Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

Now that Bruce Lee was Asia’s biggest film star, Hollywood finally began to take notice. In late 1972, Warner Brothers agreed to co-produce Enter the Dragon with Golden Harvest Studios, the first time that a Hollywood studio had ever partnered with a Hong Kong studio to make a film.

  TROUBLE

  It took about 10 weeks to shoot Enter the Dragon. By May 1973, Lee was back in the Golden Harvest recording studio to dub the sound for the film. It was hot and humid at the studio on May 10—the air conditioners were turned off to keep the noise from interfering with the sound recording. Lee was exhausted from working nonstop on the film. At one point he excused himself and went to use the restroom. When 20 minutes passed and he didn’t return, the recording crew went looking for him and found him passed out on the restroom floor. Lee regained consciousness, then passed out again and went into convulsions. The studio rushed him to the hospital, where doctors diagnosed cerebral edema (swelling of the brain). Lee made what was thought to be a full recovery, but in the weeks that followed he continued to complain of headaches.

  Pigs have 16 blood types, the most of any mammal. Cats have the fewest, with two.

  EXIT THE DRAGON

  Two months later, on July 20, 1973, Lee went to the apartment of an actress named Betty Ting Pei to go over some script changes in an upcoming film called The Game of Death. While there he got a headache, so Ting Pei gave him a tablet of Equagesic (a combination of aspirin and a tranquilizer called meprobamate). The 32-year-old Lee went into the bedroom to lay down and never regained consciousness.

  That evening Ting Pei tried to wake him, and when she couldn’t she called for an ambulance. Lee was dead by the time he arrived at the hospital. The cause of death was ruled to be cerebral edema, this time possibly brought on by an extreme allergic reaction to the Equagesic.

  Four weeks later, Enter the Dragon premiered in Los Angeles. It was one of the highest-grossing films of 1973. Over the years it has gone on to earn more than $150 million, making it one of the most successful martial arts films in history.

  So did Bruce Lee’s story end when he passed away in July 1973? Not exactly—the rest of his strange tale begins on page 339.

  56 THINGS FROM BATMAN COMICS, MOVIES, AND TV SERIES WITH “BAT” IN THEIR NAME

  Batalarm, Batanalyzer, Bat-a-rang, Bat-armor, Bat awake, Batbeam, Batbeam Firing Button, Bat Blowtorch, Batboat, Batcamera’s Polarized Batfilter, Batcave, Batcentrifuge, Batcharge Launcher, Bat-claws, Batcommunicator, Batcopter, Batcostume, Batcuffs, Batcycle, Batcycle Go-cart, Batantidote, Batparachute, Emergency tank of Batoxygen, Bat earplugs, Bat Gas, Batguage, Bathook, Batkey, Batknife, Batladder, Batlaser Gun, Batmagnet, Batmissile, Batmobile, Batmobile Antitheft Device, Batmobile Mobile Crime Computer, Batmobile’s Superpower Afterburner, Bat-o-meter, Bat-o-stat Antifire Activator, Batphone, Batpole, Batram, Bat Ray Projector, Batresearch Shelf, Batrope, Batscanner Receiver, Batscope, Bat-shield, Batsleep, Batsignal, Bat Terror Control, Batzooka, Compressed Steam Batlift, Homing Battransmitter, Memory Bat Bank, Superblinding Batpellets

  It takes Pluto 248.53 years to travel around the sun. It takes Mercury 88 days.

  MYTH-LEADING

  We might assume that the common names we have for things are accurate descriptions of them, but that’s not always true.

  BIRTHDAY PARTY. You can only have one birth day—the day you were born. After that, every time you celebrate your birthday you’re really throwing an anniversary party.

  WILD RICE. It’s neither wild, nor rice. Officially known as Zizania aquatica, this once-wild grass seed is now cultivated by farmers worldwide.

  KILLER WHALE. They’re neither killers nor whales. They were once thought to be man-eaters. The 1973 U.S. Navy diving manual even warns that killer whales “will attack human beings at every opportunity.” But they were wrong—there are very few documented cases of attacks on human. (Seals and penguins are a different story.) And they’re members of the dolphin, not the whale, family.

  RADIATOR. Whether it’s in your home or in your car, radiators work by convecting heat—moving it via a liquid or gas, not by radiating. The radiator in your home heats the air currents around it until enough is heated to make the room feel warm. The one in your car transfers heat from the engine to water, which passes it to the atmosphere. The “radiators” radiate a little, but not much.

  POISON IVY. It’s not a poison, it’s an allergen. Poisons are harmful to everybody; allergens only affect some people. Poison ivy can cause severe itching and swelling, but many people aren’t even affected by it. It’s not ivy, either—it’s a member of the sumac family.

  RINGWORM. This infection makes “ring-like” marks on skin—but there’s no worms involved. It’s caused by a fungus.

  HEAVY CREAM. When milk producers say “heavy,” they actually mean “full of fat,” and the fat is the lightest part of the milk. That means that “heavy cream,” which contains as much as 30% milk fat, is actually a lot lighter than skim milk, which contains only trace amounts of fat.

  False advertising? The Cape of Good Hope was originally named the Cape of Storms.

  CLOSE, BUT NO CIGAR

  Sometimes things that seem like good ideas at first don’t live up to their expectations. Take these duds, for example:

  THE RONSON VARAFLAME

  Brilliant Idea: One of the problems of being in the butane lighter fuel business is that as soon as a smoker lights their cigarette, they stop using your product. In the late 1960s, the Ronson lighter fuel company formed a consumer products division to dream up new ways to for people to use butane. What’d they come up with? The Varaflame Butane Candle. The Varaflame offered many advantages over traditional wax candles: they weren’t smoky, they didn’t drip wax, and the size of the flame could be adjusted to suit the occasion: “Low for intimate dinners, medium for dinner parties, high for swinging soirees,” as one ad put it. When full, a Varaflame could burn for hours—not bad if you’re in the butane business.

  Oops: Varaflame Butane Candles cost as much as $30; a lot of money in the late 1960s. Wax candles cost less than a buck and people liked them better. In 1981, after more than a decade of disappointing sales, Ronson extinguished its consumer goods division.

  THE PONTIAC AZTEK

  Brilliant Idea: Billed by Pontiac as a “party on wheels,” the Pontiac Aztek looked great on paper when it was introduced in 2000. The minivan-based SUV had a fold-down tailgate specially designed to be comfortable to sit on, complete with built-in cup holders and rear stereo controls for tailgate parties. For camping, Pontiac offered an optional air mattress and a “tent extension” that wrapped around the open tailgate. There were four power outlets and the front seat center console even doubled as a removable ice chest.

  Oops: The Aztek was also one of the goofiest looking cars ever made. It was met with stunned silence when it debuted at the Detroit Auto Show in 2000—one executive from a rival automaker called it the Pontiac “A** Crack,” and when it arrived in showrooms things didn’t get any better. “The back end of the Aztek is the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Pontiac salesman Brad Hernandez told the Los Angeles Times. “It looks like time was up and they stopped working on it. But we back it up against a wall and it looks great.” Consumers didn’t think so—first year sales were less than half what Pontiac had hoped for, and when the company redesigned the Aztek to make it less goofy-looking, sales dropped even further. Pontiac quietly phased out the Aztek in 2004.

  Q: What does “100% Natural” signify on food labels? A: Absolutely nothing.

  POLAVISION

  Brilliant Idea: In the mid-1970s, Polaroid spent $250 million researching and developing Polavision, the world’s first instant motion picture system. It went on sale in 1978.

  Oops: What did the company have to show for itself after spending all that money? Not much—the picture was grainy, the movies were only 2-1/2 minutes long, and they didn’t have sound. The cameras cost $675—in 1978—and you also had to buy a special viewing screen because they couldn�
��t be viewed on a TV. Competing Super 8 cameras sold for a fraction of the cost, made longer movies with a much better picture, and had sound. As if that wasn’t competition enough, video cameras were just around the corner. Polavision never had a chance: By the time Polaroid scrapped the product in 1979 it had lost so much money—$68.5 million—that shareholders forced Edwin Land, the company founder and CEO, into retirement.

  ZAPMAIL

  Brilliant Idea: In 1984 Federal Express launched a new delivery service called Zapmail. Instead of physically shipping important documents across the country, the company would transmit them by satellite from one FedEx office to another, then deliver them by courier in two hours or less. Price: $35 for up to ten pages. Sure, the company would have to launch satellites and build its own network of ground stations, but since it was shipping fewer documents by plane it hoped to save a fortune on jumbo jets.

  Oops: Federal Express failed to take one thing into consideration: the prices of fax machines—$3,500 or more in 1984—were already beginning to drop, and within just a few years they’d be so cheap that any business could afford them. Too late for Federal Express—by the time it pulled the plug on ZapMail in 1986, the company had zapped an estimated $500 million. (As soon as Federal Express announced it was ending the service, its stock price shot up 18%.)

  Last state to abolish flogging as a legal punishment: Delaware...in 1972.

  COLOR-BLIND

  We printed this article in black and white (just in case you’re color-blind).

  EYE SEE THE LIGHT

  Why are some people “color-blind,” and what exactly does it mean? To answer that, we have to answer a bigger question: How do we see things in the first place? The simple answer is, we don’t actually see things, we see the light that reflects off of them. That reflected light goes through a lens and hits the retina in the back of the eye. Special cells in the retina, called photoreceptors, convert that light into nerve signals that are sent to the brain’s visual center. And the fact that seeing objects is actually seeing light explains how we see in color, because light is color. More precisely, light travels in wavelengths, and the different wavelengths are interpreted by our brains as different colors.

  So back to the first question: Why are some people color-blind, and what exactly does that mean?

  EYE SEE SOME OF THE LIGHT

  There are two main types of photoreceptor cells in the retina: rods and cones (so called because of their shapes). Rods detect different amounts of light (bright to dark), and cones detect different wavelengths of light—meaning different colors.

  Human cone cells come in three different types. One type contains a pigment that responds to short-wavelength light (the blue part of the spectrum), another to medium-wavelength light (the green part), and the third to long-wavelength light (the reds). Color-blindness is simply the condition of having defective or missing cone cells. Most commonly, people inherit the trait from their parents, but it can also be caused by injury, illness, and aging, and it comes in many different forms.

  •Protanopia: Greens look like browns; reds look more like beiges and appear darker than they actually are. Violet and purple are seen as shades of blue because the red in them can’t be seen.

  •Deuteranopia: Deuteranopes lack medium-wavelength cones (the greens) and have red/green symptoms similar to protanopia.

  When asked to name a color, 60% of any group of people will name the color “red.”

  This is the most common form of color-blindness.

  •Tritanopia: An uncommon form of color-blindness—the lack of short-wavelength cones (the blues). Blues and greens are difficult to distinguish, and yellows can appear as shades of red.

  •Blue cone monochromacy: Having only one type of functioning cones—the blues. Someone with blue cone monochromacy can see few colors, but otherwise has good vision in normal light.

  •Rod monochromacy: A very rare condition and the only one for which the term “color-blindness” is actually accurate. Also known as maskun, this is the condition of having only rods—no functioning cones at all. A rod monochromat can’t see any color at all. The world is black, white, and shades of gray.

  COLOR-BLINDNESS FACTS

  •About 8% of all men have some form of color deficiency; about half of 1% of all women do.

  •Humans are all born color-blind. Cone cells don’t begin functioning until a baby is about four months old.

  •Color-blindness is also known as Daltonism, named after John Dalton, who wrote the first scientific paper about the condition (which he had) in 1794. In 1995, 150 years after his death, researchers determined that Dalton suffered from deuteranopia. How? They did a DNA analysis of his preserved eyeball.

  •Complete color-blindness, or rod monochromacy, is extremely rare—except on the Pacific island of Pohnpei, where 8% of the population has it.

  •Color-detecting cones work best in bright light. In very dim light only non-color-detecting rods are used, which is why everything seems to be in black and white in dim light.

  •Rods are more numerous in the periphery of the retina. In dim light, use your peripheral vision—it sees better.

  •Most mammals are dichromatic: they have two types of cone cells and can see fewer colors than we can. Honeybees, like humans, have three types. But honeybees can see colors in the ultraviolet range; humans can’t.

  •The mantis shrimp’s eye has at least 12 different cone cell types for detecting different colors. Exactly how many colors they can see is still unknown.

  Q: For what event in February 1964 did evangelist Billy Graham break his strict rule against watching TV on Sunday? A: The Beatles first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

  THE LIMBURGER CHEESE WAR

  From our “Dustbin of History” files, here’s the pungent tale of two midwest states whose pride and honor were once challenged...by a slab of stinky cheese.

  IT AIN’T EASY BEING CHEESEY

  It began in the winter of 1935 when a doctor in Independence, Iowa, prescribed an odd medicine to an ailing farm wife: Limburger cheese. The doctor figured the heavily aromatic cheese would help clear the woman’s clogged sinuses. (If you don’t know what Limburger smells like, give it a whiff the next time you’re at the supermarket.) So the order was put through to Monroe, Wisconsin, to send some Limburger cheese—post haste.

  Why Monroe? Swiss cheesemakers first arrived there in 1845. At the time, Wisconsin was in the depths of an economic depression and cheese helped pull them out of it. By 1910, Wisconsin had become the cheese-making capital of the United States, producing more cheese than any other state. And Monroe was the Limburger capital of Wisconsin.

  THE BATTLE LINES ARE DRAWN

  Monroe’s postmaster, John Burkhard, approved the delivery and sent it on its way. But the mail carrier in Independence, Iowa, who delivered the Limburger was so offended by the stench wafting through his roadster that he refused to deliver it. Citing a postal rule that said mail would only be delivered if it “did not smell objectionable,” Independence’s postmaster, Warren Miller, concurred without examining or even smelling the cheese. He had it sent back to Monroeon the grounds that it could “fell an ox at twenty paces.”

  Burkhard took it personally; to insult Limburger is to insult not just Monroe, but all of Wisconsin and its proud cheese heritage. So Burkhard rewrapped the package and sent it back to Iowa. Miller promptly returned it to Wisconsin. War was brewing.

  THE BATTLE OF DUBUQUE

  Burkhard took his gripe all the way to the United States Postmaster General in Washington, D.C. At first, he couldn’t understand what all of the fuss was about. So Burkhard sent him some Limburger. The Postmaster General then decided that, yes, the cheese smelled bad, but no, it wasn’t hazardous. And the war was over, right? Wrong.

  By this time the press had sniffed out the story. At a time when the nation was mired in the Great Depression and Hitler was rising to power in Germany, a story about smelly cheese was a breath of fresh air. And unwilli
ng to give in, postmaster Burkhard challenged postmaster Miller to a “cheese-sniffing duel”—if Miller could sit at a table and not wretch from the stench of freshly-cut Limburger, then he would never again raise a stink about Wisconsin or its cheese. Miller accepted. Dozens of people from each town—as well as a throng of reporters—showed up at the Julien Hotel in Dubuque, Iowa, on the cold afternoon of March 8, 1935, to witness the standoff.

  A Duel to the Breath

  The two men sat across from each other at a table. While flash-bulbs flickered and onlookers whispered, Burkhard placed a box on the table, unwrapped it, and produced a very strong sample of his state’s pride and joy, praising not only its medicinal qualities, but boasting that nothing on Earth tasted better with beer. The tension was so thick that you could cut it with a knife. Famed Milwaukee Journal reporter Richard S. Davis sent out a dispatch calling it a “duel to the breath.”

  As Burkhard prepared to push the slab of cheese over to Miller, he offered Miller a clothespin and a gas mask. But Miller just shook his head and meekly surrendered. “I won’t need that clothes-pin,” he lamented, “I haven’t any sense of smell.”

  The crowd gasped. The battle was over before it began. Burkhard was immediately declared the winner and Miller had to agree to allow any and all Wisconsin cheese safe passage throughout Iowa’s postal routes. The next day newspapers in 30 states ran a picture of the olfactarily-challenged Miller looking bewildered next to a piece of steaming Limburger. And now the war was over, right? Wrong. The final battle was yet to come.

  Did their pee smell? Romans cultivated asparagus in 200 B.C.

  THE BATTLE OF BEAVER DAM

  While Burkhard was basking in victory, something he’d said about Limburger at that table in Dubuque—that nothing tasted better with beer—was churning through Miller’s head. Every good Iowan knew that the best food to eat with beer is smoked whitefish, not some stinky piece of cheese. Miller just couldn’t let it go. So he challenged Burkhard with another contest: a fight for the title of “Best Snack in the World.” Once again the press got whiff of the food feud, and they convened at the neutral site chosen for the contest: the American Legion hall in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin.