They also gave us a children’s book that would probably have shocked the socks off John Locke. In 1992 Chronicle Books, a San Francisco publisher founded during 1967’s “Summer of Love,” published The House That Crack Built—a book about crack cocaine and the tragic results of the drug wars that plague America. Writing with a hip-hop beat, author Clark Taylor delivered lines such as “This is the Street of a town in pain/This is the Girl who’s killing her brain.” And that pretty much sums up how much children’s books shave changed since the days of Goody Two-Shoes.
1998 How many children’s books have theme parks around the world?That would be one: Harry Potter. The Wizarding World of Harry Potter opened in Orlando, Florida, in 2010, and more attractions followed in California and Japan, Australia, and England. Before the parks, there were Potter-themed movies, toys, and a long list of spin-off books and merchandise. But before that came the real children’s literature milestone: a book about a young wizard named Harry written by an unknown author, J. K. Rowling.
Anyone who hasn’t heard J. K. Rowling’s rags-to-riches story must have spent the last 20 years stuck inside a vanishing cabinet. Rowling went from a struggling single mom to one of the wealthiest people on the planet. The book that started it all—Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone—saw its first UK edition published in 1997, and its first U.S. release in 1998. The book grabbed young readers like no other book in the history of children’s literature. Reviewers from the Glasgow Herald declared they had “yet to find a child who can put it down.” The seven books in the Harry Potter series have now sold 400 million copies.
As for the effect Rowling’s writing had on children’s publishing, there are two main time periods: before Harry and after Harry. Before Harry, children’s literature was the often-ignored younger sibling of “real” publishing (meaning books for adults). “The publishing of children’s books,” wrote one industry expert, “tended to be in a ghetto.” After Harry, the sky above the ghetto started raining money and children’s books became big business. Rowling, now the world’s richest author, is reportedly worth more than $1 billion; the value of the Harry Potter franchise has topped $25 billion. With that much money at stake, children’s publishing became a whole new animal… with a hunger for more of the same. Twilight, The Hunger Games, and Percy Jackson and the Olympians are just a few of the fantasy series feeding the beast…and you can bet your Quidditch stick that we’ll see more changes.
The daisy gets its name from the Old English dæges ēage, or “day’s eye,” because the blossom opens in the morning and closes at night.
Temperature inside of a NASCAR car mid-race: 120°F.
Remember the creature in the Alien movies? The goblin shark grabs its prey by “shooting” its jaw almost entirely outside of its body.
High flyers: A pilot flying over the Himalayas once spotted a flock of bar-headed geese at 29,000 feet.
The largest-ever bag of potato chips (made by UK chipmaker Corkers in 2013) was 18 feet tall and contained 2,515 chips.
Here are a few more groundbreaking kids’ books:
1958: The Rabbits’ Wedding by Garth Williams
(interracial marriage, bunny style)
1962: A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
(girls can be sci-fi heroes)
1970: Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
(girls have periods)
1970: In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
(full-frontal nudity!)
1971: The Lorax by Dr. Seuss
(cutting down trees stinks)
1977: Everyone Poops by Taro Gomi
(everyone…well, you know)
1997: The Adventures of Captain Underpants by Dav Pilkey
(now we can say underwear!)
2005: And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
(same-sex penguins can be loving parents)
2015: Last Stop on Market Street by Matt de la Peña
(even poverty has its upsides)
For a list of the most questionable kids’ books to ever go to press, see page 466.
BOOING IS BORN
In ancient Greece, the playwriting competition at the annual Festival of Dionysia in Athens was considered the entertainment event of the year. Playwrights from all over the Greek world presented their latest tragedies, and at the end, one would be proclaimed the best. When a democratic-minded emperor named Cleisthenes took power in the sixth century BC, he let the audience be the judge: the crowd applauded the plays they liked and whistled at the ones they didn’t. Those practices continued on to ancient Rome and its peculiar form of entertainment—gladiator battles—with crowds adding hissing to the whistling. (Hissing is basically whistling, but it’s easier to do because it’s done with the tongue and not the lips.) By the 13th century, the English had a word to describe the ominous sound of a displeased crowd whistling and hooting in unison: “hoot.” Before long, people were just saying the word “hoot” instead of hissing or whistling, and by the 1800s “hoot” had evolved into “boo.”
Live free or die: In Longyearbyen, Norway, dying is illegal.
NOT MY BEST WORK
The artist and the art. Sometimes they don’t get along.
Frank Zappa: “Valley Girl”
Zappa hated the fact that his 1982 hit charted higher than any other song he released in a career that spanned more than 30 years. He’d intended it as a satire of teenage girls of California’s San Fernando Valley and their distinctive speech (“like, totally” and “gag me with a spoon”). To his dismay, the song—featuring his 14-year-old daughter Moon Unit on vocals—gave national exposure to what had only been a Southern California fad, and soon Valley girls were everywhere. “It just goes to show,” lamented Zappa, “that the American public loves to celebrate the infantile. I mean, I don’t want people to act like that. I think Valley girls are disgusting!”
Beastie Boys: “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!)”
The same thing happened with the Beastie Boys’ 1986 hit song. “There were tons of guys singing along…who were oblivious to the fact it was a total goof on them,” said Beastie Boy Mike D. The band watched in amazement as “Fight for Your Right” reached #7 in the charts and was named one of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s “500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.” When the band reluctantly included it on a greatest hits album, they admitted in the liner notes that “it sucks.”
Miles Teller: Divergent
Teller took the part as villainous Peter in the 2014 film for “business reasons”—it was his first role in an international movie, so he was hoping for a career boost, which he got. But he agreed with most of the critics who called the film a “disappointingly predictable” knockoff of The Hunger Games. “I was feeling dead inside,” he said of his time on set. “I called my agent and said, ‘This sucks.’ ” (Teller reprised his role in both sequels.)
Sir Anthony Hopkins: Transformers: The Last Knight
Hopkins played Sir Edmund Burton in the fifth installment of the Transformers movie franchise. Burton, a British astronomer, tells Mark Wahlberg’s character the history of the Transformers on Earth. For the most part, the purpose of Hopkins’s character was to explain the plot—which wasn’t easy because Hopkins didn’t really get it himself. “Please don’t ask me to explain it,” he pleaded to an interviewer. “It’s so very complicated, and there’s the whole mythology of four previous films that come into play. I have to admit, I don’t quite get all of it.”
It takes up to 50 gallons of sap to create one gallon of maple syrup.
A. A. Milne: Winnie-the-Pooh
Milne considered himself a serious author. He wrote well-received grown-up fare like The Red House Mystery (1922), which Alexander Woollcott praised as “one of the three best mystery stories of all time.” Milne also wrote 35 plays, four screenplays, and was a regular contributor to Punch magazine, which featured satire by the most revered British writers. By the mid-1920s, Milne had a rep
utation as one of the literary elite. But that all changed after he started writing stories about a teddy bear who lived in the woods. The Winnie-the-Pooh books became instantly popular and within a few years had overshadowed everything else Milne ever did. While he enjoyed the sudden fame, Pooh destroyed his literary credibility.
Worse yet, the Pooh books drove a wedge between Milne and his son, Christopher Robin Milne, who was the inspiration for the lead character. As the books’ popularity grew, so too did the fame of the “real Christopher Robin.” Capitalizing on this, Milne made his son answer all of Christopher Robin’s fan mail, read excerpts at publicity appearances, and sing songs on a Winnie-the-Pooh novelty record. Later, when Christopher was at boarding school, the other kids played the record all the time just to taunt him. It wasn’t long before he wanted nothing more to do with the books… or his parents. “My father got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders,” wrote a bitter Christopher later in life. The rift in their relationship never mended.
Arthur Conan Doyle: Sherlock Holmes
Holmes was more famous than Doyle, and Doyle really hated that. He was also annoyed that his detective stories, which he himself dismissed as an “elementary form of fiction,” outsold his historical novels like The White Company (1891), about the Hundred Years’ War. Doyle called that book his “greatest achievement.” And what did he say about Holmes? “He takes my mind from better things.” In fact, in 1893, Doyle grew so sick of the detective that he killed him off in a Strand magazine short story, “The Final Problem.” Fans were so upset that many canceled their subscriptions. A few years later, Doyle brought Sherlock Holmes back to life, but, as he told his mother, “I weary of his name.”
Tyrannosaurus rex couldn’t run—it would’ve broken its legs if it tried.
Sylvester Stallone: Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot!
One of the oddest movies ever made was this Sylvester Stallone film, an action comedy about a cop with a mom who’s a mobster, or something like that. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is how Stallone got the part: Arnold Schwarzenegger tricked him into it. At the time, the action stars were locked in a bitter rivalry over who had the bigger box office. On a few occasions, they even tried to steal each other’s roles. Knowing this, Schwarzenegger got an idea when he read the “so very bad” script: he told his agent to leak it to the press that he has “tremendous interest” in the role, but he would only do it for an exorbitant sum. “Then they’d say,” Schwarzenegger recalled in 2017, “ ‘Let’s go give it to Sly (Stallone). Maybe we can get him for cheaper.’ So they told Sly, ‘Schwarzenegger’s interested. Here’s the press clippings. He’s talked about that. If you want to grab that one away from him, that is available.’ And he went for it!” Schwarzenegger’s instincts were spot on: Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot! was universally panned, and Stallone has been apologizing for it ever since: “If you ever want someone to confess to murder, just make him or her sit through that film. They will confess to anything after 15 minutes.”
WHO WAS ALICE?
Go Ask Alice, written by “Anonymous,” was one of the biggest best-sellers of the 1970s. It purports to be the diary of a troubled teenager who made her first entry in 1969, at the age of 14. (The girl’s name is never revealed in the diary; “Alice” is a reference to a line in the Jefferson Airplane song “White Rabbit.”) The entries chronicle how the girl experiments with drugs, becomes an addict, and runs away from home. She turns to prostitution to support her drug habit, spends time in a mental hospital, and eventually kicks the habit. She reunites with her family, but—spoiler alert!—at the end of the book we are told that the girl died from an overdose, possibly accidental, three weeks after making the last entry in her diary.
The diary—if that’s really what it is—was prepared for publication by Beatrice Sparks, a therapist and youth counselor who claimed she received it from a real teenage girl. But Sparks has never produced the actual diary, and after Go Ask Alice became a best-seller, she followed it up with similar “real diaries” of teenagers struggling with unwed motherhood, AIDS, gang violence, eating disorders, foster care, Satanism, and other timely issues. The U.S. Copyright Office lists her as the sole author of Go Ask Alice and all but two of these other works. Alice is still in print and has sold more than 5 million copies to date; modern editions include a disclaimer acknowledging that it’s a work of fiction.
How revered were beans in ancient Rome? Four great families named themselves after them: Lentulus (lentil), Piso (peas), Cicero (chickpea), and Fabius (fava).
MOUTHING OFF
ACTORS WHO DIRECT
It’s the classic “actor-becomes-filmmaker-and-blabs-about-it” story.
“I like acting better than anything else, but, you know, directing’s good.”
—Tommy Wiseau
“I don’t like just showing up. I’ve never been good at, ‘Hope it all goes well.’ I want to be a part of why it goes well.”
—Drew Barrymore
“Once you’ve directed a movie, it makes you understand that a lot of things that actors do are obnoxious.”
—Seth Rogen
“The whole chameleon thing about acting; that’s why I’m moving towards directing—it’s a much more healthy occupation.”
—Andy Serkis
“Directing is too hard, it takes too much time, and it doesn’t pay very well.”
—Harrison Ford
“Producing is hell, writing is frustrating, acting is really satisfying, directing is heaven.”
—Salma Hayek
“When I direct and have to look at filmed scenes of myself, I suck.”
—William Shatner
“You get money out of acting. You get gray hair out of directing.”
—Tim Robbins
“Directing is really exciting. In the end, it’s more fun to be the painter than the paint.”
—George Clooney
“If I had to choose between a great acting job and a good directing job, I’d choose the directing job.”
—Ron Howard
THE ART OF THE
PHARM-MANTEAU
Drug naming companies have mastered creating a portmanteau, which is what happens when you combine two words to make another word.
BRAND NAME: Ambien
What it is: Zolpidem, a sedative that helps people sleep.
How it got its name: AM stands for morning. And bien means “good” in Spanish and French. If you take Ambien, you’ll sleep soundly and have a “good morning.”
BRAND NAME: Fosamax
What it is: Alendronate sodium, the chemical name for a drug that slows bone loss and increases bone mass in people with osteoporosis.
How it got its name: Os is Latin for bone, and “max” means great, so Fosamax means “for great bones.”
BRAND NAME: Lasix
What it is: Furosemide, a diuretic, used to eliminate water and salt from the body. (It makes the user have to run to the bathroom.)
How it got its name: The name refers to how long the drug works. Lasix is short for “lasts six hours.”
BRAND NAME: Latisse
What it is: An opthalmic prostaglandin that’s also used to make eyelashes grow.
How it got its name: The Brand Institute considers this name their biggest success because they appealed directly to their consumers by combining “lash” with the name of the French painter and sculptor Matisse.
BRAND NAME: Lopressor
What it is: Metoprolol tartrate, a beta blocker that lowers high blood pressure and helps prevent strokes, heart attacks, and kidney problems.
How it got its name: “Lopressor” describes exactly what the drug does—“lowers (blood) pressure.”
BRAND NAME: Macrobid
What it is: Macrodantin/nitrofurantoin, an antibiotic used specifically to fight urinary tract infections.
How it got its name: “Macro” is short for macrodantin, and “b-i-d” is short for bis in die, the Latin term doctors use for “twice a day.�
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BRAND NAME: Vicodin
What it is: A combination of the opioid pain medication hydrocodone and the painkiller acetaminophen.
How it got its name: Hydrocodone is approximately six times as potent as codeine, so the manufacturer combined VI (“six” in Roman numerals) with “codin,” a sound-alike word for codeine.
BRAND NAME: Flomax
What it is: Tamsulosin, an alpha-blocker that relaxes the muscles in the prostate and the neck of the bladder, making it easier to urinate.
How it got its name: The drug “maximizes” urine “flow.”
Near Reno, Nevada, there is a recycling plant that turns household garbage into jet fuel.
FOUND IN TRANSLATION
What do you do when you want to describe a specific feeling, but there’s no single word in the English language that accurately describes it? You look to other languages. They seem to have a word for everything.
Let’s Say… You stuffed yourself at dinner and all you want to do is fall into a coma.
There’s a Word for That: In Italian that feeling is called abbiocco.
Let’s Say… You have the abbiocco. Might as well loosen your belt to let your food digest.
Uncle John's Actual and Factual Bathroom Reader Page 60