Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (70 page)

THE FACTS

• The moon does occasionally appear blue. In
The Moon Book
, Kim Long writes:

      
This phenomenon [is] associated with unusual atmospheric conditions. A blue-colored moon, or one with a green color, is most likely to be seen just before sunrise or just after sunset if there is a large quantity of dust or smoke in the atmosphere. These particles can filter out colors with longer wavelengths, such as red and yellow, and leave green and blue wavelengths to temporarily discolor the moon.

• The term “blue moon” was once commonly used to describe a full moon that appears twice in one month. “This occurs approximately every 32 months,” says Christine Ammer in
Seeing Red or Tickled Pink.
“A full moon comes every 29-1/2 days, when the earth’s natural satellite is opposite the sun in the sky. Thus any month except February could see two full moons.” However, in 1999
Sky and Telescope
magazine admitted this was a mistake.

* * *

Musical Note:
Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart wrote the song “Blue Moon” in 1934.

Uncle John is sorry to announce that there’s been a slight change in plans, and Johnny Carson will be on vacation until the next
Bathroom Reader.
Fortunately, we were able to recruit as a special guest the illustrious Professor Pear, who’ll fill you in on all the wonderful things you can do with pears. And so, without further ado, heeeeere’s…Professor Pear.

T
hank you, Uncle John. It’s great to be here.

“The pear must be approached with discretion and reverence; it withholds its secrets from the merely hungry.” This observation, attributed to Paul Bunyard, is testimony that pears are one of the more mysterious of the fruits we commonly encounter. Unlike an apple, which is ready to eat from the day it is picked, a pear must go through a series of changes before it can deliver its full splendor. It would seem that the pear was not made for humans to easily enjoy; it must be manipulated in order to present us the flavor, texture, and juiciness that we consider attributes of high quality.

For one thing, pears do not ripen on the tree to our liking. If allowed to tree-ripen, pears typically ripen from the inside out, so that the center is mushy by the time the outside flesh is ready. In addition, the texture of tree-ripened pears is often more gritty than that of pears picked before they are ripe. So the frequently heard notion that pears are picked when they are still hard and green as a convenience for enduring the long truck ride to market misses the point. Pears are harvested when they are “mature,” which in pear language means when they have reached the point where, after picking, they will ripen to good quality, sometimes with a little help, but definitely
off
the tree.

Now the next step after harvesting mature pears is to cool them down. Commercial storages cool them way down, to around 30°F (like drunks sleeping in the snow, they don’t freeze at 32°F because they have so much dissolved material in their juice—in the case of pears, it’s sugar). The colder they are, the longer they’ll stay in good condition. One unique quality of pears is that they need to be cooled in order to ripen properly. In the case of Bartlett pears, that cooling need last only a day or two, which evens out the ripening within each fruit and sychronizes the ripening of all the fruit in a box. “Winter pears” such as Anjou, Bosc, and Comice, must be cooled for two to six weeks to get the same effect. If one of these pears is picked “mature” and allowed to sit on the kitchen shelf, it will sit and sit and eventually decompose—without ever “ripening.”

Ripening a pear must be a closely watched process, since there is a relatively narrow window between “too hard” and “too soft” where the glory of the perfect pear texture lies. The best quality is experienced when the pears are ripened by leaving them at 65 °F-75°F. The amount of time varies from about five days for a typical Bartlett, to six or seven days for Bosc or Comice, to anywhere from seven to ten days for Anjou. As ripening begins, pears, like many fruits, begin to produce “the ripening hormone,” ethylene gas, inside the fruit. This speeds the ripening along. In fact, the whole pear-ripening process can be kick-started by putting freshly bought or picked pears in a bag with a ripe banana or apple, both of which give off copious quantities of ethylene gas. The bag keeps the apple or banana ethylene around the pears, which soak it up and quickly begin producing their own.

Determining when a pear is ripe depends somewhat on the eater’s preference, but here is a time-honored method: hold the pear gently but firmly in the palm of your hand, as a baseball pitcher might hold the ball while studying the signs from the catcher. Apply the thumb of the same hand to the pear flesh just below the point where the stem joins the fruit. When the flesh beneath the spot yields evenly to gentle pressure from the thumb, it is ready to eat. If you have to push more than slightly, it’s not ready yet. After years of study, scientists have found that a really juicy pear is best eaten while naked, in the bathtub, so that you needn’t be concerned about the abundant juice streaming down your chin.

Thank you, Professor Pear.

Johnny will be back in the next
Bathroom Reader,
for the conclusion of “The Tonight Show” story.

Many years ago, during an extended visit to the bathroom, Uncle John entered a deep trance…and, suddenly
, the
secret of invisibility was revealed to him. And now we’d like to share it with you. Just follow these step-by-step instructions.

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10.

“More than any other instrument,” says Charlie McGovern of the Smithsonian Institution, “the electric guitar has been the dominant shaping force in American music in the last half-century. It completely changed the direction of the blues. It pretty much rechanneled country music. You can’t have rock-and-roll without it.” It’s also a relatively new instrument, whose history is still being written. Here’s a quick summary of what we know so far.

T
HE PROBLEM WITH GUITARS

• In the 1920s, people thought of the guitar exclusively as a rhythm instrument. In bands, there were few single-note guitar solos—guitar players strummed as hard as they could in the background, trying to be heard over the other instruments. As one critic observed:

In the Chicago and New Orleans jazz bands…the guitar had a rough time. No matter how hard the frustrated picker picked, he was usually drowned out by all sorts of horns and some bully on an eighty-eight key, five-hundred pound piano.

• Guitarists tried all sorts of tricks to be heard:

— They tried putting megaphones under the strings.

— They made bigger and bigger guitars.

— They used National Steel Guitars, which were made out of metal and came with built-in resonators.

— They put microphones up against the strings. This was a logical solution…except that microphones quickly produced feedback.

ELECTRIFYING FIRST

No one person can be considered the inventor of the electric guitar. But Lloyd Loar was the first to recognize their commercial potential.

• In the mid-1920s Loar, an employee of the Gibson Guitar Company, invented a microphone that fit in a guitar and picked up the sound better than most microphones. He proposed that Gibson manufacture them, but they weren’t interested.

• So Loar quit and formed his own company, Vivi-Tone, to manufacture “electric” guitars (acoustic guitars with a pick-up inserted). Unfortunately, he was ahead of his time, and quickly went out of business.

THE 1930s.

• Meanwhile, musicians all over the country were experimenting with their own ways to electrify guitars. In 1931, one inventor created the magnetic pickup—which “transformed string vibrations into electrical impulses that accurately reproduced sound.”

• This breakthrough enabled the Rickenbacker Co., a tool-and-die maker, to manufacture a Hawaiian steel guitar with
built-in
pickups. They called it the “Frying Pan.” In Seattle a year later, Paul Tutmar founded his Audiovox company, the first to manufacture electric guitars exclusively.

• But 1935 is generally considered the year the electric guitar was born. For the first time, major manufacturers—Gibson, Epiphone, and National—introduced electric models to the public.

THE FIRST GUITAR HEROES

Once the product was available on a wide basis, guitar players began showing the world what could be done with it.

• In the mid-1930s, for example, Aaron “T-Bone” Walker became the first bluesman to fully exploit the electric by strutting across the stage, doing splits, and playing the guitar behind his back. With this technique, he foreshadowed the stunts and styles of future rock ’n’ roll greats like Chuck Berry and Jimi Hendrix. He also experimented with volume and feedback, demonstrating that it was the guitar and amplifier
together
—not the guitar alone—that made a new instrument.

• But the guitar player who made the biggest difference was Charlie Christian, who played with Benny Goodman’s band from 1939 to 1941. He is credited with creating an identity for the electric guitar as a solo instrument. Christian would play staccato, hornlike, single-note phrases—a radical change from the accepted approach at the time. His style caused a revolution in technique and helped create the soon-to-be popular genre, bebop. In fact, his impact was so great the author of
The Art and Times of the Guitar,
wrote: “There is the guitar before Christian and the guitar after
Christian, and they sound virtually like two different instruments.”

THE SOLID-BODY GUITAR

Until the 1940s, electric guitars were still semi-acoustic. It took two electronic geniuses to bring about the solid-body electric.

Les Paul

• Paul began experimenting with electric sounds in the late twenties by jamming his mother’s phonograph needle into the top of a guitar and plugging it in.

• In the 1940s he created an early prototype of the solid-body, which he called “The Log.” It was little more than a 4′x4″ board with strings anchored to a door hinge and a guitar body attached over the top for looks. He brought it to Gibson, and again, the guitar-maker missed an opportunity to revolutionize the guitar world.

• In 1952, when Gibson finally produced their first solid-body, they worked with Paul to create one of the most widely-used electric guitars ever made: the “Les Paul.”

Leo Fender

• Fender is regarded as the father of the modern electric guitar—though, ironically, he wasn’t even a musician. He just loved tinkering with electronics.

• In 1948, Fender came out with a Spanish-style solid body electric guitar he called the “Broadcaster.” However, another music company owned that name; rather than go to court, he renamed it the “Telecaster.” It was still regarded as a novelty by most guitarists

• It wasn’t until 1954, when he created the most popular electric guitar of all time—the Stratocaster—that the electric guitar came into its own. The Strat was a new design, not based on that of acoustic or semi-acoustic guitars. For example: Most guitars in the early 1950s were heavy, and dug into guitarists’ rib cages; Fender beveled the edges of the guitar so it would be more comfortable. The body was scalloped so every note on the neck was accessible; the volume and tone controls were in easy reach of the guitarist’s hands; and so on. These and a host of other changes made the Stratocaster revolutionary in the 1950s…and opened the door to the electric guitar’s popularity. Incredibly, the first Strats sold for only $75. Today they bring in as much as $20,000 as collectibles.

On
page 241
we told you about the battle to end the sale of adulterated milk. Part II is the story of the fight to pasteurize the U.S. milk supply. It’s an instructive tale. In spite of proof that pasteurization could save lives, Americans resisted it because it was a new idea…and because it “cost too much.”

S
OLID PROGRESS

During the latter part of the 19th century, improvements were made in the quality of the milk sold in the United States.