Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader (89 page)

• Braniff Airlines once wanted to promote the fact that its leather seats were comfortable. According to reporters, when they did ads for Hispanic customers, they “used a slang term for leather which means a person’s hide as well as a cowhide. Rather than asking people to fly Braniff on leather seats, the airline asked them to fly in the nude.”

The average U.S. family redeems 81 coupons a year, compared to 33 in Canada.

• A frozen foods manufacturer used the word
burruda
to describe its burrito line. They didn’t realize that the word is slang for “huge mistake.”

JUST DO WHAT?

In one of its shoe commercials, Nike showed a Kenyan Samburu looking into the camera and speaking Maa, his native language. The subtitle read “Just do it,” Nike’s advertising slogan...but it wasn’t until after the commercial hit the airwaves that company officials realized he was saying, “I don’t want these. Give me big shoes.”

NO SEX, PLEASE

• The Swedish company that makes Electrolux vacuum cleaners once tried to market their products in the United States using the slogan “Nothing sucks like an Electrolux.” (The company’s translators talked them out of it at the last minute.)

• What Brazilian would have admitted to driving a Ford Pinto? Pinto, it turns out, is slang in Portuguese for “small male genitals.” Ford changed the name in Brazil to “Corcel,” which means
horse.

AND FUNNY MONEY, TOO

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — March 4, 1992.

Lance Aukett, a 13-year-old boy, found a 10,000-yen note in a box of schoolbooks while he was cleaning his bedroom. Unsure of its value, he decided to check with some banks. One bank said it that it might be worth $8 in American money; another valued it at $26. But the best deal came from the National Bank of New Zealand, which accepted the note and gave Aukett $78 for it.

Two weeks later the bank realized they had purchased a piece of Monopoly money (from a Japanese version of the game).

“Since 1971, any money lost through bribery has been tax deductible. According to the IRS’s official taxpayers’ guide, “bribes and kickbacks to governmental officials
are
deductible unless the individual has been convicted of making the bribe or has entered a plea of not guilty or
nolo contendere
.”

—
2201 Fascinating Facts
, by David Louis

Americans buy more candy at Easter than they do at Halloween.

You’ve used the terms a “pack” of wolves and a “flock” of sheep... here are some animal terms you probably haven’t even
heard
of:

MAMMALS

A shrewdness or troop of apes (also monkeys)

A pace of asses

A cete of badgers

A sloth of bears

A colony of beavers

A singular of boars

A clouder of cats

A brood of chickens

A rag of colts

A cowardice of curs

A gang of elk

A business of ferrets

A skulk or troop of foxes

A trip of goats

A drift of hogs

A troop of kangaroos

A kindle of kittens

A leap of leopards

A nest of mice

A barren of mules

A string of ponies

A nest of rabbits

A crash of rhinoceroses

A bevy of roebucks

A dray of squirrels

A sounder of swine

A pod or gam of whales

BIRDS

A murder of crows

A dole or piteousness of doves

A paddling of duck (swimming)

A raft of duck (in the water, but
not
swimming)

A team of ducks (in the air)

A charm of finches

A gaggle of geese (on the ground)

A skein of geese (in the air)

A siege of herons

A deceit of lapwings

An exaltation or bevy of larks

A parliament of owls

A covey of quail

An ostentation of peacocks

A nye or covey of pheasants (on the ground)

A bouquet of pheasants (taking to the air)

An unkindness of ravens

A murmuration of sandpipers

A rafter of turkeys

A descent of woodpeckers

INSECTS

An army of caterpillars

A business of flies

A cluster of grasshoppers

A plague or swarm of locusts

OTHER

A shoal of bass

A clutch of eggs

A bed of snakes

A knot of toads

A bale of turtles

A nest of vipers

The world’s rarest matchbook, issued after Charles Lindbergh’s Atlantic flight, is worth $4,000.

TV wisdom from
Primetime Proverbs: The Book of TV Quotes
by Jack Mingo and John Javna.

ON LAWYERS

“Lawyers and tarts are the two oldest professions in the world. And we always aim to please.”

—Horace Rumpole,
Rumpole of the Bailey

ON CROOKS

“All the laws in the world won’t stop one man with a gun.”

—Det. Lt. Mike Stone, The
Streets of San Francisco

Friend of a suspect:
“I just know she isn’t guilty. She’s just too nice.”

Sgt. Joe Friday:
“Well, if she’s nice, she isn’t guilty...and if she’s guilty, she’s not that nice.”

—Dragnet

ON LYING

“That’s not a lie, it’s a terminological inexactitude.”

—Alexander Haig, 1983 television news interview

“Virgins don’t lie.”

—Fonzie,
Happy Days

ON TOUGH COPS

Crook
[explaining herself]: “You can understand, can’t you?”

Sgt. Joe Friday:
“No, lady, we can’t. You’re under arrest.”

—Dragnet

“Would you like to sit down, hairball, or do you prefer internal bleeding?”

—Mick Belker,
Hill Street Blues

“Another outburst like this and I’m gonna handcuff your lips together.”

—Sgt. Wojohowicz,
Barney Miller

ON POLICE PROCEDURE

“If you really want to study police methods, do what I do: watch television.”

—Officer Gunther Toody,
Car 54, Where Are You?

ON STEALING

“If you’re gonna steal, steal from kin—at least they’re less likely to put the law on you.”

—Bret Maverick,
Maverick

The average person has 1,460 dreams a year. That’s four a night.

Here are more of the worst losers Hollywood has ever produced.

C
LEOPATRA (1963)

Description:
It started out as a low-budget “tits-and-togas” epic, but became a high-cost extravaganza when studio executives offered Liz Taylor the lead. “Sure,” she supposedly replied, “I’ll do it for a million dollars.” She was joking—no one had
ever
been paid that much for a single film role before—but 20th Century-Fox took the bait and made her the first million-dollar star in Hollywood history.

Dollars and Sense:
Adjusted for inflation,
Cleopatra
is believed to be the biggest money loser in the history of film. It had a $6 million budget when Taylor was signed, but cost $44 million—the equivalent of $110.6 million in 1980 dollars. Twenty years after it was released, the film was still an estimated $46.2 million in the hole.

Wretched Excess:
More than eight acres of sets were built near London, and the Thames River was diverted to create a “mini Nile” for the film. But the fog made filming impossible. “On a good day,” said the director, “whenever a word was spoken, you could see the vapor coming from the actors’ mouths. It was like a tobacco commercial.” Taylor almost died of pneumonia during the filming and couldn’t return to the damp London sets for more than six months. Overhead costs piled up at $45,000 a day. Finally the studio gave up and shut the London studios down. Total cost: $6 million for 12 minutes of usable film.

The Critics Speak:
“After [the London premiere], I raced back to the Dorchester and just made it to the downstairs lavatory and vomited.” —Elizabeth Taylor

THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD (1965)

Description:
In 1954, 20th Century-Fox paid $100,000 for the film rights to
The Greatest Story Ever Told
, a novel about the life of Jesus Christ. The studio set out to make a big-budget Bible epic along the lines of
Samson and Delilah
(1949) and
The Ten Commandments
(1956).

Dollars and Sense:
The film cost more than $20 million to make; five years later it had still only earned $8 million worldwide.

Chickens snore.

Wretched Excess:
Director George Stevens insisted on building a fake Holy Land in Arizona, arguing that the
real
Holy Land wasn’t good enough. “I wanted to get an effect of grandeur as a background to Christ,” he explained, “and none of the Holy Land areas shape up with the excitement of the American Southwest.” Six months into the film, a blizzard pounded the 22-acre Jerusalem set and buried it in snow. Stevens just moved to Los Angeles, where he built a whole
new
Jerusalem.

Filming fell so far behind schedule that two members of the cast and crew died, and the actress who played Mary Magdalene became pregnant (forcing Stevens to film her standing behind furniture and in other odd angles). Stevens handed out so many cameo roles to Hollywood celebrities that “it made the road to Calvary look like the Hollywood Walk of Stars.” In one scene, John Wayne played a centurion who barked out the now-famous line, “Truly, this man
wuz
the Son of Gawd!!”

MOHAMMED: MESSENGER OF GOD (1977)

Description:
A cinematic biography of the prophet Mohammed,
Mohammed: Messenger of God
was intended by the producer to be Islam’s
The Ten Commandments.

Dollars and Sense:
Two different versions of the film were made: one with Islamic actors for the Islamic world, and one with Western actors. Both versions bombed; in fact, every Islamic country except Turkey banned the Islamic version. The film(s) cost $17 million and earned less than $5 million.

Wretched Excess:
When rumors spread that Peter O’Toole—and then Charleton Heston—had been signed to play Mohammed, angry protests broke out all over the Middle East. Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal had granted permission to film on location in Mecca, but changed his mind and kicked the director out of the country. The director then moved to the desert outside of Marrakesh, Morocco, and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars building a detailed replica of Mecca. Six months after filming began, King Faisal “communicated his displeasure” over the film to King Hassan of Morocco by threatening to cut off oil shipments to the kingdom and banning all Moroccan pilgrims from entering Saudi Arabia. The director had to move to the Libyan desert and build
a third
Mecca.

G.I. blues: Elvis received 10,000 letters a week during his stint in the U.S. Army.

Think you’ve ever had a bad hair day? Just be glad you never had one like these folks.

B
ACKGROUND

“One kind of day that everyone dreads is the widely known and feared
bad hair day
,” wrote columnist William Safire when a reader asked him about the term. Safire speculated that it started with comedian Gary Shandling. “Irritated with his coverage in
Us
magazine, Shandling (who used to begin his routine with ‘Is my hair all right?’) told the
Seattle Times
in January 1991: ‘I was at a celebrity screening of
Misery
and they made up a quote for me. They said I told them I was having a
bad hair
day. They didn’t even talk to me.’”

A month later the phrase appeared in the
L.A.Times
, then the
Toronto Star
(“Was Robert DeNiro caught in a crosswind, or was he just having a bad hair day?”), and now it’s a part of our lexicon.

SIX
REAL
BAD HAIR DAYS

1. Michael Jackson

In February 1984, Jackson and his brothers were filming a $1.5 million commercial for Pepsi-Cola in which he walked down a staircase as a pyrotechnic display went off behind him. They shot the scene four times, but according to
Time
magazine, “The effect was not quite right for Director Bob Giraldi....He asked the singer to move more slowly and ordered the fireworks ‘heated up’ a bit. The combination proved volatile: On the fiery fifth take...sparks from a smoke bomb ignited Jackson’s hair, sending the singer to the hospital with second- and third-degree burns on his scalp.

2. Albert Anastasia

Anastasia was head of the Mangano crime family, one of the infamous “five families” of the New York mafia. On the morning of October 25, 1957, he went for a haircut at the Park Sheraton Hotel. While his bodyguard parked the car, Anastasia sat down in the barber chair and fell asleep. Minutes later, two men wearing scarves over their faces walked up to him, drew their guns, and opened fire. Anastasia jumped out of the chair and tried to attack the gunmen, but he was too badly wounded and collapsed dead on the floor.