Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (36 page)

PLAYING IT SAFE

The first thing any skilled, experienced safecracker will try to do is find a way to
not
put their skill and experience to work. Nobody wants to find out how much it costs to have a locksmith open a safe, and one way that a lot of people try to prevent such a disaster is by writing down the combination and hiding it somewhere—often in the room where the safe is located. So the first thing the locksmith or safecracker will do is search any obvious hiding places for the combination. If they’re
really
lucky (and the owner of the safe is
really
dumb) the combination will be written somewhere nearby or even right on the safe.

• Another bad habit common among safe owners is to set a safe on what’s known as “day lock.” They enter all but the last number of the combination at the start of the day, so that when something is needed from the safe only the last number of the combination has to be entered. If a safecracker suspects that the safe has been left in day lock, they will turn the dial slowly from one number to the next, looking for the final number in the combination that opens the safe.

• Safes are sold with sample “tryout” combinations that allow customers to try the safe out in the store. After you buy the safe, you or your locksmith are supposed to change the tryout combination to something else. But not everyone bothers to do this, or even knows that they should. So the next thing a skilled locksmith or safecracker will do is try all the industry-standard try-out combinations to see if any of them opens the safe.

PLAN B

If none of the easy ways works, the locksmith has to start trying more difficult methods. One brute-force technique that works on antique safes is to knock the combination dial off the safe with a hammer, then use a tool called a punch rod to punch the wheel pack out of position. Once the wheel pack is knocked out of the way, the safe will usually open. But this technique works only on antique safes, whose value is often greater than anything that might be contained inside. Modern safe manufacturers incorporate a variety of “relocking” devices into their safes that render them unopenable if someone tries to punch their way through the lock.

So what about using stethoscopes to open
safes and all that other Hollywood stuff?
There’s more on
page 303
.

Good news? Kids eat more Play-doh than crayons, finger paint, and paste combined.

DUSTBIN OF HISTORY:
THOMAS MEAGHER

Only two things are certain in life: 1) one day you’re born, and 2) one day you’re going to die. How much you pack in between those two days is up to you. Here’s a brief biography of a man who packed in a lot
.

T
homas Francis Meagher
(pronounced
mahr
) was born on August 3, 1823, in Waterford City, Ireland. He was educated at highly respected Catholic schools in both Ireland and England and became known as a gifted orator. In his twenties he became involved with the “Young Ireland” movement, a group dedicated to independence from England, and soon became one of its most eloquent voices.

In 1848 Meagher
was convicted of treason after the “Young Irelander Rebellion”—a six-day uprising in southern Ireland that ended in a gun battle, during which 65 policemen were killed.

Meagher and several
other rebel leaders were sentenced to death by hanging, and drawing and quartering. The sentence was commuted and the men were sent to the British penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land instead, which later became Tasmania, Australia.

In 1849 he was given
a “ticket of leave,” meaning he was free to travel around the island…in exchange for a promise not to escape. In 1851 he saved a young woman from an overturned carriage. He later married her and they had a son.

The following year,
Meagher turned in his ticket of leave and notified authorities that he planned to escape and left the island in a rowboat. After four days at sea he was picked up by an American whaling ship headed to San Francisco.

From San Francisco,
he made his way to New York City, where he earned a law degree, started a newspaper, and worked the lecture circuit speaking about Irish independence. His wife came to see him in New York once, but then returned to Ireland and died a few years later. Meagher never met their son.

In the late 1850s,
Meagher spent a year in Central America studying the possibility of building a railroad across the Isthmus of Panama, and wrote about his adventures (which included hunting jaguars) for
Harper’s Magazine
.

People generally read an item 25% more slowly on a computer screen than on paper.

When the American Civil War
began in 1861, Meagher joined the Union Army. By 1862 he was a brigadier general and the leader of the “Irish Brigade,” a hard-fighting outfit that saw action in several key battles, including Bull Run, Antietam, and Fredricksburg. He was injured twice, both times when his horse was shot out from under him. He resigned in May 1865, just after the war’s end.

That September,
Meagher was appointed acting military governor of the Montana Territory.

In 1867 he was
aboard the steamboat
G.A. Thompson
on the Missouri River in Fort Benton, Montana, when he fell overboard. According to most reports he’d been drinking, although others say he was murdered by one of the many enemies he’d made during his time as governor.

The Irish revolutionary hero,
escaped prisoner, New York lawyer, newspaper publisher, jaguar hunter, brigadier-general, and governor of Montana—was never seen again. He was 43 years old.

A statue of Meagher
on horseback with a raised sword in his hand stands in front of the Montana state capitol building in Helena, and Meagher County in central Montana is named in his honor.

FROM THE CLASSIFIEDS

These all appeared in newspapers
.

• Attorney at law: 10% off free consultation

• Braille dictionary for sale, must see to appreciate

• For you alone! The Bridal Bed Set

• Mixing bowl set. Designed to please a cook with round bottom for efficient beating

• Snowblower for sale—used only on snowy days.

• Semi-annual after Christmas sale

• Boneless bananas, 39 cents a pound

Arms race? The ant farm and Raid insecticide were both invented in 1956.

MEET THE BEATS

The Beats were America’s first hipsters. But what were they, like, really about, man?

T
HE OTHER SIDE OF AMERICA
One night in 1948, two students at New York’s Columbia University, John Clellon Holmes and Jack Kerouac, were hanging out talking about what they thought was wrong with the modern world—the constant threat of nuclear war, the hollowness of suburbia, and the stifling academic mainstream. At one point, Kerouac remarked, “This really is a beat generation.”

What did Kerouac mean? It was something he’d heard a few years earlier from someone he’d met in Times Square, a street hustler named Herbert Hunche. According to Kerouac, Hunche told him that “beat” meant that “you’re exhausted, at the bottom of the world, looking up or out, sleepless, wide-eyed, perceptive, rejected by society, on your own, streetwise.”

Holmes’ and Kerouac’s clique consisted of a handful of equally disenchanted artists, writers, and academics, all with (un)healthy interests in drugs, booze, and urban culture, including poet Allen Ginsberg and novelist William S. Burroughs. This was the Beat Generation, and they found their escape in the underexplored and often seedy side of American life. And they expressed it in what would come to be highly influential written works.

SEX, DRUGS, BEBOP

The Beats thought the way to enlightenment and artistic fulfillment was to go out and experience the world, especially the fringe elements. They hitchhiked around the country, befriending (and emulating) hobos and outlaws (like Hunche), and they experimented with marijuana, Benzedrine, and morphine.

The main core of the Beats ultimately settled in San Francisco’s North Beach in the mid-1950s, where they congregated at jazz clubs for smokey jam sessions and in coffee houses for poetry readings. The structure of jazz—it was experimental, non-linear, freeform, often stream-of-consciousness—heavily influenced the way the Beats wrote.

The first color animated TV commercial, for Ford in 1949, was created by Dr. Seuss.

BOOKING IT

But the fact that the Beats were literary doesn’t mean they were refined. Beat literature had a tendency to be raw, lurid, personal, and extremely confrontational—and that was the point. Here are some excerpts from three of the most influential pieces of Beat literature:

•
On
the
Road
(1957).
Jack Kerouac’s autobiographical novel about a road trip full of crime, shady characters, and the unseen underbelly of ’50s America is considered the definitive Beat work. Kerouac reportedly wrote it in just three weeks, typing stream of consciousness-style on a 120-foot scroll of paper. It was so unstructured that before it could be published, it had to be edited (sections deemed pornographic were deleted) and reformatted with conventional punctuation and paragraph breaks. Here’s a passage:

And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels.

•
“Howl” (1956).
Ginsberg’s furious epic free-verse poem was first performed at a poetry reading at San Francisco’s Gallery Six. Published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Press, “Howl” was banned as obscene; Ferlinghetti was arrested, and the trial that followed brought national attention to the work. Here are the first few lines of the poem:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of coldwater flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz…

•
Naked
Lunch
(1959).
William S. Burroughs’ controversial novel also led to an obscenity trial. Published in Paris in 1959, it wasn’t released in the U.S. until 1962. Semi-autobiographical,
Naked Lunch
follows the surreal adventures of junkie William Lee (Burroughs was a morphine addict). Here’s a sample:

“Selling is more of a habit than using,” Lupita says. Nonusing pushers have a contact habit, and that’s one you can’t kick. Agents get it too. Take Bradley the Buyer. Best narcotics agent in the industry. Anyone would make him for junk. I mean he can walk up to a pusher and score direct. He is so anonymous, grey and spectral the pusher don’t remember him afterwards.

The only English word that contains the letters “xyz” in order: hydroxyzine.

THE BEAT LEGACY

• The Beat Generation set forth the idea that it was okay to try new avenues in art, even if (or
especially
if) they were dark, unsettling, and personal. Artists sharing this philosophy included comedian Lenny Bruce, painter Jackson Pollock, photographer Diane Arbus, and filmmaker John Cassavetes.

• Beat writers popularized spontaneous, stream-of-consciousness prose and performance art, along with abstract expressionism and postmodernism. Modern-day “slam”-style poetry is a direct outgrowth of the Beats. So was the “New Journalism” or “literary nonfiction” movement of the ’60s and ’70s. Writers would deliver long, narrative, true stories (in which they were active participants) about the edges of American life as if it were a novel, in a highly descriptive, free-flowing manner. Two of those writers: Tom Wolfe (The
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
), and Hunter S. Thompson (
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
).

• Blogging is a relatively new form of information delivery (often challenging mainstream media) by regular people who explore the world around them and document it in online journals, if not for an audience than for the sake of self-expression. Tech writer Tom Forenski of
ZDnet.com
argues that bloggers are the present-day equivalent of the Beats. “Both celebrate the written word, and both celebrate a raw and passionate literature that is largely unedited. And both are disruptive movements.”