Read Uncle John’s Briefs Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Uncle John’s Briefs (7 page)
• He lives in the Stone Age. All building materials, tools, cars, and consumer products are made out of natural, mostly unadulterated—and extremely eco-friendly—stone. Flintstone lives off of the earth, literally.
• Flintstone doesn’t use fossil fuels. He lives alongside plants and animals that will one day putrefy and
become
petroleum. Without a drop of oil, Flintstone powers his car by rapidly pedaling his feet, perhaps the greenest alternative energy source in history. Further, since electricity hasn’t been harnessed yet, all of the appliances in his home are powered via the mechanical labor of various birds and animals. Carbon emissions from the Flintstone home: zero.
• One could argue that this is animal cruelty, as the birds and mammoths are forced to work as indentured servants. However, instead of running away, the animals seem perfectly content to insult Fred with their clever wisecracks.
• Finally, Flintstone doesn’t wear shoes or pants, so he doesn’t contribute much to the pesticide-dependent cotton industry. Conclusion: Fred Flintstone is quite “green.”
GEORGE JETSON: BAD
The Jetsons
was a product of the early 1960s idea that “the future” would be all about technology and labor-saving devices. What didn’t seem to occur to anyone was all the energy it would take to power a world full of robots, flying cars, and self-cleaning kitchens.
• Jetson eats food prepared by a Food-a-Rac-a-Cycle, a microwave-size
machine that prepares any meal at the push of a button. Because it’s a tiny device that can’t store bulky items, it can’t produce just
any
food. According to an article by David Freedman in
Discover
, it would only produce “blobs of tasteless but nutritious paste” with flavoring chemicals added. So the Jetsons subsist on highly processed chemicals, decidedly not locally grown or organic.
Who’s George Holiday? The man who videotaped the Rodney King beating in 1991.
• The food machine is just one of many sophisticated gizmos that preclude any work for Jetson and his family (his boy Elroy, daughter Judy, and Jane, his wife). The Jetsons enjoy talking watches, machines that control their dreams, holographic 3-D television, video phones, a machine that gets them out of bed and dresses them, and Rosie, the robot maid. Every single one of these gadgets requires a tremendous amount of electricity.
• Jetson drives a flying car. It looks like a cross between a Volkswagen Beetle and a flying saucer, but the closest thing we have to compare it to is a Sikorsky S-76C, a common commercial helicopter that gets terrible gas mileage—less than two miles per gallon. Today’s gas-guzzling Hummer H2 gets about 10 mpg, meaning that Jetson’s “futuristic” car is only 20% as efficient as a Hummer.
• Even if Jetson wanted to drive an energy-efficient car on the ground, he couldn’t. All of the buildings in his hometown of Orbit City are elevated hundreds of feet off the ground—he can’t even
walk
anywhere. Flying is the only option. And when Jetson steps out of the car at his destination, the sidewalks move. (It’s truly amazing, then, that Fred Flintstone is fatter than George Jetson.)
• And why exactly are all those buildings sky-high? It’s not touched upon in the show (creators say they based the buildings on the futuristic Space Needle in Seattle), but maybe Al Gore was right: By the time
The Jetsons
takes place, in the year 2062, all the electricity used to power our labor-saving devices has produced so many carbon emissions that the polar ice caps have melted, covering the surface of the Earth in water, leaving humanity no choice but to build upward. (Sorry, George. Our bad.)
Fred:
How can you be so stupid?
Barney:
Hey, that’s not very nice! Say you’re sorry.
Fred:
I’m sorry you’re stupid.
—The Flintstones
No permit required: Beavers in Connecticut have the legal right to build dams.
Experts say the path to success is built on a good vocabulary. Here are a few words, with examples of their use, that might make you sound smart enough to go into politics. (Hmm…maybe that was a bad example.)
N
ew Word:
Endemic (en-DEM-ik)
Meaning:
Belonging to a particular region or people
Instead of…
“Them Tasmanian Devils are only found in Tazakistan, I’m pretty sure. And zoos.”
Sound Smarter:
“The Tasmanian Devil is
endemic
only to the Australian island of Tasmania.”
New Word:
Cavil (KAV-uhl)
Meaning:
To quibble or nitpick
Instead of…
“Well, I guess that’s for the jury to decide.”
Sound Smarter:
“I hate to
cavil
, darling, but I’m fairly sure that man you just hit was riding a Segway, not a scooter.”
New Word:
Parlous (PAHR-lous)
Meaning:
Dangerous
Instead of…
“This won’t hurt a bit!”
Sound Smarter:
“I assure you there is nothing
parlous
about the intracranial demulsification procedure.”
New Word:
Imbibe (im-BAHYB)
Meaning:
Drink; absorb
Instead of…
“Let’s go sit on the porch, down a few cold ones and take in the scenery.”
Sound Smarter:
“Please join me on the veranda to
imbibe
some refreshing beverages and enjoy the spectacular ocean view.”
New Word:
Soporific (soh-puh-RIF-ik)
Meaning:
Sleep-inducing
Instead of…
“I could eat a whole ’nuther helping of pie—but I’m just too pooped.”
Sound Smarter:
“Unfortunately, the
soporific
effects of the turkey, not to
mention all the wine I’ve imbibed, prevent me from staying awake long enough to partake of dessert.”
In 1990 Sacramento, CA, officially renamed its manholes “maintenance holes.” Why? For “gender equality.”
New Word:
Alacrity (uh-LAK-ri-tee)
Meaning:
Quick, cheerful enthusiasm
Instead of…
“Brian’s a go-getter, isn’t he? I like him. But he kind of bugs me, too.”
Sound Smarter:
“Brian’s tendency to approach every task with
alacrity
made him not only one of the office’s favorite employees, but also one of the most annoying.”
New Word:
Circumspect (SUR-kuhm-spekt)
Meaning:
Cautious
Instead of…
“Uh, Fred, you might not want to look down that tube.”
Sound Smarter:
“Frederick, a more
circumspect
approach to that fireworks cannon you just lit might be advisable.”
New Word:
Phlegmatic (fleg-MAT-ik)
Meaning:
Apathetic; sluggish
Instead of…
“Get your lazy butt up off the sofa and answer the phone yourself.”
Sound Smarter:
“Guinness World Records
just called to let you know you’ve been named Most
Phlegmatic
Couch Potato.”
New Word:
Enmity (EN-mi-tee)
Meaning:
Ill will, hostility, or outright hatred
Instead of…
“I hate you! I hate, hate, hate you!”
Sound Smarter:
“Be assured, my charming friend, that my
enmity
for you is outmatched only by my resistance to having my tonsils extracted through my nasal passages.”
New Word:
Temerity (teh-MEHR-eh-tee)
Meaning:
Foolhardiness; reckless courage
Instead of…
“I don’t know if that was brave or just stupid, what you just did. Did it really eat your cell phone?”
Sound Smarter:
“It takes extreme
temerity
to jump into the grizzly bear enclosure, Jethro. Shall I call an ambulance?”
Ever heard of Prince Philip? He’s the Duke of Edinburgh and husband of Queen Elizabeth II of England. About the only time he makes headlines is when he, as one newspaper puts it, “uses his royal status to insult and belittle people.” His public gaffes are so frequent that they’ve earned him the title “The Duke of Hazard.”
To a driving instructor in Scotland:
“How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?”
To a Nigerian diplomat in traditional Nigerian garb:
“You look as if you’re ready for bed.”
On seeing a fuse box filled with wires, during a visit to an electronics company:
“This looks like it was put in by an Indian.”
To a chubby 13-year-old boy at a space exploration exhibit, pointing to a space capsule:
“You’ll have to lose weight if you want to go in that.”
To a smoke-detector activist who lost two of her children in a house fire:
“My smoke alarm is a damn nuisance. Every time I run my bath, the steam sets it off and I’ve got firefighters at my door.”
To members of the British Deaf Association, while pointing to a loudspeaker playing Caribbean music:
“No wonder you are deaf.”
To a tourist, during a state visit to Hungary:
“You can’t have been here long, you’ve no potbelly.”
Speaking to British students studying in China:
“If you stay here much longer, you’ll all be slitty-eyed.”
On the “key problem” facing Brazil:
“Brazilians live there.”
On his daughter Princess Anne:
“If it doesn’t fart or eat hay, she isn’t interested.”
Remark to the Queen on seeing a picture once owned by King Charles I of England in the Louvre in Paris:
“Shall we take it back?”
Instant classic: Robert Louis Stevenson wrote
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
in six days.
You know what these are…but do you know where they came from?
W
OOD-BURNING STOVES
If you wanted to heat your home in the mid-18th century, there was only one way: your fireplace. But because they were usually built into an exterior wall, fireplaces were inefficient—much of the heat was lost to the outside air. In 1742 Benjamin Franklin invented a freestanding metal stove that could be placed in the middle of the room, so
all
the heat radiated into the room. The “Franklin stove,” as it came to be known, remains one of Benjamin Franklin’s most famous inventions. One problem: it didn’t work. Smoke
rises
, which means you have to put the chimney outlet at the top of the stove. Franklin connected his at the base, and because of that the fire would not stay lit. His stove didn’t become practical until another inventor, David Rittenhouse, connected the chimney
above
the fire.
MAIL-ORDER CATALOGS
In September 1871, a British major named F.B. McCrea founded the Army & Navy Cooperative in London to supply goods to military personnel at the lowest possible price. Its first catalog was issued in February 1872…six months before an American named Aaron Montgomery Ward put his first catalog in the mail.
ALUMINUM
The Earth’s crust contains more aluminum than any other metallic element, yet it was not discovered or extracted until the mid-1820s—when it was so expensive to extract that it was actually considered a precious metal. Then, in 1886, two different inventors—Charles Hall, an American, and Paul Héroult, a Frenchman—discovered a process by which aluminum could be extracted much more cheaply using electricity. The Hall-Héroult process reduced the price of aluminum to less than 1% of its previous cost. But it wasn’t until World War I, when German designer Hugo Junkers started building airplanes out of metal instead of the traditional wood and fabric, that aluminum came into its own. Today the world uses more aluminum than any other metal except iron and steel.
Electric eels must surface to breathe every five minutes or they will drown.
Where did the low-calorie diet come from? It started with a guy known as the “Chew-Chew Man” to critics and the “Great Masticator” to fans
.
T
HE BIRTH OF “FLETCHERISM”
In 1895, 44-year-old Horace Fletcher was turned down for life insurance because he weighed 217 pounds (at 5'6" tall), and he drank excessively. “I was an old man at forty, and on the way to a rapid decline,” he recalled years later.