Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (31 page)

KCO:
Family’s only surviving son

258:
Ineptitude

290:
Desertion

KLG:
Financial irresponsibility

280:
Fraudulent entry into armed forces

LGJ:
Disapproval of request for extension of service

318:
Conscientious objection

311:
Illegal alien to the U.S.

JFB:
Underage at time of admission to service

HLK:
Unsanitary habits

464:
Schizoid personality

LFN:
Physical disability existing prior to service

41A:
Apathy; lack of interest

221:
Pregnancy

440:
Concealment of prior arrest record

256:
Homosexual

JRB:
Admission of bisexuality

41E:
Obesity

BLF:
Drug use

GMG:
Alcoholism

GMF:
Sexual perversion

JLB:
Discreditable incident involving a civilian

JLJ:
Shirking

KNL:
“For the good of the Service”

The 2010 U.S. Census cost $13 billion, or $42 per American.

OBSCURE 1960s FADS

Sure, you’ve heard of lava lamps, Nehru jackets, yo-yos, pop art, op art, paper dresses, and bell-bottoms. But here are a few crazes of the 1960s that may have escaped you
.

P
IANO WRECKING (1963)

As part of his nightclub act in the 1930s, Jimmy Durante would play a few songs on a piano...and then slowly rip the instrument apart with his bare bands and throw the chunks out into the crowd. Audiences loved this bizarre bit of performance art. More than three decades after Durante did it, wrecking pianos became a fad in the engineering department at Derby College of Technology in England. Six-man teams used tools such as axes, sledgehammers, and crowbars to break a piano into pieces so tiny that they could be passed through a 20-cm hole (that’s a little less than eight inches), competing to see who could do it the fastest. The fad spread to Cal Tech in Pasadena, California, where the Piano Reduction Study Group deconstructed a piano in just 10 minutes, 44 seconds. Engineering students at Wayne State University in Detroit beat that record with a time of 4 minutes, 51 seconds. But why wreck a piano into tiny bits? Like earlier weird college fads such as phone-booth stuffing or goldfish swallowing, it probably helped to blow off steam built up from the rigors of academia. Or, as Robert Diller of Cal Tech told
Time
in 1963, “It has psychological implications which are pretty clear to us. It’s a satire on the obsolescence of today’s society.” The fad died out by the mid-’60s, replaced with a far more pressing college pastime: protesting the Vietnam War.

COLORING BOOKS FOR ADULTS (1961)

The TV show
Mad Men
has kindled nostalgia for the booming corporate culture of the 1960s. But as it was actually happening, in 1961, Chicago advertising writers Marcie Hans, Dennis Altman, and Martin Cohen came up with a way to viciously satirize it: They wrote and drew
The Executive Coloring Book
. It looked like a children’s coloring book, but instead of cowboys and barnyard animals, it pictured men in suits sitting behind desks, and had sarcastic captions like “This is my suit. Color it gray or I will lose my job,” and “This is my desk. It is mahogany. Important people have mahogany desks. My walls are mahogany, too. I wish I were mahogany.” The idea was a lark and an inside joke, so the three creators paid for a small print run of just 1,600 copies. They sold out in a week. By the end of the year, they’d sold a staggering 300,000
Executive Coloring Book
s. In 1962 a slew of “adult coloring books” hit the market, mocking subjects like bartenders, the United Nations, John F. Kennedy, and psychiatrists (“My analyst says I am confused and abstract. Color me confused and abstract”). Before the novelty wore off at the end of 1962, a million adult coloring books had been sold.

The dwarf planet Pluto was named by Venetia Burney, an 11-year-old British schoolgirl.

SCOPITONE (1960)

Panorams, jukebox-like machines that played three-minute films of jazz musicians performing (called “soundies”), were popular in bars in pre-World War II France. After the war, using surplus military parts and equipment, a company called CAMECA tried to bring back the concept, only with color film. It took the company’s technicians 15 years to figure out how to rear-project a moving image to a TV screen, but they finally released their Scopitone “video jukebox” in 1960. About the size of a refrigerator, it offered a choice of 36 film clips, each a staged, lip-synced performance of a popular song, much like modern music videos. The first clips, distributed to French bars, restaurants, and movie theaters, featured French pop stars such as Johnny Hallyday, Juliette Greco, and Serge Gainsbourg. As Scopitones moved into West Germany, England, and the United States, stars like Neil Sedaka, Debbie Reynolds, and Dionne Warwick (warbling “Walk on By” while lying on a white bearskin rug) signed on. By 1964 more than 500 Scopitones had popped up around the United States, primarily in resort hotels, cocktail lounges, and bowling alleys (as well as hundreds more by knockoff companies Colorama, Color-Sonics, and Cinebox). Scopitones were phenomenally popular for the better part of 1964...until rock acts like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones started to dominate pop culture. Scopitone, meanwhile, could only manage to sign “stars” like Buddy Greco, Ethel Ennis, and Frank Sinatra, Jr. But Scopitone’s biggest mistake: They placed their machines in bars—where young rock and pop fans weren’t allowed. Scopitone went out of business in 1969.

Brain food: Everything a giant squid eats passes through its brain on the way to its stomach.

SECRETS OF THE AVOCADO

Inside that textured green skin, it’s ripe with mystery. It’s an “evolutionary anachronism.” It’s not a vegetable, and not exactly your typical fruit. It’s an acquired taste that most Americans still resist. Meet the avocado
.

H
AVING A BALL
The avocado came from South America, so it’s not too surprising that the Nahuatl language of the ancient Aztecs gave us its name, derived from
ahuacatl
. Besides referring to the fruit, the word had another meaning: “testicle,” which also isn’t too surprising, considering the fruit’s shape and texture. Although “guacamole” doesn’t really sound like “avocado,” the two words share a root: Guacamole comes from the Nahuatl
ahuacatl-molli
, which means “avocado sauce.” (The fact that it also means “testicle sauce” is probably not something we want to dwell on.)

BEEN THERE, DUNG THAT

Biologists suggest that it’s a lucky accident the avocado is still with us, because it evolved to fill a niche in an ecosystem that went extinct eons ago. As with many fruits, the avocado developed as a mutually beneficial trade-off with animals. The tree provides tasty food, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch—the plant’s price for its fruit is mobility for its seeds. How does that work? The seeds of the fruit are typically small enough to pass through the digestive systems of the animals that eat it. The seeds are often bitter, sometimes even toxic enough to cause nausea. So animals rarely chew them more than once, but instead learn to swallow them whole. The seeds exit the digestive system intact, as waste, and end up planted in the animal’s nutrient-rich dung.

There’s no reason to believe that the avocado was an exception to this rule. It’s unlikely that the plant species’ survival was ever meant to depend on humans poking its seed with toothpicks and suspending it in water to get it to sprout. But that begs the question: What animal in South America is big enough to eat a avocado whole and poop out its oversize pit?

It would take about 33 million people holding hands to span Earth at the equator.

ANIMANIACS

The answer, of course, is that there is none. Not anymore, anyway. As with the mango and the dodo fruit, the plant’s animal partner is no longer with us, making it what scientists call an “evolutionary anachronism.” Long ago, South America was ruled by
megafauna
, giant animals that lived until humans arrived and apparently hunted them to extinction, around 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. For millions of years South America was an island, not yet connected to North America, allowing for richly diverse evolution of animals such as the
glyptodon
, an armadillo the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, and the sleek
macrauchenia
(“long neck”), a 10-foot-long grass eater that looked like a cross between a horse, a camel, a giraffe, and a svelte elephant. Then there were the giant ground sloth, 20 feet long and weighing five tons, and the
gomphothere
, an oversize elephant-like creature that might have roamed South America as recently as 9,000 years ago. All four are prime candidates for being the avocado’s co-evolutionary pals. But if the fruit hadn’t turned out to be tasty to humans, it may well have gone the way of the glyptodon and the gomphothere.

AVOCADO FACTS

•
Good For You.
Avocados are full of nutrients and cholesterol-lowering monounsaturated fat. However, the fruit, leaves, pit, and skin have been documented as harmful—and sometimes deadly—to many animals, including cats, dogs, rabbits, birds, horses, goats, rabbits, cattle, rodents, and fish. But not all parts are poisonous to every animal. While the fruit can kill birds, at least one pet food manufacturer has added avocado pulp and oil to its line of cat and dog foods as a coat conditioner, without any known ill effects.

•
What Hass Got Rot?
There are dozens of avocado varieties. The most common by far is the Hass avocado, accounting for about 80 percent of all cultivated avocado trees worldwide. And
all
of them are descended from the cuttings of a single tree owned by Rudolph Hass, a mail carrier who lived in La Habra Heights, California. In 1935 Hass noticed that the tree of unknown lineage produced great fruit year-round, so he patented it and sold its cuttings. (His original tree died of root rot in 2002.)

Yours for the taking: The asteroid 3554 Amun, which will cross Earth’s orbit in 2020, contains an estimated $20 billion worth of metals.

•
Production.
Of America’s avocado crop, 90 percent comes from California. Of those, 60 percent come from San Diego County. How many avocados can a typical commercial tree produce each year? About 500, totaling 200 pounds of fruit. But don’t expect to see any advertisements for “tree-ripened avocados.” The avocado is unusual in that it won’t ripen on the tree. Avocados can be kept mature but unripe for weeks or even months by leaving them on the tree or refrigerating them until they arrive at their retail destination. After only a few days at room temperature, they ripen into the semi-squishy state that consumers want.

•
Fruits or Vegetables?
Based on the fact that avocados grow on trees, you’d assume that the avocado is classified as a fruit. That’s correct. But what kind of fruit? According to the University of California, it isn’t like most tree fruits—apples, pears, or peaches—it’s a “single-seeded berry.”

•
Hernando Cortés, Food Critic.
Native American populations have been cultivating avocados for thousands of years. When he wasn’t busy looting and destroying cities, conquistador Hernando Cortés took the opportunity to try an avocado in Mexico. He wrote: “In the center of the fruit is a seed like a peeled chestnut. And between this and the rind is the part which is eaten, which is abundant, and is a paste similar to butter and of very good taste.” Not everyone agrees. Only 41 percent of American households consume avocados.

•
What’s in a Name?
In 1960 the British retail chain Marks & Spencer tried introducing avocados to English consumers. Figuring the name was too foreign-sounding, the store marketed the fruit as “alligator pears.” Unfortunately, its customers thought of pears as being something you made into a dessert...the culinary results were disastrous. After numerous complaints about inedible “alligator pear” tarts and pies, Marks & Spencer decided “avocado” wasn’t such a bad name after all.

IT’S SCIENCE!

Thoughts on the joys and frustrations of scientific discovery
.

“Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.”

—
Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The task is not to see what has never been seen before, but to think what has never been thought before about what you see every day.”

—
Erwin Schrodinger

“The whole of science consists of data that, at one time or another, were inexplicable.”

—
Brendan O’Regan

“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny...’”

—
Isaac Asimov

“A good scientist is a person in whom the childhood quality of perennial curiosity lingers on. Once he gets an answer, he has other questions.”

—
Frederick Seitz

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”

—
Galileo Galilei

“Science is simply common sense at its best—rigidly accurate in observation and merciless to fallacy in logic.”

—
Thomas Huxley

“There are many hypotheses in science that are wrong. That’s perfectly all right; they’re the aperture to finding out what’s right.”