Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader (6 page)

OUTCOME:
The conflict continues. Officials keep taking the chickens away, and protestors keep dropping off new ones. Says one chicken-hating resident, “It's a comedy and it seems funny—until it's happening to you.”

Every profession has its own jargon—even the criminal world. These terms were compiled by someone else. We stole them fair and square… and we're not giving them back, and no copper's gonna make us!

Walk the plank.
Appear in a police lineup.

Barber a joint.
Rob a bedroom while the occupant is asleep.

Chop a hoosier
. Stop someone from betting because they've been continuously winning.

Dingoes.
Vagrants who refuse to work even though they claim to be looking for a job.

California blankets.
Newspapers used to sleep on or under.

Wise money.
Money to be wagered on a sure thing.

Ride the lightning.
Be electrocuted.

Rolling orphan.
Stolen vehicle with no license plates.

Put [someone] in the garden
. Swindle someone out of their fair share of money or property.

Swallow the sours.
Hide counterfeit money from the police.

Frozen blood.
Rubies.

Square the beef.
Get off with a lighter sentence than expected.

Toadskin.
Paper money—either good or counterfeit.

Vinegar boy.
Someone who passes worthless checks.

Trojan.
A professional gambler.

White soup.
Stolen silver melted down so it won't be discovered.

Grease one's duke.
Put money into someone's hand.

Irish favorites.
Emeralds.

Fairy grapes.
Pearls.

High pillow.
The top man in an organization.

Nest with a hen on.
Promising prospect for a robbery.

Trigging the jigger.
Placing a piece of paper (the trig) in the keyhole of a door to a house that is suspected to be uninhabited. If the trig is still there the next day, a gang can rob the house later that night.

The
Washington Post
runs an annual contest asking readers to come up with alternate meanings for various words. Here are some of the best (plus a few by the BRI).

Carcinoma
(n.), a valley in California, notable for its heavy smog.

Abdicate
(v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

Esplanade
(v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.

Unroll
(n.), a breadstick.

Mortar
(n.), what tobacco companies add to cigarettes.

Flabbergasted
(adj.), appalled over how much weight you've gained.

Balderdash
(n.), a rapidly receding hairline.

Innuendo
(n.), an Italian suppository.

Semantics
(n.), pranks conducted by young men studying for the priesthood.

Lymph
(v.), to walk with a lisp.

Gargoyle
(n.), an olive-flavored mouthwash.

Instigator
(n.), do-it-yourself reptile kit. Just add water.

Laughingstock
(n.), an amused herd of cattle.

Coffee
(n.), one who is coughed upon.

Hexagon
(n.), how a mathematician removes a curse.

Reincarnation
(n.), the belief that you'll come back as a flower.

Paradox
(n.), two physicians.

Prefix
(n.), the act of completely breaking a partially broken object before calling a professional.

Atheism
(n.), a non-prophet organization.

Rectitude
(n.), the dignified demeanor assumed by a proctologist immediately before he examines you.

Flatulence
(n.), emergency vehicle that transports the victims of steamroller accidents.

Eyedropper
(n.), a clumsy optometrist.

Zebra
(n.), ze garment which covers ze bosom.

Here's a behind-the-scenes look at the role the Pentagon plays in shaping how Hollywood depicts the military.

If you're going to make a war movie, chances are you're going to need army tanks, fighter planes, ships, and maybe even submarines to film some of your scenes.

There are two ways to get them: One is to pay top dollar to rent them on the open market from private owners or the militaries of foreign countries like Israel and the Philippines. That can add tens of millions of dollars to the budget. The other is to “borrow” them from the U.S. military, which makes such items available to filmmakers at a much lower cost.

Critics charge that Pentagon cooperation with the film industry is a waste of taxpayer money, but the all-volunteer U.S. military sees it differently: Supporting a movie like
Top Gun,
for example, doesn't cost all that much, and the resulting film is a two-hour-long Armed Forces infomercial starring Tom Cruise.

The catch is that the military will only support films that cast the Armed Forces in a positive light. If a movie producer submits an unflattering script, the Pentagon will withhold its support until the script is changed. If the producer refuses to make the recommended changes, the Pentagon withholds its support, and the cost of making the film goes through the roof.

The original script for
Top Gun,
for example, called for Tom Cruise's character to fall in love with an enlisted woman played by Kelly McGillis. Fraternization between officers and enlisted personnel is against Navy rules, so the Navy “suggested” that producer Jerry Bruckheimer rework the McGillis character. “We changed her to an outside contractor,” Bruckheimer told
Brill's Content
magazine. The resulting movie was such an effective
recruiting tool that the Navy set up booths in theater lobbies, to sign up enthusiastic recruits after they saw it.

Here's a look at a few films that have been through the Pentagon's screening process:

Independence Day
(1996),
starring Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum

Story Line:
Evil aliens try to destroy the world.

Status:
Cooperation denied. “The military appears impotent and/or inept,” one Pentagon official complained in a memo. “All advances in stopping aliens are the result of civilians.”

G.I. Jane
(1997),
starring Demi Moore

Story Line:
A female Navy recruit tries out for the Navy SEALs.

Status:
Cooperation denied. The title was bad, for one thing, because “G.I.” is an Army term and there are no G.I.s in the Navy. The military also objected to a bathroom scene in which a male SEAL who shares a foxhole with Moore has difficulty urinating in front of her. As one naval commander put it, “the urination scene in the foxhole carries no benefit to the U.S. Navy.”

Goldeneye
(1995),
starring Pierce Brosnan as James Bond

Story Line:
Russian mobsters and military men are out to rule the world using the GoldenEye—a device that can cut off electricity in London to control world financial markets.

Status:
Cooperation approved. The military did, however, object to one character in early drafts of the script, a U.S. Navy admiral who betrays America by revealing state secrets. “We said, ‘Make him another Navy,'” the Pentagon's Hollywood liaison, Philip Strub says. “They made him a French admiral. The Navy cooperated.”

Forrest Gump
(1994),
starring Tom Hanks

Story Line:
The life story of a developmentally-disabled man named Forrest Gump, who spends part of the movie fighting in Vietnam.

Status:
Cooperation denied. The Army felt the film created a “generalized impression that the Army of the 1960s was staffed by the guileless, or soldiers of minimal intelligence,” as one memo
put it, arguing that such a depiction is “neither accurate nor beneficial to the Army.” Separately, the Navy objected to the scene where Gump shows President Lyndon Johnson the battle scar on his buttock, complaining that “the ‘mooning' of a president by a uniformed soldier is not acceptable cinematic license.”

Windtalkers
(2002),
starring Nicolas Cage and Christian Slater

Story Line:
Based on true events, the film is about Navajo Indians who served as “code-talkers” during World War II. Their Navajo-based code so confused the Japanese military that they were never able to crack it. The top-secret code-talkers were so valuable that each was protected by a bodyguard who also had instructions to kill him rather than let him be captured by the Japanese.

Status:
Cooperation approved…but only after the producers agreed to tone down the “kill order.” The characters
imply
that there's an order to kill, but they never get to say it because the military “would not let them say the words ‘order' or ‘kill.'”

Courage Under Fire
(1997),
starring Denzel Washington and Meg Ryan

Story Line:
A military investigator (Washington) tries to solve the mystery of how a helicopter pilot (Ryan) died in combat.

Status:
Cooperation denied. “There were no good soldiers except Denzel and [Meg],” says the Pentagon's Strub. “The general was corrupt. The staff officer was a weenie.”

Apocalypse Now
(1979),
starring Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen

Story Line:
An Army officer (Sheen) is sent to Vietnam to “terminate” a colonel who has gone insane (Brando).

Status:
Cooperation denied.
Apocalypse Now
ran into the same problem with semantics that
Windtalkers
did: the military balked at supporting a film that portrays it ordering one officer to kill another. Director Francis Ford Coppola refused to change the word “terminate” to “arrest” or “detain,” so the Pentagon withdrew their support. Coppola ended up having to rent helicopters from the Philippine Air Force. That cost a fortune and helped put the film months behind schedule…because the helicopters kept getting called away to battle Communist insurgents.

These are 100% honest-to-goodness headlines. Can you figure out what they were trying to say?

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Coroner Reports on Woman's Death While Riding Horse

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