American kids make about $8.6 million per year in allowance.
Honoree: Monica Bonvicini, an Italian artist
Notable Achievement: Turning a toilet into “performance art”
True Story: In December 2003, Bonvicini had a stainless-steel toilet installed on the sidewalk across the street from the Tate Britain, a national museum in London. Then she had it enclosed in a cubicle made entirely of one-way glass, and opened it to the public. Result: People using the toilet can see out, but people outside can’t see in—it looks like a big mirrored cube stuck in the middle of the sidewalk. Of course anyone inside has the feeling of doing their business right out in the open.
“It will arouse curiosity,” says a spokesperson for the art project. “People can just come and use it, although there is a question of whether they will feel comfortable doing so.”
Honoree: Chien (Taiwan’s TVBS cable network isn’t releasing his full name.)
Notable Achievement: Getting fired for poor marksmanship
True Story: In October 2003, Chien received a letter of dismissal from his company. Reason: When answering the call of nature, Chien routinely missed the urinal. According to the letter, cleaning ladies complained repeatedly about his poor aim, so he was let go. (No word on how the cleaning ladies knew that he was the one responsible.) Chien doesn’t buy a word of it. “The company had planned to lay off a number of employees,” he told TVBS. “This was just an excuse to dismiss me.”
FIVE REAL PLACES TO SPEND YOUR NEXT HOLIDAY
1. Christmas Valley, Oregon
2. Easter, Texas
3. Passover, Missouri
4. New Years Lake, Idaho
5. Valentine, Texas
Survey says: 95% of us put our left sock on first.
THE RISE AND DEMISE OF ULYSSES S. GRANT
You’ve seen Grant on the $50 bill; you know that he was a president and also the general who won the Civil War. Here are some things you probably didn’t know about him.
SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS
In 1839 an Ohio tanner named Jesse Grant managed to obtain an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy for his son, Ulysses. Ulysses wasn’t the slightest bit interested in a military career, but Jesse didn’t think his son had much of a head for business. West Point was free, and it offered Ulysses his best chance for a good education. So off he went.
Ulysses graduated from West Point in 1843, fought in the Mexican War, and remained in the military until 1854, when he resigned and became a civilian again.
Ulysses promptly proved his father’s suspicions correct: he had no head for business. He took up farming and failed at it; then got a job in real estate and failed at that, too. By 1860 Grant, a graduate of West Point, was back working as a clerk in his father’s store. He was 37, and a failure. But the Civil War was about to save him.
The first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861. The fort fell to the Confederacy the following day, prompting President Abraham Lincoln to call for troops. Grant returned to the army and was quickly promoted to brigadier general. “Be careful, Ulyss, you are a general now,” Jesse Grant wrote him after learning of the promotion. “It’s a good job, don’t lose it!”
ITCHING FOR A FIGHT
In the early months of the war Grant was assigned mostly defensive tasks, but he wanted to go on the offensive. In February 1862 he won approval for a plan to attack two key Confederate strongholds: Fort Henry, on the Tennessee River, and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland. Grant, with 17,000 troops and the assistance of gun-boats commanded by Commodore Andrew Foote, planned to attack the forts.
This page is about 500,000 atoms thick.
Fort Henry fell after just a few hours of fighting; the attack on Fort Donelson began a week later and raged for two days. By February 15, defeat was imminent.
As was the custom in 19th-century warfare, the fort’s commander, General Simon Bolivar Buckner, sent a message to Grant proposing a truce so that the two men could negotiate terms of surrender. Buckner had served with Grant in the Mexican War and had even lent him money, but if he was expecting generous terms from his old friend, he was soon rebuked. Grant’s reply was swift and blunt: “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted.” Buckner, complaining that he had no choice but “to accept the ungenerous and unchivalrous terms,” gave in.
Capturing the two forts marked the first major Union victories in the war, and turned “Unconditional Surrender” Grant, as his admirers nicknamed him, into a national figure. He was promoted to major general. And “purely by accidental circumstance,” as Grant himself later put it, the campaign caused him to pick up the habit that would eventually claim his life—cigars.
THE SPOILS OF WAR
Up to this point, Grant had smoked a pipe, but only occasionally. When Commodore Andrew Foote was wounded in the assault on Fort Donelson, he asked Grant to confer with him aboard his ship, and offered him a cigar. Grant was still smoking it on his way back to his headquarters when a staff officer informed him that Confederate soldiers were attacking. Grant recalled in 1865:
I galloped forward at once, and while riding among the troops giving the directions for repulsing the assault I carried the cigar in my hand. It had gone out, but it seems that I continued to hold the stump between my fingers throughout the battle. In the accounts published in the papers I was represented as smoking a cigar in the midst of the conflict; and many persons, thinking, no doubt, that tobacco was my chief solace, sent me boxes of the choicest brands from everywhere in the North. As many as 10,000 were soon received. I gave away all I could get rid of, but having such a quantity in hand, I naturally smoked more than I would have done under ordinary circumstances, and I have continued the habit ever since.
Betamax VCRs were commercially available until 2002.
STILL SMOKIN’
Inundated with free cigars, Grant was soon addicted. In March 1864, he was promoted to lieutenant general and given command of all the Union armies. By then he was smoking his first cigar of the day right after breakfast as he stuffed the pockets of his uniform with another two dozen. When he accepted General Robert E. Lee’s surrender in 1865, Grant was still puffing away. And after the war the gifts of free cigars and related paraphernalia—ashtrays, cigar holders, cigar stands, and so on—only increased.
Even in those days people had an idea that smoking was unhealthy, and in 1866 Grant tried to cut back on the stogies. “I am breaking off from smoking,” he told a newspaper reporter. “When I was in the field I smoked eighteen or twenty cigars a day, but now I smoke only nine or ten.” (One large cigar can contain as much tobacco as an entire pack of cigarettes.) Grant was elected president in 1868 and reelected in 1872. He smoked his way through both terms; though he still tried to quit on occasion, he never managed to cut back much.
WHAT GOES AROUND...
Grant was still smoking heavily in the summer of 1884 when he experienced throat pain while eating a peach. Doctors found a small cancerous growth in the soft palate of his mouth; at the time of discovery it may still have been small enough to be surgically removed, but by the time Grant got around to having it treated in the fall, the mass had grown to the point that it was inoperable.
Grant struggled with the disease for about a year before dying on July 23, 1885. The man who never wanted a military career and never smoked more than an occasional pipe before the Civil War, died a war hero...from smoking.
WHERE THERE’S A WILL
•The world’s longest will was 95,000 words and took more than 20 years to complete.
•The world’s smallest will was written on the back of a postage stamp. It included the required signatures of two witnesses.
Let it be: One of every three insects in the world is a beetle.
JACKIE CHAN’S GREATEST HITS
He’s one of the greatest action stars of all time. And what’s most amazing is that he does his own stunts. So how does he do all that fighting and perform all thos
e daredevil feats without getting injured? He doesn’t—he’s been injured dozens of times.
Here’s a sample of what you (almost) never see.
Body Part: Head
The Movie: Armour of God (1987)
The Stunt: Jumping from a castle wall to a tree, Chan missed the branch and fell headfirst onto the rocky ground below. Result: a broken skull and a brain hemorrhage. With blood pouring from his ears, Chan was rushed to the nearest hospital for emergency brain surgery. He now has a permanent hole in his skull, filled with a plastic plug. The same fall shattered his jaw, knocked out some teeth, and broke his nose.
Body Part: Arm
The Movie: Snake in Eagle’s Shadow (1978)
The Stunt: In a sword fight scene, his opponent’s sword was supposed to be blunt—but it wasn’t. Chan’s arm was slashed and blood went everywhere. He screamed in pain, looked up at his opponent in surprise...and kept right on fighting. The camera kept rolling, and the scene—and the real blood—appeared in the final cut of the film.
Body Part: Neck
The Movie: Mr. Nice Guy (1997)
The Stunt: A stunt called for Chan to be pushed backward into a wheelbarrow on the second floor of a construction site, then fall out of the wheelbarrow to the ground two stories below, where he would land on mats that were out of camera range. Chan missed the mats: He jumped up to let everybody know that he was okay, then immediately passed out. X-rays revealed torn ligaments and dislocated vertebrae in his neck. (He broke his nose filming another scene.)
The combined area of the entire United Kingdom is smaller than the state of Oregon.
Body Part: Nose
The Movie: First Strike (1996)
The Stunt: You’d think this would have happened during one of the film’s snowboarding stunts—considering Chan did them with only four days of snowboard training. But it was actually in a scene where he jumped through an extension ladder. He got tangled in the rungs and couldn’t escape before it crashed to the ground, breaking his nose and knocking him unconscious.
Body Part: Shoulder
The Movie: Supercop (1992)
The Stunt: One of his most dangerous stunts ever. Chan had to jump from a building and catch a rope ladder that was hanging from a passing helicopter—with no air bags or cushions below him to break the possible 100-foot fall. Did he fall? No—but the rope ladder crashed through several billboards, breaking Chan’s shoulder.
Body Part: Ankle
The Movie: Rumble in the Bronx (1994)
The Stunt: Chan jumped from a bridge onto the deck of a hover-craft, turning his body as he landed to avoid hitting a wall. But his ankle didn’t turn with him. It stayed planted on the craft’s non-slip deck, breaking in two places. Chan’s doctor set the bone and told him to stay off it, but Chan put a sock over the cast, painted it to look like a sneaker, and finished the movie.
Body Parts: Hands, pelvis, back
The Movie: Police Story (1985)
The Stunt: Chan leaped 10 feet from a narrow handrail (70 feet above the ground) to a nearby pole, slid down the pole, then crashed through a glass ceiling and fell to the ground on his back. The slide peeled the skin off his hands (he was treated for second-degree burns), and the fall dislocated his pelvis and pushed several of his lower vertebrae into the surrounding organs, causing internal bleeding. When he managed to stand up, blood gushed from his mouth. Chan later told reporters that this was the only time in his career when he actually thought he might not survive a stunt. A few hours later he was back on the set.
Modern bowling comes from the German game of heidenwerfen, which translates to “strike down the heathens.”
THE DIGITAL AGE
Uncle John’s brother Stumpy’s advice: Be careful where you stick your fingers!
NO RETURN
When 46-year-old Emanuel Fleming of East St. Louis, Illinois, lost 50 cents in a pay phone, he stuck his middle finger in the coin return slot and tried to get it back. Not only did he not get his change back, he almost didn’t get his finger back. He tried calling his wife, but the line was busy. Two passersby tried to help him, to no avail. He finally called 911, but fire department and ambulance crews couldn’t free him either—so they cut off the entire pay phone and drove Fleming (together with the phone) to the hospital. ER doctors gave him a painkiller, put on some lubricant, and finally freed his finger. Another painful part of the four-hour ordeal: the phone was near a busy bus stop. The embarrassed Fleming recalled, “People on the bus who know me were laughing at me.”
GAS ATTACK
In July 2000, a Danish woman traveling in Germany stopped at a gas station near Hannover. For some reason, after she filled up she put her finger in the fuel tank flap...and got it stuck. The station attendant couldn’t free her, so he called the police. The police couldn’t help, so they called the fire department...who called in paramedics...who couldn’t free the finger either. Finally a mechanic stopped to help. He spent an hour removing the gas tank and filler pipe, then took them, the woman still attached, to a doctor. Luckily, the doctor was in and managed to get the finger out.
THE MACHINE FIGHTS BACK
Two 15-year-old boys were trying to steal candy bars from a vending machine in Melbourne, Australia, when one of them got his thumb stuck. Unable to free the digit, the boys finally gave up and called the police. It took 10 cops and rescue workers an hour to get the thumb loose...after which the lad was immediately arrested.
ANOTHER GAS ATTACK
In 1994 Sergeant Arnie Ziegler of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police answered a call from a TV station in Oliver, British Columbia, saying there was a thief in the parking lot. Sergeant Ziegler arrested 24-year-old Hugo Murdock—but couldn’t take him directly to jail. Murdock had been busy stealing gas from a van when his siphoning hose got stuck. He used his pinky finger to free it—and the finger got stuck, too. “The fire department had to push the van out of the parking lot with the guy attached so they could work on him,” Ziegler reported. They removed the gas tank pipe and took it (and Murdock) to a hospital, where doctors freed his pinky and handed him back to the police. “The guy was pretty embarrassed,” said Ziegler. “He said, ‘I think this is gonna be the end of my criminal career.’”
RING OF POWER
A seven-year-old Welsh boy named Joel Withey found a small copper ring in his dad’s toolbox in January 2003. It was a compression device commonly used by plumbers to seal pipes, but Joel thought it looked like the ring from The Lord of the Rings. He and his younger brothers had been acting out scenes from the film The Two Towers, and the ring seemed perfect. Once he put it on, though, he couldn’t get it off. His finger swelled up and his parents eventually took him to a local fire station, where they cut it off (the ring, not the finger). Joel’s father decided to keep the ring to teach the boy a lesson. “We’ve kept Joel’s ring in a jar,” he said, “to show to his girlfriends and embarrass him when he grows up.”
MUNCHING MANCHAS
In 2004 employees of the Rio Grande Zoo in Albuquerque, New Mexico, found a finger on the ground next to the jaguar cage. One of the staff remembered seeing a man the day before running into the bathroom with his hand in his pocket and a dark stain on his pants. The man was a member of the zoo and a daily visitor, so they called him and asked if perhaps he was missing a finger. He said he wasn’t. But police weren’t convinced. They got a print from the finger, and it was a match. Apparently the man had been trying to pet the jaguar, whose name is Manchas. Officials didn’t press charges, saying that losing a finger was punishment enough, but the zoo barred him from ever coming back.
Hey, technophiles! What was the first domain name ever registered? Symbolics.com
HAPPY EOSTRE!
Ever wonder why a sacred Christian holiday is celebrated with candy, baskets, and a bunny? Wonder no more.
THE HOLIDAY: Easter comes from Eostre, a pagan festival. Before Christianity, early Germans held an annual celebration in honor of Eostre, goddess of spring and fertility. As Chri
stianity spread across Europe in the first and second centuries, the Church often modified or adopted pagan holidays. Because Eostre was the goddess of spring and her festival celebrated renewal and rebirth, the Church’s belief in Christ’s resurrection made for a good match.
THE EASTER BUNNY: Rabbits breed notoriously quickly. Eostre’s association with fertility led to her frequent depiction with a rabbit’s head. But the concept of an Easter Bunny originated with the Germans, who settled in Pennsylvania when they emigrated to the United States in the 1700s. Their “Pennsylvania Dutch” children believed that if they were well-behaved, the Oschter Haws (literally, “Easter rabbit”) would leave a nest of brightly colored eggs on Easter morning. The idea began to catch on nationwide after the Civil War.
Some countries don’t have the Easter Bunny. Switzerland has the “Easter cuckoo,” while Australia has the “Easter bilby,” a marsupial with rabbitlike ears. (Rabbits aren’t native to Australia—they were imported in the mid-1800s and destroyed thousands of acres of crops, so they’re not considered a symbol of growth.)
EASTER EGGS: In a folktale, Eostre turns her pet bird into a rabbit to entertain some children. The rabbit performs a trick: it lays colorful eggs. Eggs are also a common symbol of rebirth in many ancient cultures, including those of Egypt, Persia, China, Gaul, and Rome.
The first concrete historical association of colored eggs with Easter is in the 1200s, when English servants were given painted eggs by their masters as Easter gifts. Today, different countries have different egg-coloring traditions:
•Greece: They’re painted red to symbolize Christ’s shed blood.
Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader Page 8