Uncle John's Actual and Factual Bathroom Reader
Page 39
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
We Hear: The “War Rig” roaring down Fury Road. The heavily armored tractor-trailer was stolen by Furiosa (Charlize Theron) to escape the evil clutches of Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne).
Actual Sound: Whales. According to sound designer Mark Mangini, “I had this notion that the truck itself was an allegory for Moby-Dick.” And he viewed Immortan Joe as Captain Ahab “hell-bent on killing the great white whale—the War Rig.” So when it came time to providing the sounds for the truck, “we wanted to personify it as this giant, growling, breathing, roaring beast. It had to be grounded in reality, but we wanted it to be more than that, so we designed whale sounds to play underneath all those truck sounds to embody the real sounds and to personify it.” (The allegory goes beyond sound design: at the end of the film, the bad guys are literally throwing harpoons at the War Rig.)
There’s more water in our atmosphere than there is in all the rivers on Earth combined.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
We Hear: The liquid-metal T-1000 (Robert Patrick) oozing his way through steel bars.
Actual Sound: Wet dog food being poured out of a can.
The Transformers movies (2007–present)
We Hear: The wheezing of Megatron, the main villain who (like Darth Vader in the Star Wars series) has a breathing problem.
Actual Sound: A tiger with emphysema. “Most of Megatron is voiced by Hugo Weaving,” said sound editor Ethan Van der Ryn, “but there were moments when we wanted to get more animalistic with him—a little more violent. We went to this animal park just hoping to get cool sounds from animals…and the tiger just happened to have, lucky for us, emphysema. It had this crazy kind of asthmatic wheeze that ended up working well. A lot of the times in our business, some of the best things come from happy accidents.” (Not so happy for the tiger, though.)
The Arrival (2016)
We Hear: The aliens’ logograms. Their way of communicating is to use “ink” to make circular pictographs that represent words and phrases.
Actual Sound: The film’s Foley artist, Nicolas Becker, blended a lot of disparate elements together to create the squishy sounds of the alien writing: “We basically played with vegetables that we put in water, and also rice. Then we worked with plastic boards. We took metal brushes and scratched them across the plastic board. All of those sounds were combined and treated and that’s how we made the logograms.”
Caddyshack (1980)
We Hear: The gopher’s squeaky voice as it wreaks havoc above and beneath the golf course.
Actual Sound: The squeaky voice of a dolphin. And not just any dolphin, but the same dolphin sound effect that was used for the 1960s TV show Flipper.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)
We Hear: The rumbling of a many-tentacled rathtar chasing Han Solo (Harrison Ford) down a corridor in a spaceship.
Actual Sound: A Honda Civic coasting down a gravel road. That sound effect was created by legendary sound designer Ben Burtt for Raiders of the Lost Ark when a giant boulder chases Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) through a cave. The Force Awakens sound designer David Acord used the sound as an homage to Burtt, but also because it really fit the scene.
Payback: Pirates captured Julius Caesar and held him ransom for 38 days…
The Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
We Hear: The screams of the Nazgul, long-dead kings hell-bent on finding the One Ring. Their screams are so evil that anyone who hears them has to cover their ears in agony.
Actual Sound: Two plastic beer cups being rubbed together.
Godzilla (1954)
We Hear: The monster’s famous roar
Actual sound: A double bass. There are two broad categories of sounds that Foley artists have to re-create: those that exist in the real world, and those that don’t. Godzilla is a good example of the latter, and it took the filmmakers a while before they got a roar that worked. They first tried several different animal sounds, but they all sounded too…real. So they turned to the movie’s composer, Akira Ifukube, who came up with Godzilla’s iconic roar by “dragging a resin-coated leather glove along the loosened strings of a double bass.”
Godzilla (2014)
We Hear: The monster’s famous roar
Actual Sound: Unknown. The filmmakers refuse to say how they came up with Godzilla’s voice for Gareth Edward’s remake. The sound designers, Ethan Van der Ryn and Erik Aadahl, explained their reasoning to NPR. “If we tell everybody exactly how we did it,” said Aadahl, “people will think of that when they hear the roar, and we want them to think of Godzilla.” And that gag order came all the way from the top of the movie studio: “We actually were sworn to take it to our graves with us,” said Van der Ryn.
The X-Men films (2000–present)
We Hear: The “SNIKT” sound of Wolverine’s (Hugh Jackman) adamantium claws springing out of his fist.
Actual Sound: Like most superhero sound effects, this one combines a real-world sound—a metal blade being pulled from a sheath—and something extra to give it a “hyper-reality.” What was the extra something? According to sound designer Craig Berkey, it was a turkey carcass being torn apart.
…after his release, he personally commanded the brigade of ships that caught and killed those pirates.
HEN-SCARTINS WITH A
CHANCE OF BLENKY
The Brits and Scots have hundreds of unusual (to us) words to describe the weather. Scotland alone has 421 different words for snow, including feefle (swirling snow), spitters (small drops of wet snow), and skelf (a large snowflake). Here are some more.
AMMIL
Origin:Devon, England
Definition: A thin layer of sparkling ice that glosses trees, leaves, and grass when a freeze follows a partial thaw.
Sentence: “The Snow Queen waved her wand and ammil covered the grass and trees, glittering like diamonds.”
APRICITY
Origin: Exeter, England
Definition: The warmth of the sun in winter.
Sentence: “Mary looked skyward, and basked in the apricity of that perfect January day.”
GRIMLINS
Origin: Orkney Islands, Scotland
Definition: That time of a midsummer night when dusk blends into dawn.
Sentence: “On the summer solstice, we stayed up through the grimlins, watching the sky turn from deep purple to glowing gold.”
BLENKY
Origin: Devon, England
Definition: To snow very lightly. Derived from blenks, which describes cinders.
Sentence: “It blenkied last night and the whole yard looks like it’s been dusted with ash.”
BLACKTHORN WINTER
Origin: Rural England
Definition: A sudden cold snap in early spring when the blackthorn blossoms.
Sentence: “The April snow ushered in a blackthorn winter.”
FLAN
Origin: Scotland
Definition: A gust of wind.
Sentence: “The ladies at the military tattoo giggled when a flan lifted the piper’s kilt.”
OTHER WORDS FOR ICICLES
Daggler and clinkerbell (Hampshire), ickle (Yorkshire), shuckle (Cumbria), and tankle (Durham)
Good news! It would take 1.1 million mosquito bites to drain you of all your blood.
HEN-SCARTINS
Origin: Northumberland, England
Definition: Long, thin streaks of clouds that forecast rain. It means “chicken scratches.”
Sentence: “Judging by the hen-scartins, I’d say we’re in for a wet one.”
SMIRR
Origin: Scotland
Definition: A continuous mist of rain that is so fine, it looks like smoke when seen from a distance.
Sentence: “Smirr is the worst, ’cause you hardly know it’s there. You step outside for a few and suddenly you’re soaked to the bone.”
DREICH
Origin: Scotland
Definition: Really nasty,
gloomy, dismal, wet weather.
Sentence: “We were so looking forward to our vacation, but the weather was such gray dreich, we never left the house.”
YOWE-TREMMEL
Origin: Scotland
Definition: A week of cold, windy, wet weather at the end of June.
Sentence: “Don’t pack away your winter woolies yet. We’re in for one helluva yowe-tremmel.”
FIZMER
Origin: Fenland District, Cambridgeshire, England
Definition: The whispering sound of wind in reeds or grass.
Sentence: “As the hunter crossed the field, the only sound he heard was the soft fizmer of the reeds.”
AQUABOB
Origin: Kent, England
Definition: An icicle
HOOLIE
Origin: Orkney Islands, Scotland
Definition: A strong wind or gale.
Sentence: “Strike the mainsail, it’s blowin’ a hoolie!”
POOTHY
Origin: Fenland District, Cambridgeshire, England
Definition: Close, hot, muggy weather.
Sentence: “This poothy is suffocating. I’m just sitting here sweating buckets.”
ROARIE BUMMLER
Origin: Scotland
Definition: A fast-moving bank of storm clouds.
Sentence: “Get inside before you get drenched! A roarie-bummler is speeding across the northeastern sky.”
More salt is used for de-icing roads than for seasoning food.
MOUTHING OFF
CELEBRITY WISDOM
Random thoughts from famous folks.
“I wish I could trade my heart for another liver so I could drink more and care less.”
—Tina Fey
“In every circle of friends there’s always that one person everyone secretly hates. Don’t have one? Then it’s probably you.”
—Will Ferrell
“There is no sunrise so beautiful that it is worth waking me up to see it.”
—Mindy Kaling
“One person’s craziness is another person’s reality”
—Tim Burton
“If you know you’re going to fail, then fail gloriously!”
—Cate Blanchett
“One of my goals in life is to have the biggest residential pool on the planet.”
—Drake
“Well, I try to keep to ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ The rest of them I’m kind of shaky on.”
—Willie Nelson
“You laugh at me because I’m different; I laugh at you because you’re all the same.”
—Lady Gaga
“LUCK IS ABOUT NINE-TENTHS OF IT.”
—Woody Harrelson, on his success
“I broke something, and realized I should break something every week to remind me how fragile life is.”
—Andy Warhol
WEIRD CANADA
O, Canada: where the mountains are capped with snow, the maple trees and beavers are abundant, and the news stories are really, really strange.
NOSEY NEIGHBORS
David and Joan Gallant moved in next door to Lee and Shirley Murray’s farm in Indian Mountain, New Brunswick, in 2001. Everyone was friendly with everyone until late 2013, when Lee Murray left a massive load of cow manure on his lawn. (Estimated size of the poop pile: 18 by 14 meters, or 59 by 46 feet.) That much manure tends to stink to high heaven, and it drove the Gallants mad. They asked many times to clear the waste away, but the Murrays apparently refused, at one point telling the Gallants that it would freeze over and stop smelling once winter came. Meanwhile, the manure mountain started to slip…and run into the Gallants’ property. David Gallant enlisted a local farm board to help, and after 11 months, the Murrays finally got rid of the cow poop, but then they accused the Gallants of trespassing, which sent the whole thing to court. (A judge ruled in favor of the poor Gallants.)
FIRE AND ICE
Late one night in January 2018, a fire raged throughout the small Saint-Gabriel-de-Valcartier Hotel outside of Quebec City, Quebec. The hotel was almost completely booked, with guests asleep in 13 of the structure’s 14 rooms. Nobody was killed or seriously hurt, but several patrons reported minor smoke inhalation. What’s so weird about this? The Saint-Gabriel-de-Valcartier is an ice hotel, meaning it’s made completely out of frozen blocks of water. Amazingly, the fire didn’t melt the hotel, which reported no structural damage, although the lack of windows left a strong smoky smell in the hotel for a few days.
THE MONEY PIT
Leston Lawrence worked at the Royal Canadian Mint in Ontario up until 2016, when he was convicted of taking his work home. Between 2014 and 2015, Lawrence smuggled 22 solid gold disks (called “pucks,” because this story took place in Canada) out of the mint. Total worth of the pucks: about $190,000, although he sold most of them for $130,000, which he sold to build a house and buy a boat. So, how did Lawrence get those pucks out of the mint, and fool the metal detectors in place to prevent this exact crime? He hid them in his rectum. Lawrence was sentenced to 30 months in prison and a fine of $190,000 by an Ontario provincial judge. Bonus: The judge’s name was Peter Doody.
Spy hard: Before he was an actor, Bruce Willis was a private detective.
BEARLY LEGAL
Innisfail is a small town in rural, southern Alberta. Its biggest attraction: an animal refuge and theme park called Discovery Wildlife Park. The center’s most notable resident is a young Kodiak bear named Berkley, whose videos have gone viral. One clip depicted Berkley leaning out of the driver’s-side window of a pickup truck so she could eat ice cream and cake right out of the hands of a Dairy Queen employee working the drive-through. “We’ve got Berkley in the drive-through testing out some ice cream so she can pick out her birthday cake,” a man named Mark says in the video. Two days later, Discovery posted another video showing Berkley licking the frosting off an ice cream cake. In the same video, a park employee notes that in addition to cake, Berkley also enjoys peanuts and “Kraft Dinner,” which is what Canadians call boxed macaroni and cheese. These are just two more examples of questionable behavior by Discovery Wildlife Park, which has led to an investigation by Alberta’s Environment and Parks department. The agency has previously received complaints about the park after its Facebook page depicted photos of children standing by the bears, and adults allowing the bears to kiss their faces.
FOR THE BIRDS
Police were sent to a home in Brighton, Ontario, one evening in 2016 when neighbors, fearing a violent domestic dispute, overheard what they believed to be the couple who lived there screaming at one another. According to police records of the call, the man was yelling things like “I hope you die.” But it wasn’t the couple yelling at each other. “We located the male of the household alone in the house,” Constable Steve Bates said. The man had apparently been “screaming at his pet parrot who had been ‘beaking off’ at him” (at least that’s what the man told police). Fortunately, the bird had not been physically abused, and, unsurprisingly, the man had been drinking. No charges were filed, although Bates said, amazingly, “These are the kinds of stories that police run into all the time.”
FREEDOM FROM INFORMATION ACT
In 2018 Michael Dagg, a researcher from Ottawa, filed a request with Library and Archives Canada for access to 780,000 documents that related to a mid-1990s police investigation into money-laundering and corruption. The national request program allows any Canadian to request government information for a $5 fee. It usually takes about 30 days. But in this case, the federal department told Dagg it would take a little longer. How much longer? About 290,000 days…roughly 800 years. Dagg then received another email informing him that the first email had been in error. It wouldn’t take 800 years to get the documents—it would take only 80 years.
In the 19th century, the Egyptian “mummy trade” was so booming that tourists could buy them from Cairo street vendors.
TYPO-RRIFIC!
What blood type is Uncle John? Typo. Now, some typo stories you might appreciha
te.
THERE’S A TYPO IN YOUR SENTENCE
In 1987 a jury in California found Bruce Wayne Morris guilty of first-degree murder in the death of a hitchhiker he’d picked up in Sacramento. During the sentencing phase of the trial in 1987, the judge sent the jury a note informing them that they had a choice of sentencing Morris to death or life in prison without the possibility of parole. Except that the judge mistakenly wrote with the possibility of parole. The jury, thinking their choice was between a death sentence and the possibility of Morris walking the streets again, chose death. Morris’s attorneys appealed the case, and in 2001–14 years of litigation later—the death sentence was overturned by a federal appeals court, on the basis of the judge’s typo. The case was sent back to the original court for a new sentencing hearing; the death sentence was vacated.
ABOUT TIMES!
On January 20, 1853, the New York Times published an article about Solomon Northup, a former slave who had written a memoir titled 12 Years a Slave. Except they spelled his name wrong…twice: they spelled it “Northrup” in the article’s headline, and “Northrop” in the article itself. The Times was informed of the error and issued a correction…161 years later. A Twitter user alerted them of the typo in 2014, after the film adaptation of 12 Years a Slave won the Oscar for Best Picture at the Academy Awards.
LESUS!
In October 2013, the Vatican issued a commemorative medal to celebrate Pope Francis’s first year as head of the Catholic Church. Around the rim of one side of the coin was a phrase in English, reportedly a favorite of the pope, that said, “Jesus, therefore, saw the tax collector, and because he saw by having mercy and by choosing, He said to him, ‘Follow me.’ ” Except the most important word in the phrase—Jesus—was spelled “Lesus.” All 6,000 of the medallions, which had been minted in gold, silver, and bronze, and which had already been sent out to retailers, were recalled and destroyed. (Italian media reported at the time that four of the medallions were actually sold to collectors before the recall—meaning those collectors now own some extremely valuable “Lesus” medals.)