Uncle John's Actual and Factual Bathroom Reader
Page 46
IF IT AIN’T BROKE
When Theo Albrecht bought the company, it was debt-free and making huge profits. He opted to leave it alone, and paid Coulombe to stay on and run the company for another decade. Coulombe retired in 1988, just as the chain was expanding outside Southern California and opening a Trader Joe’s in San Rafael, north of San Francisco.
In the years that followed, the company’s growth rate soared as it opened stores in Arizona and up and down the West Coast, then the East Coast, then the states in between. By the end of 2017, there were 474 stores in 43 states and Washington, DC. It’s estimated that Trader Joe’s now sells more than $13 billion worth of groceries a year, but—of course—the number can’t be confirmed because the company isn’t talking. If you’re curious to visit a Trader Joe’s but live in one of the seven states that hasn’t gotten a store yet, don’t worry: it probably won’t be long before one opens near you.
Marilyn Monroe’s first taste of fame: In 1948 she was named the Artichoke Queen of Castroville, California.
BUNKERISMS
A huge part of All in the Family’s success was the “wisdom” that Archie Bunker dispensed from his armchair at 704 Hauser Street, Queens, New York. His twisted English and skewed view introduced a new phrase into the lexicon: “Archie Bunkerisms.”
On Politics and History
“Between here and Florida, ya got your original 48 states.”
“We have the highest standard of living! The grossest national product!”
“That’s how ya got your Chinatown, your Harlems, your Little Italy…all them grettos.”
“Something’s rotten in the state of Denver.”
“That’s what Columbus said to the Indians just before he gypped ’em out of Manhattan.”
“In the words of Harry S. Truman: ‘If it’s too hot in the kitchen, stay away from the cook.’ ”
“As our president said in his renegurial address.”
“Nixon’s got that big house to maintain in San Clemency.”
“It’s a well-known hysterical fact: they gave ’em an inch of Czechoslovakia and they took Poland.”
“Won by…your distinguished incrumbent.”
“You wanna talk that Russian talk, take yourself back over to the USSO.”
On Marriage
“I’m a man. Men have got another thing… they got whaddya call, a carnival instinct.”
“Hell hath no fury like a woman’s corns.”
“A woman should cleave into her husband. Right here in this house is where Edith’s cleavage belongs.”
“Do you, Edith, take Archie Bunker to be your lawfully bedded husband?”
“Our marriage vows: till death do us part, for better for worse, in secrets and in health.”
“If everything is good in the henhouse youse don’t have to go out for eggs.”
“Tell her I ain’t crawlin’ home to her with my tail between her legs.”
“Birth patrol pills.”
“She’s loaded with, whaddya call, women’s intermission.”
“The sexual act was never constipated.”
“The titular head—that’s the mother, ain’t it?”
“We’re like two sheeps that pass in the night.”
“All kids are trouble, Edith. And I don’t wanna spend my reclining years trying to raise another one.”
“It’s too late Edith, my bus has sailed.”
On God
“It ain’t supposed to make sense—it’s faith. Faith is something that you believe that nobody in his right mind would believe.”
“The whole world is turning into a regular Sodom and Glocca Morra.”
We should all be so lucky: Sloths poop once a week, and when they do, they lose about a third of their body weight.
“He made us all one true religion, Edith, which he named after his son, Christian—Christ, for short.”
“Honor thy parents. That’s one of the Lord’s top ten commandments. That’s right around covetin’ your neighbor’s cattles and wives and there.”
On the Law
“Your honor, may I encroach the bench?”
“I just want to take the opportunity to express my whaddya call, gratitude and depreciation.”
“Certainly I’m innocent, Edith…but of what?”
“Ifso fatso.”
“Here’s my last will and tentacle.”
“Position is nine-tenths of the law.”
“And that’s the crutch of the situation.”
“The dent in his car is hardly cold and he’s coming over here to claim his pound of fish.”
“It’s a proven fact that capital punishment is a well-known detergent to crime.”
Fightin’ Words
“What’d ya think, you were gonna pull the wolf over my eyes?”
“I ain’t in no mood to play 120 questions.”
“I got bigger fish to fly.”
“Up there in his ivory shower.”
“Wild hornets couldn’t drag me there.”
“I’m gonna keep a beagle-eye on you the whole weekend.”
“Maybe my mind chewed off more than the mind should bite.”
“Wouldn’t let ’em get in a word wedgewise.”
On Health
“My doctor tells me I got a communications disease.”
“They got her in the expensive care unit.”
“Probably a torn filament right there in the kneecap.”
“They said he had neurosis of the liver.”
“Don’t be hollerin’ at him, will ya, you’ll give him a mental sterosis.”
“What ya eat ain’t got nuttin’ to do with how old ya are. That all depends on your ancestors. It’s what they call a matter of heresy.”
Advice
“I just don’t want you to do nothin’ on the sperm of the moment.”
“It’s a pigment of your imagination.”
“It ain’t exactly the Pope diamond.”
“You don’t hear me gettin’ historical.”
“There’s an old saying: ‘Ya don’t keep runnin’ after you catch the bus.’ ”
On Bigotry
“Welcome to our home. And as youse people say ‘shaboom.’ ” (shalom).
“He was wearing a Yamaha.”
“Fags…that’s what ya call an ungendered species.”
“For too long they’ve been gettin’ the short end of the totem pole.”
“Well, if that ain’t the black calling the kettle pot!”
“Welfare incipients.”
“These people know a lot about that voodoody-oh-doo-doo.”
There’s three times more water in the Earth’s mantle than in all the oceans combined.
WHATEVER HAPPENED
TO AL SMITH?
The U.S. presidency is one of the world’s biggest contests. We know what happens to the winners—they become president and part of history. But what about the losers? Here’s what happened to some of America’s major party presidential candidates after they lost their run for the highest office in the land.
BOB DOLE
Election: Gerald Ford selected Dole, the senior U.S. senator from Kansas, as his vice-presidential running mate in the 1976 election campaign. When they lost, Dole returned to the Senate, but 20 years later he secured the Republican presidential nomination for himself. He lost again in 1996, thoroughly defeated by Bill Clinton by a margin of nine points. Dole joined Richard Nixon as the only candidates to be on both halves of a presidential ticket and lose both times. Unlike Nixon, however, Dole would never go on to win the presidency. After the election, Dole didn’t have a job to return to—in order to devote the time necessary to running for president, he stepped down from his position as a U.S. senator, a job he’d held since 1969. After the election, the 73-year-old Dole retired from politics.
After: Dole had a dry, curmudgeonly, self-deprecating sense of humor that he displayed on the campaign trail and in interviews. Once decorum was no longer an issue, he really let
it loose. He became a major media personality and constant TV presence. The former Senate majority leader appeared in an ad for Dunkin’ Donuts, an ad for Pepsi (with pop star Britney Spears), and even in one for the new “miracle drug” Viagra, bringing the phrase “erectile dysfunction” into the English lexicon. Dole also made cameo appearances on TV sitcoms and on Saturday Night Live, and after Clinton left office in 2001, the two teamed up for a weekly political debate segment on 60 Minutes. Away from TV, Dole became a Washington, DC, lobbyist, working on behalf of foreign government interests, anesthesiologists, and the chocolate industry.
AL SMITH
Election: With the economy flying high under President Calvin Coolidge, his Republican successor, Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover easily ascended to the White House in a landslide in the election of 1928. Hoover defeated New York governor Al Smith by a vote of 444 to 87 in the Electoral College. Smith’s religion may have had something to do with his unpopularity—he was the first Roman Catholic presidential candidate, and anti-Catholic sentiment was high in the United States, brought on by massive immigration from Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Silly Putty was originally marketed to adults.
After: Hoover proved extremely unpopular—the stock market crash of 1929 and the beginnings of the subsequent Great Depression happened on his watch, giving the Democrats a virtual lock of winning back the White House in 1932. Smith threw his hat in the ring again, but was easily defeated in the primaries by another former New York governor: Franklin D. Roosevelt. But probably the most interesting thing Smith did after politics: He was named president of Empire State Inc., the company that built and operated the Empire State Building, the tallest building in the world at the time. Smith was also among the first figures in the U.S. to warn of the increasingly powerful Nazi Party in Germany. In 1933 he publicly advocated for an international boycott on German-manufactured products and delivered speeches on the radio and at political rallies trying to get Americans and political leaders to pay attention to what was going on in Europe before World War II could break out. When war did break out, Smith tried to sway public opinion to American entry, a position also held by his former opponent, President Roosevelt.
WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN
Election: Bryan is the only politician in American history to be a major party’s nominee in three different elections…and lose every time. In 1896 the Democrat ran on a platform of putting the United States on a silver standard (as opposed to gold) to cure the nation’s economic ills; he lost to Republican William McKinley. (It was also the first U.S. presidential election in which both major candidates had the same first name.) The 1900 election was a rematch between Jennings and McKinley, and McKinley won again. After the popular President Theodore Roosevelt declined to run for reelection in 1908, William Howard Taft ran at the top of the Republican ticket, promising to uphold Roosevelt’s policies, and he easily beat the Democratic nominee…William Jennings Bryan (the only other U.S. presidential election in which both major candidates had the same first name).
After: When Democrats took back the White House in 1912 with the election of Woodrow Wilson, Bryan’s long service to the party was recognized with a plum appointment: Secretary of State. In 1915 he resigned the position because he disagreed with President Wilson, who insisted on strong sanctions against Germany after its military torpedoed the English ocean liner Lusitania. Bryan also dabbled in the law—such as when he argued in opposition to Darwinism being taught in public schools in the famous 1925 Scopes trial in Tennessee. The teacher on trial, John Scopes, was ultimately found guilty of the crime of teaching evolution. Just five days after the verdict, Bryan died in his sleep.
Hi Mom!
BEYOND SPITE HOUSES
On page 44 we told you about spite houses—homes that were built to intentionally annoy a neighbor. But it turns out that some folks have applied the same sentiment—revenge—to other kinds of buildings.
Building: The Sam Kee Building, 8 W. Pender St., Vancouver, British Columbia
Background: Sam Kee was a prosperous Chinese merchant who owned a parcel of land in Vancouver’s Chinatown in 1912. That year, the city government decided to widen Pender Street, and to do it they appropriated a 24-foot-wide strip off Kee’s lot. Only a five-foot-wide strip remained, plus a few more feet that became a sidewalk. The city and Kee’s neighbors—who hoped to buy the remaining strip from him and incorporate it into their own parcel—believed there was too little left for Kee to build on.
Revenge! Kee didn’t see it that way. He refused to sell what little remained of his parcel. Instead, he hired an architect to design a commercial building that was just 4 feet, 11 inches from storefront to rear on the ground floor. The basement was wider: it extended beneath the sidewalk, and the second floor extended 25 inches out over the sidewalk. Guinness World Records considers it the shallowest commercial building in the world…and it’s still in use today.
Building: The Richardson Spite House, Lexington Ave and 82nd St., New York City
Background: In the early 1880s, a man named Joseph Richardson owned a strip of land on Lexington that was just over a hundred feet long but only five feet wide. An adjoining plot was much larger, and its owners, Hyman Sarner and Patrick McQuade, wanted to buy Richardson’s parcel so that they could join it with his and build an apartment building on the enlarged parcel. They offered Richardson $1,000 for his strip, but Richardson wanted $5,000. Sarner and McQuade balked at paying that much; instead, they went ahead and built their apartment building on their lot, figuring that Richardson’s five-foot-deep lot could never be built on.
Revenge! How wrong they were! Richardson built a four-story apartment building on his little strip of land, completely blocking the light and the views in Sarner and McQuade’s building in the process. Richardson lived in one of the skinny apartments for the next 32 years until his death in 1897. If you were hoping to see the building the next time you’re in New York, you’re more than a century too late: Richardson’s heirs sold the building in 1902 and it was torn down in 1915.
Building: The Edificio Kavanagh, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Background: The Kavanagh building was built in the 1930s by Corina Kavanagh, a wealthy Argentine woman of Irish descent. She is said to have built it to get back at the aristocratic Anchorena family after she fell in love with a member of the family but was blocked from marrying him because she came from “new money.”
Odds that a glass of water you drink contains at least one molecule that passed through a dinosaur: 99.9%.
Revenge! The Anchorenas lived in a mansion overlooking the Plaza San Martin in Buenos Aires. From the mansion, they had a view of the Basilica of the Holy Sacrament, which the family built in 1916 and donated to the Catholic Church. When Kavanagh learned that a parcel of land between the mansion and the basilica was for sale, she snapped it up and commissioned a 31-story Art Deco skyscraper to be built on the spot. She instructed the architects to make sure that the building blocked the view of the basilica from the Anchorena mansion.
After the Kavanagh building was completed in 1936, Corina moved into an apartment that occupied the entire 14th floor and lived there for many years. The Anchorenas moved out, selling their mansion to the Argentine government in 1936. Today it serves as the ceremonial headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Relations. The Edificio Kavanagh still stands, and it still blocks the mansion’s view of the basilica.
Building: A house across from the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas
Background: The Westboro Baptist Church is infamous for its inflammatory speeches and for picketing churches and military funerals with signs containing slogans like “Thank God for 9/11,” “Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” and “God Hates Fags.” In 2012 a nine-year-old Topeka boy named Josef Miles staged his own counterprotest near some Westboro demonstrators with a handmade sign that read “God Hates No One.”
When Aaron Jackson, the co-founder of a nonprofit charity called Planting Pe
ace, read about Josef’s counterprotest, he was impressed by the boy’s courage, and he was curious to get a look at the Westboro church. So he checked out the church’s neighborhood on Google Street View. “I was ‘walking’ down the street and saw a ‘for sale’ sign,” Jackson told the Washington Post in 2013, and thought “how great it would be to paint it in the colors of the gay pride flag.”
Revenge! That house was no longer for sale, but the house directly across the street from the church was. So Jackson bought it for $81,000. When local painters balked at doing the job, he found a contractor—and military veteran—named Mike McKessor who agreed to paint the house in rainbow colors. “I don’t like them messing with veterans,” he said. Then in 2016, when the house next door to the rainbow house came up for sale, a donor named Martin Dunn stepped forward and provided the funds for Planting Peace to buy the house. Volunteers painted it the pink, white and blue colors of the transgender flag, in the process creating a “spite neighborhood” across from the Westboro Baptist Church. Who knows? As more houses in the neighborhood come up for sale, the neighborhood may grow larger.
Before buffalo wings were invented in 1964, chicken wings were used almost entirely for making soup stock.
FUN GUN FACTS
The only way to stop a bad page of gun facts is a good page of gun facts.
Oldest gunmaker in the world: Beretta. They started manufacturing guns in Brescia, Italy, back in 1526.
Russian cosmonauts were issued triple-barreled shotguns. In case of alien attack? Nope—if, on the trip back to Earth, they crash-landed in Siberia, they’d be able to defend themselves against bears.
In 1881 Charles J. Guiteau shot President James Garfield with an ivory-handled revolver. He claimed he specifically selected that one over a wooden-handled gun because he thought it would look better in a museum.