Uncle John’s Briefs (13 page)

J
OHN COLTRANE
Date of Death:
July 17, 1967 (age 40)
Last Song:
“A Few of My Favorite Things.”

Story:
The man considered one of the most influential saxophone players in jazz history played his last concert on April 23, 1967, at the Olatunji Center of African Studies in Harlem. That night, Coltrane and his band performed a version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic “My Favorite Things,” which had long been his signature song. They stretched it out to 34 minutes in a cacophonous, swirling deluge of sound, described as “frightening” and “Picassoesque” by both those who loved it and hated it. Coltrane knew at the time that he was dying of liver cancer; he’d be gone three months later. The performance was released 44 years later, in 2001, on the album called
The Olatunji Concert
.

OTIS REDDING

Date of Death:
December 10, 1967 (age 26)

Last Song:
“(Sittin’ on the) Dock of the Bay”

Story:
In his seven years of recording, Redding had never cracked the top 20 on the charts before. But when his song “Dock of the Bay” came out in January 1968, it held the top spot for four weeks. He recorded it on December 6 and 7, 1967—just a few days before he was killed in a plane crash.

MICHAEL HUTCHENCE

Date of Death:
November 22, 1997 (Age: 37)

Last Song:
“Possibilities”

Story:
This song was written by the former lead singer of INXS for his first solo album, simply titled
Michael Hutchence
. He had been working on the album, while recording and touring with INXS, since 1995. He
recorded “Possibilities” just three days before his death, which some believe was a suicide; others said it was an accident resulting from autoerotic asphyxiation.
Michael Hutchence
was released in 1999.

Winnie the Pooh is named for Winnipeg, Manitoba.

BING CROSBY

Date of Death:
October 14, 1977 (age 74)

Last Song:
“Once in a While”

Story:
Crosby ended his final recording session on October 11 at BBC studios in London with the 1937 standard. Three days later, after playing golf with friends in Spain, he uttered a now-famous line as he walked off the course: “That was a great round of golf, fellas.” A few seconds later, he died from a massive heart attack. What wasn’t widely known until 2001 was that the
very
last song he sang was on that golf course. The summer 2001 issue of
BING
magazine, put out by the still-active “Club Crosby” fan club, carried an interview with Valentin Barrios, who played that round of golf with Crosby that day. “There were some construction workers building a new house just off the ninth hole,” Barrios recounted. “The workers recognized Bing and motioned for him to come over to them. Bing was very happy to be recognized and walked over to the men, who asked for a song. The last song Bing Crosby sang, which I remember vividly, was ‘Strangers in the Night.’”

GEORGE HARRISON

Date of Death:
November 29, 2001 (age 58)

Last Song:
“Horse to Water”

Story:
Harrison wrote the song with his son Dhani for old friend and pianist Jools Holland (you can hear it on Holland’s album
Small World Big Band
). Harrison recorded it in his home on October 1, in the midst of his battle with throat and brain cancer. With his characteristic dark sense of humor, he asked that his songwriting credit be listed as “RIP Limited.”

“We want to be the band to dance to when the bomb drops.”

—Simon Le Bon, of Duran Duran

Cost of a 3-minute phone call from New York to San Francisco in 1915: $20.70.

A DOTTY IDEA

Elbert Botts’s brainchild may have seemed like just a bump in the road at the time, but it’s saved countless lives
.

M
EET DR. BOTTS
You may never have heard of Elbert Dysart Botts, but if you did any driving today, you probably ran over his invention. The invention? Botts Dots, the raised reflective markers seen on roads and freeways throughout the United States.

Botts didn’t start out in the public-safety profession. He earned a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin in 1924 and taught for 16 years at San Jose State University. When World War II broke out, he went to work for the government as a chemist. Then he landed a job in research and development at CalTrans (the Californian Department of Transportation), where he was assigned the task of creating a reflective paint for freeways that could be seen in heavy rain.

SPIKED

While working for CalTrans, Botts dreamed up the idea of raised markers that would alert drivers when they crossed into a different lane, avoiding unintentional lane changes and, theoretically, serious accidents. He called his innovation reflective pavement markers, or RPMs (later known by the nickname “Botts Dots”). Unfortunately, the ceramic markers cracked apart when cars rolled over them, exposing the spikes that held them to the road surface—which was bad news for tires. But one of Botts’ former students came up with a solution: a durable, fast-drying epoxy that replaced the spikes. Glued-on Botts Dots have been the industry standard ever since.

FOLLOWING THE DOTTED LINE

Elbert Botts died in 1962 at age 69, a year before the first working models of his invention were installed in Northern California. Within a few years, Botts Dots were installed on roads all over the country. They’ve been in use ever since, and his legacy lives on every time we hear a “thump-thump-thump” when we change lanes on the freeway—or almost cross into someone else’s.

In bumblebee hives, the entire colony, except for the queen, dies at the end of each summer.

SMITHSONIAN FUN

In his spare time, Scott Williams of Newport, Rhode Island, digs up things from his backyard and submits them to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. as authentic “paleological finds.” Here is the actual (we think) response from the Smithsonian, proving that some scientists do indeed have a sense of humor
.

Smithsonian Institution

207 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington, D.C. 20078

Dear Mr. Williams,

Thank you for your latest submission to the Institute, labeled “93211-D, layer seven, next to the clothesline post…Hominid skull.” We have given this specimen a careful and detailed examination, and regret to inform you that we disagree with your theory that it represents conclusive proof of the presence of Early Man in Charleston County two million years ago. Rather, it appears that what you have found is the head of a Barbie doll, of the variety that one of our staff, who has small children, believes to be “Malibu Barbie.” It is evident that you have given a great deal of thought to the analysis of this specimen, and you may be quite certain that those of us who are familiar with your prior findings were loathe to contradict your analysis. However, we do feel that there are a number of physical attributes of the specimen which might have tipped you off to its modern origin:

1. The material is molded plastic. Ancient hominid remains are typically fossilized bone.

2. The cranial capacity of the specimen is approximately 9 cubic centimeters, well below the threshold of even the earliest identified proto-hominids.

3. The dentition pattern evident on the skull is more consistent with the common domesticated dog than it is with the ravenous man-eating Pliocene clams you speculate roamed the wetlands during that time.

This latter finding is certainly one of the most intriguing hypotheses you have submitted in your history with this institution, but the evidence seems to weigh rather heavily against it. Without going into too much detail, let us say that:
A.
The specimen looks like the head of a Barbie doll that has been chewed on by a dog.

B.
Clams don’t have teeth.

A typical Somali pirate “earns” 17 times as much as an average Somali.

It is with feelings tinged with melancholy that we must deny your request to have the specimen carbon-dated. This is partially due to the heavy load our lab must bear in its normal operation, and partly due to carbon-dating’s notorious inaccuracy in fossils of recent geologic record. To the best of our knowledge, no Barbie dolls were produced prior to 1956 A.D.

Sadly, we must also deny your request that we approach the National Science Foundation Phylogeny Department with the concept of assigning your specimen the scientific name
Australopithecus spiff-arino
. Speaking personally, I, for one, fought tenaciously for the acceptance of your proposed taxonomy, but was ultimately voted down because the name you selected was hyphenated, and didn’t really sound like it might be Latin.

However, we gladly accept your generous donation of this fascinating specimen to the museum. While it is undoubtedly not a Hominid fossil, it is, nonetheless, yet another riveting example of the great body of work you seem to accumulate here so effortlessly. You should know that our Director has reserved a special shelf in his own office for the display of the specimens you have previously submitted to the Institution, and the entire staff speculates daily on what you will happen upon next in your digs at the site you have discovered in your Newport backyard.

We eagerly anticipate your trip to our nation’s capital that you proposed in your last letter, and several of us are pressing the Director to pay for it. We are particularly interested in hearing you expand on your theories surrounding the trans-positating fillifitation of ferrous metal in a structural matrix that makes the excellent juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex femur you recently discovered take on the deceptive appearance of a rusty 9-mm Sears Craftsman automotive crescent wrench.

Yours in Science,

Harvey Rowe

Chief Curator–Antiquities

A bolt of lightning is six times hotter than the sun.

ASK UNCLE JOHN:
IN THE BATHROOM

Plumbing the depths of the bathroom’s greatest mysteries
.

D
ear Uncle John:
Is it true that water in sinks and toilets swirls in one direction in the Northern Hemisphere and in the opposite direction in the Southern Hemisphere? And what happens to the water in the toilet bowl if you’re on the equator?

The idea that sink or toilet water swirls one way or another depending on what hemisphere you’re in is pretty much completely wrong.

The belief in differently draining water is based on the Coriolis force, an actual phenomenon caused by the rotation of the Earth. Because of the Coriolis force, hurricanes, cyclones, and other large weather systems in the Northern Hemisphere rotate in a counterclockwise direction, while those in the Southern Hemisphere rotate clockwise. (So what happens to a hurricane when it moves from one hemisphere to another? Nothing, because hurricanes don’t leave their hemispheres of origin—in fact, they don’t even form within five degrees of the equator, because the Coriolis forces at the equator are too weak to allow it to happen.)

But the effect of the planet’s rotation on the average bathroom fixture is miniscule; the Coriolis force does almost nothing to your sink or toilet water. The things that
do
affect how the water goes down the drain are much more mundane, like air currents, the shape of the sink, or the fact that your dog just lapped out of the john. Water drains in all sorts of directions, no matter where on Earth you are.

Dear Uncle John:

I get into the shower, and after a few minutes, my shower curtain starts attacking me. What’s up with that? Is it possessed?

This is one of those things that people have wondered about for years, but the explanation for weird, clingy shower curtains didn’t come about until
2001—and it required some fairly advanced computer modeling to figure it out. Who spends his time modeling the physics of a clingy shower curtain? David Schmidt, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Massachusetts.

If you’re average, you’ll produce about 10,000 gallons of saliva in your lifetime.

First, Schmidt created a computer model of his mother-in-law’s bathtub. Then he filled the virtual bathtub with thousands of computerized “cells” that measured pressure and velocity. Then he turned on a virtual showerhead to see what would happen.