Uncle John’s Briefs (32 page)

SYMBOLOGY

Although anyone is free to use the recycling symbol as part of an advertising campaign (or as a graphic on a page…like in a
Bathroom Reader
), its use to advertise a commercial product’s recycling properties is strictly regulated by the Federal Trade Commission’s “Guides for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims.” There are several variations, but here are the symbol’s two main classifications:
•
Recycled:
If the arrows are surrounded by a solid black circle, then the product is made from previously recycled material. A percentage displayed in the center of the symbol denotes how much of the product was made from recycled material. (If no percentage is denoted, it is 100% recycled.)
•
Recyclable:
If the arrows are not surrounded by a circle, then the product is recyclable, but only if the “regulations and/or ordinances of your local community provide for its collection.”

STILL AT IT
Four decades later, Gary Anderson remains active in the green movement. After earning his Ph.D. in geography and environmental engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 1985, the architect-by-trade has spent the bulk of his career as an urban planner with a focus on controlled growth. When asked how it feels to have created one of the most popular symbols in the world, Anderson tries to downplay his accomplishment, but admits that it’s “pretty neat.”

In Old Testament times, the Mediterranean Sea was called the Great Sea.

SAY GOODNIGHT, GRACIE

With her husband George Burns, Gracie Allen was a star of vaudeville, radio, movies, and television…and one of the funniest women of the 20th century. Here are some of her one-liners and comedy bits
.

George:
Gracie, let me ask you something. Did the nurse ever happen to drop you on your head when you were a baby?

Gracie:
Oh, no, we couldn’t afford a nurse. My mother had to do it.

George:
Gracie, what day is it today?

Gracie:
Well, I don’t know.
George:
You can find out if you look at that paper on your desk.
Gracie:
Oh, George, that doesn’t help. It’s yesterday’s paper.

“They laughed at Joan of Arc, but she went right ahead and built it.”

George:
This letter feels kind of heavy, I’d better put another three-cent stamp on it.

Gracie:
What for? That’ll only make it heavier.

Gracie:
The baby my father brought home was a little French baby. So my mother took up French.

George:
Why?

Gracie:
So she would be able to understand the baby.

Gracie:
On my way in here, a man stopped me at the stage door and said, “Hiya, cutie, how about a bite tonight after the show?”
George:
And you said…?
Gracie:
I said, “I’ll be busy after the show but I’m not doing anything now,” so I bit him.

Harry Von Zell:
Gracie, isn’t that boiling water you’re putting in the refrigerator?
Gracie:
Yes, I’m freezing it.
Harry:
You’re freezing it?
Gracie:
Mmm-hmm, and then whenever I want boiling water, all I have to do is defrost it.

“This recipe is certainly silly. It says to separate two eggs, but it doesn’t say how far to separate them.”

Gracie:
Don’t give up, Blanche. Women don’t do that. Look at Betsy Ross, Martha Washington—they didn’t give up. Look at Nina Jones.

Blanche Morton:
Nina Jones?
Gracie:
I’ve never heard of her either, because she gave up.

The Wright Brothers tested their first airplane in a wind tunnel before flying it.

A MUSICAL IS BORN

Some musicals are so famous that they are familiar even to people who never go to plays. Here are the origins of some favorites
.

S
HOWBOAT
(1927)
Oscar Hammerstein, Jerome Kern, and producer Florenz Ziegfeld were sick of the light, upbeat musicals that had made them famous.
They wanted to do something with adult themes like alcoholism, interracial relationships, and marital troubles—even if no one came to see it. But they needn’t have worried. Their adaptation of Edna Ferber’s novel about life on a riverboat opened in 1927 to rave reviews and sold out so often that Ziegfeld considered staging a second production in a nearby theater to handle the overflow. So far, the show has had five Broadway revivals, more than any other musical in history.

GREASE
(1972)
This show got its start as a five-hour rock ’n’ roll musical written by two amateur writers for a Chicago community theater. A producer bought the rights and had it trimmed by more than half before taking it to New York. Interesting sidelight: George Lucas’s film
American Graffiti
is usually credited with starting the 1950s nostalgia boom, but
Grease
opened off-Broadway on February 14, 1972—a year before
American Graffiti
premiered. It ran for 3,388 performances, and the 1978 film version was the #1 box-office film of the year.

WEST SIDE STORY
(1957)
In 1949 Arthur Laurents and Jerome Robbins came up with an idea to do a modern New York slums-set musical version of
Romeo and Juliet
about a forbidden love amongst racial gangs called
East Side Story
. The plot was about a teenage Catholic American boy who falls in love with a Jewish Israeli girl. By 1950, they shelved the idea after a Broadway play called
Abie’s Irish Rose
had a similar plot. Laurents and Robbins decided to revisit it in 1954 after reading an article about street riots in Los Angeles. They changed the musical to
West Side Story
and the racial groups from Catholics and Jews to Polish and Puerto Rican immigrants. They hired 25-year-old composer Stephen Sondheim to write the lyrics and convinced Leonard Bernstein to compose the songs. The result: a dark, violent musical that was deliberately aggressive to reflect the passions of the angry, adolescent teenage characters. It opened on Broadway in 1957. Audiences and critics were stunned by its originality:
West Side Story
was the first musical with a tragic ending (not changed from
Romeo and Juliet
), and the music was technically intricate with atonal melodies and music in minor keys. Nevertheless, it was a hit, running for 985 performances.

Southern Florida is the only place where alligators and crocodiles both live.

OKLAHOMA!
(1943)
This blockbuster was based on a play called
Green Grow the Lilacs
, which had a limited run in the 1930–31 Broadway season. A woman who’d helped produce it thought it would make a good musical and approached composer Richard Rodgers with the idea. He was interested, but his partner Lorenz Hart—who’d become an unreliable alcoholic—wasn’t. Rodgers’s solution: he teamed up with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein…who hadn’t had a hit in years and was considered a has-been. Together they wrote a musical called
Away We Go!
When it got to Broadway, it was renamed
Oklahoma!
and played to sellout crowds. It established Rodgers and Hammerstein as a team.

RENT
(1996)
Playwright Billy Aronson came up with an idea in 1988 to create a musical based on Puccini’s 1896 opera
La Bohème
, but about young artists dealing with AIDS in modern-day Greenwich Village (and not tuberculosis in 19th century Paris). He hired 29-year-old composer Jonathan Larson, who completely took over the project and conceived it as a rock musical. He named it
Rent
. The title refers to the characters’ dingy lofts, but it also means “torn apart,” fitting for a play in which nearly all the main characters are dying of AIDS. Larson spent three years writing
Rent
and another five developing it with a theater workshop. It debuted on Broadway in April 1996 and caused a sensation. Critics called it the most important musical of the last 20 years and it went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony for Best Musical. Tragically, Larson never got to see the fruit of his efforts: He died of a brain hemorrhage the night before
Rent
debuted.

Something missing? The Mona Lisa is
epalperbate
—without eyebrows.

PATENTLY ABSURD

Here’s proof that the urge to invent something—anything—
is more powerful than the urge to make sure the invention
is something that people will actually want to use
.

T
HE INVENTION:
Musical Baby Diaper Alarm
WHAT IT DOES:
Three women from France marketed this alarm to mothers in 1985. It’s a padded electronic napkin that goes inside a baby’s diaper. When it gets wet, it plays “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

THE INVENTION:
The Thinking Cap
WHAT IT DOES:
Improves artistic ability by mimicking the effects of autism. The cap uses magnetic pulses to inhibit the front-temporal, or “left brain” functions. This, say the two Australian scientists behind the project, creates better access to extraordinary “savant” abilities. They reported improved drawing skills in 5 of 17 volunteers in a 2002 experiment.

THE INVENTION:
Pantyhose x3
WHAT IT DOES:
Patented in 1997, they are three-legged panty hose. No, they’re not for three-legged people, they’re for women who know what it’s like to get a run in their stockings. Instead of having to carry spares, you just rotate the legs. The extra leg is hidden in a pocket in the crotch; the damaged leg rolls up to take its place.

THE INVENTION:
The Breath Alert
WHAT IT DOES:
This pocket-sized electronic device detects and measures bad breath. You simply breathe into the sensor for three seconds, then the LCD readout indicates—on a scale of 1 to 4—how safe (or offensive) your breath is.

THE INVENTION:
Weather-Reporting Toaster
WHAT IT DOES:
Robin Southgate, an industrial design student at Brunel University in London, hooked up his specially made toaster to the Internet. Reading the day’s meteorological stats, the toaster burns the day’s predictions into a slice of bread: a sun for sunny days, a cloud with
raindrops for rainy days, and so on. “It works best with white bread,” says Southgate.

“I never knew an early-rising, hard-working, prudent man, careful of his earnings, and strictly honest, who complained of bad luck.” —Henry Ward Beecher

THE INVENTION:
Separable Pants
WHAT IT DOES:
You don’t take them off, you take them apart. The zipper goes all the way around the crotch, from the front to the back. That way, you can mix and match the legs with other colors and styles, making your own artistic, customized pants.

THE INVENTION:
Vibrating Toilet Seat
WHAT IT DOES:
Thomas Bayard invented the seat in 1966. He believed that “buttocks stimulation” helps prevent constipation.

THE INVENTION:
Automatic-Response Nuclear Deterrent System
WHAT IT DOES:
A relic from the Cold War era, this idea was patented by British inventor Arthur Paul Pedrick in 1974. He claimed it would deter the United States, the USSR, and China from ever starting a nuclear war. How? Put three nuclear warheads on three orbiting satellites. If sensors on the satellites detected that nuclear missiles had been launched, they would automatically drop bombs: one each on Washington, Moscow, and Peking.

THE INVENTION:
Lavakan
WHAT IT DOES:
It’s a washing machine…for cats and dogs. This industrial-strength machine soaps, rinses, and dries your pet in less than 30 minutes. One of the inventors, Andres Díaz, claims that the 5-by-5-foot, $20,000 machines can actually reduce pet stress. “One of the dogs actually fell asleep during the wash,” he said. Cats weren’t quite as happy about being Lavakanned. “But it’s better than having a cat attach itself to your face, which is what can happen when you try to wash one by hand.”

MILITARY INDUSTRIAL SIMPLEX

Andorra is a small country between Spain and France. In the 1970s it reported an annual defense budget of $4.90. The money was used to buy blanks to fire on national holidays.

SMUDGERS & SLEEPERS

A few bits of top-secret spy lingo
.

• Terminated with extreme prejudice:
When a spy agency executes one of its own spies for betraying the agency. (As opposed to just firing—terminating—them.)