UPS trucks are painted a trademarked color called Pullman Brown. It was formerly used on…
BEST SPORTS OWNERS
You can choose your team, but you can’t choose your owner. For fans of these teams, that’s not a problem.
MARK CUBAN
Most billionaires who buy sports teams do it because no matter how poorly the team does, its value will grow thanks to lucrative TV deals. But bartender-turned-billionaire Mark Cuban bought the Dallas Mavericks for another reason: he’s a rabid sports fan. When Cuban bought the Mavs in 2000, the team was the laughingstock of the NBA. In the 17 years since, they’ve made the playoffs 15 times and won one NBA title. But winning isn’t the only reason Cuban is beloved by players and fans. From day one, Cuban has taken the heat off his players by berating referees and opponents from his courtside seat (he attends nearly every game) to the cost of more than $2 million in fines since buying the team. This endeared him to fans, who could email him their thoughts and complaints—and actually get a response back. Cuban didn’t just create a winning team, he created a winning culture with a blueprint that has since been copied by other owners.
JERRY BUSS
The late Dr. Jerry Buss was such an outsized Hollywood character that the team he bought instantly took on his personality. Originally a chemistry professor at USC, Buss switched to investing in Los Angeles real estate when he realized the vast fortune he could make. In 1979 he struck a deal with Los Angeles Lakers owner Jack Kent Cooke to buy the team and its Inglewood arena, the Forum. But it wasn’t just the Lakers’ five championships in the 1980s that made Buss a beloved figure among Angelenos. With Buss’s playboy reputation and Hollywood stars in the seats, the Lakers became the hottest ticket in town. The Lakers didn’t just win, they won with a flashy style that became known as “Showtime.” And everything related to the team, from Magic Johnson’s no-look passes to the scantily clad Laker Girls, could be traced back to the culture Buss imbued into this franchise. When Buss passed away in 2013, Angelenos mourned the loss but were grateful that the owner, who was just as much a family man as he was a ladies’ man, passed the team down to his children, led by his daughter and protégée, Jeanie Buss.
ROCKY WIRTZ
To say Chicago Blackhawks owner Bill Wirtz was disliked by his fans is a bit of an understatement. Thanks to decades of penny-pinching on contracts and upholding the ridiculously anachronistic policy of not airing home games on TV, he was one of the most hated men in Chicago. So much so that when the team requested a moment of silence after his 2007 passing, the United Center erupted in boos. Bill’s son, Rocky, inherited the team and decided to take a markedly different approach. Besides obvious changes like allowing fans to watch all 82 regular-season games on TV, Rocky rebuilt relationships with former Blackhawk greats and spent on current players and fan amenities in a way befitting a team in America’s third-biggest market. The result: three Stanley Cup titles (2010, 2013, 2015) after a 49-year championship drought.
…Pullman railroad cars. UPS adopted it because it’s “easy to keep clean.”
PETER MAGOWAN
The San Francisco Giants have one of the most beautiful stadiums in all of sports and won three World Series in the 2010s. However, younger fans might be surprised to know that the San Francisco Giants were on the verge of moving not just once but twice. Unlike the Los Angeles Dodgers, their longtime rivals who also moved from New York to California in 1958, the Giants did not build a baseball-only park. Instead, the City of San Francisco built a baseball-football hybrid—Candlestick Park—in Bayview Heights, ensuring cold and windy conditions, and awful sight lines. With decades of low ticket sales and nearly zero interest from free agents, owner Bob Lurie, who bought the team in 1976 to stop their move to Toronto, was close to selling the team to a St. Petersburg, Florida, group. Thankfully for the Bay Area, an investment group led by Safeway CEO Peter Magowan stepped in and stopped the team from leaving. Magowan made an instant change to the team’s culture by signing Barry Bonds, a superstar and Bay Area native whose father Bobby and godfather Willie Mays both played for the team. Then Magowan built a brand-new stadium, using no public funds. While Magowan stepped down as principal owner in 2008 prior to San Francisco winning their three World Series titles, every Giants fan knew that Magowan was the reason they still had a team.
GREEN BAY PACKERS INC.
The Green Bay Packers are the only major professional American sports team to be owned by the community it plays in. Sports fans may know that the team got its name in 1919 when co-founder and head coach Curly Lambeau solicited funds from the Indian Packing Company for uniforms and equipment. Lambeau continued to have financial trouble, which led to the formation of the Green Bay Football Corporation (later reorganized as Green Bay Packers, Inc.). Starting with a 1923 stock sale in which 1,000 shares were offered at $5 each, the Packers now have 360,584 stockholders. Unlike traditional stock, this stock doesn’t include an equity interest or pay dividends, so the lucky “cheeseheads” who own a piece of the team aren’t doing so to make a profit—they’re doing it purely out of their devotion to the Pack. While Packers Inc. does have an executive committee and board of directors to ensure that little Tommy from Kenosha can’t fire their head coach, this unique ownership structure ensures that the small town of Green Bay will forever keep its historic football team.
What do sodium, lithium, and potassium have in common? 1) They’re all metals. 2) They all float.
TALK PIDGIN “TALK STORY”
In 2015 the U.S. Census Bureau finally added Pidgin to its list of official languages in the state of Hawaii. It was about time—Hawaiian Pidgin had been around since the 1850s.
WHAT IS PIDGIN?
Linguists use the term to describe a simplified blend of multiple languages spoken by communities of people who do not share a common language. Hawaiian Pidgin English originated as a means of communication between English-speaking Americans, Hawaiians, and non-English speaking immigrants (Japanese, Portuguese, Cantonese, Filipinos, Koreans, and Puerto Ricans) on the sugar plantations. When the children of pidgin-speakers learned it as their native language, Hawaiian Pidgin evolved into its own language, with a fully developed vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar.
To pass the time telling stories is called “talk story” in Hawaiian Pidgin. Maui author Serena Leilani Shipp recently translated these well-known opening lines from literature into Hawaiian Pidgin for Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader.
A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
English: Marley was dead: to begin with.
Pidgin: Marley stay ma-ke-die-dead.
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
English: I am an invisible man.
Pidgin: I stay one buggah’ dat you no’can see.
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
English: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Pidgin: Dem happy ohana stay all da’ same; an’ da kine unhappy ohana stay all buss up in dea own special kine way.
A Good Man Is Hard to Find, by Flannery O’Connor
English: The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida.
Pidgin: Da Tutu no like go fo’ Florida.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
English: You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter.
Pidgin: You no can know na’ting ’bout me if you nevah reed da kine book da Adventures of one haole braddah, Tom Sawyer, but no worries.
Another Roadside Attraction, by Tom Robbins
English: The magician’s underwear has just been found in a cardboard suitcase floating in a stagnant pond on the outskirts of Miami.
Pidgin: Da magician’s unda’wea stay found in one cardboard suitcase in one ma-ke pond on da side of da kine Miami.
Dandelion, milkweed, and sagebrush all contain rubber.
A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
English: It
was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the edge of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
Pidgin: It stay da bes’ foa’ times, it stay da’ wors’ foa’ times, it stay da’ edge fo’ wisdom, it stay da age fo’ foolishness, it stay da epoch fo’ belief, it stay da epoch fo’ da kine incredulity, it stay da sea’sin fo’ Light, it stay da sea’sin fo’ Darkness, it stay da spring fo’ hope, it stay da winta’ fo’ despeah’.
The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger
English: If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
Pidgin: If you like fo’ hea’ ’bout it fo’ real, guarantee da firs’ ting you like try know is where I stay born, how bunk life was when I stay one keiki, an’ what da kine parents did befoa’ dey make me, an’ all da kine David Copperfield crap, but I no’ like foa’ talk story about it, if you like know da trut’.
The Stranger, by Albert Camus
English: Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.
Pidgin: Mada ma-ke tade’. O’ maybe she ma-ke yestade’; No can be sure.
The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
English: He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
Pidgin: He stay one old buggah dat try fish alone in da kine skiff in da Gulf Stream an’ he go eighty-foa days an’ nevah even take one fish.
On the Road, by Jack Kerouac
English: I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead.
Pidgin: I firs’ fo’ meet da braddah Dean afta’ ma’ wahine an’ I stay split up. I get one serious illness dat I won’ boddah you wit, but I stay all sick ovah how ma’ wahine an’ I no stay togeda no moa’, an’ da kine feeling dat every’ting is ovah an’ ma-ke-die-dead.
Murphy, by Samuel Beckett
English: The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
Pidgin: Da sun kep’ shining, having na’ting else foa’ to do, on da na’ting new.
Paradise, by Toni Morrison
English: They shoot the white girl first.
Pidgin: Dey shoot da haole gurl firs’.
DID YOU KNOW?
In Hawaiian, Pidgin is called ōlelo pa i ai, which means “pounding-taro language.”
There are 200 times as many chickens as people in Delaware.
YOUR MIND IS A SEWER
When Uncle John was a boy, whenever he said something his mother thought was distasteful or offensive, she would say to him, “Your mind is a toilet!” Little did she know just how right she was.
NOTHING TO SNOOZE AT
If you live to be 100 years old, you’ll spend some 33 years of that time fast asleep. And yet for all the time humans spend sleeping, the process remains very mysterious, like the brain itself. One area where scientists have gained considerable insight in recent years is in understanding the mechanism that your brain uses to refresh itself when you sleep.
Every living cell in your body functions like an engine, consuming fuel as it performs whatever task it is designed to do. The fuel is contained in your blood, and delivered to each individual cell via the blood vessels that are an important part of your circulatory system.
As your cells work, just like an automobile engine they create waste products, such as ammonia and certain proteins, that accumulate over time. The more work that a cell does, the more waste it produces and deposits into the spaces between individual cells.
So how is all this waste disposed? In most (but not all) of your body, it’s removed through a parallel network of vessels similar to blood vessels called the lymphatic system. These vessels collect the waste products from the spaces between your cells and deliver them to the bloodstream, which transports them to the liver. From there they exit the body by way of the kidneys, in the form of urine.
Although your brain accounts for just 2 percent of your body mass, the electrical activity that takes place there consumes about 25 percent of your body’s energy supply.
ANOTHER STORY
That’s how cellular waste is disposed of in most of your body—but not in your brain. There are no lymphatic vessels in your skull, which is remarkable considering that although your brain accounts for just 2 percent of your body mass, the electrical activity that takes place there consumes about 25 percent of your body’s energy supply.
Your brain cells consume that much energy because they do a lot of work—and that means they produce a correspondingly large amount of waste. Like other cells in your body, they dump this waste in the spaces between individual cells. Scientists believe that you experience the accumulation of these wastes as fatigue. The longer you are awake, the more wastes accumulate and the more tired you become, until finally at the end of the day you have to go to sleep.
A Nintendo Entertainment System console from the 1980s had twice the computing power as the computers that put a man on the Moon.
INSIDE AND OUT
So how does your brain get rid of all the waste it produces without making use of lymphatic vessels? It turns out that the blood vessels in your brain perform double duty: Inside the vessels, blood containing fuel and oxygen is transported to every individual cell in your brain. And outside the vessels—along the outer surface—a fluid called cerebral spinal fluid is pumped from outside the brain into the spaces between the brain cells. This fluid flows in, collects the waste products that have accumulated there, then flows back out again, taking the waste with it. From there, the fluid transports the waste to your bloodstream, where it is removed from the body via the liver and kidneys.
All of this activity occurs when you are sleeping. It’s as if the brain lets the waste products accumulate while it’s busiest; then when you’re asleep and your brain has less to do, it has time for housekeeping. It literally flushes itself clean while you sleep. Then, after the waste has been removed, you awaken refreshed.
In studies of living mice, their brain cells shrink by as much as 60 percent when they sleep. This creates more space between the brain cells for the cerebral spinal fluid to flow, and the amount of fluid moving through the brain increases nearly twentyfold. The same process is believed to take place in human brains during sleep, and scientists at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland are conducting similar research with human subjects to determine if this is the case.
TIGHT QUARTERS
So why did the brain develop its own waste-removal system when the rest of the human body makes use of the lymphatic system? One theory: doing away with a network of lymphatic vessels inside the skull frees up more room for the brain, allowing it to grow larger than it would have been able to otherwise. This extra space, now occupied by extra brain cells instead of lymphatic vessels, may be what makes us human, or at least more human than we would be if we had smaller brains.
It’s as if the brain lets the waste products accumulate while it’s busiest; then when you’re asleep and your brain has less to do, it has time for housekeeping. It literally flushes itself clean while you asleep.
All of the planets in the solar system could fit inside the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
SWEET HISTORY
The short and sweet histories of some of the world’s most delicious desserts.
BAKED ALASKA
Description: Ice cream over layers of sponge cake in a pie plate, topped with a dome of meringue (whipped egg whites and sugar, usually with an acid
ic element such as cream of tartar to help the meringue stiffen). The dessert is kept frozen until serving, then put in a hot oven for a few minutes to brown the meringue before serving.
Sweet History: Baked Alaska was invented in 1867 by Charles Ranhofer, the French chef at New York City’s renowned Delmonico’s restaurant. Original name: Alaska-Florida, for the hot-and-cold elements of the dish. (Alaska was a popular subject in 1867—the year the United States purchased the territory from Russia.) The dish became known as “Baked Alaska” some years later.
Note: Ranhofer is believed to have based his creation on a similar dish that was popular in Paris. The Parisian desert also had a geography-inspired name—Omelette Norvégienne, or “Norwegian Omelet.”
HUMMINGBIRD CAKE
Description: A spice cake made with pineapples, bananas, and pecans (or walnuts), topped with cream cheese frosting
Sweet History: Cakes made with pineapples and bananas have been popular since the Great Depression. The hummingbird cake has been especially popular in the American South for decades, but that’s not where it comes from. The cake was first created, without cream cheese icing, in the Caribbean island nation of Jamaica, probably around the late 1960s. It was named after Jamaica’s national bird, the swallow-tailed hummingbird (known as the “doctor bird”). Variations of the Jamaican recipe started showing up in Southern newspapers and cookbooks by the early 1970s, under names like “Doctor Bird Cake” and “Tropical Treat Cake.” In 1978 a recipe for the “Hummingbird Cake” (with its now-familiar cream cheese frosting) was published in Southern Living magazine and it became a Southern standard.
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