Uncle John’s Briefs (30 page)

C
APITAL
P
UNISHMENT BILL CALLED
“DEATH ORIENTED”

C
HICAGO
C
HECKING ON
E
LDERLY IN
H
EAT

T
IPS TO AVOID ALLIGATORS:
D
ON’T SWIM IN WATERS INHABITED BY LARGE ALLIGATORS

Here’s How You Can Lick Doberman’s Leg Sores

Coroner Reports on Woman’s Death While Riding Horse

C
HEF
T
HROWS
H
IS
H
EART
I
NTO
H
ELPING
F
EED
N
EEDY

C
INCINNATI
D
RY
C
LEANER
S
ENTENCED IN
S
UIT

High-Speed Train Could Reach Valley in Five Years

FISH LURK IN STREAMS

KEY WITNESS TAKES FIFTH IN LIQUOR PROBE

J
APANESE
S
CIENTISTS
G
ROW
F
ROG
E
YES AND
E
ARS

S
UICIDE
B
OMBER
S
TRIKES
A
GAIN

DONUT HOLE, NUDE DANCING ON COUNCIL TABLE

P
OLICE
N
AB
S
TUDENT WITH
P
AIR OF
P
LIERS

MARIJUANA ISSUE SENT TO JOINT COMMITTEE

Girl Kicked by Horse Upgraded to Stable

KILLER SENTENCED TO DIE FOR SECOND TIME IN TEN YEARS

C
OURT
R
ULES
B
OXER
S
HORTS
A
RE
I
NDEED
U
NDERWEAR

Nuns Forgive Break-in, Assault Suspect

ELIMINATION OF TREES COULD SOLVE CITY’S LEAF-BURNING PROBLEM

According to race car drivers, peanuts and the color green are unlucky.

WHAT IS SPAM?

Everybody’s tried it and hardly anyone says they like it…but 30% of all American households have a can on hand. So how much do you know about SPAM? How much do you want to know? Not much, probably. Too bad—we’re going to tell you about it anyway
.

M
AKING A SILK PURSE OUT OF A SOW’S EAR
It’s a question as timeless as the pork-packing industry itself: Once you’ve removed all the choice meat from the carcass of a pig, what do you do with all the pig parts nobody wants?

That’s the question the folks at the George A. Hormel Company faced in 1937. Their solution: Take the parts that nobody wants and make them into a loaf nobody wants. Jack Mingo describes the historic moment in his book
How the Cadillac Got Its Fins
:

Seeing thousands of pounds of pork shoulders piling up in the Hormel coolers in 1937 gave one of the company’s executives an idea: Why not chop the meat up, add some spices and meat from other parts of the pig, and form it into small, hamlike loaves? Put it in a can and fill the excess space with gelatin from the pig’s leftover skin and bones—you could probably keep the meat edible for months without refrigeration. They tried it. It worked. Hormel’s Spiced Ham quickly found a niche in the market. It was inexpensive, savory, and convenient, and it didn’t need refrigeration.

PORCINE PLAGIARISM

But pig parts were piling up just as high at other pork packers, and as soon as they saw Hormel’s solution they began selling their own pig loafs. Afraid of being lost in the sow shuffle, Hormel offered a $100 prize to anyone who could come up with a brand name that would make its pork product stand out from imitators. The winner: A brother of one of the Hormel employees, who suggested turning “
Sp
iced H
am
” into “SPAM.”

PIGS AT WAR

Described by one writer as “a pink brick of meat encased in a gelatinous
coating,” SPAM seems pretty gross to folks who aren’t used to it (and even to plenty who are). It probably wouldn’t have become popular if it hadn’t been for World War II.

Because it was cheap, portable, and didn’t need refrigeration, SPAM was an ideal product to send into battle with U.S. GIs It became such a common sight in mess halls (where it earned the nickname “the ham that didn’t pass its physical”) that many GIs swore they’d never eat the stuff again. Even General Dwight Eisenhower complained about too much SPAM in army messes.

The melody of “Love Me Tender” was taken from the Civil War-era song “Aura Lee.”

THEIR SECRET SHAME
American G.I.s
said
they hated SPAM, but evidence suggests otherwise. Forced to eat canned pork over a period of several years, millions of soldiers developed a taste for it, and when they returned home they brought it with them. SPAM sales shot up in supermarkets after the war.

Laugh if you want (even Hormel calls it “the Rodney Dangerfield of luncheon meat—it don’t get no respect”), but SPAM is still immensely popular: Americans consume 3.8 cans of it every second, or 122 million cans a year. That gives SPAM a 75% share of the canned-meat market.

SPAM FACTS
• More than five billion cans of SPAM have been sold around the world since the product was invented in 1937. “Nowhere,” says Carolyn Wyman in her book
I’m a SPAM Fan
, “is SPAM more prized than in South Korea, where black-market SPAM regularly flows from U.S. military bases and locally produced knockoffs, such as Lospam, abound. In fact, young Korean men are just as likely to show up at the house of a woman they are courting with a nine-can gift pack of SPAM as wine or chocolate.”
• SPAM may have helped defeat Hitler. Nikita Khrushchev, himself a war veteran, credited a U.S. Army shipment of SPAM with keeping Russian troops alive during World War II. “We had lost our most fertile, food-bearing lands,” he wrote in Khruschev
Remembers
, “Without SPAM, we wouldn’t have been able to feed our army.”
• SPAM isn’t as gross as legend would have you believe. There aren’t any lips, eyes, or other pig nasties in it—just pork shoulder, ham, salt, sugar, and the preservative sodium nitrate.

Cleopatra’s palace in modern-day Alexandria, Egypt, is now underwater.

PREDICTIONS FOR THE YEAR 2000

For a century, people speculated about what life would be like way off in the future—in the year 2000. Now that it’s come and gone, we can see just how bizarre some of those predictions were
.

T
HE DREAM HOUSE OF 2000
“[Using] wonderful new materials far stronger than steel, but lighter than aluminum…houses [in the year 2000] will be able to fly….The time may come when whole communities may migrate south in the winter, or move to new lands whenever they feel the need for a change of scenery.”

—
Arthur C. Clarke,
Vogue
, 1966

“Keeping house will be a breeze by the year 2000. Sonic cleaning devices and air-filtering systems will just about eliminate dusting, scrubbing and vacuuming. There may be vibrating floor grills by doors to clean shoes, and electrostatic filters will be installed in entrances to remove dust from clothes with ultrasonic waves.”

—
Staff of the
Wall Street Journal
,
Here Comes Tomorrow!
(1966)

“When [the housewife of 2000] cleans house she simply turns the hose on everything. Why not? Furniture—(upholstery included), rugs, draperies, unscratchable floors—all are made of synthetic fabric or waterproof plastic. After the water has run down a drain in the middle of the floor (later concealed by a rug of synthetic fiber), [she] turns on a blast of hot air and dries everything.”

—
Waldemarr Kaempfert,
Popular Mechanics
, 1950

The first TV news helicopter was used by KTLA Channel 5 in Los Angeles, in 1958.

COMMUTING

“[In 2000], commuters will go to the city, a hundred miles away, in huge aerial buses that hold 200 passengers. Hundreds of thousands more will make such journeys twice a day in their own helicopters.”

—
Waldemar Kaempfert,
Popular Mechanics
, 1950

“[Commuters will] rent small four-seater capsules such as we find on a ski lift. These capsules will be linked together into little trains that come into the city. As the train goes out towards the perimeter of the city, the capsule will become an individual unit. One can then drive to wherever he may want to go.”

—
Ulrich Frantzen,
Prophecy for the Year 2000
(1967)

“A Seattle executive might board his reserved-seat air-cushion coach at 8:15 A.M. It would lift off the roadbed, whirl around an ‘acceleration loop’ and plunge into the main tube running from Seattle to San Diego. Little more than half an hour later, the car would peel off onto the ‘deceleration loop’ in downtown Los Angeles. By 9 a.m. the executive would be at his desk.”

—
Mitchell Gordon,
Here Comes Tomorrow!
(1966)

THE WORLD OF WORK

“By 2000 the machines will be producing so much that everyone in the U.S. will, in effect, be independently wealthy. With government benefits, even nonworking families will have, by one estimate, an annual income of $30,000–$40,000 (in 1966 dollars). How to use leisure meaningfully will be a major problem.”

—
Time
, February 25, 1966

“By the year 2000, people will work no more than four days a week and less than eight hours a day. With legal holidays and long vacations, this could result in an annual working period of 147 days [on] and 218 days off.”

—
The New York Times
,
October 19, 1967

The rough, bumpy surface of certain types of glass (such as your shower door) is called
crizzle
.

THE
OTHER
SOPRANOS

If you’re a man, perhaps you need a little reminder that your life is pretty good. Well, just be glad you weren’t born in Italy in the 1700s. (Now cross your legs and read this story.)

T
HE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE
Who were the
castrati
? They were boys who were castrated in an effort to fill the Catholic Church’s need for singing talent. The practice appeared in Europe as early as the 1500s, but historians estimate that between 1720 and 1730 (the height of the craze), 4,000 boys between the ages of nine and twelve who showed even vague musical promise were castrated each year. By that time, the practice was limited almost entirely to Italy, but its seeds had been planted years earlier when the Church, having banned women from singing in choirs (religious officials thought women’s voices were too seductive for the church) turned to young boys, whose sweet tones were preferable to the shrill soprano falsettists.

Castration prevented puberty, and without the male hormone
testosterone
, a castrato’s vocal cords remained small and immature throughout his lifetime, which kept his voice high. And because his bone joints didn’t harden, he also grew unusually tall and developed a large chest cavity, which gave him extra lung capacity. With rigorous training, the combined effect was tremendous vocal flexibility, a high range, pure tone, and extraordinary endurance. The very best could hold a note for up to a minute without taking a breath.

THE GOOD LIFE

Many poor parents willingly sacrificed their sons to this cause in the hope that they’d find fame and fortune. Cardinals, church fathers, choir directors, and composers signed up the castrati for shows and performances. The boys dedicated their youth to a rigorous musical and vocal training regime. But only a few went on to stardom. The rest made careers in cathedrals, church choirs, and the theater.

Many historians consider the castrati who did make it “the original
pop stars.” Women swooned for them onstage and off; one young castrato was welcomed to the city of Florence by the town’s wealthiest and most influential citizens. And though their voices were as high as a soprano’s, they rarely played women’s roles in operas—they were cast instead as the brave young heroes. (Male sopranos played the female roles until women were allowed on the stage in the late 18th century.)

Christmas trees were introduced to the U.S. by Hessian troops during the Revolutionary War.