Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader
Page 26
•559 B.C. The Persian Empire is founded by Cyrus the Great, with Zoroastrianism as its main religion.
•509 B.C. The Romans conquer southern Italy and start a republic largely based on Athenian democracy. The Adena and Hopewell farming-based civilizations begin on the Ohio River in North America; they are known today for their pottery, elaborate burial rituals, dome-shaped mounds, and large-scale corn cultivation. Nok culture thrives in Nigeria, producing sculpture and iron works, and establishing an iconic style that remains evident in African art today. Europe’s Iron Age begins.
•469 B.C. The philosopher Socrates is born in Athens.
•440 B.C. Greece is becoming an empire, with Athens as its capital. The reign of Emperor Pericles leads to a golden age of arts, culture, and government. The Celts, a tribe from northern Italy, dominate the British Isles.
•400 B.C. The site of London is first inhabited. Plato writes The Republic. Ice cream (usually credited to China) is invented.
Ellis Island processed 445,987 immigrants during its first year in service.
•338 B.C. Alexander the Great, king of Macedonia, conquers the Greek city-states and expands the Greek empire to Egypt, southern Europe, and northern India, spreading Greek culture and knowledge along the way. He builds the city of Alexandria on the Egyptian coast and commissions its library. The city will become the economic and cultural hub of Asia, Africa, and Europe, and will house the world’s first university.
•300 B.C. The Greek mathematician Euclid writes Elements, considered one of the most important books on mathematics ever written.
•260 B.C. The first gladiator contests are held by the Romans, who now rule most of modern-day Italy. The Indian ruler Ashoka converts to Buddhism, spurring its spread through Asia. The first overland trade routes develop between China and India; they will soon become part of the Silk Road, connecting the goods, innovations, and philosophies of the Far East and Europe. Gunpowder is invented in China.
•220 B.C. Qin Shih Huang-di unites China for the first time and becomes emperor; work begins on the Great Wall of China (to keep out the Mongolians). Carthaginian commander Hannibal leads his army (and elephants) across the Mediterranean, Spain, and the Alps to attack the Romans. New technology: the Chinese invent the compass, leading to safer travel and improved mapmaking.
•146 B.C. Rome conquers Greece.
•87 B.C. Babylonians make the first record of Halley’s Comet. Glassblowing is invented by the Phoenicians, greatly increasing the production and use of glassware.
•54 B.C. General Julius Caesar conquers Gaul (central and northern Europe) for the Romans. Upon returning to Rome, he declares himself dictator.
•51 B.C. Land trade routes are now firmly established between the Far East and West. Cleopatra becomes queen of Egypt. She will be the last pharaoh.
And then what happened? Turn to page 345.
Genghis Khan killed his brother in an argument over a fish.
THE TALENTED MISS AMERICA
The Miss America pageant added the talent portion to the contest in 1935. Most contestants sing or dance, but some display more unusual skills.
1943: Joan Hyldoft (Miss Ohio) planned an ice skating routine. They built a small rink for her but left it out in the sun and it melted before the pageant began. She had to perform the routine on a bare concrete floor.
1949: Carol Fraser (Miss Montana) rode a horse onto the stage to perform an equestrian routine. The horse stumbled and almost fell into the orchestra pit. Animal acts have been banned ever since.
1957: Marian McKnight’s (Miss South Carolina) talent: an impersonation of Marilyn Monroe. (She won.)
1958: Mary Ann Mobley (Miss Mississippi) sang an aria, which turned into a burlesque routine, including a striptease. She only got down to shorts and a slip, but disrobing was banned from any future acts. (She won, too.)
1959: Lynda Mead (Miss Mississippi) became Miss America performing a dramatic recitation about schizophrenia.
1962: Mary Lee Jepsen (Miss Nebraska) accidentally threw a flaming baton into the judges’ pit, leading to a ban on pyrotechnics. (She lost.)
1967: Jane Jayroe (Miss Oklahoma) won the crown by conducting the Miss America orchestra.
1995: Heather Whitestone (Miss Alabama) won after performing a ballet piece. What’s unusual about that? She’s deaf—she took her cues from the vibrations coming through the stage from the orchestra.
2000: Theresa Uchytil’s (Miss Iowa) talent was a flashy baton twirling act. Lots of Miss Americas do baton-twirling. What made hers so impressive? Uchytil was born without a left hand.
Other actual “talents:”
•Properly packing a suitcase.
•Stomping on broken glass.
•Driving a tractor.
•Telling a fishing story with a Norwegian accent.
Uranus spins on its side.
ANIMAL LIFE SPANS
Did you ever wonder how long a hippopotamus lives on average? Or a butterfly? Or an ant? Well, neither did we...until BRI member Phyllis Stein came up with this fascinating list.
Platypus: 10–15 years
Garter Snake: 8 years
Deer: 10–15 years
Dragonfly: 1–4 weeks
Coyote: 14 years
Irish Wolfhound: 6 years
Duck: 10 years
Cow (Farm raised): 5–7 years
Cow (Free range): 18–22 years
Manatee: 60 years
Hippopatumus: 30 years
Daddy-longlegs: 2–3 years
Groundhog: 4–9 years
Sheep: 12 years
Monarch butterfly (Summer bred): 4–6 weeks
Monarch butterfly (Winter bred): 7–8 months
Elephant (Wild): 50–60 years
Elephant (Zoo): 15–20 years
Horse: 20–25 years
Kangaroo: 4–6 years
Sturgeon: 80 years
Chihuahua: 16 years
Oyster: 6 years
Giant tortoise: 150 years
Guinea pig (Wild): 3 years
Guinea pig (Pet): 12 years
Cat: 11 years
Mouse: 2 years
Rabbit: 6–8 years
Honeybee: 30 days
Earthworm: 4–8 years
Squirrel: 8–9 years
Horseshoe bat: 17 years
Alligator: 35–50 years
Tarantula (Female): 25–30 years
Tarantula (Male): 5–7 years
Carpenter ant: 5–7 years
Black crocodile: 75 years
Caribou: 5–8 years
Bullfrog: 7–9 years
Polar bear: 25–30 years
Rattlesnake: 20–25 years
Pig: 10 years
Giant paa-aa-aa-ndas bleat like sheep.
THE ZOMBIE QUIZ
Most people have seen so many vampire movies they’d know what to do if attacked by a vampire: hold up a cross, pound a wooden stake into its heart, yada yada yada. But what if you were attacked by a zombie? Take this quiz...while there’s still time. Answers are on page 516.
1. What is a zombie?
a) Someone possessed by the devil.
b) Someone who’s been given the evil eye by a gypsy.
c) A tropical drink containing lime, pineapple, and papaya juice, and four kinds of rum.
d) A dead person come back to life, with an insatiable hunger for human flesh.
2. How does a person become a zombie?
a) Have a few of those four-kinds-of-rum drinks, wander out into traffic, and crash! You’re a zombie.
b) Do you know how it feels to flip through 300 channels and still find nothing on TV? Do it long enough and Zap! You’re a zombie.
c) By getting bitten or killed by another zombie. (No word on where the very first zombie, the “alpha zombie” came from.)
d) Ask your mother—it’s not Uncle John’s place to tell you about the zombie birds and the zombie bees.
3. What do zombies drink?
a) Zombies.
b) Water.
c) Half decaf, half regular nonfat double lattes, easy on the foam.
d) Nothing—zombies don’t drink.
4. How smart are zombies?
a) They’d be a lot smarter if they’d just lay off the zombies.
b) They have some intelligence but not much.
c) Except for shuffling around and eating humans, totally mindless.
d) Dumber than mindless. Typical zombie investment portfolio: Enron, Beanie Babies, assorted dot-com stocks.
Wrinkles have three main causes...the sun, gravity, and facial expression.
5. What is the average “life span” of a zombie?
a) Until the next full moon, when they will die.
b) Two weeks at the most.
c) Three to five years.
d) With enough human flesh to eat, they can live forever.
6. How strong are zombies?
a) Weak—like one of those zombie cocktails if you left out the rum.
b) As strong as when they were alive, just stiffer and slower.
c) Double the strength of a human being.
d) Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!
7. How do you kill a zombie?
a) Splash it with holy water.
b) Destroy its brain.
c) Feed it vegetarians—until it dies from malnutrition.
d) Tie it to a tree, then wait for the sun to come up and melt it.
8. What happens when you chop off a zombie’s head?
a) It’s dead. You win!
b) The head grows a new body; the body grows a new head. Nice going—now you’ve got two zombies to deal with.
c) The body is dead, but watch out for that head! It’s still alive, and if it gets a chance it’s going to bite you on the ankle.
d) Don’t let it go to waste: Smear it with peanut butter, roll it in peanuts, and hang it from a tree. Your zombie-head birdfeeder will add a festive atmosphere to your yard as it feeds birds all winter.
9. What’s the weapon of choice when trying to kill a zombie?
a) Hand grenade
b) Hatchet
c) Flamethrower
d) Rifle
10. How can you protect your pets from zombies?
a) Cats avoid zombies by instinct. As for the dog, add a new trick to its repertoire: 1) Sit! 2) Fetch! 3) Get away from that zombie!
b) Bathe your pets once a month with flea, tick, and zombie soap.
c) Dress them in little zombie costumes (zombies don’t eat zombies).
d) Don’t worry, zombies don’t care about pets—they only eat humans.
Smile! The Mentawai tribe of Indonesia file their teeth into sharp points.
THE KING OF KUNG FU
Bruce Lee only finished four films in his lifetime, but many martial arts movie fans still consider them the best kung fu movies ever made. Here’s a look at the man behind the myth.
FIGHT CLUB
In 1958 a bunch of Hong Kong teenagers who studied a style of martial art known as choy li fut challenged another group of teens, who studied a style known as wing chun, to a fight. Fights like this were fairly common in Hong Kong—the kids would go up on the roof of a local apartment building, pair off, and spar with each other until one fighter forced his opponent over a white line painted on the roof.
But this fight was different—it turned ugly when one of the choy li fut kids punched one of the wing chun kids, Lee Jun Fan, in the face and gave him a black eye. Lee Jun Fan (better known by his English name, Bruce Lee) flew into a rage and gave his opponent quite a beating, even knocking out a tooth or two. When the kid’s parents saw what happened, they called the police. Bruce Lee’s mom got hauled down to the station and had to sign a paper stating that she would assume full responsibility—and possibly even go to jail—if her son misbehaved again.
COMING TO AMERICA
Fortunately for Bruce’s mom, her son had an option that most other Hong Kong teens didn’t: He had American citizenship. He’d been born in San Francisco while his parents were touring the United States with a Hong Kong opera company, so he was free to return to America at any time. And as Mrs. Lee saw it, that was probably the best place for him.
Bruce wasn’t much of a student—his bad grades and penchant for fighting had gotten him thrown out of more than one school—but even if he had been a good student, Hong Kong was still a British colony and nearly all the best job opportunities were set aside for the British kids. If Bruce stayed in Hong Kong, he’d likely end up on the streets, in jail, or dead. So, Mrs. Lee handed her 17-year-old son $100 and put him on a ship to San Francisco.
The game of marbles dates back to the Stone Age and is found in almost every culture.
Bruce spent a short time there, then moved to Seattle, where he enrolled in high school and went to work as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant. Bruce was a champion cha cha dancer as well as a student of the martial arts, and he gave dancing and kung fu lessons on the side. In time he dropped the dance lessons and focused on martial arts full time.
BACK TO BASICS
By 1964 Lee was 24, married, and running two of his own martial arts studios, one in Seattle and a second in Oakland, California. Several months after the Oakland studio opened, a martial arts instructor named Wong Jack Man from nearby San Francisco demanded that Lee stop teaching martial arts to non-Chinese gweilos or “foreign devils.” (In those days, many Chinese instructors were opposed to teaching anyone outside their own community.) If Lee refused, Wong Jack Man would challenge him to a fight, and if Lee lost he would either have to stop teaching martial arts to gweilos or close down his studio altogether.
Lee accepted, and then over the course of the next three minutes gave Wong Jack Man the beating of his life. Other fighters might have been content with such a victory, but Lee wasn’t—he figured he should have been able to drop Wong after the first couple of blows. The experience caused Lee to question his entire approach to martial arts. Until then he had been a devotee of the wing chun school of kung fu (he spelled it gung fu), but now he began to study all forms of martial arts, including fencing, Western-style boxing, and Greco-Roman wrestling, incorporating anything he thought was useful and discarding everything else.
NO NONSENSE
Lee had little interest in classical fighting stances, black belts, breaking boards with his fists, and other kung fu clichés. He just wanted to win fights, as quickly and as skillfully as possible. Everything else was fluff—or as he once put it, “ninety percent of Oriental self-defense is baloney.” Over the next two years, Lee developed his own stripped-down, back-to-basics style of fighting that he named jeet kune do, or “way of the intercepting fist.”
Meanwhile, Lee was also beginning to find work in Hollywood. In August 1964, he gave a demonstration at a martial arts exhibition in Long Beach, California. One person who saw his performance was Jay Sebring, a top Hollywood hair stylist who had a TV producer named William Dozier as a client. Dozier had produced The Tammy Grimes Show and Studio One, and his new show Batman would soon hit the airwaves. When Dozier mentioned that he was looking for an Asian actor to play the part of Charlie Chan’s “number-one son” in a new project, Sebring told him about Bruce Lee.
Mmm! There is a British beer called Old Fart.
BECOMING AN ACTOR
The Charlie Chan project never materialized, but when Batman became a smash hit, Dozier decided to follow up with a similar show called The Green Hornet. Dozier cast Bruce Lee as the Hornet’s Asian sidekick, Kato. Lee moved his family to Los Angeles, and in addition to working on the TV show, he began giving private martial arts lessons to celebrities such as James Coburn, Steve McQueen, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
The Green Hornet aired for only one season: it premiered in September 1966 and went off the air in July 1967. Lee earned good reviews for his performance, but it was difficult for an Asian actor to land big parts. Three years passed and his career went nowhere. Lee’s celebrity friends helped him l
and small roles in movies and TV shows, but they weren’t the kinds of jobs that would advance his career. He helped develop the TV series Kung Fu only to learn in 1971 that he’d lost the lead role to David Carradine, a white guy who didn’t know much about kung fu. Kung Fu’s producers felt that Carradine was a better choice for the role because he had the calm personality that they were looking for in Caine, but Lee’s chances were also hurt by the fear that if an Asian actor were cast in the lead, fewer people would watch the show.
ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD
Lee didn’t know it at the time, but while he was struggling in Hollywood, his star was beginning to rise in Hong Kong. By now The Green Hornet had been off the air in the United States for more than three years, but it was still playing in Hong Kong—where it had been renamed The Kato Show—and it was one of the most popular shows on the air. Viewers in Hong Kong were thrilled that one of their own had landed a major role in an American TV show.
Q: What is punctate pruritus? A: The medical term for an itchy spot.
When Lee took a quick trip back to Hong Kong to make arrangements for his mother to come to the United States, he was surprised to learn that he was famous there. Not only that, but two Hong Kong studios wanted to hire him to star in their movies. Lee was still determined to make it in Hollywood, but he decided that when he couldn’t find work there, he’d turn to Hong Kong.
UP, UP, AND AWAY
In 1971 and 1972, Lee made three films for Hong Kong’s Golden Harvest Studios: The Big Boss (U.S. title: Fists of Fury), Fist of Fury (U.S. title: The Chinese Connection), and The Way of the Dragon (U.S. title: Return of the Dragon), which Lee wrote and directed himself. They were all smash hits: The Big Boss made $3.5 million in Hong Kong in its first 19 days alone, making it the highest grossing film in Hong Kong history. Fist of Fury smashed that record by making $4 million in about the same amount of time, and Return of the Dragon made $5.4 million.