Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (41 page)

Myth:
Giraffes have more vertebrae in their necks than other mammals.

Fact:
They’re the same as the rest of us. Although giraffes have the longest neck of any animal—10 to 12 feet—they have the same number of vertebrae as all mammals, including humans. The giraffe’s neck bones
are
farther apart, though.

Myth:
Air fresheners remove offending odors from the air.

Fact:
Not even close. Actually, they either cover smells up with a stronger scent, or make your nose numb so you can’t smell the bad stuff. The only way you can get
rid
of odors is with expensive absorption agents like charcoal or silica gel.

Commentary from one of America’s most popular comedians.

“Now they show you how detergents take out bloodstains, a pretty violent image there. I think if you’ve got a T-shirt with bloodstains all over it, maybe laundry isn’t your biggest problem. Maybe you should get rid of the body before you do the wash.”

“Nothing in life is ‘fun for the whole family.’”

“It’s amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day just exactly fits the newspaper.”

“My parents didn’t want to move to Florida, but they turned sixty, and that’s the law.”

“A date is like a job interview that lasts all night. The only difference between the two is that there are very few job interviews where there’s a chance you will wind up naked at the end of it.”

“Let me ask you something. If someone’s lying, are their pants really on fire?”

“One of the powers of adulthood is the ability to be totally bored and remain standing. That’s why they could set up the DMV that way.”

“Where lipstick is concerned, the important thing is not what color to choose, but to accept God’s decision on where your lips end.”

“Seventy-five percent of your body heat is lost through the top of your head. Which sounds like you could go skiing naked if you got a good hat.”

“Why does McDonald’s have to count every burger that they sell? What is their ultimate goal? Do they want cows to surrender voluntarily?”

“You know why dogs have no money? No pockets. ‘Cause they see change on the street all the time and it’s driving them crazy when you’re walking them. He is always looking up at you: There’s a quarter…’”

“Milk and kids” are virtually synonymous in our culture with “good health.” But that wasn’t always the case. Until the early 1900s, milk was often adulterated with foreign substances, taken from sick cows, or mis-handled during milking and storage. As a result, it was often host to tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid fever, and other life-threatening diseases. But few people knew that the milk made them sick. It wasn’t until the late 19th century, when scientists began to understand germ theory, that they realized diseases were being transmitted through milk—and that they could do something to eliminate the hazard. Here’s a fascinating but little-known story from American history.

T
HE GOOD OLD DAYS

In the days before refrigeration, farmers who lived near towns delivered milk the old-fashioned way: they brought a cow into town and went door to door looking for customers. Anyone who wanted milk could step out into the street with a pitcher or a bucket, and watch the farmer milk the cow right before their eyes.

Since customers were standing only a few feet away, it paid for the farmer to take good care of his cows. Nobody wanted to buy milk from a beast that looked mistreated, dirty, or sick. So although there was a risk of buying bad milk, it was kept to a minimum.

City Slickers

But in cities, where door-to-door cow service wasn’t practical or possible, buying milk was another matter. “Milk sellers” acted as middlemen between farmers and townspeople. Like used car dealers today, they were widely mistrusted and said to possess “neither character, nor decency of manner, nor cleanliness.” Whether or not the reputation was deserved, they were notorious for diluting milk with water to increase profits. People said their milk came from “black cows,” the black cast-iron pumps that provided towns with drinking water. And if the pump was broken, horse troughs were always a handy source of water.

Although it actually spread serious diseases, watered-down milk was seen as more of an annoyance than a health hazard, and nothing much was done about it. It wasn’t until the 1840s that scandals in the
liquor
industry led to the first demands for milk reform.

THE SWILL MILK SCANDALS

In the mid-1800s, it was common for whiskey and other liquor distillers to run dairy and beef businesses on the side. The manufacture of grain alcohol requires huge amounts of corn, rye, and other fresh grains, which are cooked into a mash and then distilled. Once the distillation is complete, the remaining “swill” can be discarded…or, as the distillers discovered, it could be fed to cows.

Profit, not quality, was the priority with “swill herds.” As a result, conditions in many distillery-owned dairies were atrocious. The cows spent their entire lives tied up in tiny pens, which were rarely cleaned. They received no food other than the swill—and no fresh water at all since, distillers thought, there was already plenty of water in the swill.

Spoiled Milk

With no exercise, no real food, and no water, even the hardiest cattle sickened and died in about six months. The failing herds were milked daily until the very end; when a cow became too weak to stand on its own, it was hoisted upright with ropes so that it could be milked until it died.

Milk produced by swill herds, as muckraking journalist Robert Hartley wrote in 1842, was “very thin, and of a pale bluish color,” the kind nobody in their right mind would buy. So distilleries added flour, starch, chalk, plaster of Paris, or anything else they could get away with to make the milk look healthy. This adulteration only increased the amount of bacteria in milk that was already virtually undrinkable.

TAKING NOTICE

The toll that adulterated milk took on public health was severe: in New York City, where five million gallons of swill milk were produced and sold each year, the mortality rate of children under five tripled between 1843 and 1856.

No one knew for sure what was causing the child mortality rate to soar, and there was probably no single cause. But people began to suspect that bad milk was at least partially to blame. In May 1858,
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
, one of the most popular journals of the day, published a series of articles describing in graphic detail the conditions in some of New York’s swill dairies.

REFORMS

Public exposure had a devastating impact on the industry. Some distilleries got out of the milk business entirely; others cleaned up their act. Those that remained were forced out of business in 1862, when the state of New York outlawed “crowded or unhealthy conditions” in the dairy industry. Two years later, the state outlawed the industry outright, declaring that “any milk that is obtained from animals fed on distillery waste, usually called swill, is hereby declared to be impure and unwholesome.”

Several other states followed suit, including Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Kentucky, and Indiana. As they took action, the spiraling infant death rate in the U.S. leveled off—and even began to decline. But there was still plenty of work to be done to ensure that milk was safe.

For
the next part of the story, turn to
page 424

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TWO-LETTER SCRABBLE WORDS

Some unusual two-letter words that are acceptable to use in Scrabble.

aa

ae

ag

ai

al

ar

aw

ay

ba

bo

da

de

ef

eh

em

en

er

es

et

ex

fa

hm

ho

jo

ka

la

li

lo

mi

mm

mo

mu

na

ne

nu

od

oe

op

or

os

oy

pe

pi

re

sh

si

ta

ti

People have been looking for aphrodisiacs since the beginning of recorded time.
Most
of the concoctions they’ve come up with are pretty weird and basically worthless. But some, it turns out, may actually work.

O
RIGIN OF THE TERM

The word
aphrodisiac
comes from
Aphrodite
, the Greek goddess of love and beauty (also known as
Kallipygos
, or “Beautiful Buttocks” in Greek).

• Aphrodite was originally supposed to be the embodiment of pure beauty and heavenly love. But over the years she came to represent great prowess in sexuality and seduction as well.

• Eventually, according to the
Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins
, her name was used “to describe any drug or other substances used to heighten one’s amatory desires.”

APHRODISIACS IN HISTORY

As sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer says—and history proves—“an aphrodisiac is anything you think it is.”

• In the Middle Ages people believed that “eating an apple soaked in your lover’s armpit is a sure means of seduction.” Others drank the urine of powerful animals to increase sexual powers.

• A 15th-century Middle Eastern book entitled
The Perfumed Garden for the Soul’s Delectation
suggested that lovers eat a sparrow’s tongue, and chase it down with a cocktail made of honey, 20 almonds, and parts of a pine tree.

• People once thought that eating any plant that looks phallic would increase male virility—carrots, asparagus, and mandrake root were especially popular. Bulbs and tubers—e.g., onions—which people thought resembled testicles, were also believed to increase sexual potency. And peaches, tomatoes, mangos, or other soft, moist fruits were considered aphrodisiacs for women.

• In Consuming
Passions
, Peter Farb and George Armelagos write that during the 1500s and 1600s, “Europe was suddenly flooded with exotic plants whose very strangeness suggested the existence of secret powers.” For example:

      
Tomatoes brought back from South America were at first thought to be the forbidden fruit of Eden, and were known as “love apples.” And when potatoes first arrived in Europe—the sweet potato probably brought back by Columbus and the white potato somewhat later—they were immediately celebrated as potent sexual stimulants….A work dated 1850 tells the English reader that the white potato will “incite to Venus.”

• In the 20th century, everything from green M&M’s to products like Cleopatra Oil and Indian Love Powder have been passed off as aphrodisiacs. Even in 1989, a British mail-order firm called Comet Scientific was offering an aerosol spray that it claimed made men “irresistible to women.”

DANGEROUS APHRODISIACS

• Spanish fly, one of the most famous aphrodisiacs, is also one of the most dangerous. It has nothing to do with Spain or flies. It’s really the dried, crushed remains of an insect known as the “blister beetle.” Although it can constrict blood vessels, and thus may appear to be a sexual stimulant, it’s actually a deadly poison. It can do irreparable damage to the kidneys.

• For thousands of years, people (especially in the Far East) have believed that by eating part of a powerful animal, a man can absorb its sexual vitality. This has led to the ingestion of such weird stuff as dried and powdered bear gallbladders, camel humps, and rhinoceros horns. (In fact, animal horns have been considered sexual stimulants for so long that the term “horny” became slang for “a need for sex.”) It has also had a drastic effect on some endangered species.
U.S. News & World Report
noted in 1989 that “with a kilo of rhino horn fetching $42,800 in Taiwan, poachers have slaughtered rhinos so relentlessly that barely 11,000 survive.” And in North America, poachers have killed thousands of black bears to get their golf ball-sized gallbladders.