Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (80 page)

SYA HWAT?

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are; the olny iprmoetnt fatcor is taht the frist and lsat ltteres be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Petrty amzanig, huh?

Zebras can be trained to pull carts, but they’ve never been fully domesticated.

DEAD TV

When an actor on a TV show dies, producers are left with a dilemma: What do they do with the actor’s character? Say they moved away? Pretend they never existed? Or make the character die too?

A
ctor:
Will Lee

Show:
Sesame Street
(1983)

Story:
Lee had played Mr. Hooper, the grandfatherly candy store owner, from the show’s inception in 1969 until his death of a heart attack in 1982.
Sesame Street
writers decided to have Mr. Hooper die as well, in order to teach kids about death—that it’s forever, and that it’s okay to feel sad. On a highly publicized episode that aired on Thanksgiving Day in 1983 (so parents would be home to answer their children’s questions), Big Bird can’t find Mr. Hooper anywhere, and the human characters tell him that “Mr. Hooper died”—the writers didn’t want to use a euphemism like “passed away.” When Big Bird asks when he’ll be coming back, he’s told that he won’t. “But it won’t be the same,” Big Bird pleads. “No, it won’t,” says Bob, who goes on to assure Big Bird that they will always have memories of Mr. Hooper, and that David, the new candy shop owner, will make Big Bird his birdseed milk shakes.

Actor:
Phil Hartman

Show:
NewsRadio
(1998)

Story:
Hartman’s death was a sudden and violent one—in May 1998, his mentally ill wife shot him, and then herself. The sitcom had finished taping for the season, so the first episode that aired after Hartman’s death was the September 1998 season premiere. Plot: the staff of the news radio station deals with the sudden death of Hartman’s character, the arrogant news reader Bill McNeal. The actors choke back real tears as they read a letter found in Bill’s desk to be opened upon his death, “If Dave is reading this to you, I have either been fired or I have passed away. Since my formidable talent would preclude the former, I’ll have to assume that the latter is true.” Hartman’s former
Saturday Night Live
castmate Jon Lovitz joined
NewsRadio
as a replacement, but the show was cancelled at the end of the 1998–99 season. Hartman was also a voice actor on
The Simpsons,
playing two recurring characters: washed-up B-movie actor Troy McClure and the terrible lawyer Lionel Hutz.
Simpsons
producers opted to simply retire those two characters.

The average adult has three colds per year. The average kid: six.

Actor:
John Ritter

Show:
8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter
(2003)

Story:
Ritter suddenly fell ill on the set in September 2003 and was rushed to a hospital, where he died later that day of an undiagnosed heart ailment. It was early in the show’s second season, and ABC wasn’t sure what to do about
8 Simple Rules,
a family sitcom that was also a starring vehicle for Ritter. Ultimately deciding that the show could continue with the other characters (James Garner and David Spade were later added to the cast), producers transformed the show into one about a family trying to put their lives back together after the death of the patriarch. It ran for two more seasons.

Actor:
Nicholas Colasanto

Show:
Cheers
(1985)

Story:
Colasanto was primarily a director of TV drama series episodes, but in 1982 he was cast as bartender Ernie “Coach” Pantusso on
Cheers
as Sam Malone’s (Ted Danson) absent-minded former baseball coach. While at home after completing his work on the third season of
Cheers
in early 1985, Colasanto died of heart failure. His death was acknowledged as part of the plot in the fourth season premiere that September—Coach had died, and the bar needed to hire a new bartender to replace him. Colasanto, however, was remembered in more subtle ways by the cast and crew. Colasanto had kept a picture of Geronimo in his dressing room as a good-luck charm, and after his death it was placed on the
Cheers
set. In the last scene of the very last episode of
Cheers
in 1993, Sam straightens the Geronimo picture, turns off the lights, and the show ends.

“If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.”

—Don Marquis

First American billionaire: Henry Ford.

THE PEARL HARBOR
SPY, PART II

From Uncle John’s Dustbin of History, here’s the final installment of our story about the person most responsible for making Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 as devastating as it was. (Part I is on
page 343
.)

B
EFORE THE STORM

On the evening of Saturday, December 6, 1941, Yoshikawa sent what would turn out to be the last of his coded messages to Tokyo:

VESSELS MOORED IN HARBOR: NINE BATTLESHIPS; THREE CLASS-B CRUISERS; THREE SEAPLANE TENDERS; SEVENTEEN DESTROYERS. ENTERING HARBOR ARE FOUR CLASS-B CRUISERS; THREE DESTROYERS. ALL AIRCRAFT CARRIERS AND HEAVY CRUISERS HAVE DEPARTED HARBOR….NO INDICATION OF ANY CHANGES IN U.S. FLEET. “ENTERPRISE” AND “LEXINGTON” HAVE SAILED FROM PEARL HARBOR….IT APPEARS THAT NO AIR RECONNAISSANCE IS BEING CONDUCTED BY THE FLEET AIR ARM.

Though Yoshikawa provided much of the intelligence used to plan the attack on Pearl Harbor, he did not know when—or even if—it would occur. (“To entrust knowledge of such a vital decision to an expendable espionage agent would have been foolish,” he later explained.) He learned the attack was under way the same way that Hawaiians did: by hearing the first bombs go off as he was eating breakfast, at 7:55 a.m. on the morning of the 7th.

INFAMY

Yoshikawa had been feeding the war planners in Japan a steady stream of information for eight months, and his efforts had paid off. The Japanese military accomplished its objective with brutal effectiveness: The naval strike force, which included nine destroyers, 23 submarines, two battleships and six aircraft carriers bristling with more than 400 fighters, bombers, dive-bombers and torpedo planes, had managed to sail more than 4,000 miles across
the Pacific undetected and then strike at the home base of the U.S. Pacific Fleet while its ships were still at anchor and the Army Air Corps planes were still on the ground.

There are 42 gallons in a barrel of oil.

Twenty American warships were sunk or badly damaged in the two-hour attack, including the eight battleships along Battleship Row, the main target of the raid. More than 180 U.S. aircraft were destroyed and another 159 damaged. The destruction of the airfield on Ford Island, in the very heart of Pearl Harbor, was so complete that only a single aircraft managed to make it into the air. More than 2,400 American servicemen lost their lives, including 1,177 on the battleship
Arizona,
and another 1,178 were wounded. It was the greatest military disaster in United States history.

The Japanese losses were miniscule in comparison: 29 planes and 5 midget submarines lost, 64 men killed, and one submariner taken prisoner—the first Japanese P.O.W. of the war—when his submarine ran aground on Oahu.

INVISIBLE MAN

The FBI raided the Japanese consulate within hours, but by then Yoshikawa had burned his code books and any other materials that would have identified him as a spy. He was taken into custody with the rest of the consular staff, and in August 1942 they were all returned to Japan as part of a swap with American diplomats being held in Japan.

Yoshikawa worked in Naval Intelligence for the rest of the war. When Japan surrendered in August 1945, he hid in the countryside, posing as a Buddhist monk, fearful of what might happen to him if the American occupation forces learned of his role in the Pearl Harbor attack. After the occupation ended in 1952, he returned to his family. In 1955 he opened a candy business.

By that time Yoshikawa’s role in the war had become widely known, thanks to an Imperial Navy officer who identified him by name in a 1953 interview with the newspaper
Ehime Shimbun
. If Yoshikawa thought the exposure would bring him fame, fortune, or the gratitude of his countrymen, he was wrong on all counts. Japan had paid a terrible price for starting the war with the United States: On top of the estimated 1.6 million Japanese soldiers
who died in the war, an additional 400,000 civilians were killed, including more than 100,000 who died when atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Few people wanted anything to do with the man who helped bring such death and destruction to Japan. “They even blamed me for the atomic bomb,” Yoshikawa told Australia’s
Daily Mail
in 1991, in one of his rare interviews with the Western press.

Some species of shark can live to be 100 years old.

The candy business failed, and Yoshikawa, now a pariah in his own land, had trouble even finding a job. He ended up living off of the income his wife earned selling insurance. He never received any official recognition for his contribution to the war effort, not a medal or even a thank-you note, and when he petitioned the postwar government for a pension, they turned him down. By the end of his life he had returned to the same vice that supposedly landed him in the spying business in the first place: alcohol. “I drink to forget,” he told a reporter. “I have so many thoughts now, so many years after the war. Why has history cheated me?” He died penniless in a nursing home in 1993.

FINAL IRONY

Yoshikawa was the only Japanese spy in Honolulu before the outbreak of war; only the consul general knew his true identity and purpose, and with the exception of the geishas, his driver, and others who assisted him without fully realizing what he was up to, he worked alone.

And yet it was the Roosevelt administration’s fear that other Japanese spies might be out there, both in the Hawaiian Islands and on the West Coast of the United States, that prompted the federal government to round up 114,000 Japanese Americans and incarcerate them in internment camps for the duration of the war. Many were given only 48 hours to put their affairs in order and as a consequence lost everything they owned.

Not a single internee was ever charged with espionage, and no one understood better than Yoshikawa that they were innocent. He knew because he
had
tried to recruit Japanese Americans, sounding them out about their loyalties without revealing his purpose, and had failed. “They had done nothing. It was a cruel joke,” he admitted to the
Daily Mail
. “You see, I couldn’t trust them in Hawaii to help me. They were loyal to the United States.”

First Miss Black America contest: 1968. Miss Black Tennessee 1971: Oprah Winfrey.

THE MONTY HALL PARADOX

Remember Monty Hall, the host of the TV game show
Let’s Make a Deal?
Monty (and the show) may be gone, but his name lives on in a fascinating probability puzzle that was inspired by one of the “deals” on his show
.

D
OOR PRIZE

Imagine you’re a contestant on
Let’s Make a Deal,
standing in front of three giant doors labeled “1,” “2,” and “3.” Behind one of the doors (you don’t know which one, but Monty does) is a new car. Behind the other two doors are booby prizes: live goats. Monty Hall invites you to choose a door; you’ll win whichever prize is behind it. You pick a door—say, Door #1. But before Monty tells you what you’ve won, he opens one of the doors you
didn’t
pick, say Door #3, to reveal…a goat. Then he asks you, “Do you want to switch to Door #2?” Well, do you? Will switching from Door #1 to Door #2 improve your chances of winning the car? This puzzle, originally called the “Monty Hall Problem,” was first proposed by a statistician named Steve Selvin in 1975.

THINK AGAIN

If you think the odds are the same whether you stick with Door #1 or switch to Door #2, you’re not alone. That’s what most people would say, because that seems to make sense. After all, if there’s one car and three doors, the odds of it being behind Door #1, Door #2, or Door #3 are are exactly the same: 1-in-3. But that’s the wrong way to look at the problem. According to Selvin, you have to think of it in terms of the one door you
picked
versus the two doors you
didn’t pick:
The odds that the car is behind the door you picked are 1-in-3, and the odds that the car is behind one of the two you didn’t pick are 2-in-3. The odds don’t change when one of the doors is opened because the prizes haven’t moved. Sure, once Door #3 is opened to reveal a goat, the odds of the car being behind that door drop to zero. But there’s
still
a 2-in-3 chance that the car is behind one of the two doors you didn’t pick. That means there’s now a 2-in-3 chance that the car is behind Door #2. Switching from Door #1 to Door #2 actually
doubles
your odds of winning the car—from 1-in-3, to 2-in-3. So switch doors!