Uncle John's Actual and Factual Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  Chimichanga is the Spanish equivalent of the word “thingamajig.”

  ARE YOU SMART ENOUGH

  TO WORK FOR EDISON?

  We learned in school that Thomas Edison invented the first practical incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, and motion pictures. One invention he’s less famous for: “The Edison Test,” an odd collection of 150 questions job applicants had to answer before he would hire them to work in his labs.

  HELP WANTED

  Thomas Alva Edison was one of the most prolific inventors in history. He was awarded more than a thousand patents in his lifetime—the most that the U.S. Patent Office has ever issued to a single individual. And yet for all his genius, he had almost no formal education. Already hard of hearing by the age of seven, he was “dreamy,” easily distracted, and he doodled in his school notebooks. All of this drove Mr. Crawford, his instructor at the Family School for Boys and Girls in Port Huron, Michigan, crazy. Edison was just three months into his first year at the Family School in 1854 when Crawford told Edison’s mother that her boy was “addled” (confused). That made Mrs. Edison so angry that she pulled her son out of the school. Thomas was largely self-taught after that, his learning guided in his early years by his mother, who had once worked as a teacher.

  For the rest of his life, Edison took a dim view of formal education and the kinds of people turned out by American colleges and universities. Over the years, he had repeatedly hired scientists and engineers who’d been educated in the best schools, only to be shocked at how little they actually knew—at least as far as he was concerned—and how poorly they performed on the job. By the 1920s, he’d grown so frustrated that he added a 150-item questionnaire to the employment application for his lab. If an applicant answered 90 percent or more of the question correctly, they were offered a job. Everyone else was shown the door.

  TAKE THE QUIZ

  The questionnaire was strange even by the standards of the 1920s, but Edison justified it by explaining that the two things he valued in an employee were 1) curiosity, which would cause them to learn the answers to many of the questions on the test; and 2) a strong memory, which would enable them to retain the information once they’d learned it. “Of course I don’t care directly whether a man knows the capital of Nevada…or the location of Timbuktu. But if he ever knew any of these things and doesn’t know them now, I do very much care about that in connection with giving him a job. For the assumption is that, if he has forgotten these things, he will forget something else that has direct bearing on his job,” Edison said in 1921.

  Most popular musical instrument in North Korea: the accordion.

  Edison tried to keep the contents of the questionnaire secret; the only reason we know what the questions are is because someone who flunked the test (and was not offered a job) was nonetheless able to recall 146 of the questions from memory. He leaked them to the New York Times, which published them, along with the answers. Are you ready to take the test? Many of the questions have become outdated in the decades since Edison asked them. The answers to “What is the price of 12 grains of gold?” (57¢) and “What country is the greatest textile producer?” (Great Britain) are not what they were in 1921. But here is a sample of questions whose answers have not changed. To qualify for a job with Edison, you need to answer 33 of the 37 questions correctly. Good luck! (The answers are on page 500.)

  1.What countries bound France?

  3.Where is the River Volga?

  9.Is Australia greater than Greenland in area?

  10.Where is Copenhagen?

  12.In what country other than Australia are kangaroos found?

  14.Who was Bessemer and what did he do?

  17.Who was Paul Revere?

  20.Who was Hannibal?

  32.Where was Napoleon born?

  34.Who invented logarithms?

  35.Who was the Emperor of Mexico when Cortez landed?

  37.What and where is the Sargasso Sea?

  42.Rhode Island is the smallest state.

  What is the next and the next?

  46.Of what state is Helena the capital?

  59.What causes the tides?

  70.Where is Kenosha?

  71.What is the speed of sound?

  72.What is the speed of light?

  73.Who was Cleopatra and how did she die?

  75.Who discovered the law of gravitation?

  76.What is the distance between the earth and sun?

  79.What is felt?

  85.Who discovered radium?

  86.Who discovered the X-ray?

  92.Who composed “Il Trovatore”?

  93.What is the weight of air in a room 20 by 30 by 10?

  98.Who discovered how to vulcanize rubber?

  101.Who invented the cotton gin?

  105.Of what is glass made?

  110.What is a foot pound?

  121.Who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner”?

  125.Who wrote Don Quixote?

  126.Who wrote Les Misérables?

  129.Who made The Thinker?

  130.Why is a Fahrenheit thermometer called Fahrenheit?

  133.What insect carries malaria?

  134.Who discovered the Pacific Ocean?

  During a March 1989 solar storm, the northern lights were visible as far south as Cuba.

  DUDE, WHERE’S MY CAR?

  Forgetting where you parked your car and wandering around, sometimes for hours until you find it, is a common experience. But not finding it for days? Weeks? Longer? That’s what happened to these folks.

  Dude: Gavin Strickland, a 19-year-old who drove his 2015 Nissan Versa sedan from Syracuse, New York, to a Metallica concert in Toronto in July 2017

  Where’s My Car? Strickland parked his car in a downtown garage and took an $8.00 taxi ride to the concert. To help him find his way back, he made a mental note that his garage was near a Starbucks and a construction site. It was only after the concert that he realized that there were Starbucks and construction sites all over downtown. He looked for his car late into the night, but never found it. The following morning he took a bus back to Syracuse.

  Strickland’s dad posted an ad on Craigslist asking for help. “Our doofy son parked the car in an indoor parking garage…but that garage cannot now be located,” the ad read, noting that the car had Florida license plates, a Canadian flag on the door frame, and a Bernie Sanders bumper sticker. Reward: $100 to the finder and another $100 to their favorite charity.

  Found It! The ad not only attracted interest from Craigslist readers in Toronto, but also from newspapers, radio, and television stations all over Canada. “Apparently like a search party went out. Basically like a scavenger hunt, which I thought was pretty cool,” Gavin said.

  Three days later a woman named Madison Riddolls found the car at Toronto Dominion Centre after searching several garages downtown. Bonus: the garage waived the four-day parking fee and gave Gavin a Bluetooth device that will help him find the car the next time he loses it. “I love Canada, and I think I just love how the city got together to help me out,” he told the throngs of reporters who met him when he stepped off the bus in Toronto.

  Dude: An embarrassed Scotsman whose name—for obvious reasons—was not released to the press

  Where’s My Car? What could be worse than forgetting where you parked your car? In June 2016, this man borrowed his friend’s car—a pricey BMW—and drove it from Scotland to Manchester, England, to go to a Stone Roses concert. He must have had a pretty good time, because by the time the concert was over, he couldn’t find his way back to the car. He’d parked it in a multistory garage in the center of Manchester, but there were a lot of garages in downtown Manchester and they all looked the same to him. He spent five days looking for his friend’s car…and then gave up. His friend e-mailed the police and parking companies for more than a month, hoping his car would turn up. It didn’t. In August he reported it stolen.

  The Colorado River should flow to the Gulf of California, but from 1998 to 2014, it didn’t. (It ran dry
before it got there.)

  Found It! Six months later, in December 2016, police came upon an “abandoned” car in a Manchester parking garage, right where the man had parked it. They ran the license plate, found it was a car that had been reported stolen, and notified the owner that it had been found. Estimated cost of storing a car in an expensive downtown parking garage for six months: £5,000, or about $6,200.

  Dude: Antonio, a 44-year-old Italian factory worker who declined to give his last name

  Where’s My Car? In the fall of 2013, Antonio drove his silver VW Golf from northern Italy over the Tyrolean Alps to Munich, where he planned to spend the day at Oktoberfest, the city’s famous beer festival. He parked on a city street miles from the festival and hopped a tram that took him the rest of the way. “It was a small street without any particular features, close to a bus stop,” he later told reporters.

  By the end of the day, he’d forgotten the name of the street and which tram line he’d taken. It might have been the No. 15…or the No. 16. Or maybe not. Before you blame the beer, consider that Antonio claims he didn’t touch a drop. “I was just there for the rides,” he said.

  Antonio went back over the Alps and returned to Italy, but without his car. On his days off from work, he made several trips over the Alps back to Munich and rode various tram lines, hoping he’d spot his car, or at least something that would jog his memory. No such luck.

  Found It! After weeks of searching, Antonio’s plight eventually attracted the notice of Munich’s Abendzeitung newspaper, which ran a story about him. Someone who read the article spotted Antonio’s car and told the newspaper where it was parked. Antonio made one last trip over the Alps to pick it up, five weeks after he parked it.

  Dude: An embarrassed German man, not named in news reports

  Where’s My Car? Like Antonio, in 2010 this man parked his car in Munich. Unlike Antonio, this man admits he was in town for a night of drinking and revelry. The next day he went back to the neighborhood where he thought he’d parked the car…but there was no sign of it. He searched the surrounding streets for hours and when he found nothing, he assumed his car had been stolen. He promptly reported the theft to the police.

  Americans eat 21,000 slices of pizza every minute.

  Found It! Two years later, traffic police came upon a car whose inspection stickers had expired. When they ran the plates, it turned out to be the man’s car, still parked where he’d left it, two and a half miles from where he thought he left it. Still in the trunk: the man’s $51,000 worth of power tools. “The weird thing is that it turned up so far away,” a spokesperson for the Munich police told reporters, “even though the owner was pretty sure of where he’d left it.”

  Dude: What is it about people losing their cars in Germany? This time it was a 56-year-old man, also not named in news reports.

  Where’s My Car? In 1997 the man parked his car in a multistory garage in the city of Frankfurt. When he went back to get it, he either went to the wrong garage, or to the wrong floor of the right garage. When he didn’t find his car where he thought he’d left it, he assumed it had been stolen and reported the theft to the police.

  Found It! Twenty years later, in 2017, the man’s car was found right where he’d parked it. Somehow it had gone unnoticed by the staff of the parking garage the entire time. It was only discovered when the parking structure was closed, emptied, and prepared for demolition, and no one came to get the car. The demolition company reported it to the police, who traced it back to the owner, now 76, through his 1997 stolen car report. “Unfortunately,” said a spokesperson for the Frankfurt police, “the car cannot be driven anymore and will be sent to the scrap heap.”

  GAME OF DRONES

  According to the Federal Aviation Administration, if you want to fly a drone, you need to follow these guidelines:

  •Fly at or below 400 feet above the ground.

  •Always fly within line of sight; if you can’t see it, bring it in.

  •Stay away from airports.

  •Stay away from airplanes—they have the right of way in the air.

  •Do not fly over people.

  •Do not fly over or close to sports events or stadiums.

  •Do not fly near emergency situations such as car crashes or building fires.

  •Do not fly in national parks.

  •Do not fly under the influence.

  •Be aware of controlled airspace.

  Why do gum chewers fart more than other people? They swallow a lot of air.

  MOUTHING OFF

  STRANGE CELEBRITIES

  Do you enjoy reading wise quotations? You won’t find any on this page.

  “Every great story seems to begin with a snake.”

  —Nicolas Cage

  “I’ve been noticing gravity since I was very young.”

  —Cameron Diaz

  “For years I was be-hated, and now I’m beloved.”

  —Barry Manilow

  “Actually, you can trademark anything. If nobody objects, I can own every breath of air you take.”

  —Gene Simmons

  “I don’t want to be alone. The aloneness is so alone.”

  —Kate Gosselin

  “I actually don’t like thinking. I think people think I like to think a lot. And I don’t. I don’t like to think.”

  —Kanye West

  “I took so many driving tests because I was so out of it. On one occasion I nodded off during the test. When I woke up there was a note on the seat saying, ‘You have failed.’ ”

  —Ozzy Osbourne

  “In the studio, I do try to have a thought in my head, so that it’s not like a blank stare.”

  —Cindy Crawford

  “I’m not a hero. A hero is a sandwich and I’m on a low-carb diet.”

  —Shaquille O’Neal

  THE LAST VHS TAPE

  We never know we’ve come to the end of an era while it’s happening—we have to wait until we can look back. In the world of electronics, eras end fairly quickly, but here’s what you’ll see when you look back.

  Last movie released on Betamax: In the first home video “format war” of the 1980s, JVC’s widespread VHS technology beat Sony’s proprietary Betamax. But hard-core Beta enthusiasts refused to give up their players, insisting the picture quality was better. So studios kept releasing movies for this audience well into the 1990s. The last one came off the line in 1996: Mission: Impossible, starring Tom Cruise.

  Last VHS movie: DVDs were introduced in the late 1990s, but it took a while for them to completely eliminate VHS. Reason: most people had been watching movies at home for nearly two decades. So until 2006, movie studios put out movies on both VHS and DVD. The last VHS tape available: the Viggo Mortensen mob drama A History of Violence.

  Last LaserDisc: Film purists didn’t mind dropping a few thousand bucks on a LaserDisc player. The discs were the size of a vinyl LP and offered DVD quality… in 1983. The size and cost of LaserDiscs (especially compared to VHS) meant the product never reached more than a small niche audience. Philips and MCA stopped selling the players in 2001, shortly after the last new movie was produced on LaserDisc—the Arnold Schwarzenegger thriller End of Days.

  Last Blockbuster Video video: The last company-owned Blockbuster Video, in Hawaii, stopped renting out movies on November 9, 2013, in anticipation of shutting down completely a few weeks later. The final customer of the night rented, appropriately enough, the Seth Rogen comedy This Is the End.

  Last HD DVD: There was another smaller, briefer home video format war in the mid-2000s. Two high-definition movie systems aimed to succeed the DVD: Blu-ray, championed by nine electronics companies, including Sony, Panasonic, and Philips; and HD DVD, created by Toshiba. Blu-ray won, and Toshiba discontinued HD DVD production. The last movie available in that format was Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, in 2008.

  Last book on tape: They’re technically called audiobooks, although a lot of people still call them “books on tape.” That’s in s
pite of the fact that publishers ditched cassettes for CDs and downloadable files long ago. The last major book on tape actually released on tape was James Patterson and Howard Roughan’s 2008 novel Sail.

  The sparklemuffin is a brightly colored “peacock spider” that lives in Australia.

  Last cassette: Small labels continue to make tapes, as do bands that self-release their music, but the big record labels phased them out entirely in the 2000s. One of the last big albums on the format was The Last Kiss, a 2009 album by the rapper Jadakiss.

  Last major eight-track: The oh-so-’70s format had its last hurrah in 1988, courtesy of a definitively 1970s band. The final eight-track released by a major record label was Fleetwood Mac’s Greatest Hits.

  Last CD in a longbox: Thanks to iTunes and services like Spotify, compact discs don’t sell the way they did back in the 1990s. The last major change to affect CDs was the elimination of the longbox. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, CDs were sold in long rectangular packages decorated with an album’s art. The reason for this nasty waste of paper: longboxes were tall, and record stores could display them in the bins that had once held LPs. Customers hated them—they reportedly added a dollar to the cost of a CD, and they produced about 18 millions pounds of extra trash. In early 1993, record companies said they’d stop using them as of April of that year…just before Earth Day. The last album to come in one of those unnecessary pieces of garbage was LL Cool J’s March 1993 release 14 Shots to the Dome.

  Last Atari game: The video game craze of the early 1980s led to an industry crash in 1983. Atari barely survived, and as the decade wore on, companies like Nintendo introduced games with more advanced graphics. Amazingly, Atari kept producing games for its flagship 2600 system until the end of the decade. Its last release in North America was Secret Quest in 1989.