Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Golden Plunger Awards (50 page)

As rose enthusiasts know, the increase in the number of species comes from cross-pollination and seed production. Josephine’s gardener, Monsieur Dupont, gets as much credit as his flower-hungry employer in the craze for rose propagation. Dupont was one of the earliest cultivators of roses from seed, which helped to strengthen certain cultivars.

During Josephine’s residence at Malmaison, Dupont amassed
nearly 260 rose species and cultivars. Dupont passed on this legacy to Alexandre Hardy, who took over the Luxembourg Garden in Paris and raised many roses we still grow today, including ‘Mme. Hardy’ and ‘Safrano.’

Another of Josephine’s legacies was commissioning Pierre-Joseph Redouté to paint the roses in her collection and hiring leading botanists to describe the plants in accompanying texts. Redouté had been the court painter to Queen Marie-Antoinette, but despite the Revolution, survived to become Josephine’s rose painter. The Empress paid him 180,000 francs per year to catalog her living collection.

Redouté’s work,
Les Roses
, was completed after Josephine’s death. The three volumes, issued between 1817 and 1824, are among the most important rose books ever published. (Some consider Redouté’s “Blush Noisette” to be the masterpiece of botanical illustration.) It is still used to identify older varieties of roses, and many of the included species can still be found in today’s gardens.

By all accounts, Napoleon adored Josephine, but her flirtations, her extravagance, and her inability to bear Napoleon a son strained their marriage, which Napoleon had annulled in 1810.

Joséphine retreated to her private residence at Malmaison. She continued to entertain lavishly, with the emperor paying the bills. After Napoleon’s abdication she won the protection of the Russian emperor Alexander I, but she died soon after.

Napoleon died in exile on Elba in 1812, and Josephine died in 1814, but both they and her children from her first marriage live on in roses that exist in great part due to the Malmaison gardens.

Two roses named “Josephine de Beauharnais” and one named “Empress Josephine” exist, all of which have light pink blossoms and originated in France. “Madness at Corsica/Napoleon” is pink. “Hortense de Beauharnais,” named after Josephine’s daughter, is pink, while “Eugene de Beauharnaise,” after her son, is a mauve-colored climbing rose.

Cryogenics

As early as 1823, scientists were looking at ways to create extreme low temperatures with gases. Two British chemists, Sir Humphry Davy and, later, his assistant Michael Faraday, spent more than two decades—between 1823 and 1845—whipping up a cold concoction involving carbon dioxide, ether, and test tubes.

It’s a complex process to make gases so cold that they liquefy, but they did it, and they managed to get the carbon dioxide to drop down to a temperature of -166°F. In 1877, two French physicists improved on Davy and Faraday’s work—the Frenchmen were able to get oxygen to liquefy. From then on, scientists from European countries spent several decades experimenting with more and more gases, like hydrogen and helium. Today, cryogenics deals with temperatures ranging between -238°F and -459.67°F (absolute zero).

The pursuits of these early cryogenic scientists were not just for fun. It was serious business because many of them considered cryogenics to be the answer to humanity’s greatest mystery—death. Cryogenics didn’t hold all the answers to life after death, but it did, some contended, hold the ability to make death a temporary condition. This is still the prevailing theory of cryogenics: If you can use the technology to freeze a person, maybe you can bring him back later on.

People commonly refer to cryogenics as a way to preserve a human
body after death, but the correct term when applied to people is “cryonics.” And the real question a person considering cryonics faces is this: If you want to be frozen after death (and by law, you must wait until you have been officially pronounced dead) you must first make a choice—do you want to freeze just your head, or do you want to keep your whole body?

Usually, the deciding factor is money. Freezing just your head will cost about $80,000. Freezing your whole body costs more than $150,000. (There’s also an annual fee for preservation and storage, so many patients set up a trust fund to keep payments up in perpetuity.) The folks who choose to go bodyless presume that when science has advanced enough to bring your head out of the cryonic soup, it will also be far enough along to regrow your missing body.

Those who opt for crynoics are also betting on a few more scientific outcomes: 1) a cure for whatever killed them in the first place; 2) a way to reverse the aging process so they’re not right back in the freezer; and 3) the ability to undo the damage done by the cryonics.

In the least case, that damage could be substantial, so doctors try to stave it off by taking a few steps right after the person has died. The first step, as soon as possible after death has occurred, is for the cryonic scientists to artificially restart the breathing and blood circulation process. Then the cooling process begins. Chemicals called cryopectants are added to (theoretically) prevent the brain from freezing completely. Finally, the body (or head) is placed in a titanium steel vat of liquid nitrogen. From there, the remains are stored, and the next step is to wait . . . and wait.

Cryonics was first performed in 1967—the first person to undergo the procedure was a psychologist named Dr. James Bedford. Over the past four decades, about 100 more people have chosen it.

Companies that practice cryonics are committed to preserving anonymity, so rumors about which celebrities chose the procedure are rampant. But we got the frozen scoop on two of them:

Cryogenics is not just a theoretical method to cheat death. It also has practical applications that humans use today. Here are a few:

As Snoopy once said, he was born “one bright spring morning at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm.” There were seven other puppies born along with Snoopy that day. The most familiar was Spike, his fedora-wearing and mustached brother from Needles, California. Like pink-hued sister Belle (from Kansas City), Spike can play the violin. Marbles, the smartest of the litter, plays the banjo, and overweight Olaf wins an ugly-dog contest. Andy is the shaggiest; he and Olaf live together on a farm.

The last puppy pair, a boy and a girl, are never named in the strip. But they did get names when they appeared in the 1991 television cartoon,
Snoopy’s Family Reunion.
Molly and Rover play the dobro and the mandolin.

Bodily Functions

When the diaphragm muscle contracts involuntary, you’ve got the hiccups. The diaphragm is the muscle you use to breathe—it contracts to pull in air and expands to expel your exhalations. No one knows exactly why it spasms and contracts involuntarily. But when it does, it causes you to make an embarrassing noise that’s caused by the quick closing of the opening between the vocal chords. In the vast majority of cases, hiccups last only a few minutes and aren’t serious. But consider this: some hiccups cases can last for days, weeks, or even years and can be the result of serious afflictions, like pneumonia or kidney failure.

It’s hard to say no to a scoop of ice cream, but knowledgeable eaters know to fear the brain freeze—the quick headache that comes from eating cold food too fast. When something freezing cold touches the roof of the mouth, it sets off a chain reaction in the nerves of the head. The blood vessels immediately begin to contract to hold blood in, and then they swell, releasing a relatively large stampede of blood. And there you go . . . brain freeze. For most people, the brain freeze is gone within 60 seconds, but sometimes it can last up to five minutes. Ice cream and other cold treats may be worth the temporary pain, but still . . . slow down and chill—or drink something warm. That can help too.

Feet, don’t fail me now . . . whoops, they already did. Sitting too
long in a way that cuts off circulation also cuts off communication between the nerves and the brain. The signals between the two get all jumbled, creating that all too familiar tingling feeling. Any part of the body, not just feet, can be affected by this, and the tingling sensation acts as a warning to switch positions to prevent doing any damage. Most people who move are back to normal within a few seconds (though it can take several moments for the nerves to return to normal and start sending out their regular messages). But beware of the condition known as Saturday Night Palsy: Intoxication (or some other condition) can put the body into a deep slumber, and people have been known to sleep right through the nerves’ desperate messages to get up and move. In those rare case, it can takes days or even months to undo the damage. Something to think about when you’re sitting for too long.

Ah, gas. The world would be a much duller place without it. And there’s no getting around it, really. When you eat, you use the same mouth that you breathe with, and you can’t help but take in air with your dinner. That air gets in the stomach and doesn’t really have anywhere to go but back the way it came. It travels up through the esophagus and makes its rude little reentrance into the world. If burps really bother you, just be glad you don’t have to hang around Brit Paul Hunn. He’s in the
Guinness World Records
for having the loudest belch—118.1 decibels, about as loud as an airplane taking off.

Ah, gas . . . oh, wait, we already said that. Well, it’s still true. There’s no shortage of gas in the body. The aforementioned oxygen that creeps into the stomach is one, and there are also blood gases and gases produced by bacteria inside the body. So much gas, in fact, that sometimes it just has to get out. And if it doesn’t go out through the mouth, there’s really only one other way it can go. The combination of gases produced are different depending on what you’ve eaten and what bacteria are inside your body, but the smell is usually from sulfur compounds. Oh, and beans may make you toot, but it turns out they’re not very sulfuric, so discharges caused by them won’t smell as bad. Something to chew on.

Rubber Ducky

No citation exists for the first rubber duck, but they’ve been around since at least the early 1800s, when they were hard and nonsqueaking rubber toys. Today, they’re big business, and though they’ve retained the name “rubber ducks” since the 1950s, nowadays these bath-time playthings are made mostly of plastic.

Rubber ducks have always been fun toys, but since the 1970s, they’ve become an obsession for some. Ernie on
Sesame Street
was “awfully fond” of his, but some people take collecting to an extreme, amassing them by the hundreds and even thousands. Charlotte Lee of Santa Monica, California, holds the current world record in rubber duck collecting—she’s amassed more than 2,600 of the little guys over the years. (That’s a lot more than the few dozen that sit on our widowsills here at the BRI.)