Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (67 page)

“We’ve heard all this before,” said fan Sarah Sprague, speaking of the false rumors that circulated prior to the first two prequels. But this one wasn’t a rumor. Twentieth Century Fox had signed a deal with another theater. A fan organization called LiningUp.net staged a protest. Said one angry member, “Grauman’s is the
Star Wars
mecca. The studios knew we were going to line up here, made the decision to show the movie elsewhere, allowed us to line up for weeks, and then told us for sure the movie wouldn’t be playing here. Then they offered us seats at a nearby theater, only to retract their offer a week later. It isn’t right. We just want to see the movie.” Ultimately the Dark Side prevailed—they were forced to wait in line at the other theater and miss the opening-night showings.

*        *        *

C-3PO FACTS AND GOSSIP

• C-3PO has the first line in the first
Star Wars
(“Did you hear that? They’ve shut down the main reactor!”) and the last line in the last one (“Oh no!”).

• Anthony Daniels, on getting the part: “I was quite insulted to be offered a role as a robot; I was a serious actor. I wasn’t going to be in some weird American movie as a robot, yet my agent insisted.”

• Kenny Baker (R2-D2), on Daniels: “He’s been such an awkward person over the years. If he just calmed down and socialized with everyone, we could make a fortune touring and making personal appearances. I’ve asked him four times now but the last time he looked down his nose at me like I was a piece of s*#@ and said, ‘I don’t do any of these conventions—go away, little man.’”

The sound a grasshopper makes is called
stridulation
.

FRONTIER WOMEN

It took a lot to survive on the frontier. Most histories of the Wild West focus on men—cowboys, gunfighters, chiefs—and ignore the fact that women could be powerful, influential, and hell-raising, too
.

C
ALAMITY JANE (1852–1903)
Claim to Fame:
Soldier, caregiver, hell-raiser
Her Story:
Born Martha Jane Cannery in Missouri, she was one of the most famous American women of the 19th century. Yet it’s difficult to know for sure exactly what she actually
did
. Why? Because much of her legend comes from pulp-fiction writers, as well her own trumped-up autobiography. And then there were her days of touring with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, where Jane told many more tall tales about her rugged life. Here’s some of what she claimed:

• She was married to Wild Bill Hickok and had his child.

• She was a scout for General Custer.

• She was a Pony Express rider.

• The name “Calamity Jane” was given to her by an army captain who she rescued single-handedly in an Indian fight.

Historians doubt these claims. But what makes Jane so interesting is that she could have told the truth and would still have been considered an amazing woman. Here’s what
is
known:

• She was an expert horsewoman and sharpshooter.

• She often dressed as a man and fought Indians.

• A hard drinker who chewed tobacco (and cussed a lot), she was highly respected by the men she rode with.

• During a smallpox epidemic in Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1876, Jane nursed many of the sick back to health.

Most likely, Calamity Jane got her nickname simply because trouble seemed to follow her everywhere. In the end, alcoholism got the better of her—she died penniless at 51 years old.

NELLIE CASHMAN (1845–1925)

Claim to Fame:
Humanitarian, entrepreneur, adventurer

Her Story:
Cashman emigrated to Boston from Ireland with her sister and mother in the mid-1860s. An adventurer at heart, Cashman heard stories of the Gold Rush and decided to go west. She boarded a ship, sailed down the Atlantic coast to Panama, crossed the isthmus on a donkey, then set sail for San Francisco. But she didn’t settle there—Cashman wanted to go where the action was, so in 1872 she moved to Nevada and worked as a cook in various mining towns while panning for gold. Using the little money she earned, she opened her first boardinghouse in Panaca Flat.

Q: Who has the most appearances on the cover of
Sports Illustrated?
A: Michael Jordan.

Frontier Angel

Once the boardinghouse was up and running, Cashman sold it, joined a group of 200 gold prospectors, and headed for Cassiar, British Columbia. She opened another boardinghouse there, then moved on to Victoria. But as a devout Catholic, Cashman’s desire to help people was as strong as her love of adventure. Shortly after arriving in Victoria, she got news of a scurvy epidemic in Cassiar. She hired six men and hauled in 1,500 pounds of food and supplies—a trip that took 77 days, often through blizzard conditions. She nursed 100 men back to health and received the first of many nicknames, “Angel of the Cassiar.” Other names given to her in time: “Frontier Angel,” “Saint of the Sourdoughs,” “Miner’s Angel,” and “the Angel of Tombstone.”

All across the West, from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Tombstone, Arizona, Cashman was responsible for establishing restaurants, hotels, grocery stores, hospitals, and churches. Charitable almost to a fault, she would sooner give a free meal to a hungry man than try to make a profit. Along the way, Cashman had many male suitors, but she turned them all down. When, in 1923, a reporter asked her why, she replied, “Why child, I haven’t had time for marriage. Men are a nuisance anyhow, now aren’t they? They’re just boys grown up.”

Nellie Cashman lived a long, hard life that never saw her slow down. She died at the age of 79—after contracting pneumonia on a 750-mile dogsled journey across Alaska.

OTHER FRONTIER WOMEN

•
Libby Smith Collins
. Like Nellie Cashman, Collins proved that a woman was capable of running a business. Her birthdate is unknown, but she came west with her parents sometime in the 1850s. After her husband, a cattle rancher, fell ill in 1888, Collins took it upon herself to transport their herd from Montana to the stockyards of Chicago. She almost didn’t make it: the railroad company wouldn’t let her board—it was against regulations for an unaccompanied woman to ride on a train. Collins fought the rule, got it changed, and made a tidy profit in Chicago. She took the trip alone every year after that, earning her the nickname “Cattle Queen of Montana.” A movie by that title was released in 1954, based on Collins’s life and starring Barbara Stanwyck and Ronald Reagan.

The Greek Parthenon has no straight lines and contains no mortar.

•
Cattle Kate (1861–1889)
. Born Ella Watson, Cattle Kate is more famous for the way she died than the way she lived: she was lynched by a vigilante mob in 1889 for alleged cattle rustling. After setting up a cattle ranch in Sweetwater Valley, Wyoming, Kate had tried to register a brand with the state, but the Wyoming Stock Growers Association used their power to squash small-time ranchers. So Kate bought a brand from a neighboring farmer and began homesteading her land. This infuriated the big ranchers, who claimed ownership over the entire Sweetwater Valley. So a group of them took the law into their own hands and hanged Kate and her husband, Jim Averell. No one was ever tried for the crime.

•
Pearl Hart (1870)
The only woman convicted of stagecoach robbery was Canadian-born Pearl Hart. She and a partner named Joe Boot held up a stagecoach in Arizona in 1899 (reportedly because Pearl needed money for her dying mother). They got caught, and newspapers ran with stories of the “Lady Bandit.” Hart gained even more notoriety from her disdain for authority: “I shall not consent to be tried under a law in which my sex had no voice in making!”

She was sentenced to five years in prison in Yuma, Arizona, but served only three. She claimed that she was pregnant, so they released her early. After that, Hart was never heard from again.

*        *        *

“Women have a right to work whenever they want—as long as they have dinner ready when you get home.”

—John Wayne

Even for sharp cheese? A dull knife can slice cheese thinner than a sharp one.

HI PHI

Anyone who’s read Dan Brown’s best seller
The DaVinci Code
is probably familiar with what Brown and others call a “mystical” number that shows up with remarkable regularity in nature, art, music, and architecture. Some even call it a “cosmic blueprint.” Some of Brown’s claims are far-fetched, but some aren’t—they’re real…and fascinating. The number is known as
Phi,
a modern term for a very old concept
.

T
AKE A NUMBER
The story starts with Euclid, a Greek mathematician who lived in the 3rd century B.C., considered by experts to be the most important mathematician in history (his book
Elements
is still referenced today—2,000 years after he wrote it). Euclid wanted to find the point on a line that divides that line into two segments with a special relationship: the ratio of the entire line to the large segment is equal to the ratio of the large segment to the small segment. He found it, and called his discovery
extreme and mean ratios
. Here’s what it looks like:

The ratio of line L to segment A is the same as the ratio of segment A to segment B, or L/A = A/B.

The ratio can also be expressed as a number: 1.61803398875…(the number is
infinite
—the digits go on forever). To meet Euclid’s requirements, line L must be 1.618… times larger than segment A and segment A must be 1.618… times larger than segment B. (Euclid didn’t use the number, he explained it with an equation.)

THE DIVINE PROPORTION

In 1509 Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli published a treatise entitled
De Divina Proportione
(illustrated by Leonardo daVinci) in which he gave the ratio the name
divina proportion
, because, he said, “just as God cannot be properly defined, nor understood through words, likewise this proportion can never be designated through intelligible numbers.” Since then the ratio has been given many names, such as the Golden Section, the Golden Mean (from Euclid’s “extreme and mean ratio”), and the Golden Ratio.

According to experts, camels have the worst breath in the animal kingdom.

GOLDEN DISCOVERIES

•
Leonardo Fibonacci
, a 12th-century mathematician, developed an amazing sequence of numbers. The sequence starts with zero and one, and continues by adding the two previous digits.

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55… and so on.

•
Robert Simson
, a Scottish mathematician, proved in 1753 that the ratios of successive Fibonacci numbers moved closer and closer to the mysterious Golden Ratio.

Fibonacci had found the sequence by computing how fast a pair of rabbits could multiply under ideal conditions. The answer is his number sequence, and since his sequence is so related to the Golden Ratio—the Golden Ratio was believed to have a mysterious presence in the natural world.

NUMBER BUILDER

Around the turn of the 20th century, American mathematician Mark Barr gave the Golden Ratio the name it is often referred to today—
Phi
. He named it in honor of the Greek sculptor Phidias (500 B.C.–432 B.C.), who he was convinced used the ratio in his sculptures. Others claim that Phi was used in ancient art and architecture because it has a naturally balancing and pleasing aspect to it. (Some mathematicians dispute these claims, attributing them to coincidence.) A few examples:

• The Egyptians may have used Phi in the design of the pyramids. The Great Pyramid of Khufu (3200 B.C.) appears to have been designed so that the ratio of the height of its triangular face to half the side of the base is equal to Phi.

• Many art historians are convinced that Phidias applied the Golden Ratio to his design of sculptures for the Parthenon. The dimensions of the Parthenon itself follow the Golden Ratio of Phi.

• Other buildings that seem to utilize the Phi ratio: the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris and the UN building in New York City.

A rhinoceros beetle can push 850 times its weight, equivalent to a man pushing a tank.