Uncle John’s Briefs (3 page)
Read Uncle John’s Briefs Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Late Bloomers
Famous Tightwads
Medium
Famous for 15 Minutes
Diva of the Desert
ORIGINS
Short
Random Origins
Let’s Dance!
Founding Fathers
Medium
Random Origins
Let’s Dance!
A Musical Is Born
THE PRINTED WORD
Short
Free Pork With House
My Other Vehicle Is in Orbit
Little Willie
Flubbed Headlines
Medium
Novel Starts
What the #!&%?
The League of Comic Book Creators
A Barrel of Laughs
PAST & FUTURE
Medium
Were You Raised in a Barn?
Predictions for the Year 2000
When Your Husband Gets Home…
Ladies, Behave Yourselves
MOUTHING OFF
Short
Mr. T
Always…
Never…
Say Goodnight, Gracie
When Celebrities Attack
The English Language
Final Thoughts
Medium
Supposedly Said
WORD & PHRASE ORIGINS
Short
He’s a Curly Wolf
Underworld Lingo
Smudgers & Sleepers
Medium
Word Origins
Familiar Phrases
Answer Pages
INTRODUCTION
F
irst, a brief history of the Bathroom Readers’ Institute: In 1987 a small gaggle of pop-culture aficionados led by Uncle John decided to make a book just for the bathroom. We compiled strange news stories, interesting facts, trivia, history, science, and whatever else we could find to create the very first
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader
. Since then, we’ve released 22 annual volumes as well as dozens of special editions—kids’ books, plus books about pets, states, sports, quotes, science, movies, and much more. All in all, it adds up to nearly 20,000 pages of bathroom reading. (Really? Wow.)
So why
this
book? Most of our
Bathroom Readers
include short, medium, and long articles—and a few extra-long ones for those leg-numbing bathroom experiences. But over the years, a lot of our readers have asked us to put together an edition with all of the best short stuff. So we scoured our entire library to find our all-time favorite 1- and 2-page articles (along with a few absorbing 3-pagers). And voilà—here it is.
Open up
Briefs
to any page, and you’re sure to find something you didn’t know: an interesting origin, a wise quotation, an obscure bit of history, or something totally random, such as the “Bunga Bunga” hoax (a prankster fools the British Navy), symbolic meanings of dreams, the true story of Mike the Headless Chicken, Irish toasts and curses (our favorite: “Your nose should grow so much hair it strains your soup!”), how to say “mullet” in other languages, the science of farts, and…well, you get the idea.
So turn the page and treat yourself to a few seconds (or hours) of entertainment. Happy reading and, as always…
Go with the Flow!
—Uncle John, the BRI staff, and Porter the Wonder Dog
Check out
www.bathroomreader.com
for more bite-sized pieces of bathroom-reading fun.
It’s always interesting to find out where the architects of pop culture get their ideas. These may surprise you
.
C
HARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY
.
In the 1920s, England’s two biggest chocolate makers, Cadbury and Rowntree, tried to steal trade secrets by sending spies into each others’ factories, posed as employees. Result: Both companies became highly protective of their chocolate-making process. When Roald Dahl was 13, he worked as a taste-tester at Cadbury. The secretive policies and the giant, elaborate machines later inspired him to create chocolatier Willy Wonka.
MARLBORO MAN.
Using a cowboy to pitch the cigarette brand was inspired when ad execs saw a 1949
Life
magazine photo—a close-up of a weather-worn Texas rancher named Clarence Hailey Long, who wore a cowboy hat and had a cigarette in his mouth.
NAPOLEON DYNAMITE
.
Elvis Costello used it as a pseudonym on his 1986 album
Blood and Chocolate
. Scriptwriter Jared Hess met a street person who said his name was Napoleon Dynamite. Coon liked the name and, unaware of the Costello connection, used it for the lead character in his movie.
THE ODD COUPLE
.
In 1962 TV writer Danny Simon got divorced and moved in with another divorced man. Simon was a neat freak, while his friend was a slob. Simon’s brother, playwright Neil Simon, turned the situation into
The Odd Couple
. (Neil says Danny inspired at least nine other characters in his plays.)
CHARLIE THE TUNA.
The Leo Burnett Agency created Charlie for StarKist Tuna in 1961. Ad writer Tom Rogers based him on a beatnik friend of his (that’s why he wears a beret) who wanted to be respected for his “good taste.”
“I DON’T GET NO RESPECT.”
After seeing
The Godfather
in 1972, comedian Rodney Dangerfield noticed that all the characters did the bidding of Don Corleone out of respect. Dangerfield just flipped the concept.
An average covered wagon train crossed the prairie at 1-2 miles per hour.
A
cat’s whiskers are a marvel of form and function. Here are a few facts about them that will have you feline fine
.
• On average, cats have 24 cheek whiskers—12 on each side of their face—that are arranged in four horizontal rows.
• Each whisker is rooted in the cat’s upper lip, and every root connects to 200 or more nerve endings.
• As a cat moves around an object—a bush or a sofa—air currents create a tiny breeze. The whiskers pick up the changes in air pressure, helping the cat to avoid objects in its path.
• Whiskers also direct hunting cats to their prey. In one experiment, a blindfolded cat was placed in an enclosure with a mouse. When the cat’s whiskers touched the mouse, the cat grabbed its prey and delivered a killing bite in one-tenth of a second.
• Once the prey is in the cat’s mouth, the whiskers curl forward to sense any movement that might mean the animal is still alive and not safe to eat.
• The width of a cat’s outstretched whiskers is usually the same as the width of his body, enabling him to measure whether a hole or opening is wide enough for him to enter. When a cat gains too much weight, though, his whiskers stay the same size. So a fat cat may misjudge the size of his body and get stuck in a hole or cat door.
• Cats also have whiskers on the backs of their front paws, which help him walk over uneven ground without stumbling. Paw whiskers also help cats determine the size and position of captured prey.
• Cats use their whiskers to communicate. Whiskers held out to the side indicate calmness or friendliness. When they’re pointed upward, the cat is alert or excited. Backward-pointing: Look out—that’s a defensive or angry cat.
• Whiskers are such an important part of a cat’s physiology that the feline fetus develops whiskers before any other hairs. And when kittens are born, they’re blind and deaf, but the touch sensors on their whiskers are fully operational.
So where
do
they sleep? Ornithologists say birds do not sleep in their nests.
For every successful cereal like Frosted Flakes or Wheaties, there are hundreds of bombs like Banana Wackies and Ooboperoos. Here are a few legendary cereal flops
.
K
ellogg’s Kream Crunch (1963).
Frosted-oat loops mixed with cubes of freeze-dried vanilla-orange or strawberry ice cream. According to a Kellogg’s exec: “The product kind of melted into gooey ice cream in milk. It just wasn’t appetizing.”
Sugar Smiles (1953).
General Mills’ first try at sugar cereal. A bizarre mixture of plain Wheaties and sugar-frosted Kix. Slogan: “You can’t help smiling the minute you taste it.”
Dinos (early 1990s).
After the success of Fruity Pebbles, Post tried naming a cereal after the Flintstones’ pet dinosaur. “A question that came up constantly,” recalls a Post art director, “was ‘We’ve got Cocoa Pebbles and Fruity Pebbles…so what flavor is Dino?’…It sounds like something Fred would be getting off his lawn instead of something you’d want to be eating.”
Day-O (late 1960s).
“The world’s first calypso-inspired presweetened cereal,” from General Mills.
Ooops (early 1970s).
General Mills had so many bombs, they came up with a cereal they actually
said
was based on a mistake—jingle: “Ooops, it’s a crazy mistake, Ooops, it’s a cereal that’s great!”
Kellogg’s Corn Crackos (1967).
The box featured the Waker Upper Bird perched on a bowl of candy-coated twists. An internal company memo said: “It looks like a bird eating worms; who wants worms for breakfast?”
Punch Crunch (1975).
A spinoff of Cap’n Crunch. The screaming pink box featured Harry S., an exuberant hippo in a sailor suit, making goo-goo eyes at Cap’n Crunch. Many chain stores perceived the hippo as gay and refused to carry the cereal. Marveled one Quaker salesman: “How that one ever got through, I’ll never understand.”
To shuffle one’s feet while mumbling is to
whittie-whattie
.
If you gave up every time you failed, you’d never succeed. These people got rejected, but they didn’t give up—and the rest of us benefited
.
W
ho wants to copy a document on plain paper?”
This was included in one of the 20 rejection letters Chester Carlson received for his invention—the Xerox machine. After six years of rejections, the Haloid Company bought his idea in 1944. The first copier was sold in 1950, and Carlson made over $150 million in his lifetime.
“The product is worthless.”
Bayer Pharmaceuticals’ 1897 rejection of Felix Hoffman’s formula for aspirin. (They eventually accepted it in 1899.)
“Too different from other juvenile titles on the market to warrant its selling.”
One book publisher said this in 1937 about
And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street
, the first children’s book by Dr. Seuss. In fact, 27 publishers rejected it before Vanguard Press accepted. Dr. Seuss went on to write over 40 children’s books that sold nearly half a billion copies.
“Balding, skinny, can dance a little.”
Paramount Pictures made this assessment after an early audition by Fred Astaire. He signed with RKO Studios instead.
“We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.”
This was said to Stephen King in the early 1970s about his first novel,
Carrie
. The book went on to become the first of dozens of bestsellers for King, the top-selling horror author of all time.