Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (53 page)

LITTLE BIG MAN

The man that Lord put in charge of the Mini, Alec Issigonis, may have been the only British auto executive who would even have had a chance at pulling off such a feat. The son of Greek refugees from Turkey, in the late 1940s Issigonis led the design team that created the hugely successful Morris Minor, a car already well on its way to becoming the first British car to sell a million units.

The Minor was a fairly small car by the standards of the day, but it was surprisingly roomy inside, which was one of Issigonis’s trademarks as a designer—he had a knack for squeezing the maximum amount of interior space out of any car he worked on.

Safety was another important part of his design philosophy: “I make my cars with such good brakes, such good steering, that if people get in a crash it’s their own fault,” he liked to say. Considering how tiny the Mini was expected to be, roominess and safety were going to be very high priorities indeed.

SIDEWAYS

Working out of a special studio set apart from the rest of the company, Issigonis, an automotive engineer named Jack Daniels, and seven other staffers set to work. Issigonis and Daniels had worked together on the Minor, and as they developed the design for the new car, they drew heavily from a prototype they’d built a few years earlier. That car had front-wheel drive and a “transverse” engine—the engine block was rotated 90° to give it a left-to-right orientation, instead of the standard front-to-back of the time.

Front-wheel drive improved the car’s performance, and it also eliminated the need to run a driveshaft the length of the car from the engine (in front) to the rear wheels, which saved space, weight, and cost. The transverse engine also saved a lot of room—because the engine was installed sideways, it could be squeezed into just a few feet of space under the hood.

Back when Issigonis and Daniels first proposed their sideways-engined, front-wheel drive Minor, their superiors rejected such an unconventional and seemingly risky design. But now that reducing space, weight, and cost were so important in making the new car a success, suddenly the design didn’t seem so risky after all.

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

The Mini team managed to squeeze the transverse engine and a 4-speed manual transmission into just 18
inches
of space, which left 8½ feet for the passenger compartment, if Lord’s goal of keeping the car under 10 feet in length was to be met. (The Volkswagen Beetle, by comparison, was just under 13½ feet long.)

Because interior space was at such a premium in so tiny a car, Issigonis gave it a very boxy shape to provide the driver and passengers with as much room as possible. To limit the wheel wells’ intrusion into that space, he pushed the wheels out to the four corners of the car. And to keep those wells as small as possible, he used the tiniest wheels ever used in a production automobile: just 10 inches in diameter, smaller than a dinner plate. In such tight confines there was no room for a standard spring suspension, either, so small rubber cones called “doughnuts” were used instead, which gave the car a very stiff ride.

The car windows did not roll up and down—you slid them open and closed by hand, which saved on the weight and expense of window hardware. No radio was installed, and neither were seat belts (few cars of the era had them). But Issigonis, a chain-smoker, made sure the car had an ashtray.

SMALL WONDER

Issigonis wanted the Mini to have a 948cc engine that would have given the car quick acceleration and a top speed of more than 90 mph. But he worried that it might be too powerful for ordinary drivers to handle, so he had a couple of engineers take the car for a test drive. They flipped the car. Issigonis replaced the engine with an 848cc engine. New top speed: 72 mph. That might not sound like much, but the Mini was faster than just about any other small car of the day, including the VW Beetle, which had a top speed of 68 mph. That, combined with the stiff suspension and the placement of the wheels at the four corners of the car, gave it go-kart-like handling that was absolutely thrilling. BMC head Leonard Lord realized it the first time he took the prototype out for a test drive in July 1958: He was gone only five minutes before he roared back to the plant at top speed, braked sharply, and jumped out of the car. “Build it!” he ordered. The first production Minis rolled off the assembly line in early 1959.

There are no Cubans on Facebook. (Private Internet access is banned in Cuba.)

LITTLE INTEREST

As fun as the Minis were to drive, it took them a while to catch on. They were, after all,
tiny
. Compared to ordinary British cars, they looked pretty silly. They were also noisy, spartan, and underpowered by big-car standards. Even the car’s low price—£500, or about $1,400—may have put buyers off. How good could a car that small and that cheap really be?

But as more people experienced the thrill of driving one, word of mouth began to spread and demand surged. BMC sold 116,000 Minis in 1960, not bad for the car’s first full model year, and sales climbed quickly from there, passing 157,000 in 1961. The introduction of the Mini Cooper, a suped-up racing Mini designed by Formula One racing legend John Cooper in July 1961, followed by the even sportier Mini Cooper S in 1963, generated even greater interest, pushing sales past the 240,000 mark for 1964. (John Cooper was paid £2—around $5.40—for every Mini Cooper sold, just for the use of his name.) Sales remained strong through the rest of the decade, finally peaking in 1971, when more than 318,000 Minis were sold.

NO CLASS

Within just a year or two of its introduction, the Mini became
the
car to be seen in for British film stars, the London “in crowd,” and celebrities around the world. Peter Sellers bought one, so did Mick Jagger, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Bridget Bardot, all four of the Beatles, and at least one of the Monkees. King Hussein of Jordan owned one, so did Princess Grace of Monaco. Prince Charles learned to drive in his, and he wasn’t alone—in the years to come more British subjects would learn to drive in a Mini than in any other car. In this most class-conscious of societies, here was Britain’s first (and probably last) truly
classless
car—everybody wanted to own one, and almost anybody could afford to buy one. No British car before or since has had the Mini’s widespread appeal. Few cars have enjoyed the long life that it had: There were plenty of improvements over the years to be sure (roll-up windows were standard after 1969, heaters after 1974), but the same basic car stayed on the market from 1959 until the year 2000. In that time it sold more than 5.3 million cars—that’s an average of nearly 2,500 cars a week,
every
week, for 41 years.

All domestic chickens are descended from
Gallus gallus,
the Red Junglefowl.

THINKING BIG

The Mini was by far the most successful British car in history; no other model has ever come close to selling 5.3 million units. But the success of the tiny car also contributed to the decline of the British auto industry, as Issigonis tried to repeat the Mini’s formula in much larger cars and failed.

When customers pay $1,400 for a car, they’re willing to settle for one that offers only the bare essentials, but when they pay full price, they want a little luxury. Issigonis understood this, but because he thought he understood car buyers better than they understood themselves, he would not budge. “I know there are such people, but I will not design cars for them,” he said.

FOLLOW THE MONEY

Later cars designed by Issigonis, including the full-sized Austin Maxi, were sales disappointments that helped force the flailing British Motor Corporation into a shotgun merger with other troubled British automakers in 1968. The resulting conglomerate, British Leyland, lost so much money that the British government nationalized it in 1975, keeping it from going under.

The remnants of British Leyland were renamed the Rover Group in 1986. BMW bought Rover in 1994 and spent millions trying to make it profitable. But BMW finally gave up in 2000 and sold the company off in pieces—every piece, that is, except for the Mini division. BMW has since built Mini into a thriving company, one that owes much of its success to nostalgia for Issigonis’s original tiny car of dreams. In April 2007, 11 years after they bought the company, BMW sold its one millionth Mini—about the same amount of time it took the British Motor Corporation to sell its millionth Mini. If sales remain strong, the new Mini should outsell the old Mini sometime in the late 2030s.

Dutch winemaker Ilja Gort insured his nose for $8 million.

GROSS COCKTAILS

Culled from bartenders and bar guides from around the world, most of these drinks
had
to have been created—and consumed—on a dare
.

Buffalo Sweat

3 parts bourbon

1 part Tabasco

Liquid Steak

1.5 oz rum

Drizzle of Worcestershire sauce

(The end result supposedly tastes like grilled meat.)

Smoker’s Cough

1.5 oz Jägermeister

A dollop of mayonnaise

Relishious

1.5 oz Jägermeister

A spoonful of pickle relish

Prairie Oyster

1.5 oz bourbon Dash of Tabasco

1 raw egg

Hot Sauce

1.5 oz pepper-flavored vodka

1 oz olive juice

1 oz tomato juice

3 oz Guinness

Dash of Worcestershire sauce

Dash of Tabasco

(Garnish with blue-cheese-stuffed olives.)

Green Monster

4 oz Red Bull energy drink

12 oz Mountain Drew

6 oz cognac

Eggermeister

1.5 oz Jägermeister (or licorice-flavored liqueur)

1 pickled egg

(Drink the booze while chewing the egg.)

Beergasm

1 part beer

1 part whole milk

Black Death

1 part vodka

1 part soy sauce

Ranchero

2 parts tequila

1 part Tabasco

1 part ranch dressing

Cement Mixer

1.5 oz Irish cream

A lime wedge

(The drinker sucks the wedge and holds the juice in their mouth while consuming the Irish cream. The acidity of the lime juice makes the creamy liqueur instantly curdle.)

Active ingredient in Planet brand anti-aging face cream: snake venom.

PRANKELANGELO

Michelangelo’s paintings and sculptures are beautiful, timeless…and full of secret messages
.

T
he massive mural on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome contains hundreds of images. The work was commissioned by Pope Julius II, who Michelangelo reportedly thought was corrupt due to his aggressive schemes to obtain new lands for the church. So he painted Julius II (“The Fearsome Pope”) into the mural: The depiction of the prophet Zechariah has Julius’ face. But behind Zechariah is an angel holding his thumb between his index and middle finger—a gesture known as “the fig.” It meant to Renaissance-era Italians what the middle finger does to present-day Americans—the angel is flipping off the pope.

• Another part of the Sistine mural is “The Creation of Adam,” in which God and Adam touch fingers, representing the creation of human life. Upon closer inspection, writes Dr. Frank Meshberger in the
Journal of the American Medical Association,
the “heaven” in which God and angels float is shaped like a human brain. The different parts of the organ are distinct, including the cerebellum, optic nerve, and pituitary gland. God’s green sash, for example, is the vertebral artery. What does it mean? Michelangelo believed in a philosophy called
Neoplatonism,
which attests that intellect is a divine gift, so the painting may be his expression of that idea. Or, as he believed the Church was corrupt, it might have been a suggestion that God was the creation of a human brain (i.e., not real).

• Michelangelo’s
David
is one of the world’s best-known statues, and represents the artist’s ideal human form—even though critics have long wondered why the “ideal human form” would have such disproportionately small “private parts.”
David
is 13 feet high and placed on a pedestal so admirers have to look up at it. But according to Pietro Bernabei, writing in the Italian journal
Il Giornale dell'Arte,
viewing David’s face head-on, his blank expression changes to one of fear and worry. This makes sense—the statue depicts David just before his fight with the giant Goliath. And in a bit of dark humor, it explains the figure’s “shrinkage”: Male genitals typically recede when the body is under stress.

Most dangerous food to consume while driving, according to one study: coffee.

PUN-LINERS

They say puns are the lowest form of humor. Just who are “they,” and why are “they” trying to rain on our pun parade?

“Putting your hands in the earth is very grounding.”

—John Glover

“Two Dallas women opened up a marina. They ran the best little oarhouse in Texas.”

—Richard Lederer

“Sometimes I pray to Cod for the veal-power to stop playing with my food words, but I fear it’s too bread into me.”

—Mark Morton

“I made a killing on Wall Street a few years ago. I shot my broker.”

—Groucho Marx

“Dunkin Donuts…Just move the ‘D’ to the end and you get ‘Unkind Donuts,’ which I’ve had a few of in my day.”