Adding up all the times you blink in a day, your eyes are closed for a total of 30 minutes.
GEEZERS AND RODNEYS
On a recent trip to the Emerald Isle, Uncle John picked up some Irish words and expressions, old and new. Here are some of his favorites.
Parish priest: A pint of stout. It has a black body and white collar (the foamy head of the beer).
Jingler: A telephone.
Donkey’s grudge: Day-old cake. If a cake didn’t sell by the end of the day, the baker added layers of pastry on the top and bottom and sold it the following day. Add a layer of cream on top, and it’s called a Donkey’s Wedding Cake.
Mooching shoes: Today Ireland is one of Europe’s wealthiest countries. But it used to be one of the poorest. Mooching shoes were dirty old shoes specially worn when asking merchants or banks for extra time to pay an overdue bill.
Hogger: Someone who mooches drinks off others. Originally referred to indigent alcoholics who drank the dregs out of empty Guinness barrels, or “hogsheads,” left outside Dublin pubs for collection and refilling.
In a rat: In a bad mood.
Rodney: A twit.
Petty: Outhouse. From the French petit, or “little,” referring to the little house out back behind the main house.
How’s your granny for slack? A stock pickup line used by Dublin lads who were too shy to say anything else to girls they were interested in.
Shuggly-shoe: A seesaw.
Swimmers and bricks: Fish and chips.
Tickle-the-bricks: A sneaky person (they step very lightly).
Black dog: An unpaid bill; dates back to the days when pub tabs were written in chalk on slate blackboards.
Chairwheeze: A fart.
Geezer: A cat.
Child: In some parts of Ireland, the word child refers only to females. It’s not uncommon to hear someone asking of an infant, “Is it a boy or a child?”
Spadger: Little boy; from the slang term for “sparrow.”
Mot: A girlfriend.
Shed a tear for Ireland: To pee.
It is rumored that Napoleon owned a pair of spider-silk gloves.
LIFE IMITATES ART
Countless movies and TV shows are inspired by real-life events. But when real-life events are inspired by fiction, that’s when Uncle John takes notice.
ON THE SCREEN: In the TV sitcom Seinfeld, actor John O’Hurley portrayed J. Peterman, owner of the J. Peterman Catalog, for 21 episodes (1995–98).
IN REAL LIFE: In 1998 the real J. Peterman Catalog was in financial trouble and headed for bankruptcy. Desperate, the catalog company’s owner (the real J. Peterman) called O’Hurley for help. The actor funneled money into it, and within a year, the company was again turning a profit. The J. Peterman Catalog now has two owners: the real J. Peterman and John O’Hurley, the TV J. Peterman.
ON THE STAGE: Tim Owens, lead singer for British Steel, a Judas Priest tribute band in Pennsylvania
IN REAL LIFE: Judas Priest had been without a lead singer for five years in 1996 when Christa Lentine, girlfriend of drummer Scott Travis, happened to see a British Steel show in a small nightclub in Erie, Pennsylvania. She videotaped the performance and showed it to the band, and they immediately flew Owens to London for an audition. After singing just one verse of one song, he got the job. Owens went on to record four albums with Judas Priest.
ON THE SCREEN: In a 1999 episode of The Simpsons, Homer invents “tomacco,” a horrible-tasting, highly addictive hybrid of tobacco and tomatoes.
IN REAL LIFE: Inspired by the episode, Rob Baur of Lake Oswego, Oregon, did some research on tobacco and tomatoes, both members of the nightshade plant family. He then successfully grafted a tomato plant onto tobacco roots. Result: real-life tomacco. The plant even bore fruit that looked like regular tomatoes. But although tests on the fruit revealed no nicotine, Baur wouldn’t eat them. One tomacco fruit was destroyed for testing, one was given to the Simpsons writers, and one was sold on eBay.
Nothing to sniff about: You will have lost 20% of your sense of smell by the age of 20.
DUSTBIN OF HISTORY: AL GROSS
We recently came across the story of this unknown pioneer of modern communication. Who was he? Let’s put it this way: if you can talk into it and it isn’t plugged into a wall, thank Al Gross.
FDR’S REQUEST
Not long after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt summoned William Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA), to make a complaint. Winston Churchill always seemed to have more accurate, up-to-date information on the war than he did, Roosevelt explained. Churchill got his intelligence directly from spies behind enemy lines, but FDR had to wait for information to filter up through the chain of command. The president wanted Donovan to do something about it.
Donovan had recently read an article about a 23-year-old man named Al Gross who had invented a portable two-way radio with a range of several miles. Donovan thought Gross’s “walkie-talkies” or something like them might help solve the president’s problem. He arranged to meet Gross and get a demonstration.
Gross had been fascinated by radio since childhood and had built amateur, or “ham,” radios out of parts he scrounged from junkyards. In those days ham radios were bulky—as big as today’s microwave ovens—and too heavy to carry, and Gross didn’t like being stuck inside the house every time he wanted to talk to other hams. It took two years of tinkering, but in 1938 he finally managed to build one small enough to hold in his hand.
Four years later, when Gross demonstrated the device to Donovan, the OSS chief came away so impressed that he hired Gross on the spot, gave him the rank of captain, and set him to work building radios that American spies could use behind enemy lines.
JOAN AND ELEANOR
The first thing Gross did was take a trip in a high-altitude bomber over Nazi-occupied Europe. The bomber was loaded with radio scanning equipment, and as Gross studied the radio traffic he realized the Germans didn’t have any equipment that worked on frequencies above 180 megahertz. So he came up with a system—codenamed “Joan-Eleanor”—that operated at 250 MHz and was composed of two kinds of radios: “Joan,” a small walkie-talkie that spies could easily conceal, and “Eleanor,” an enormous radio built into the belly of the high-altitude bombers that regularly flew over enemy territory.
Only 2% of the immigrants who were processed through Ellis Island were turned away.
The Joan and Eleanor radios had a range of more than 30 miles, which meant that spies operating behind enemy lines could talk to a bomber flying overhead for as long as 15 minutes. And because the Germans didn’t have the technology to detect the radio traffic or listen in, the spies could use plain English instead of speaking in code. That meant that as soon as the bomber was back on the ground, the information could be sent on its way to President Roosevelt without having to be deciphered first. The radios even saved on training time, since people could be sent into the field without having to master secret codes.
LIFESAVERS
Joan-Eleanor was a huge success: The Germans never intercepted any of the radio signals and didn’t even know that such high-frequency radios existed. FDR got the intelligence he wanted, and the radios helped shorten the war, saving hundreds of thousands of lives in the process. The spy radios were a highly classified secret—so secret, in fact, that Vice President Harry Truman did not learn of their existence until he became president following FDR’s death in 1945. Joan and Eleanor radios weren’t declassified until 1976.
Gross also aided the war effort by inventing another kind of radio—a one-way device that received signals but could not transmit them. It was used to detonate bombs. Operatives would hide explosives under bridges, and then an aircraft flying overhead would transmit a radio signal to the receiver, causing it to detonate the bomb. As many as 600 bridges were destroyed using Gross’s invention—another huge contribution to the war effort.
Both of Gross’s wartime inventions
later found peaceful uses. Just before the war ended, Ewell K. Jett, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, asked for a demonstration of the Joan-Eleanor radios. He was so impressed with the idea of portable radio communications that he created the Citizens Radio Service Frequency Band in 1946. After the war Al Gross founded a company that manufactured the first radios approved by the FCC for use on the “citizen’s band”—the first CB radios. (He was the first person to receive a CB license.)
President Herbert Hoover owned a dog named King Tut.
THE OTHER RADIO
It took a little longer for the bomb-detonator radio to find a peacetime application. That idea came to Gross after he spent time in the hospital and got tired of hearing doctors and nurses being paged over a loud intercom. He reworked his radio so that when it received a radio signal, it would make a beeping sound, alerting the wearer that he was being paged—the world’s first wireless pager.
Gross patented the pager in 1949 and the following year set up a paging system in New York City’s Jewish Hospital, certain that the medical world would be quick to embrace it. He was wrong: Doctors worried that beeping pagers would frighten patients during working hours, and disrupt golf games and other leisure activities during their off-hours. And nurses balked at having to wear the bulky receivers on their uniforms. Gross eventually put the pager aside and moved on to other projects; in the meantime, an outside company licensed the technology and used it to make the first automatic garage door openers.
AHEAD OF HIS TIME
Throughout the 1950s, Gross made repeated attempts to interest AT&T in his radios. The technology, he explained, would free telephones from having to be connected to the wall. People could make calls from anywhere in their homes or offices. But the phone company wasn’t interested in cordless phones. He explained how CBs could be integrated into the telephone system, so that people would be able to make phone calls outdoors or even from their cars. The phone company wasn’t interested in cellular phones either. Gross explained that his hospital pagers could be integrated into the system, too, so that people could reach someone even if they weren’t near a phone, just by dialing a special number for the pager. Again the phone company said no.
Spread the news: August 2 is National Mustard Day.
What could he do? In those days AT&T had a monopoly on phone lines in America, so if they weren’t interested, that was pretty much the end of the story. Gross couldn’t get other companies to bite because they were afraid that AT&T would sue to stop them from using alien equipment on its phone system. Reluctantly, Gross gave up on the phone company and focused his attention on other things.
About the only person who showed an early interest in Gross’s ideas was Chester Gould, the cartoonist who wrote the Dick Tracy comic strip. During a visit to Gross’s workshop in 1947, Gould saw a demonstration of a wireless microphone that could be worn on the wrist; the following year Dick Tracy started wearing his famous two-way wrist TV.
SIGNING OFF
If Al Gross had an unlucky number, it must have been 17, because his patents were only good for 17 years. After that, anyone could use his inventions without paying him a penny. His last radio patent expired in 1971—just in time for him to miss out on the communications revolution that his inventions made possible. The first successful consumer pager was introduced by Motorola in 1974; 20 years later, 61 million people around the world owned pagers. Their popularity only began to decline after the next invention based on Gross’s patents, the cellular phone, became affordable enough for the general public. And cordless phones now outnumber corded phones. But he didn’t make a penny off of that one, either.
After a lifetime of work, Gross had made more than enough money to retire, but he never did. He preferred to keep on tinkering, and spent his last years designing missile systems at an Arizona company called Orbital Sciences Corp. He kept on working until shortly before his death from cancer in 2000 at the age of 82, and somehow he managed not to be bitter about having missed out on the electronics boom. “I was born 35 years too soon,” he liked to joke. Indeed, the sight of so many pagers, cordless phones, and cell phones in use thrilled him. “It makes me feel good,” he said, “like I’ve had a part in the world.”
Yet he never did get a cell phone of his own. “I go to the office and my wife calls me on the phone there,” he told a reporter in 1998. “Why do I need one?”
Leonardo da Vinci invented an alarm clock that woke him by rubbing his feet.
GOT YOUR EARS ON, COME ON?
Some more of our favorite expressions from the golden age of CB radio.
Tin can: a CB radio.
Kojak with a Kodak: a State trooper with a radar gun. (Kojak was a 1970s TV detective.)
Breaker, breaker: What you say when you need to interrupt routine conversation to say something important, like when there’s a Kojak with a Kodak up ahead.
Come on: I’m done talking and am waiting for your reply.
Put the hammer down: Step on the gas pedal; floor it.
Hammer lane: fast lane or passing lane.
Sandwich lane: middle lane.
Granny lane: slow lane.
Dream weaver: a sleepy driver who’s weaving in and out of their lane of traffic.
Roller skate: a car.
Pregnant roller skate: a Volkswagen Beetle.
Barbershop: a low overpass.
Draggin’ wagon: a tow truck.
Pickle park: a highway rest stop.
Good buddy: Used to mean “friend”; now it means “homosexual.”
Good neighbor: What you call your good buddies now that “good buddy” means homosexual.
Got your ears on?: Are you listening?
Seat cover: a good-looking woman in a vehicle.
Bumper sticker: a car that’s following way too close.
Hole in the wall: a tunnel.
Bird dog: radar detector.
Bear bait: a reckless trucker who’s driving fast without a bird dog to spot the Kojaks with the Kodaks.
We gone: Bye-bye!
Buzzards are legally classified as songbirds in Ohio.
CREATIVE CROOKING
Kudos to the cops who caught these clever crooks.
BAR CODES TO PRISON STRIPES
Twin brothers Justin and Nicholas Chitwood were arrested after a year-long investigation into their bar-code swapping scheme at Target stores all over Wisconsin. The two men would cover up the bar codes on items that cost about $150 with fake codes that put their cost at less than $10, buy them, and then sell them on eBay. They sold about $15,000 worth of items before they were caught. “The photocopying and sticking the new UPC sticker over the old ones is unique,” said Detective Barry Waddell. “I’ve never seen this before.” The two were charged with conspiracy, theft, and computer crime, and face 28 years in prison.
FOOL PIGEONS
Police in the state of West Bengal, India, uncovered a bizarre robbery scheme when truck drivers reported being robbed of their cargo…after seeing ghosts. Drivers reported that they’d seen strange lights flying around their trucks while driving on remote highways. The sight disturbed them so much that they stopped their trucks and fled. On returning, they’d find the trucks empty. An investigation took the mystery out of the story: A gang of highway bandits was creating the “ghosts” with trained pigeons. They strapped battery-operated red lamps to the birds and released them before approaching trucks. “In the darkness of the night, all the drivers see are red lights flying all around,” said a police official. “And being superstitious, most of them flee, leaving their consignments at the mercy of bandits.” Undercover officers patrolling the highways caught several of the bandits (and their pigeons).
FISH STORY
In April 2006, someone reported to Fish and Wildlife officers that they’d found something odd at Lake Barkley in Kentucky: a basket containing five live bass, tied to a dock just below the waterline. That aroused the suspicion of the officers, who knew that a fishing tournament wa
s scheduled at the lake that weekend. So they marked the fishes’ fins and watched the site. Sure enough, on Saturday morning a boat pulled up, retrieved the stashed fish, and left. The boat belonged to two Kentuckians—Dwayne Nesmith, 43, and Brian Thomas, 31—who were registered in the tournament. The officers posed as staff and were at the weigh-in when Nesmith and Thomas dropped off the marked fish. They didn’t win anything (they were just ounces shy of earning prize money), so when the officers identified themselves the two could only be charged with misdemeanors. But an investigation revealed that Nesmith and Thomas had entered other tournaments as well—and had been uncannily lucky in them, netting thousands of dollars in prizes and even winning a $30,000 boat. The fishy fishing buddies were charged with 10 felony counts of theft and face several years in prison.
Loony law: In Wilbur, Washington, you can be fined for riding an ugly horse.
YOU ARE FEELING VERRRRY GENEROUS
Police in the Eastern European nation of Moldova reported in 2005 that they were on the lookout for a robber who hypnotized bank clerks. The hypno-thief was identified as 49-year-old Vladimir Kozak, a trained hypnotist from Russia. Police said Kozak would start a conversation with a teller, make eye contact, and put the teller into a hypnotic trance. He would then have the teller hand over all the money in the till. Kozak’s total haul: nearly $40,000 (one clerk in the city of Chisinau reportedly handed over more than $12,000). Police put wanted posters with Kozak’s face around the nation…but warned bank clerks not to make eye contact with it.
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SOME REALLY, REALLY, REALLY BAD PUNS
• A fisherman accidentally got some vinegar in his ear, and now suffers from pickled hearing.
Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader Page 32