Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader (92 page)

Researchers say that males and females are naturally different from one another in a number of unexpected ways. Here are a few of the things they’ve found out.

Women are more likely to smile than men when delivering bad news.

Toddler girls as young as two years old maintain eye contact with adults nearly twice as long as toddler boys do.

At the age of four months, infant girls can distinguish between photographs of people they know and don’t know; most boys can’t.

Did you have a nightmare last night? Women are twice as likely as men to say they did.

In households that have them, males control the TV remote control 55% of the time; women have control 34% of the time.

Doctors consider men obese when 25% of their body is composed of fat, and women obese when 30% is fat.

Boys fight more than girls do. The difference begins at about age two.

Fifty-nine percent of females—but only 4% of males—say they didn’t enjoy the first time they had sex.

The average male brain is 14 percent larger than the average female brain.

Seventy-one percent of car-accident victims are male; only 29% are female.

On average, a man’s skin ages 10 years more slowly than a woman’s does.

In the year following a divorce, the average woman’s standard of living falls 73%; the man’s standard of living actually
rises
by 43%.

Male snow skiers are more likely to fall on their faces; female skiers are more likely to fall on their backs.

In one recent study, 36% of husbands surveyed said their wife “is like a god.” Only 19% of women said the same thing about their husbands.

Women cry about five times as much as men; a male hormone may actually suppress tears.

Americans spend $1.5 billion on toothpaste (and $680 million on mouthwash) every year.

A lot of money is made on X-rated films, books, etc. But what happens when somebody’s work unintentionally winds up X-rated? That’s actually a problem that some producers have to cope with. Here are a few examples.

A
CCIDENTALLY X-RATED MOVIE

In 1969, the movie rating system was still new. The X rating hadn’t become a symbol of sexually explicit material yet—it just meant “adult subject matter.” So when the Motion Picture Association of America gave
Midnight Cowboy
—the story of a male prostitute’s (platonic) relationship with a down-and-out New York vagabond—an X rating, director John Schlesinger wasn’t upset. In fact, he
approved of
the rating: He considered the film’s subject matter too controversial for young audiences and didn’t want to have to warn them away from the theatres himself; plus, he was afraid that without an “adult” rating, people might show up at theaters thinking the film was a genuine Western.

What Happened:
Midnight Cowboy
became the first X-rated film to play in top-flight movie houses and the only one ever to win an Oscar (for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay). A few months after the film went into general release, the MPAA’s Rating Commission decided to reserve the X-rating for “non-quality” films and officially changed
Midnight Cowboy’
s rating to R.

ACCIDENTALLY X-RATED CARTOONS

According to Hollywood legend, cartoonists in nearly every major movie studio have amused themselves by inserting one or two bawdy frames into “family” cartoon classics. In the theater, the frames went by much too fast for anyone to notice. But the laserdisc player enables people to view films frame by frame, and since their arrival, a number of things the public was never meant to see have been found in cartoons, new and old.

For example, in an old cartoon called
The Wabbit Who Came to Dinner
, Bugs steps out of the shower and wraps a towel around himself. According to Bill Givens in his book
Film Flubs II
, “There’s a frame or two where an added bit of anatomy that you don’t see in other Bugs cartoons seems to appear between his legs.”

Twenty-three percent of Americans who study abroad go to England; 12% go to France.

When
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
was released on video/laserdisc,
Variety
magazine spilled the beans with a detailed examination of the film. They came up with two specific scenes to look for:

Scene #1:
At the beginning of the film, Roger Rabbit is filming a cartoon with diaper-clad Baby Herman. Roger ruins the scene and Baby Herman stomps off the set, passing under a woman wearing a dress as he leaves. She screams and jumps away as he passes beneath her. According to
Variety
, “On screen, [the scene] looks playful. Advanced frame by frame on laserdisc, it’s far from it.”

Scene #2:
Jessica Rabbit, Roger Rabbit’s voluptuous wife, is riding through Toon Town in a taxi when the cab smashes into a lightpost. According to
Variety
, as Jessica is thrown from the cab she “spins in Kerrigan-like triple lutz fashion, with her trademark red dress hiking up. On the first scene, she appears to be wearing underwear. On the second spin, however, there are three frames which clearly show she’s wearing nothing at all.”

ACCIDENTAL X: REVENGE AND PRACTICAL JOKES

• In December 1994, a disgruntled video production worker of the UAV Corp., which distributes cartoon videos, added a two-minute scene from a movie called
Whore
to about 500 copies of the video,
Woody Woodpecker and Friends No. 3015.
The sabotage wasn’t caught until the tapes were already in stores; the company had to recall all 20,000 copies that had been distributed.

• When Mark Twain sent his manuscript for
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
to the printers in the fall of 1884, they discovered that an engraved illustration of Uncle Silas “had been made to appear obscene.” The engraving was so offensive (to Victorian eyes, anyway) that it had to be removed and a new one created and substituted in its place, causing the American edition to miss the 1884 Christmas season entirely. Had the mistake not been caught, the printer said at the time, “Mr. Clemens’ credit for decency and morality would have been destroyed.” The end result:
Huckleberry Finn
was released in the U.S. two months too late for Christmas ...and two months after the British version hit the shelves in England.

True lies: 57% of Americans say they “look younger” than they are.

It was one of the most ridiculous sitcom plots in TV history: An American teenager gives up her life as a beach bunny and becomes Sister Bertrille at the Convent San T anco, in Puerto Rico. Then she discovers that because she weighs only 90 pounds, wearing her order’s bulky coronet (nun’s hat) on windy days enables her to fly—a skill she uses to get into and out of trouble, fight crime, and occasionally assist the owner of a nearby casino. Believe it or not, “The Flying Nun” made a star out of 19-year-old actress Sally Field. Now in best
BR
tradition, we’ve decided to torture you with trivia questions about the show. But don’t blame us—this quiz was devised by John Dollison, for his book
, Pope Pourri.

1.
What was the inspiration for the show?

(A) A real-life incident involving a small nun and a big hat.

(B) A novel about a flying nun.

(C) The TV shows “Bewitched” and “I Dream of Jeannie.”

(D) Sally Field came up with the idea herself.

2.
The part of Sister Bertrille was created for Sally Field...but she turned it down at first. Why?

(A) Fearful of scandal, the show’s producers insisted that Field take a vow of chastity while she was on the show.

(B) Field had bad memories from her years in parochial school

(C) Field thought the role would restrict her too much...and besides, she wanted to be a movie star, not a TV star.

3.
What made her change her mind and take the role?

(A) An intense religious experience

(B) Her movie career bit the dust.

(C) Pope Paul VI phoned Field personally and urged her to take the role before studio executives offered it to Annette Funicello.

4.
How did the other nuns on the show try to keep Sister Bertrille from flying?

Americans fill in 54 acres of crossword puzzle space every day.

(A) Reverend Mother Plaseato (played by Madeline Sherwood) tied lead weights around her feet.

(B) They gave her a set of extra-heavy rosary beads.

(C) They tried to bulk her up with huge, heavy meals whenever possible.

5.
How did officials in the Catholic Church respond to the show when it first went on the air?

(A) They condemned it.

(B) They refused to take a public stand.

(C) They liked it—and actually saw it as a recruiting film for nuns.

ANSWERS

No, we won’t make you turn to the back of the book to find out the truth about Sister Bertrille. If you made it this far, you deserve a break.

1. (B)
TV executive Max Wylie was flipping through a Doubleday catalog of recently published books one day in the mid-1960s looking for ideas for TV sitcoms. He came across a book called
The Fifteenth Pelican
, a story about a ninety-pound nun who could fly. Author Tere Rios got the idea for the book while travelling in 1955. “I saw a little Sister of Charity in her big white bonnet nearly blown off her feet in Paris,” she later told reporters.

Wylie pitched the idea to Harry Ackerman, creator of the “Bewitched” TV series. Another show of his, “Gidget,” had just gone off the air and he was looking for a new vehicle for Sally Field, the star of the show. “Bewitched,” a show about a friendly witch with magic powers, had been a huge success; so had “I Dream of Jeanie,” a show about a female genie with magical powers who marries an astronaut. Ackerman thought a similar show about a nun would be a hit...although he worried that giving a nun magical powers would be too controversial. So he stuck with
The Fifteenth Pelican’
s original premise and gave the nun special powers (brought on by high winds, her coronet, and the laws of aerodynamics) instead of magic ones.

The average Japanese drinks 4.8 gal. of liquor a year; the average American drinks 1.3 gal.

2. (C)
“I didn’t want to play a nun,” Field told
TV Guide
in 1968. “You’re not allowed to kiss or show your belly button.” But that wasn’t her only objection: her previous TV show, “Gidget,” had fallen flat on its face, and Field mistakenly thought it was her fault. As
TV Guide
put it, “Sally came away with the feeling that she was somehow responsible for ‘Gidget’s’ flop and no one would tell her why....She left the studio ‘feeling defeated’...and embarked on a movie career, determined that TV should never darken her door again.”

3. (B)
Field tried out for the part of daughter Elaine Robinson in
The Graduate
...but Katherine Ross got the part. Then she tried out for the role of Neely in
Valley of the
Dolls...and lost it to Patty Duke. All of a sudden, another TV series didn’t look so bad. “It was presumptuous to think I could step into movies,” Field later recalled. “‘Idiot,’ I told myself, ‘you’re not Liz Taylor!’ The Flying Nun’ would give me time to learn and still keep me in the public eye. So—I changed my mind.” (Money had a little to do with it, too. Studio executives cemented the deal by raising her pay from her $450-a-week “Gidget” salary to $4,000 a week.)

4. (B)
Not your normal sitcom prop, but what do you expect?

5. (C)
Studio executives were extremely worried about potential Catholic objections to “The Flying Nun” and went to great lengths to see that the church was not offended. They even gave special sneak previews of the pilot episode to high church officials all over the country, hoping to enlist their support for the show. “We just wanted to be sure the Catholic community dug it,” one of the show’s promoters told TV Guide in 1968....But their concerns were unfounded: Catholic Church officials loved the show and actually saw it as a much-needed recruiting film for nuns, whose numbers had been in decline since Vatican II. “The show is positioning nuns as human beings,” one official with the National Catholic Office for Radio and Television said. “Only the studio, the agencies and the sponsors were worried. I guess they thought Catholics might stop buying toothpaste.”

Or watching TV.

34% of U.S. men say meat makes up the largest portion of their diet; only 15% of women do.

More random questions...and answers...from America’s trivia experts.

S
EEING THE LIGHT

Q:
What is a hologram? How is it different than a regular picture?

A:
“A hologram is a three-dimensional image produced with the use of laser light. Contrary to what you might think, when you look at something, you are not really viewing the object itself, but are instead looking at the light coming from the object. Because photographs are only able to record part of this light, the images they produce are limited to two dimensions. Using a laser, an object’s illumination can be completely recorded, enabling it to be reproduced later in three dimensions.” (From
Ask Me Something I Don’t Know
, by Bill Adler, Jr. and Beth Pratt-Dewey)

DELICIOUS QUESTION

Q:
Why is New York called the Big Apple?

A:
“It appears more than likely that jazz musicians deserve the credit. Musicians of the 1930s, playing one night stands, coined their own terms not only for their music...but also for their travels, the people they met, the towns they stayed in. A town or city was an “apple.” At that time a man named Charles Gillett was president of the New York City Convention and Visitors Bureau. Learning of the jazz term, he bragged, There are lots of “apples” in the U.S.A., but we’re the best and the biggest. We’re The Big Apple.’” (From
All Those Wonderful Names
, by J. N. Hook)