“You don’t need tea in order to raise the dead.”
“After the universe comes the big bang.”
“Pains are just erotic fantasies on drugs.”
“Don’t depend upon your enemy’s feelings, just be a grown-up.”
“Keep calm and stay ugly.”
“Remain inbred. Feast on wheat grass.”
“Reality is an accident waiting to happen.”
“Don’t enjoy. Punish.”
It’s illegal to own rabbits in Queensland, Australia…unless you’re a scientist or a magician.
“ALO! SOLLUNGA!”
It may seem natural to say “hello” when answering the phone, but that’s just because we’ve been taught that. Many countries around the world have their own cultural norms for how to greet a caller.
France: “Allo, qui est a l’appareil?” (“Hello, who’s calling?”)
Mexico: It’s a Spanish-speaking country, so “diga” is used sometimes, but not as often as “bueno.” It literally means “good,” but it’s also an idiom that means “I can hear you.” In the mid-20th century when phone reception in the nation was poor, “bueno” meant the signal was good, or clear enough, to hear the person on the other line.
Italy: “Pronto,” which means “I’m ready.” Then the caller asks, “Chi parla?” or “Who is speaking?”
Polish: “Cześć,” an informal greeting similar to “hi.” Another way is to say “Tak, slucham,” which translates roughly to “Yes, I’m listening.”
Dutch: In the Netherlands they say “met,” and then their name. It means “You’re speaking with…”
Germany: It’s customary to clearly state one’s last name only.
India: In the southern region where Tamil is spoken, people say “Alo, sollunga,” which means “Hello, speak!”
Japan: “Moshi moshi,” the polite verb form of “I’m going to talk,” said twice.
Spain: “Diga,” which means “speak.”
Arab countries: A telephone exchange may involve a long string of pleasantries from both parties. Something like this is realistic:
ANSWERER: May your morning be good.
CALLER: May your morning be full of light.
ANSWERER: Praise God, your voice is welcome.
CALLER: Welcome, welcome.
ANSWERER: How are you?
CALLER: Praise God.
ANSWERER: Praise God.
CALLER: What news? Are you well? Is your family well?
ANSWERER: Praise God. How are you?
CALLER: All is well. All is well. Welcome. Welcome.
And then the conversation can begin.
Denmark: Danes answer the phone by saying their first and last name.
Brazil: “Fala,” which is an invitation to “talk.”
Russia: Reportedly because of widespread phone-tapping during the Soviet era, most Russians still don’t say anything when they answer…and let the other person speak first.
Gross fact: Porcupines crave salt, and have been known to sneak into outhouses to suck it up from urine-soaked floorboards.
TOY ORIGINS
A look into how some all-time favorites came to be.
MY LITTLE PONY
Bonnie Zacherle grew up in Japan—her father was a veterinarian with the U.S. Army who watched over quarantined and abandoned animals during the post–World War II occupation. Bonnie’s favorite animal: a chubby, short-legged pony from Korea named Knicker. The family returned to the United States, and Bonnie grew up to get a degree in illustration from Syracuse University, which led to a job designing toys for Hasbro in 1978. Many times over the course of three years, Zacherle pitched the idea of a pony doll—small, soft, and cuddly with a tail and mane kids could comb. The bosses cited research that said kids, girls in particular, didn’t want pony toys, so she gave up… until one executive asked her to design a different pony toy. He wanted it to be huge—about the size of a cat—made of hard plastic, and with a lever that made its ears wiggle, eyes wink, and the tail move. That toy, My Pretty Pony, sold about a million units when it was released in 1981, but a Hasbro executive thought they could do better. He asked his wife how she would improve the toy, and she suggested they make it smaller and softer, with comb-able hair. In other words…just like Zacherle’s original idea. In 1982 Hasbro revamped My Pretty Pony as a line of six soft vinyl ponies with manes and tails that kids could brush, and called it My Little Pony.
COZY COUPE
Pedal cars for kids have been around almost since the birth of “real” cars. In the 1970s, a former auto industry worker named Jim Mariol came up with a new idea. The ex-Chrysler designer wanted to make an immersive make-believe car for kids, so he created the Cozy Coupe—a toy car that, unlike most other kid-size vehicles, had a roof and working doors. He had the money for those elements because the Cozy Coupe had no pedals. Taking inspiration from Fred Flintstone’s car, no motor skills were required, and with no pedals to operate, it was perfect for younger kids. First released by Little Tikes in 1979, the Cozy Coupe was selling 500,000 units a year by the early 1990s… which was more than any “real” American-made car at the time.
FIDGET SPINNER
In early 2017, teachers were besieged by kids carrying cheap, three-pronged plastic devices that spun on a ball bearing. The “fidget spinner,” as it was nicknamed, purportedly helped channel kids’ nervous energy, thereby allowing them to focus on their classwork. Whether it really did was beside the point—for a few months, the fidget spinner was the hottest toy in the world, available in stores everywhere for just a couple of bucks. It was based on a device designed by an IT worker named Scott McCoskery. He got so bored during meetings that he created a Torqbar, a metal toplike object that he’d hold in one hand and spin around with the other to pass the time. Figuring other people were probably as bored as he was, he started selling the Torqbar online in 2014. Cost: $300…and yet he couldn’t keep up with demand. By late 2016, other companies started making Torqbar knockoffs, and for the much more attractive price of $5 or less. McCoskery filed for a patent, but it was too late. By the time the fidget spinner fad started to fade in late 2017, McCoskery’s patent still hadn’t been approved.
Why is chocolate is associated with Valentine’s Day? One theory is that doctors in the 1800s prescribed chocolate to heartbroken people.
BETSY WETSY
It’s probably an apocryphal story, but the official Ideal Toys company line on how it came up with the idea for one of the most popular dolls ever made involved a frustrated mother talking to a company designer at a party. The woman said that her preschool-aged daughter felt miffed whenever mom had to go and change her newborn baby’s diaper. She suggested Ideal come up with a lifelike doll so that little girls could play with it and work right alongside their mothers. This was in the early 1930s, and it took Ideal a while to develop the perfect plastic—it had to be submergible in hot water (if a kid gave the doll a bath), and the company wanted it to really drink and “wet” itself. In 1934 Ideal debuted Betsy Wetsy, one of the first “realistic” toy dolls, made out of soft latex. It drank water, cried tears, and left a wet mess in a diaper. It didn’t really take off in sales until after World War II, but was the best-selling doll of the 1950s and remained in production until the early 1980s. (Why was it named Betsy? That was Ideal executive Abraham Katz’s daughter’s name.)
WHAT IT’S CALLED IN CANADA
•DiGiorno frozen pizza is called Delissio.
•In Quebec, signage must be printed in both English and French by law. In French, KFC is known as PFK, because “Kentucky Fried Chicken” translates to “Poulet Frit Kentucky.”
•Exxon used to be known in the U.S. as Esso, until it was changed in 1972. It’s still Esso in Canada.
•Mr. Clean’s French Canadian cousin: Monsieur Net.
Indonesian wedding tradition: Newlyweds get a tooth filled to “seal” their negative qualities.
RECIPES TO DIE FOR
Uncle John’s mom had a secr
et recipe for pecan bars that she wouldn’t share with anyone. “Over my dead body!” she’d say. When she died, the pecan recipe went with her. But it doesn’t have to be that way: some folks have found a unique way to share beloved family recipes—whether they’re secret or not—after they pass on.
ETCHED IN STONE
When Maxine Menster died in 1994 at the age of 68, her family searched for a way to honor her warmth and generosity of spirit in a way that was “specific to her,” her daughter Jane says. One memory that came quickly to mind was the smell of the Christmas cookies that she baked each year using a recipe passed down in her family for generations. On the day she made them, the kitchen would be filled with cookies cooling “over every surface—die counters, the tables, the chairs—there were cookies everywhere,” family friend Charlie Becker told the Cedar Rapids Gazette. “She loved to bake.”
The cookie recipe was hardly a secret; Maxine shared it with anyone who asked. So why not continue that tradition and share it with the world? That’s just what the Mensters did: When they ordered the tombstone for Maxine’s grave in the Cascade Cemetery in Cascade, Iowa, they had the recipe carved into the back side of the marker.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Carving a loved one’s favorite recipe into their tombstone is hardly a fad. But now that nearly everyone has a smartphone with a camera built in, whenever someone stumbles across a recipe in a cemetery, they tend to take pictures, and soon those photos begin circulating on the internet. Only problem: the recipes usually take up so much space that they appear on the back side of the marker, and either the person taking the picture neglects to photograph the side with the name, or the picture of the side with the name doesn’t circulate as widely as the one with the recipe. Either way, it makes it difficult to determine where the picture was taken and who is being memorialized. But that doesn’t make the recipes any less tasty!
A snake with “king” in its name means it will kill and eat other snakes.
Here are some other examples of recipes so good that they’ve literally been carved into stone:
SEEN ON: A grave in a cemetery in Nome, Alaska (identity of the deceased unknown)
(The grave is also decorated with an image of a tub of Cool Whip, which presumably was dolloped onto the finished cookies.)
SEEN ON: The grave of Jacob and Mina Toper in the Kibbutz Na’an in Israel
SEEN ON: The grave of Kathryn Kirkham Andrews and Wade Huff Andrews, Logan City Cemetery, Logan, Utah
Why did Mr. Rogers announce he was feeding his fish on his show? A blind child who worried about the fish…
STALL OF FAME:
“THE TINDER POO DATE”
It’s a sad fact of life: if you’re old enough to go on dates, you’ve probably had at least one “date from hell.” But can you top this one? It took place in Bristol, England, and went so badly that it made headlines and earned the unfortunate couple a spot in our Stall of Fame.
ON A ROLL
In the summer of 2017, a Bristol University graduate student named Liam Smith, 24, met a woman (unnamed in news reports, for reasons that will become clear in a moment) using the dating app Tinder. He liked her and she liked him, so they agreed to go for dinner and drinks at Nando’s, a popular Portuguese restaurant in Bristol. That part of the date went well—so well, in fact, that the happy pair went back to Smith’s flat to watch a movie on Netflix. About an hour into the movie, the woman excused herself to use the bathroom. That’s when the trouble started: The woman had to go “number two,” and it was only after she did so that she realized that Smith’s toilet was malfunctioning. It would not flush.
Had the pair known each other even a little bit better, the story would probably have ended there. One of them would have found a way to fix or flush the toilet, and the unfortunate occurrence would be quickly forgotten. But remember, this was their first date—and the woman panicked.
Remember, this was their first date—and the woman panicked.
THE PLOT THICKENS
Rather than admit to her new friend that she had a problem, the woman wadded up some toilet paper and used it to—carefully—pluck her poo out of the toilet, then she wrapped the offending item in more toilet paper and tossed it out the bathroom window, which opened at the top. That’s how she learned that the bathroom window was no ordinary bathroom window.
“Unfortunately, owing to a design quirk of my house, the toilet window does not in fact open to the garden, but instead into a narrow gap of about a foot and a half, separated from the outside world by another (non-opening) double-glazed window,” Smith writes. “It was into this twilight zone that my date had thrown her poo.” Apparently, the outer window was so clear—or Smith’s date was so panicked—that she did not realize the second window was there until her TP-wrapped poo bounced off of it and landed between the two windows, where it was clearly visible from inside the bathroom.
…wrote in and said, “I can’t see if you are feeding them, so please say you are feeding them out loud.”
The gap between the two windows was narrow and deep—so deep that when the woman tried to reach down to retrieve her imperfectly jettisoned poo, she found that her arms were too short to reach it.
THERE’S SOMETHING YOU SHOULD KNOW
At this point the woman decided to fess up. She exited the bathroom and “with a panicked look in her eye,” told her date what happened. (“It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to say,” she later admitted.) Trying to be helpful, Smith suggested they just smash the window and retrieve the poo that way. But his date had another idea: she was an experienced gymnast, and she thought she could climb through the opening at the top of the inside window and lower herself upside down between the two windows, grab the poo, and with a little help from Smith, pull herself back out again without breaking any glass.
They decided to try it. The woman climbed through the opening at the top of the window and lowered herself into the gap. She reached for the poo…and couldn’t quite get it. So she lowered herself a little further into the gap. She still couldn’t reach her poo. So she lowered herself still further into the gap and…success! She reached the poo and, with a plastic bag covering her hand, bagged it, and handed it up to Smith. He dropped it into the toilet and was able to get the toilet to flush.
A TIGHT SPOT
Now all that remained was to remove the upside-down woman from the narrow gap between the two windows. No such luck: “My hips were wedged in the window,” the woman explained online. Smith spent 15 minutes trying to free her before he gave up and called firefighters, who arrived a short time later and freed her by breaking the window. The woman spent a total of about 30 minutes wedged upside down, and other than a few scratches—and a lot of embarrassment—she was fine.
“My hips were wedged in the window.”
The story might not have spread any further than the couple, the firefighters, and their friends were it not for the fact that Liam Smith is a starving grad student. He didn’t have the £200 (about $350) that he figured he was going to need to fix the window so that his landlord wouldn’t evict him. So he took the woman out on a second date, and over drinks they decided to launch a GoFundMe campaign to raise the money to fix the window. On his GoFundMe page, Smith gave a full account of the incident. He also posted pictures of the windows—with and without the woman wedged upside down in the gap between them—and a photo of the firefighters working to free her. If ever a story was tailor-made to spread quickly across the internet, this was it. Within hours the tale of the “Tinder Poo Date” had tongues wagging all over the world. The BBC contacted the Avon Fire and Rescue service, which confirmed the story. They had indeed “received a call and freed a woman trapped between external and double glazing,” and that “a window was broken in the process.”
Dublin, Ohio, is home to an art installation called Cornhenge: It’s 109 six-foot-tall concrete ears of corn.
ALLS WELL THAT ENDS WELL
The GoFundMe campaign raised more than
$3,500—more than ten times the amount of money needed to replace the window. Smith and his date donated the excess money to two charities: one that supports firefighters in the Bristol area, and another called Toilet Twinning, which builds toilets in the developing world.
At last report the Tinder Poo Date woman was still safely anonymous, and she is remarkably philosophical about what she has been through. “It’s not something I’m proud of, but people are laughing, and if I’m making people happy then I’m not going to complain,” she says. Whether she’ll find love with Liam Smith is another question. “As for a third date,” she told the BBC, “I’m not sure.”
FOOD (NOT) FOR THOUGHT
The concept of throwing food at lousy stage acts predates tomato cultivation. (Tomatoes were introduced to Europe in the 16th century, but many people thought they were poisonous and they didn’t catch on as a popular food until the 19th century.) The first printed reference to pelting speakers with produce is from 63 AD, when Roman emperor Vespasianus Caesar Augustus tried to calm a rioting crowd… and was greeted with a barrage of turnips. At London’s Globe Theatre—where William Shakespeare presented many of his plays in the 17th century—people in the cheap seats (directly in front of the stage) threw rotten eggs at performers. Shakespeare reportedly figured it was because they were getting bored, so he started to write his plays differently, placing serious or emotional scenes just before and after crowd-pleasingly funny, sexy, or violent scenes. The first known instance of a tossed theatrical tomato wasn’t until 1883 in Hempstead, New York. The New York Times reported that while performing in a vaudeville show, a tumbler named John Ritchie was unable to complete a somersault because “a great many tomatoes struck him, throwing him off his balance and demoralizing him.” One tomato hit Ritchie between the eyes and knocked him to the ground. He hightailed it off the stage, dodging tomatoes as he ran.
Uncle John's Actual and Factual Bathroom Reader Page 31