Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (65 page)

In 1973 Stephen King made $6,600 teaching. In 2008 he made $45 million writing.

LOST BUT NOT FORGOTTEN LUDWIG

Australian authorities waited almost four years before sending out a rescue party. They found no trace of Leichhardt’s expedition except for one curious bit of evidence at a campsite: a tree with an “L” carved into its trunk above the letters “XVA.” In 1868 another search party was sent out, but aside from finding a few more trees marked with a carved “L,” it too came up with nothing. Leichhardt’s case was labeled “Unsolved” and stayed that way for the next 138 years. Then in 2006, a small brass nameplate found in a box of memorabilia in the back room of a district office in the Western Territories was determined to have belonged to Leichhardt. An aborigine stockman had discovered the plate 100 years earlier, but a local clerk had filed it away and forgotten about it. Tracing the story back to its source, investigators found that the nameplate had been pulled from the stock of a badly burned rifle found hanging from the trunk of a baobab tree with an “L” carved into its trunk. The tree was located between the Tanami and Great Sandy deserts, almost two thirds of the way along Leichhardt’s planned route. “We still don’t know how much further he got,” says Matthew Higgins of the National Museum of Australia, where the nameplate is now on display, “but at least we know he got that far, and that’s a massive achievement for a European at the time.”

A MOUSE JOKE

The Mouse family was making their way across the kitchen floor when the family cat rushed toward them. Daddy Mouse yelled, “BOW-WOW!” And the cat ran away. “That,” said Daddy Mouse to his kids, “is why it’s important to learn a second language.”

Millions
&
Millions! More than 400 million M&Ms are made every day.

WEIRD FISH STORIES

Read one and you’ll be hooked
.

T
HAT BITES.
Brian Guest, 51, of Perth, Australia, was a longtime and controversial advocate for the protection of sharks. In December 2008, he was snorkeling at a beach not far from his home…when he was attacked and killed by a shark. Guest’s son Daniel, 24, said the attack was a random event, and that it shouldn’t make people afraid of sharks.

SHAD SHAM.
Every April the town of Grifton, North Carolina, holds the Grifton Shad Festival in honor of the Atlantic shad, a herringlike fish that migrates through the state’s coastal waters each spring. The festival includes a “Shad Parade,” a 5K “Spring Shad Run,” a “Shad Shack” that sells shad-based souvenirs, and, of course, a fish fry. Only problem: The Grifton Shad Festival fish fry has no shad. The fish’s numbers have dropped so drastically due to overfishing in recent decades that festival organizers removed it from the menu. They serve catfish instead. “They don’t eat mules at the mule festival,” explained festival secretary Janet Haseley. (The Benson Mule Days festival takes place in nearby Benson, North Carolina, every September.)

THE COST OF FREEDOM.
In 2006 animal activists broke into a fish farm near the town of Oban, Scotland, and opened its huge underwater cages, freeing 15,000 halibut. Over the next few weeks thousands of the “freed” fish washed up dead on nearby beaches. Biologists said that because the fish had been raised on commercial pellet feed, they didn’t know how to find food in the wild.

HEADS UP!
In April 2010 a man was leaving a restaurant parking lot in Melbourne, Florida, when a fish fell from the sky and landed on his windshield. Seeing that the fish was still alive, he picked it up, ran back into the restaurant—and dropped it in their large aquarium. The fish had the odd fortune to have fallen from the sky right in front of Chameleon’s…a sushi restaurant. Workers there said the fish, which is believed to have fallen from the talons of an osprey, would not be eaten, as it was a “lucky fish.” (They also said it had a “dent” in its head from the fall.)

Late bloomer: Mae West was over 40 when she began her acting career.

POP-CULTURE ALPHABET

One day Uncle John saw the movie
Z
on TV, and during an ad starring Mr. T, he wondered what other pop-culture things were known by just a single letter? Here’s a look at pop culture…from A to Z
.

A
The title of a 1980 album by the British rock band Jethro Tull. The group’s 13th overall, it was intended to be a solo release by lead singer/flautist Ian Anderson (A is for Anderson), but Chrysalis Records thought it would sell better if it was billed to the whole of Jethro Tull. It didn’t work
—A
was the group’s lowest selling album in a decade and marked the beginning of the band’s decline in popularity.

B
-list.
A movie industry and entertainment term that means “second-rate.” The A-list comprises the biggest, most successful, most popular stars of the moment—currently box-office draws like Sandra Bullock and Will Smith. B-listers are well-liked but not quite the theater-fillers of their A-list counterparts—someone like Steven Seagal, Ashton Kutcher, or Megan Fox. This is all purely subjective, and unofficial, but such status is taken very seriously in Hollywood. That means it can be mocked, too: Stand-up comedian and former sitcom star Kathy Griffin self-effacingly titled her reality show
Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List
.

C
One of the major computer programming languages, first developed in the 1970s at Bell Labs. It’s not used much today, but its successor, the language C++, is one of the most widely used of all time.

D
This interactive, horror-themed puzzle video game for the Sony PlayStation went on sale in 1995. The player controls a character named Laura, whose father has gone on a killing spree. Laura gets stuck in an alternate reality as she attempts to find clues and solve puzzles that will help her understand why her father did what he did. Ultimately, Laura discovers that she and her father are vampires—direct descendants of Dracula (that’s where the game gets its cryptic title).
D
was one of the first home video games to feature full-motion live-action video as part of game play.

$127 billion per year of Italy’s GDP (about 7%) is attributed to organized crime.

E
The stage name of experimental rock musician Mark Everett, who released two albums:
A Man Called E
(1992) and
Broken Toy Shop
(1993). When he formed a band in 1996, he extended his stage name slightly, to Eels, which became a popular alternative rock group with the hits “Novocaine for the Soul” and “Last Stop, This Town.” One benefit of picking the name Eels, according to E: Eels albums directly follow the E albums in record-store bins.

F
-1
Also known as Formula One, an auto racing circuit. Most teams are based in Europe, where it’s one of the most popular spectator sports, second only to soccer. Each major race is called a Grand Prix and is held on specially built courses, or sometimes on public roads (unlike American NASCAR or IndyCar). Each car contains one seat and is individually built, often by sports car producers. Top speed of a typical F-1 car: over 200 mph.

G
.
A novel by British writer and art critic John Berger about a sex-obsessed lothario who becomes politically aware and involved as Europe plunges into World War I.
G
. won the 1972 Booker Prize, England’s national book award.

H
An absurdist French sitcom (1998–2002) set in a hospital. (It was very similar to the American sitcom
Scrubs
.)

i
-zone
The last major instant-film camera produced by Polaroid. An inexpensive (under $50), easy-to-use camera marketed to kids and teenagers, the i-Zone instantly printed tiny photographs—about one square inch each—on paper, with colorful or decorated borders and removable paper backs, so the photos could be stuck onto any surface. The widespread consumer shift from film cameras to digital cameras hurt i-Zone’s sales, but in 2001, it was the bestselling film camera in the United States. The film was pulled off the market for good in 2006; Polaroid stopped making instant-film cameras shortly thereafter.

J
, K, L
The main characters in the
Men in Black
movies, portrayed by Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, and Linda Fiorentino, respectively. The movies were based on a 1990 underground comic book series about the conspiracy theory that the U.S. government really does have an alien-invasion-coverup agency. (They don’t, do they?)

Studies show: It takes 0.1 second to form an impression of a stranger from his or her face.

M
James Bond’s superior and assignment giver—the nickname of the head of MI6, the British spy agency (real name: Miles Messervy). The role has been portrayed by five actors in the Bond film series: Bernard Lee, Robert Brown, John Huston, Edward Fox, and, most recently, Judi Dench.

“N.”
A novella by Stephen King, published in 2008 in King’s short-fiction collection
Just After Sunset
. The plot: A woman tries to figure out why her brother, a psychiatrist, killed himself. As it turns out, he and one of his patients (named N.) were driven to suicide after seeing a monster named Cthun. Before it was published,
N
. was adapted into a series of twenty-five 90-second animated films to promote
Just After Sunset
. The films were available only as online “webisodes” on iTunes and video-enabled cell phones.

O
A 2001 film version of William Shakespeare’s
Othello
set against the backdrop of a high school basketball team. The lead character, Othello, was called Odin, the only African-American student at a prep school. The coach’s son Hugo (originally Iago) is jealous of his on-court skills, and also covets his girlfriend, Desi (Desdemona). The film starred Mekhi Phifer, Josh Harnett, and Julia Stiles.
O
was filmed in 1998, part of a spate of teen movies based on Shakespeare plays, such as
William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, and
10 Things I Hate About You,
a retelling of
The Taming of the Shrew,
which also starred Stiles. The film was scheduled for an April 1999 release date, but after the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, studio Lions Gate Entertainment shelved the film for two years because its final scenes depict high-school violence.

P
The name of a band formed in the early ’90s by movie star Johnny Depp and singer Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers. Featuring Depp on guitar and bass, P had minor radio hits with covers of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” and Wings’ “Jet.”

Q
James Bond’s gadget-master. (His real name is Major Boothroyd; Q stands for “Quartermaster.”) In the first Bond film,
Dr. No
(1962), the part was portrayed by British actor Peter Burton. Bad luck: Burton had a scheduling conflict for the next movie,
From Russia With Love,
so filmmakers cast Desmond Llewelyn, who went on to play the part in 17 films until his death
in 1999. Some of the gadgets Q developed include a garrote-wire wristwatch, a poison-dagger shoe, a cigarette-lighter grenade, binocular glasses, a whistle-activated stun-gas-emitting key ring, a camera rocket launcher, a grappling-hook gun, an underwater jet pack, a rocket belt, a ring camera, a cigarette-case safecracker, a surfboard that contains C-4 explosives, a mini computer, a combat knife, a small satellite GPS transmitter, and radioactive lint.

The
Mona Lisa
is insured for about $670 million.

R
.
The title of R&B superstar R. Kelly’s third album, released in 1998. It sold more than 10 million copies in the United States and peaked at #2 on the album chart. It included an unlikely #1 hit—a duet with soft-rock superstar Celine Dion called “I’m Your Angel.”

S
Club 7
was a British teen pop band, formed in 1999 by Spice Girls creator Simon Fuller. He auditioned more than 10,000 singers for the prefabricated group, narrowing it down to seven singers—four girls and three boys. Fuller launched the group with a 13-episode Monkees-like TV series called
Miami 7,
in which the group cavorted around the beach and performed their songs. The show was a moderate hit when shown in the U.S. on the Fox Family Channel, but the group’s musical success in America was limited to a single top-40 hit, “Never Had a Dream Come True,” which hit #10 in 2000. It didn’t really matter, though, because S Club 7 sold 17 million albums in Europe and Asia, and scored four #1 hits in the United Kingdom. S Club 7 broke up in 2003, but regrouped in 2008 as S Club 3, because that’s how many members were interested in getting the band back together. What does the letter S stand for? According to the band, nothing.