Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (36 page)

AFTERMATH:
Newspapers all over the country picked up the story, and Napoleon became a feline celebrity. He also became a professional weather-cat and newspaper columnist. His predictions were printed regularly—and he did pretty well. All told, he was about as accurate as human weather forecasters.

HEADLINE:
Nuts to Him! California Dog Wins Nutty Contest

THE STAR:
Rocky, a 100-pound male Rottweiler

WHAT HAPPENED:
In 1996 a Fresno radio station ran a contest offering free Neuticles to the dog submitting the best ghostwritten essay on why he wanted them. (Neuticles are artificial plastic testicles, implanted after a dog is neutered, that supposedly make the dog feel better about itself.) The appropriately named Rocky won.

AFTERMATH:
The contest made national news.
Parade
magazine called it the “Best Canine Self-Improvement Story” of 1996.

HEADLINE:
Dog Makes List of Notable Americans

THE STAR:
Otis P. Albee, family dog of the Albees, in South Burlington, Vermont (breed unknown)

WHAT HAPPENED:
In the 1980s George Albee, a professor at the University of Vermont, was invited to submit biographical information for a book called
Community Leaders and Noteworthy Americans
. Instead, he filled out the forms for his dog—”a retired explorer, hunter and sportsman with a Ph.D. in animal husbandry.”

AFTERMATH:
Otis made it into the book. When this was reported nationwide, Albee announced that Otis had no comment. Apparently, neither did the book’s publishers.

HEADLINE:
A Dog Is Man’s…Best Man?

THE STAR:
Samson, a six-year-old Samoyed mix

WHAT HAPPENED:
In 1995 Dan Anderson proposed to Lori Chapasko at the Wisconsin animal shelter where they both volunteered. She said yes…and approved when Dan chose their dog Samson to be “best man” at the wedding. “He epitomizes everything a best man should be,” Anderson explained to reporters.

AFTERMATH:
The dog was news, but apparently the wedding wasn’t. Reporters seem to have ignored it.

HEADLINE:
World Gets Charge from Nuclear Kittens

THE STARS:
Four black kittens—Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Neutron—who were living at the shut-down San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant in San Diego, California

WHAT HAPPENED:
How do you make a nuclear power plant seem warm and fuzzy? Find some kittens there. In February 1996, just as the owner of the San Onofre power plant was kicking off a pro-nuclear PR campaign, a worker happened to find four motherless kittens under a building. A pregnant cat, the story went, had slipped through security at the shut-down power plant, given birth to a litter of kittens, and disappeared. When the worker tried to carry them off the grounds, alarms went off. It turned out that the cute little animals were slightly radioactive…though officials explained that they were in no danger. The story was reported worldwide.
The Nuclear News
, a nuclear industry publication, called it “the biggest nuclear story in years.”

AFTERMATH:
Seven months later, the Atomic Kittens were pronounced “radiation-free”…proving that nuclear power
isn’t
so bad after all. Offers to adopt the pets flooded in from alt over the world, but workers at the plant decided to keep them.

As early as kindergarten, we’re taught that there are nine planets, but
200
years ago, even scholars were sure there were only six planets. Here’s how we got the three new ones.

T
HE END OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM

People have always known about Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Early civilizations named the days of the week after each of these planets, plus the sun and moon. The Greeks watched them move through the night sky, passing in front of the stars that make up the constellations of the zodiac, and called them
planetes
—which means “wanderers.”

As recently as the 1700s, people still believed that the planet Saturn was at the farthest extent of the solar system. That there might be other planets wasn’t even a respectable idea. But as technology and science became more sophisticated, other members of the solar system were discovered.

URANUS

In 1781 a self-taught astronomer, William Herschel, was “sweeping the skies” with his telescope. By March, he had reached the section included the constellation Gemini, and he spotted an object that appeared as a disk rather than a glowing star. Because it moved slightly from week to week, Herschel thought it was a comet. After a few months, however, he decided the orbit was circular…and came to the shocking conclusion that it wasn’t a comet, but an unknown planet. People were astonished.

Finding a Name

No one since ancient times had named a planet. Herschel felt that it should be called “Georgium Sidus” (George’s Star) in honor of his patron, George III—the king of England who reigned during the American Revolution. Some people wanted to name it “Herschel” after its discoverer. But one influential astronomer suggested they call it “Uranus,” after the Greek god of the heavens. That made sense, since this new planet was certainly the limit of the skies of the solar system. Or so they thought.

NEPTUNE

The newly found planet had a slight variation in its orbit, almost as if something were tugging at it. Could there be another planet affecting Uranus? A century earlier, Isaac Newton had come up with laws describing the effects that the gravitational forces of planets have on one another. Using Newton’s laws, two young scientists set out independently in 1840 to find the unknown planet whose gravitational forces might be pulling on Uranus. One of the scientists was a French mathematician, Jean Leverrier. The other was an English astronomer, John Couch Adams. Both hoped the unknown planet would be where their calculations said they could find it.

The Hidden Planet

Adams finished his calculations first, in September 1845. The following August, Leverrier completed his. Neither had access to a large telescope, so they couldn’t verify their projections—and no one would make one available to them. Finally, Leverrier traveled to the Berlin Observatory in Germany, and the young assistant manager, Johann Gottfried Galle, agreed to help search for the planet.

That was September 23, 1846. That night, Galle looked through the telescope, calling out stars and their positions while a young student astronomer, Heinrich Louis d’Arrest, looked at a star chart, searching for the stars Galle described. Finally Galle called out an eighth-magnitude star that d’Arrest couldn’t locate on the charts. They had found the unknown planet! It had taken two years of research—but only a half hour at the telescope. The honor of the discovery belongs to both Adams and Leverrier, who had essentially discovered the new planet with just a pen and a new set of mathematical laws. The greenish planet was named after Neptune, god of the sea.

VULCAN

Leverrier was on a roll. He started looking for other planets…and became convinced that there was one between the Sun and Mercury. He called his planet “Vulcan,” the god of fire, because it was so close to the Sun. Leverrier noted that, like Uranus, Mercury experienced disturbances that caused it to travel farther in one point in its orbit. Since Neptune was one of the causes of similar pulls on Uranus, it made sense that another planet was affecting Mercury.

Leverrier never found Vulcan, but people believed it was there until 1916, when Einstein’s general theory of relativity was published. Einstein gave a satisfactory explanation for the discrepancies in Mercury’s orbit, so scientists no longer needed Vulcan. It thereby ceased to exist…until decades later, when Gene Roddenberry, creator of “Star Trek,” appropriated the planet and made it the home of Spock.

PLUTO

The discovery of Neptune did not completely account for the peculiar movements of Uranus. Once again, scientists considered the pull of another planet as a cause and set out to find “Planet X.” Using the telescope at his observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, Percival Lowell searched for Planet X for 10 years. After he died in 1916, his brother gave the observatory a donation that enabled it to buy a telescope-camera. The light-sensitive process of photography allowed astronomers to capture images of dim and distant stars that they couldn’t see, even with the aid of a telescope.

In 1929 the Lowell Observatory hired Clyde Tombaugh, a young self-taught astronomer from Kansas, to continue the search for Planet X. Lowell had suggested that the unknown planet was in the Gemini region of the sky. Using an instrument called the
blink microscope
, Tombaugh took two photographs of that area of the sky a few days apart and placed them side by side under the microscope. If something moved in the sky, as planets do, it would appear as a speck of light jumping back and forth as Tombaugh’s eyes moved from one photograph to the other, looking through the microscope.

That’s just what happened. The observatory announced the discovery of the ninth planet on March 13,1930. An 11-year-old girl, the daughter of an Oxford astronomy professor, chose the name Pluto—the god of the netherworld—for the new planet.

For years before his death, Tombaugh repeatedly declared that there were no more planets in our solar system. If there were, he said, he would have found them.

More goofs, blunders, and dumb mistakes.

C
HURCH MUSIC

‘A funeral in 1996 in an English church ended with Rod Stewart singing:

If you want my body,

And you think I’m sexy,

C’mon baby let me know.

The vicar admitted that when he was recording the deceased’s last request—a hymn—he’d apparently failed to erase the entire cassette tape.”

—
Fortean Times
, 1996

UNPLUGGED

“In 1978 workers were sent to dredge a murky stretch of the Chesterfield-Stockwith Canal. Their task was to remove all the rubbish and leave the canal clear….They were disturbed during their tea-break by a policeman who said he was investigating a giant whirlpool in the canal. When they got back, however, the whirlpool had gone…and so had a 1 1/2-mile stretch of the canal…. A flotilla of irate holidaymakers were stranded on their boats in brown sludge.

Among the first pieces of junk the workers had hauled out had been the 200-year-old plug that ensured the canal’s continued existence. ‘We didn’t know there was a plug,’ said one bewildered workman…All the records had been lost in a fire during the war.”

—The Book of Heroic Failures,
by Stephen Pile

YIKES!

“Defense lawyer Phillip Robertson, trying to make a dramatic point in front of the jury at his client’s recent robbery trial in Dallas, pointed the pistol used in the crime at the jury box, causing two jurors to fling their arms in front of their faces and others to gasp. Though Robertson was arguing that his client should be sentenced only to probation, the horrified jury gave him 13 years.”

—“The Edge,” in The Portland
Oregonian,
September 10, 1997

THE WRONG NOTE

“A 61-year-old woman and her daughter made a deposit at the drive-up window of an Albuquerque, New Mexico, bank Thursday, and were waiting for a receipt when police cars surrounded them and officers ordered them out of their vehicle at gunpoint. It turned out the New Mexico grandmother had accidentally held up the bank; she’d handed in a deposit slip on which a prankster had scrawled a hold-up message. The FBI said investigators believe someone wrote the note on the deposit slip and left it in a pile inside the bank, where the woman picked it up and used it, unaware of what was written on the back.”

—
Washington Post
, May 24, 1997

A PAIR OF BIRDBRAINS

“Each evening, birdlover Neil Symmons stood in his backyard in Devon, England, hooting like an owl—and one night, an owl called back to him.

“For a year, the man and his feathered friend hooted back and forth. Symmons even kept a log of their ‘conversations.’

“Just as Symmons thought he was on the verge of a breakthrough in interspecies communication, his wife had a chat with next-door neighbor Wendy Cornes.

“‘My husband spends his night in the garden calling out to owls,’ said Mrs. Symmons.

‘“That’s odd,’ Mrs. Cornes replied. ‘So does my Fred.’

“And then it dawned on them.”