Read Uncle John’s Briefs Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Uncle John’s Briefs (5 page)
This was not his complete sentence, and out of context it sounds silly. It is only fair to put it back into its setting: “When one stands here,” Nixon declared, “and sees the wall going to the peak of this mountain and realizes it runs for hundreds of miles—as a matter of fact, thousands of miles—over the mountains and through the valleys of this country and that it was built over 2,000 years ago, I think you would have to conclude that this is a great wall and that it had to be built by a great people.”
Of the 28,000 people in Japan who are over 100 years old, 85% are women.
Line:
“Let them eat cake.”
Supposedly Said By:
Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, when she was told that conditions were so bad that the peasants had no bread to eat
Actually:
She was alleged to have said it just before the French Revolution. But the phrase had already been used by then. It has been cited as an old parable by philosopher Henri Rousseau in 1778—a decade or so before Marie Antoinette supposedly said it. Chances are, it was a rumor spread by her political enemies.
Line:
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.”
Supposedly Said By:
Mark Twain
Actually:
Twain, one of America’s most quotable writers, was quoting someone else: Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli of England.
Line:
“Keep the government poor and remain free.”
Supposedly Said By:
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
Actually:
Ronald Reagan said it during a speech and attributed the line to Holmes. But Holmes never said it, and it wasn’t written by a speechwriter, either. Reagan’s “speechwriting office” later told a reporter, “He came up with that one himself.
HOLY BAT FACTS!
• Most species of bats live 12 to 15 years, but some live as long as 30 years. Some species can fly as fast as 60 miles per hour and as high as 10,000 feet.
• Bats are social animals and live in colonies in caves. The colonies can get huge: Bracken Cave in Texas contains an estimated 20 million Mexican free-tailed bats.
• Vampire bats drink blood through a “drinking straw” that the bat makes with its tongue and lower lip. The bats’ saliva contains an anticoagulant that keeps blood flowing by impeding the formation of blood clots.
• It’s not uncommon for a vampire bat to return to the same animal night after night, weakening and eventually killing it.
How'd they get airmail? From 1939–42, there was an underwater post office in the Bahamas.
We thought it might be fun to test your ad slogan IQ. How many products and brands can you recognize by their slogans? Answers are on
page 284
.
1
.
“Good to the last drop.”
2
.
“You’re in good hands.”
3
.
“It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.”
4
.
“A little dab’ll do ya.”
5
.
“When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.”
6
.
“The beer that made Milwaukee famous.”
7
.
“We answer to a higher authority.”
8
.
“Plop, plop, fizz, fizz.”
9
.
“When it rains, it pours!”
10
.
“Don’t leave home without it.”
11
.
“Ask the man who owns one.”
12
.
“I liked it so much I bought the company.”
13
.
“Takes a licking and keeps on ticking.”
14
.
“Reach out and touch someone.”
15
.
“Let your fingers do the walking.”
16
.
“It keeps going, and going, and going.”
17
.
“Come to where the flavor is.”
18
.
“It helps the hurt stop hurting.”
19
.
“It does a body good.”
20
.
“It’s what’s for dinner.”
21
.
“We love to fly and it shows.”
22
.
“And we thank you for your support.”
23
.
“Rich Corinthian leather.”
24
.
“Celebrate the moments of your life.”
25
.
“Manly, yes, but I like it, too.”
26
.
“Generation Next.”
27
.
“We’ll leave the light on for you.”
28
.
“Better living through chemistry.”
A red blood cell is about 8 microns wide—less than half the width of a human hair.
Things (and people) aren’t always what they seem. Here are some peeks behind the image
.
J
OHN JAMES AUDUBON
Image:
Considered a pioneer of American wildlife conservation, this 19th-century naturalist spent days at a time searching for birds in the woods so he could paint them. The National Audubon Society was founded in 1905 in his honor.
Actually:
Audubon found the birds, then shot them. In addition to painting, he was an avid hunter. According to David Wallechinsky in
Significa
, “He achieved unequaled realism by using freshly killed models held in lifelike poses by wires. Sometimes he shot dozens of birds just to complete a single picture.”
WASHINGTON CROSSING THE DELAWARE
Image:
One of the most famous paintings of American history depicts General George Washington—in a fierce battle against the redcoats—leading his men across the Delaware River on Christmas Eve 1776.
Actually:
It was painted 75 years after the battle by a German artist named Leutze. He used American tourists as models and substituted the Rhine River for the Delaware. He got the style of boat wrong; the clothing was wrong; even the American flag was incorrect. Yet the drama of the daring offensive was vividly captured, making it one of our most recognized paintings.
WEBSTER’S DICTIONARY
Image
: The oldest and most trusted dictionary in the United States, created in 1828 by Noah Webster.
Actually:
“The truth is,” says M. Hirsh Goldberg in
The Book of Lies
, “is that any dictionary maker can put
Webster’s
in the name, because book titles can’t be copyrighted.” And a lot of shoddy publishers do just that. To know if your
Webster’s
is authentic, make sure it’s published by Merriam-Webster, Inc.
If an animal has a tail, it’s
caudate
; if it doesn’t have a tail, it’s
anurous
.
Here are some tidbits about lefties. Why devote more than one page to the subject? Because we don’t want the southpaws to feel left out. Alright?
L
EFT-HANDED STATS
• Lefties make up about 5% to 15% of the general population—but 15% to 30% of all patients in mental institutions.
• They’re more prone to allergies, insomnia, migraines, schizophrenia and a host of other things than right-handers. They’re also three times more likely than righties to become alcoholics. Why? Some scientists speculate the right hemisphere of the brain—the side left-handers use the most—has a lower tolerance for alcohol than the left side. Others think the stress of living in a right-handed world is responsible.
• Lefties are also more likely to be on the extreme ends of the intelligence scale than the general population: a higher proportion of mentally disabled people and people with IQs over 140 are lefties.
LEFT OUT OF SCIENCE
• For centuries science was biased against southpaws. In the 1870s, for example, Italian psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso published
The Delinquent Male
, in which he asserted that left-handed men were psychological “degenerates” and prone to violence. (A few years later he published
The Delinquent Female
, in which he made the same claims about women.)
• This theory existed even as late as the 1940s, when psychiatrist Abram Blau wrote that left-handedness “is nothing more than an expression of infantile negativism and falls into the same category as…general perverseness.” He speculated that lefties didn’t get enough attention from their mothers.
LEFT-HANDED TRADITIONS
• Why do we throw salt over our left shoulders for good luck? To throw it into the eyes of the Devil, who, of course, lurks behind us to our left.
• In many traditional Muslim cultures, it is extremely impolite to touch
food with your left hand. Reason: Muslims eat from communal bowls using their right hand; their left hand is used to perform “unclean” tasks such as wiping themselves after going the bathroom. Hindus have a similar custom: they use their right hand exclusively when touching themselves above the waist, and use only the left hand to touch themselves below the waist.
Heavy! The Earth’s atmosphere weighs about 5,517,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms.
• What did traditional Christians believe was going to happen on Judgement Day? According to custom, God blesses the saved with his right hand—and casts sinners out of Heaven with his left.
• Other traditional mis-beliefs:
If you have a ringing in your left ear, someone is cursing you. If your right ear rings, someone is praising you.