘weblog’ as ‘wee’-blog. Or ‘blog’ for short.” It quickly spread and was soon being used as a verb—to blog. Merholz later said, “I like that it’s roughly onomatopoeic of vomiting. These sites (mine included) tend to be a kind of information upchucking.”
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It ain’t what you don’t know that makes you look like a fool; it’s what you do know that ain’t so.
—Appalachian proverb
What do Google, Apple, and Amazon.com have in common? They were all started in home garages.
A few forays into famous folks’ food fixations.
• Three days a week, Mariah Carey eats only purple foods, such as plums, because they contain high levels of antioxidants, which she believes will stop her from developing wrinkles.
• Comedian Paula Poundstone eats six brown-sugar-and-cinnamon Pop-Tarts and drinks 16 cans of Diet Pepsi each day.
• Singer Fiona Apple eats split pea soup every day when she’s on tour.
• While he’s writing a book, author Michael Crichton eats the same thing for lunch every day to help him concentrate. When he was writing Jurassic Park, he ate egg salad sandwiches every day for nine months.
• Billy Bob Thornton supposedly eats only orange-colored foods.
• Daphne Zuniga (Melrose Place) used to eat fish daily, including sushi four times a week. After a severe bout of mercury poisoning, she no longer eats fish of any kind.
• Ben Stiller brings his own plastic-sealed bagels to restaurants and asks the staff to toast them.
• Avant-garde composer Erik Satie ate only white foods: eggs, sugar, shredded bones, animal fat, coconuts, rice, and white cheese. To drink: wine that had been boiled, then chilled.
• Janine Turner (Northern Exposure) has the same breakfast every day: a quesadilla and a Coke.
• Soccer player David Beckham has three refrigerators: One has only salad, one has all his other food, and the third has only Diet Coke. All the sodas are arranged symmetrically and in pairs.
• During the six-month shoot of the movie What’s New, Pussycat?, Woody Allen ate only potato soup and sole.
• French actress Brigitte Bardot says she needs to eat only once a day. It’s usually a croissant and a slice of toast.
POLI-TALKS
John F. Kennedy said, “Mothers want their sons to grow up to be president, but they don’t want them to become politicians in the process.” Here’s why.
“I like the color red because it’s a fire. And I see myself as always being on fire.”
—Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger
“I will never apologize for the United States of America. I don’t care what the facts are.”
—George H. W. Bush
“We have a lot of kids who don’t know what work means. They think work is a four-letter word.”
—Hillary Clinton
“People tell me that Senator Edwards got picked to run as vice president for his good looks, sex appeal, and great hair. I say to them, ‘How do you think I got the job?’”
—Dick Cheney
“I made no attempt to be inaccurate, but I want to be clear I was never attempting to be precise”
—Josh Steiner, Treasury Chief, explaining comments leaked from his diary
“I was with some Vietnamese recently, and some of them were smoking two cigarettes at a time. That’s the kind of customers we need!”
—Sen. Jesse Helms
“That’s George Washington. The interesting thing about him is that I read three or four books about him last year. Isn’t that interesting?”
—George W. Bush, to a German reporter looking at Washington’s portrait
“I am not going to give you a number for it because it’s not my business to do intelligent work.”
—Donald Rumsfeld
“Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans, a city that has been destroyed, things are going relatively well.”
—Michael Brown, FEMA director
“I’m electable if you vote for me.”
—Rep. Dennis Kucinich
An adult turkey has about 3,500 feathers.
MAKING THE GODFATHER, PT. I
The Godfather is considered one of the best movies ever made—the American Film Institute ranks it #3, after Citizen Kane and Casablanca. The story of how it got made is just as good.
BOOKMAKER
In 1955 a pulp-fiction writer named Mario Puzo published his first novel, The Dark Arena, about an ex-GI and his German girlfriend who live in Germany after the end of World War II. The critics praised it, but it didn’t sell very many copies.
It took Puzo nine years to finish his next novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim, which told the story of an Italian immigrant named Lucia Santa who lives in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York City. After two bad marriages, Lucia is raising her kids alone and worries about her daughter, who has become too Americanized, and her son, who is being pulled into the Mafia.
Today The Fortunate Pilgrim is widely considered a classic work of Italian American fiction; Puzo himself considered it the best book he ever wrote. But it sold as poorly as The Dark Arena— together the two books had earned Puzo only about $6,500. By then he was 45 years old, $20,000 in debt, and tired of being broke. He wanted his next novel to be a success. “I looked around and said…I’d better make some money,” he recalled years later.
HIT MAN
Puzo figured that a story with an entire family of gangsters in it instead of only one would have more commercial appeal than The Fortunate Pilgrim had. He titled his third novel Mafia, and in a sign of how his fortunes were about to change, he received a $5,000 advance payment from the publisher. Then, after he’d completed only an outline and 114 pages, Paramount Pictures acquired the movie rights for $12,000 and agreed to pay an additional $50,000 if the movie actually got made.
Puzo’s decision to pack his story with wiseguys paid off. Mafia, by now retitled The Godfather, was a publishing phenomenon. The most successful novel of the 1970s, it spent 67 weeks on the bestseller list and sold more than 21 million copies before it even made it to the big screen.
The first U.S. passport was issued in 1796. Recipient: Francis M. Barrere.
THE NUMBERS RACKET
Believe it or not, the success of the novel actually hurt its chances of becoming a decent film. Bestsellers appeal to movie studios because they have a guaranteed audience. But fans will come to the theater no matter what, so why spend extra money to get them there? Shortsighted studio executives are often tempted to maximize profits by spending as little on such movies as possible. At the time Paramount was in bad financial shape and its last Mafia film, The Brotherhood, starring Kirk Douglas, bombed. The studio couldn’t afford another expensive mistake. It set the budget for The Godfather at $2 million, a miniscule figure even for the early 1970s.
Two million dollars wasn’t enough money to make a decent film set in the present, let alone a period piece like The Godfather, which takes place from 1945 to 1955—and in Manhattan, one of the most expensive places in the country to shoot a film. To save on expenses, Paramount deci
ded to move the story forward to the 1970s, and made plans to film it in a Midwestern city like Kansas City, or on the studio back lot instead of on actual New York streets. The title would still be The Godfather, but other than that the film would have very little in common with Puzo’s novel.
Paramount signed Albert Ruddy, one of the co-creators of TV’s Hogan’s Heroes, to produce the film. Ruddy had produced only three motion pictures, and they’d all lost money, but what impressed the studio was that he had brought them in under budget. That was what Paramount was looking for in The Godfather—a critical flop that would nonetheless turn a quick profit because it had a built-in audience and would be filmed on the cheap.
NO, THANKS
By now it was clear in Hollywood that the studio was planning what was little more than a cinematic mugging of millions of fans of Puzo’s novel. What director would want to work on something like that? It was enough to ruin a career. Ruddy approached several big directors about making the film but, of course, none were interested. So he turned to a hungry young director named Francis Ford Coppola.
Sideswiped: Americans charge over $1 trillion on their credit cards annually.
He turned it down, too.
THE KID
In his short career, Coppola, then 31, had directed only four films (not including the nudie flicks he worked on while studying film at UCLA): Dimentia 13, a critical flop that bombed at the box office; Finian’s Rainbow, another critical flop that bombed; You’re a Big Boy Now, another critical flop that bombed; and The Rain People (starring James Caan and Robert Duvall), a critical success that bombed. With his track record, he couldn’t afford to be too choosy, and yet when Albert Ruddy offered him The Godfather in the spring of 1970, Coppola picked up a copy of the book and read only as far as one particularly lurid scene early in the book before he dismissed the whole work as a piece of trash and told Ruddy to find someone else. (Have you read the book? It’s the part where Sonny’s mistress goes to a plastic surgeon to have her “plumbing” fixed and ends up having an affair with the doctor.)
Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader Page 10