Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  ENGLISH SIGNS AND LABELS SEEN IN JAPAN

  “For Restrooms, go back to your behind.”

  —In a restaurant

  “Danger! This toy is being made for the extreme priority the good looks. The little part which suffocates when the sharp part gets hurt is swallowed is contained generously. Only the person who can take responsibility by itself is to play.”

  —Warning label on a children’s toy

  “Soft Drinks: Cola, Ginger Ale, Milk, Flesh Juice”

  —On a restaurant menu

  “My Fannie”

  —Toilet paper brand name

  Q: What was the brand name of the first television set? A: The Philco Predicta.

  AND THEN WHAT HAPPENED?

  Our next installment in the history of (almost) everything that ever happened.

  PART IV: FROM THE DARK AGES TO THE NEW WORLD

  •850 A.D. This is the Islamic golden age (Europe will remain in the Dark Ages for centuries), marked by continuing advances in the arts and sciences. Persian mathematician al-Khwarizmi writes Kitab Al-Jabr wa al-muqabalah, from which we get the term algebra.

  •871 Muslims now dominate sea trade; Islam spreads to southeast Asia. Alfred the Great becomes the first king of England.

  •930 The Althing, the oldest functioning parliament in world, is established in Iceland.

  •1000 Mississippian culture flourishes in North America. Native chiefs run territorial governments. Maize, beans, and squash are cultivated. The largest city, Cahokia (near present-day St. Louis) has a population of 10,000. Viking Leif Eriksson lands in North America.

  •1066 The Norman Conquest: William of Normandy, a French duke, conquers the English and becomes king, creating England’s first stable monarchy. Many historians call this the true beginning of English history.

  •1075 Turkish Muslims take Jerusalem.

  •1095 The Christian Crusades begin, a series of nine holy wars started in Europe and sanctioned by the pope to reclaim the Holy Land from Muslims. They will last until 1291.

  •1206 Temüjin unites the Mongol peoples and becomes the “Universal Ruler”—Genghis Khan. He begins making conquests with a very mobile—and very brutal—army. In less than 100 years, he and his descendants will expand their small empire into the largest the world has ever known, extending from the Sea of Japan, through China and India, all the way to eastern Europe.

  Garden State? Newark, New Jersey, was the site of the first asphalt paving in 1870.

  •1215 English barons force King John to adopt the Magna Carta (“Great Charter”), a seminal document in the history of constitutional government. Its provisions limited the power of royalty and guaranteed an individual’s basic civil liberties. It is considered a predecessor of the American Bill of Rights.

  •1250 The Shona people build hundreds of cities in southwest Africa. The most elaborate: Great Zimbabwe, an 1,800-acre stone complex. Roger Bacon makes the earliest gunpowder recipe in Europe.

  •1300 Mayan civilization collapses. Islam becomes the official religion of the Mongol Empire, further helping its spread through Asia. Spectacles are invented in Italy.

  •1325 Osman I rules the Turks. He is regarded as the father of the Ottoman Empire, which will thrive until World War I. In Mexico, the Aztec Empire begins with the founding of Tenochtitlán.

  •1347 The bubonic plague sweeps across Europe, killing 25 million people.

  •1400 Europe emerges from the Dark Ages with an unparalleled era of advances in art, literature, and science known as the Renaissance (generally regarded as beginning in Florence, Italy).

  •1450 Johannes Gutenberg becomes the first in the West to invent movable type and a printing press, making possible the mass production of books. Constantinople is taken by the Ottoman Turks, ending the Byzantine (eastern Roman) Empire.

  •1478 The bloody Spanish Inquisition is formed to rid the nation of “heretics” and enemies of the Catholic Church. Incan civilization covers the entire western coast of South America; the Aztec Empire covers most of Central America and Mexico.

  •1492 Christopher Columbus sails west from Spain searching for a new route to India and accidentally “discovers” the New World.

  And then what happened? A whole lot of stuff—Galileo, baseball, Elvis, Shakespeare, coffee, Canada, the Pilgrims, Huckleberry Finn, blue jeans, the French Revolution, Gilligan’s Island...but we ran out of room, so we’ll save it for another Bathroom Reader. See ya!

  What’s special about August 21, 2017? It’s the next time a solar eclipse will be visible in the U.S.

  LET’S WATCH KUNG FU!

  Were you a fan of the TV series Kung Fu? You aren’t alone—it was one of the most popular shows of its day. Along with the films of Bruce Lee, it helped launch the martial arts craze of the 1970s.

  EAST SIDE STORY

  In the late 1960s, a man named Ed Spielman was studying radio and television production at Brooklyn College in New York City. He was also a martial arts buff and a big fan of Japanese movies. One day a martial arts instructor he knew happened to tell him in passing that his wife, who was trained in the Chinese martial art of kung fu, could knock him to the ground using only one or two fingers. Intrigued, Spielman began reading up on kung fu.

  Spielman earned money writing comedy with his friend Howard Friedlander, who was also fascinated by the Far East. Whenever Spielman read anything interesting about kung fu, he shared it with Friedlander.

  Friedlander had a favorite tale about a man who travels through China and meets up with a warrior-monk from the Shaolin temple, where kung fu has been practiced for more than 6,000 years. One afternoon the two men were walking down Broadway toward Times Square when Friedlander stopped suddenly, turned to Spielman, and said, “Ed, why don’t we write an Eastern Western? We can take the monk from the temple and place him in the West.”

  RAISING CAINE

  The pair set to work writing a film screenplay, and in early 1970 they finished a story about a half-Caucasian, half-Chinese Shaolin monk named Kwai Chang Caine who flees to the American West after he accidentally kills the nephew of the emperor of China. When Caine gets to the United States, he learns that he has a half brother, Danny Caine, and for much of the rest of the screenplay Caine searches for his brother.

  Meanwhile, the Warner Bros. studio was looking for ways to use its Old West film sets now that Westerns were declining in popularity. Spielman and Friedlander’s script seemed to fit this need, so the studio bought it in late 1970 and made plans for a feature film...only to shelve the idea indefinitely in 1971. Reason: According to studio spokesmen, Kung Fu was too violent, not to mention too expensive to film. Besides, they said, the Eastern themes were too “esoteric” for American audiences.

  Scientists believe a 1% drop in ozone levels causes up to a 6% rise in skin cancer cases.

  A few months later, Harvey Frand, the Warner Bros. liaison between the studio’s feature film and television departments, happened to read the Kung Fu script and was impressed. He pitched it to the ABC network as an original movie-of-the-week, and they bought the idea and turned it into a 90-minute film.

  SPLIT PERSONALITY

  Since Caine was half-Caucasian and half-Chinese, casting either a white actor or an Asian actor in the part would have worked. Two actors were considered: Bruce Lee, then best known for the role of Kato in the Green Hornet TV series, and David Carradine, son of screen legend John Carradine. Carradine was the calmer, more serene of the two actors, and the creators thought he would make a better Caine than the tense, energetic Lee. (Besides, studio executives worried that American audiences would not be interested in a series with an Asian male lead.) Carradine got the part.

  When the TV film aired on February 22, 1972, 33% of the American viewing audience tuned in to see it. In those days people had only the big three networks to choose from, along with an independent channel or two. Still, getting one in three viewers to tune in to a brand-new show was impressive. Kung Fu had something for everyone
: peaceniks liked the fact that Caine lived his life according to an Eastern philosophy of nonviolence, and action fans loved how the bad guys got a beating at least once in every show. ABC ordered four more episodes, and when these pulled in large audiences, the network ordered 15 more.

  IT’S A FAD!

  Kung Fu’s timing couldn’t have been better—Americans were beginning to take an interest in martial arts, thanks in large part to the guy who didn’t get the part of Caine, Bruce Lee. By the time Lee got the news that he’d lost the part to Carradine, he was already in Hong Kong filming the first of the “chop-socky” martial arts films that would make him an international star. That caused Hollywood to take a second look, and in 1973 Bruce Lee made Enter the Dragon for Warner Bros. Then, just weeks before Enter the Dragon was scheduled to premiere, Lee died suddenly from cerebral edema, or swelling of the brain. He was 32.

  President George W. Bush spent a summer selling sporting goods for Sears.

  By then Kung Fu had been on the air for several months, and the combination of the TV show and Lee’s movies—made all the more popular by his untimely death—helped launch the martial arts craze of the 1970s. People watched Kung Fu on TV, went to see chop-socky movies, and signed up for martial arts classes in greater numbers than ever before (or since). Elvis got a black belt. Kids wore Kung Fu T-shirts and read Kung Fu comic books and pulp novels while eating sandwiches out of Kung Fu lunchboxes. In 1974, when a singer named Carl Douglas spent 10 minutes recording what was supposed to be a B-side song called “Kung Fu Fighting,” it went all the way to #1 on the Billboard pop chart. The song got it right—everybody was kung fu fighting.

  KEEPING IT REAL

  •The creators of Kung Fu were sticklers for authenticity, so they inserted real-life traditions from kung fu and other martial arts wherever they could. Walking across rice paper is a part of traditional ninja training in Japan, and snatching a pebble from the master’s hand was inspired by a similar practice at the Shaolin monastery.

  •Another scene taken from real life: the one where Caine, in his final act before leaving the temple, walks down a long corridor and lifts a red hot urn filled with coals with his wrists, branding a tiger and a dragon into his skin. Monks at the Shaolin temple ran a similar gauntlet: as they walked down a long corridor, they dodged acid dropped from the ceiling and spears thrust through holes in the walls and floors. If they made it to the end of the corridor, they branded themselves by lifting the urn with their arms or, if they needed to, with their stomach. “There’s more to a disciple’s leaving the temple than branding his arms,” Carradine says. “We left the rest out because we doubted whether anyone would believe it.”

  KEEPING TRACK

  Even when Kung Fu episodes are shown out of sequence, there are visual cues that viewers can use to place each episode in its proper chronological place in the series’ three-year run:

  There are no rivers in Saudi Arabia.

  •Carradine shaved his head at the start of the series and didn’t cut his hair again until the final episodes. The longer Carradine’s hair, the later the episode appears in the series.

  •When Bruce Lee died in 1973, Carradine changed the color of the shirt he wore from brown to orange-yellow.

  •The original martial arts advisor for the show was not a genuine Shaolin master, but he was eventually replaced with someone who was, which helped make the kung fu action sequences more authentic. Carradine marked the change by having Caine lose his signature fedora hat. “If you see me without a hat, it’s genuine kung fu,” he says.

  BEHIND THE SCENES

  •Spielman based the character of the blind, sympathetic Master Po on his grandfather, a Russian immigrant. “He was a moral and spiritual man. When he died,” Spielman says. “I was only a teenager, too immature to thank him or tell him how much I loved him. The relationship between Master Po and young Caine was my way of doing that.”

  •Actor Keye Luke wore special opaque contact lenses to make him appear blind. He could see out of a tiny hole drilled into each lens, but other than that, he really was almost blind when he had them on, and he tended to leave them on all day—even when he wasn’t filming a scene—to help him “get into character.”

  NOT AS THEY SEEMED

  •One of the most famous scenes in the series is when Caine arrives as a young orphan boy at the Shaolin temple and is accepted as a student. Master Kan, who runs the temple, points to a pebble in his open palm and tells Caine, “As quickly as you can... snatch the pebble from my hand.” Caine tries and fails, and Master Kan says to him, “When you can take the pebble from my hand, it will be time for you to leave.” Filming the scene was tougher than you might think—actor Philip Ahn’s reflexes were so slow that he couldn’t stop Radames Pera from grabbing the pebble. Finally after about 15 takes, director Jerry Thorpe told Pera to signal with his left hand before grabbing with his right.

  •In another important scene, young Caine is taught to tread lightly—symbolically and literally—by walking across fragile rice paper without breaking it. “When you can walk the rice paper without disturbing it,” Master Kan explains, “then your steps will not be heard.” But the prop department couldn’t find any rice paper, so they used regular butcher paper instead, which is much stronger. Pera couldn’t rip it no matter how hard he tried, even when the crew glued sandpaper to the bottom of his feet. They finally shot the scene by having Pera walk over paper that was already torn, but didn’t show the paper until he’d already walked over it.

  In Turkey, drunk drivers are dropped off 20 miles from home and made to walk back.

  THE PRICE OF FAME

  •Eleven-year-old Radames Pera, who played the young Caine, had his own problems. Child labor laws limited the number of hours he could be on the set each day, which meant that there was no time for makeup artists to apply a bald cap to his head—so they shaved him bald for much of the show’s three-year run. He was a big TV star, but the bullies at his school picked on him anyway, slapping his bald head and calling him “eightball.” Pera drew strength from the show’s scripts. “As I was dealing with my personal struggles,” he says, “young Caine was dealing with his. Asian philosophy helped us both.”

  •Like George Reeves (TV’s Superman) before him, David Carradine had to worry about overly enthusiastic fans who really did believe he was an indestructible warrior monk. “People were throwing themselves at his car in the street,” Harvey Frand says. It eventually got so bad that Carradine spent most of his free time on the set hiding in his dressing room.

  SO LONG, GRASSHOPPER

  Kung Fu might have continued for season after season save for one thing: David Carradine. Apparently worried that he would be typecast in the part, he was determined from the beginning not to play Caine for longer than three years. Just as he’d promised, he left the show. The last original episode aired on April 19, 1975.

  Three attempts to revisit Kung Fu were made; two succeeded. Kung Fu: The Movie was a 1986 made-for-TV movie that starred Carradine as Caine and Bruce Lee’s son Brandon as his son, Chung Wang. That did well enough to inspire a 1987 pilot for a show set in the 1980s. Brandon Lee signed on to play Caine’s great-grandson... but Carradine thought the script was stupid—he called it “Kung Fu car crashes”—and passed. The pilot aired in February 1986 but died without Carradine’s support. He did, however, agree to star in Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, which ran from 1993 to 1997. In this series, set in the 1990s, Carradine plays the original Caine’s grandson (also a kung fu master named Kwai Chang Caine), and Chris Potter plays Caine’s son, Peter, a big-city police officer.

  What do people have in common with wild geese? We both get the flu.

  LASTING INFLUENCE

  The original Kung Fu left an indelible mark on film and television. One huge fan was Quentin Tarantino, who lists the show as one of his earliest inspirations. He even wrote the part of Bill in his revenge flick Kill Bill with Carradine in mind (who got the role after Warren Beatty dropped out).
Carradine’s Bill is sort of “an evil Kwai Chang Caine, offering deep-sounding Chinese parables with psychopathic twists, in between the soothing tunes of Caine’s trademark wooden flute,” writes Chris Pepus, one of the many critics who praised the film.

  And Kill Bill is just the latest role in a long career for David Carradine, who’s appeared in more than 100 film and television projects. Yet nearly every biography about Carradine echoes these same words: “...best known for his role as Caine on the 1970s series Kung Fu.”

  THE GREAT WIDE NORTH

  It’s a good thing Canada has free health care. Here are some less-than-healthy (but still delicious) Canadian food favorites.

  Poutine: French fries and a heap of cheese (or cheese curds) immersed in brown gravy.

  Trempette: Bread soaked in maple syrup and topped with heavy cream.

  Tire sur la neige: Heated maple syrup that congeals into taffy when served on top of fresh snow.

  Kraft Dinner sandwich: Macaroni and cheese on white bread, topped with ketchup.

  You have a 1-in-77 chance of dying by accident and a 1-in-211 chance of being murdered.

  ANIMALS FAMOUS FOR 15 MINUTES

  Here’s our feature based on Andy Warthog’s prophetic remark that “in the future, every animal will be famous for 15 minutes.”

  THE HEADLINE: O Brother, Boar Art Thou?

  THE STARS: Three male boars named Kalle, Oskar, and Willy; their mates Luise, Berta, and Sophie; and their 50 offspring

  WHAT HAPPENED: In September 2003, a group called the German Hunting Protection League launched a Web site with 24-hour Web cams that let viewers watch the animals on a wildlife preserve in the Eifel Plateau in western Germany. The site didn’t attract a whole lot of attention...until March 2004, when the league turned its cameras on the six adult boars and their babies. They happened to do this at about the same time that the German version of the reality TV show Big Brother launched the latest installment of the series.