Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (58 page)

THE GRANDPA SIMPSON LEXICON

Abraham Simpson—Homer’s father on
The Simpsons
—frequently talks about the good old days, especially what things were supposedly called back then. Examples:

• Bananas were once known as
yellow fatty beans
.

• Turkeys were called
walking birds
.

• A
Swedish lunchbox
was a slang term for suitcase.

• He claims that during World War II, anti-Japanese sentiment led America to change the name of sushi to
liberty logs
.

• Grandpa uses the word
dickety
instead of “twenty,” because when he was young, “the Kaiser had stolen our word ‘twenty.’”

TATT-OOPS!

A few stories that may make you want to rethink that new tattoo you’re planning to get
.

B
AD SUIT.
In 2003 Michael Machetti sued Riverside, California, tattoo parlor Bullseye Tattoo. Misspelled tattoo? No—Machetti went in to have his “F* * * YOU” neck tattoo altered into “666.” He charged that in the process of making the alteration, the shop somehow infected him with a rare disease called
necrotizing fasciitis,
better known as “flesh-eating bacteria,” which he claims cost him $580,000 in medical bills. The suit was thrown out of court.

BAD CAREER MOVE.
Stephen Baldwin, a member of the Baldwin acting family, had been in a career slump since the mid-’90s, and by 2008 he seemed willing to do just about anything to land a major role. That year he met Miley Cyrus, teen star of the popular Disney Channel sitcom
Hannah Montana,
and the two made a pact: If Baldwin got an “HM” tattoo (for
Hannah Montana),
Cyrus would get him a cameo on her show. Baldwin got the tattoo in late 2008 and showed it to Cyrus, but she never was able to get him the promised role before the show was cancelled in 2010. (Baldwin now says he “regrets” the tattoo.)

BAD PRODUCT PLACEMENT.
Steven Smith was a devout fan of Microsoft products. (“The Apple community can kiss my a**,” he says.) In 2007, when Microsoft announced the release of its Zune MP3 player, Smith got three Zune-related tattoos: 1) the helix-like Zune logo on his upper arm, 2) a line drawing of a man and a rabbit, taken from a Zune TV commercial, on his other arm, and 3) the Zune slogan, “Welcome to the Social” on his back. Pictures of Smith and his tattoos became an Internet phenomenon, and Smith received a free Zune from Microsoft. But the company backed out of the free trip to company headquarters he claims they promised him…even after he nearly had his name legally changed from Steven Smith to “Microsoft Zune.” Smith, feeling cheated, covered up his Zune logo with a giant image of Vice President Dick Cheney as the devil.

In Mesopotamian myth, the god Enlil flooded the Earth because humans were too noisy.

DUSTBIN OF HISTORY:
THE PEARL HARBOR SPY

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, remains one of the most infamous events in U.S. history. Yet the spy who played a key role in the sneak attack is a forgotten man, unknown even to many World War II buffs
.

U
NDER COVER
On March 27, 1941, a 27-year-old junior diplomat named Tadashi Morimura arrived in Honolulu to take his post as vice-consul at the Japanese consulate. But that was just a cover—“Morimura” was really Takeo Yoshikawa, a Japanese Imperial Navy Intelligence officer. His real mission: to collect information about the American military installations in and around Pearl Harbor.

Relations between the United States and Japan had been strained throughout the 1930s and were now deteriorating rapidly. In 1940, after years of Japanese aggression in China and Southeast Asia, Washington froze Japanese assets in the U.S., cut off exports of oil and war material, and moved the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet from southern California to Pearl Harbor, bringing it 2,400 miles closer to Japan.

The fleet was in Pearl Harbor to stay. But if Japan wanted its funds unfrozen and the crippling economic embargo lifted, the United States insisted that all Japanese troops had to leave China and Southeast Asia. This was a demand that Japan was unwilling to meet. Instead, it began preparing for war, and by early 1941, the eyes of Japan’s military planners had turned to Pearl Harbor.

THE AMERICAN DESK

Yoshikawa had become a spy in a roundabout way. He’d been a promising naval academy graduate, but his career hopes were dashed in 1936 when, just two years after graduation, stomach problems (reportedly brought on by heavy drinking) forced him out of the Japanese Navy. The following year he landed a desk job with Naval Intelligence, where he was put to work learning all that he could about the U.S. Navy.

New York City taxi drivers can be fined for wearing shorts on the job.

From 1937 until 1940, Yoshikawa pored over books, magazines, newspapers, brochures, reports filed by Japanese diplomats and military intelligence officers from all over the world, and anything else he could find that would give him information about the U.S. Navy. “By 1940 I was the Naval General Staff’s acknowledged American expert,” he recounted in a 1960 article in the journal
Naval Institute Proceedings
. “I knew by then every U.S. man-of-war and aircraft by name, hull number, configuration, and technical characteristics. I knew, too, a great deal of general information about the U.S. naval bases at Manila, Guam, and Pearl Harbor.”

MISSION IMPLAUSIBLE

In August 1940, Yoshikawa was ordered to begin preparing for a spy mission in Pearl Harbor. And he was probably surprised by what his superiors told him next: He wasn’t going to receive any training in the art of espionage—none at all. He wasn’t going to receive any support from Japan’s Hawaiian spy network, either, because there wasn’t one. He would be the only Japanese spy in Hawaii, posing as one Tadashi Morimura, a low-level diplomat assigned to the consulate in Honolulu, and only the consul general would know his true identity and mission. The job paid $150 a month, plus $600 every six months for expenses. In March 1941, Yoshikawa arrived in Honolulu.

A MAN WITH(OUT) A PLAN

Now what? Yoshikawa had received very little guidance on how to go about his job, but his worries ended when the consul general, Nagao Kita, took him to dinner at the Shuncho-ro, a Japanese restaurant on a hill overlooking Pearl Harbor. From a private dining room on the second floor of the restaurant, Yoshikawa could see both the Navy base and the nearby Army Air Corps base at Hickam Field laid out below. The Shuncho-ro was the perfect location for studying the flow of ships and aircraft in and out of the harbor, and it even had telescopes. It also happened to be owned by a woman who came from the same prefecture in Japan as Yoshikawa, and she happily made the private dining room (and telescope) available to the up-and-coming young diplomat whenever he requested it.

What is
enuresis?
The scientific term for bed-wetting.

THE NATURAL

Yoshikawa quickly discovered that he could accomplish much of his spying without attracting attention, and without even breaking any laws. After all, Pearl Harbor was no isolated military installation; it was part of Honolulu, the Hawaiian Islands’ capital city and largest commercial port. Civilians, foreigners, and sightseeing tourists were everywhere. Even if the military had tried to shield Pearl Harbor’s operations from prying eyes, it would have been virtually impossible.

Yoshikawa collected a lot of useful information from his observations at the Shuncho-ro, and also by hiking the hillsides that overlooked Pearl Harbor. He could even rent planes at a nearby airport whenever he wanted to take aerial photographs of the ships at anchor. He blended in easily with the large Asian-American population, and he was careful to vary his routine, never visiting any one place too frequently, and never staying any longer than necessary. Sometimes he posed as a laborer; other times he put on a loud Hawaiian shirt and masqueraded as a tourist. When he felt conspicuous traveling alone on, say, a visit to a military air show or a plane or boat ride around the harbor, he’d take one of the geisha girls who worked at the Shuncho-ro or one of the female consular staff on a “date,” always being careful not to reveal his true identity or mission to his companion. An experienced long-distance swimmer, Yoshikawa also made many swims around the harbor to study its defenses. By breathing through a reed, he could swim underwater when needed to avoid detection.

NICE TO MEET YOU

After a long day of spying on land or in the water, Yoshikawa passed many an evening picking up hitchhiking U.S. soldiers or buying drinks for servicemen in bars, prying as much information out of them as he could without arousing suspicion. (Soldiers who were tight-lipped around
male
foreigners often happily spilled the beans to the geishas at the Shuncho-ro, so Yoshikawa made sure to question them, too.) After the restaurants and bars closed, he would pose as a drunken bum and scour the dumpsters outside of military installations for any documents he could get his hands on.

Britons didn’t comb their hair until they learned it from Dutch invaders in 789 B.C.

Yoshikawa rarely took photographs, and he never drew diagrams or wrote anything down while making his rounds. He never carried a notepad: Instead, he relied on his photographic memory to record every detail—locations and numbers of ships and aircraft, the timing of their arrivals and departures, the depths of water in different parts of the harbor, everything—so that if he was stopped or questioned, there would be no evidence on him that suggested he was a spy. He never even carried binoculars for fear they would call too much attention to him or arouse suspicion.

PACKING A PUNCH

If Japan had planned its attack on Pearl Harbor without the data Yoshikawa gathered, it’s quite possible that it would have been merely a glancing blow, one that damaged the Pacific Fleet but did not knock it out of commission. But the information Yoshikawa provided was devastating:

• When he reported that air patrols rarely watched the waters north of Oahu (where the seas were thought to be too treacherous for an enemy to mount an attack), the Japanese military planners decided to attack from that direction.

• When he told them the water in the harbor wasn’t deep enough for ordinary torpedoes, they devised a torpedo with special fins that would work in shallow water.

• When Yoshikawa told them that the ships along “Battleship Row” were moored in pairs to protect the inboard ships from torpedo attacks, the planners decided to attack those ships with armor-piercing bombs dropped from dive-bombers.

• When he reported that ships commonly left the harbor for maneuvers on Monday and returned to port at the end of the week, the planners set their attack for the weekend.

• When they asked Yoshikawa which day of the weekend the most ships were likely to be in the harbor, he replied simply: “Sunday.”

Part II of the story is on
page 477
.

Water isn’t colorless—it’s actually very slightly blue.

BRAIN POWER

Pay close attention—there’s a lot going on in that skull of yours
.

• The human adult brain weighs about three pounds—the same as a bag of sugar.

• 100,000 years ago, our ancestors’ brains weighed just one pound.

• Your brain is three percent of your body mass, but consumes more than 20 percent of the oxygen your body uses.

• The brain has no pain receptors so it registers no pain. Brain surgery can actually be conducted while you’re awake. (Except for the part where they drill through your cranium—that can hurt.)

• The brain is the fattiest organ in the body.

• The brain is made up of
gray
matter (mostly on the surface) and
white
matter (mostly the inner brain). They’re both actually pinkish, and are so-named for the color they become in formaldehyde.

• Studies show that the areas of the brain that process vision “turn off” when you blink. That’s why we don’t notice our blinks.

• Worried about brain research? No problem. Harvard maintains a “brain bank” of 7,000 brains for study.

• It takes about 25 years for your brain to become fully developed.

• Your brain is so soft it can be cut with a butter knife.

• The
cerebral cortex
is the folded, “wrinkly” surface of the brain. It’s about 1/16 of an inch thick. The “wrinkles” appeared as our brains evolved and grew larger over the ages. More folds means more surface area—and more brain power—in less space.

• Other animals that have “wrinkled” brains: cats, dogs, monkeys, and dolphins. One that doesn’t: the rat, which has a smooth brain.

• Recent studies have shown that people who learn a second language, especially at a young age, have increased gray matter density in the left hemispheres of their brains.

• The Chinese pictogram for “brain” translates to “fleshy contents of the skull.”

Horses lie down for only about 43 minutes a day.

UNCLE JOHN’S
STALL OF SHAME

It is with heavy hearts that we bring you these true stories of stinkers who seem to have forgotten that each and every bathroom is a hallowed place—it should never be used for nefarious purposes
.

D
ishoneree:
Michael O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair