Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (18 page)

FOOD
: Hot Brown

FOUND IN
: Louisville, Kentucky

DESCRIPTION
: It’s named after the place where it was created in 1926: the Brown Hotel. The most popular dish on the menu was ham and eggs, but chef Fred Schmidt became bored with making it. So he came up with this sandwich as an alternative: an open-faced sandwich of turkey, bacon, and Mornay sauce (a basic cheese sauce), cooked under a broiler. It quickly gained popularity because sliced turkey was a novelty at the time—it was rare to see turkey when it wasn’t Thanksgiving. Result: within a year, the Hot Brown was being ordered by 95 percent of Brown Hotel customers.

Hey! There’s a new invention out there called the “Internet.”

“The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand. It’s the largest experiment in anarchy that we’ve ever had.”

—
Eric Schmidt

“Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.”

—
Mitchell Kapor

“The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom.”

—
Jon Stewart

“There’s a statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to work, they’d eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this isn’t true.”

—
Ian Hart

“I’ve just found out there are pages on the Internet dedicated to whether I’m gay or not.”

—
Matthew Perry

“National borders aren’t even speed bumps on the information superhighway.”

—
Tim May

“The Internet is the most powerful stupidity amplifier ever invented. It’s like TV without the TV part.”

—
James “Kibo” Parry

“First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII—and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we’ve realized it’s a brochure.”

—
Douglas Adams

“My favorite thing is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without having to smell them.”

—
Penn Jillette

“Sometimes I think the Web is a big plot to keep people like me away from normal society.”

—
Scott Adams

“Looking at the proliferation of personal Web pages on the Net, it looks like very soon everyone on Earth will have 15 megabytes of fame.”

—
M. G. Sriram

“Common knowledge” is frequently wrong. Here are some examples
.

M
YTH
: Cockroaches would survive a nuclear holocaust.
TRUTH
: Some scientists say that cockroach bodies contain very little water, which might protect them from radiation damage (although their offspring would be genetically mutated). But on an episode of
MythBusters
, 50 cockroaches were exposed to post-nuclear levels of radiation…and they all died within 24 hours.

MYTH
: If you think someone is an undercover cop, ask them. If they are, they have to tell you.

TRUTH
: It’s a common scene in movies: The criminal asks a suspicious character if he’s a cop and avoids entrapment. No such law exists. Undercover cops are allowed to lie to protect themselves.

MYTH
: Whatever else was said about Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy, at least he made the trains run on time.

TRUTH
: Pure propaganda. Italy’s railway system was upgraded between World War I and when Mussolini took office in 1922, so whatever improvements had been made weren’t his doing. Even so, the claim that the trains in Italy were always on time was an exaggeration.

MYTH
: Singer-songwriter Robert Zimmerman changed his name to Bob Dylan in order to honor one of his idols, Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.

TRUTH
: The name is an homage, but not to Thomas. Dylan had a favorite uncle named Dillon and was also a big fan of the TV western
Gunsmoke
, which featured a character—a U.S. Marshal—named Matt Dillon.

MYTH
: When you’re hungry, your stomach rumbles.

TRUTH
: It’s not your stomach making the noise—it’s actually your small intestine. The small intestine is what’s behind your belly button; most of your stomach sits behind the lower ribs.

…or worst nightmare
?

B
OUNCY DOG.
A family in York, England, reported their bull terrier Harvey missing. At first, they had no idea how he’d escaped—there were no signs of him digging his way under the fence or finding a hole in it. They finally figured out that Harvey had bounced onto the trampoline in the backyard, over the backyard fence, into the neighbor’s yard, and away.

STICKY DOG.
One day, Pamela Panting was playing fetch with Hector, her Great Dane puppy. The game ended when Hector lost sight of the two-foot-long tree branch Panting had thrown. The next morning, Hector wouldn’t eat and was drooling excessively, so Panting took him to a veterinarian. An X-ray revealed the problem: Hector hadn’t lost the two-foot-long stick, he’d swallowed it. Cost to remove the branch: $4,000.

CRIME DOG.
In Waukesha, Wisconsin, a drug-sniffing German Shepherd police dog named Officer Nutz broke out of his kennel, ran to a nearby supermarket, went through the automatic doors, grabbed a package of prime rib, and ran back outside, where he attacked the raw meat. Officer Nutz was captured on store security cameras; the police department placed him on administrative leave.

EMBARRASSING DOG.
The Milner family of Dorset, England, was playing around with Google Earth, an Internet service that displays satellite photos of nearly any location on the planet. They looked up their home and saw a mysterious brown blob on their front lawn. The Milners finally came to realize what that brown lump was: Boris, their bull mastiff. At 200 pounds, the dog was so overweight that he could be seen from outer space.

TRAITOR DOGS.
Police in Marion Oaks, Florida, went to the home of Wayne Huff to arrest him on wire fraud charges. Huff came to the door with his two dogs and resisted arrest, so the police used force. The struggle continued as the cops dragged Huff into his front yard. Both of Huff’s dogs then attacked him, biting him on his arm, back, leg, and ear. The bites subdued him enough to be peaceably taken away by the police.

You know the names. Here’s a look at the people behind them
.

C
HARLES WALGREEN
In 1896, 23-year-old Walgreen lost a finger in an accident at the Galesburg, Illinois, shoe factory where he worked. Suddenly unemployed and disabled, Walgreen took the advice of his doctor, who suggested he become a pharmacist. Walgreen got his license and in 1901 moved to Chicago to work for a pharmacist named Issac Blood. Upon Blood’s retirement, Walgreen bought Blood’s store and changed its name to Walgreen’s. He began to acquire other stores and eventually built one of the country’s first pharmacy chains. Among Walgreen’s other innovations were adding lunch counters, soda fountains, and grocery and household items to his pharmacies. By 1927 there were 110 Walgreen’s stores. Today, there are more than 6,000.

In 1863 Robert, an army major, was asked to preside over an organizational meeting at his church in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Because the attendees were from different parts of the country, and all were familiar with different rules for how to conduct a meeting, Robert came up with his own rules: a call to order, roll call, reading of last meeting’s minutes, officers’ reports, committee reports, important new business, unfinished business, announcements, and adjournment. He thought the idea would have universal appeal, but nobody would publish
Robert’s Rules of Order
. So in 1876, he paid for the first printing himself. It sold out in four months. Since then, the book has sold more than 4.5 million copies, and Robert’s system is the universal standard for how meetings are conducted.

In 1895, 18-year-old Lithuanian orphan Lena Himmelstein moved to New York and found work in a sweatshop for a dollar a week. In 1899 she married a man named David Bryant. When he died five years later Lena Bryant borrowed $300 from her brother-inlaw and opened a dressmaking business. The bank misspelled
“Lena” as “Lane,” but she liked the way it sounded so she called her business Lane Bryant and opened a store in Manhattan (she lived in the back). Bryant found a niche when, at the request of a pregnant customer, she made a dress fitted with an elastic waistband and an accordion skirt. Maternity wear was her specialty until 1914, when she discovered another ignored demographic: plus-size women. Sold via catalog (to “respect privacy”), Lane Bryant had annual sales of $5 million by 1923. When Bryant died in 1951, it was a $200 million company.

Craig worked for a series of fitness clubs, ultimately becoming an executive at Body Contour, a chain in the South. In 1982 she presented a weight-loss program based on nutrition, one-on-one counseling, and individualized menu plans to her bosses at Body Contour. They turned her down, so she started her own company. Because of a non-compete clause in her contract, Craig opened her first 12 Jenny Craig Weight Loss Centers in Australia. By 1985 the noncompete clause had expired, so Craig expanded to the U.S., opening 12 centers in Los Angeles. There was competition (Nutri-System, Weight Watchers), but Craig’s centers offered something others didn’t: frozen diet meals sold on the premises. Five years later, the company was national with annual revenues of $350 million. Craig sold the company in 2002; today it’s owned by Nestle.

In 1944, 32-year-old chemical engineer Wilbert Gore got a job with DuPont Labs. In 1957 clients from the fledgling computer industry asked DuPont to develop cables insulated with a water-resistant and heat-maintaining substance called polytetrafluororoethylene (PTFE), better known as Teflon. DuPont declined, so Gore quit his job and started W.L. Gore & Associates in the basement of his house to make the cable. Gore landed many lucrative cable-making contracts, including one with NASA, but he developed more than 2,000 other products out of PFTE as well, including artificial blood vessels and a windproof fabric he called Gore-Tex. The first Gore-Tex product: a tent in 1976. It’s now used for shirts, jackets, pants, and other outdoor gear. An outdoorsman himself, Gore died at the age of 74 in 1986 while backpacking in Wyoming.

Giant corporations are as much a part of our culture as movies, music, and sports. Many become household names and then, one day…they’re gone
.

B
EATRICE FOODS
The Rise:
In 1894 two Nebraska businessmen formed the Beatrice Creamery, a wholesaler of milk, eggs, and butter purchased from local farmers. By 1910 Beatrice controlled nine Midwestern creameries and shipped their products nationwide. By 1930 the company had 32 dairy plants that churned out 27 million gallons of Meadow Gold brand milk each year. In the 1950s, the company—now called Beatrice Foods—aggressively expanded by purchasing other established food brands, including Jolly Rancher candy, Dannon yogurt, Tropicana orange juice, Clark Bars, Butterball, and Wesson vegetable oil. In the 1970s, Beatrice expanded beyond food, purchasing Avis Rent-a-Car, Playtex, Airstream, and Samsonite. By 1984 the company had annual sales of $12 billion.

The Fall:
Beatrice was so successful that others wanted a piece of the business. In 1984 a private equity firm called Kohlberg Kravis Roberts began buying up large chunks of Beatrice stock, so much that KKR was able to place its representatives on Beatrice’s corporate board, which then helped direct the company’s “future path.” In other words, KKR staged a hostile takeover. By 1986 KKR owned all of Beatrice and had paid a total of only $8.7 billion for it. Over the next four years, KKR dismantled and sold off every individual division, product, and brand Beatrice once controlled. The majority of it was sold to Beatrice’s biggest competitor, ConAgra Foods.

The Rise:
Nash Motors, makers of the classic Roadster, purchased the Kelvinator Appliance Company in 1937. The resulting company, Nash-Kelvinator, bought the Hudson Motor Car Company in 1954 and became American Motors Corporation. The new company was valued at $198 million and was, at the time, the biggest merger in history. Nash CEO George Mason thought consolidation of smaller brands was the only way to compete with the “Big
Three” car companies—GM, Ford, and Chrysler. In its first decade, AMC’s biggest seller was an old Nash model: the Rambler. They added the Rambler American in the late ’50s and the sporty AMX and the Javelin in the early ’60s. But in 1970 the company decided the best way to carve out a niche was differentiation. Since the Big Three made big gas-guzzlers, AMC made fuel-efficient compacts. Tiny AMC hatchbacks like the Gremlin, Hornet, and Pacer, while ugly and prone to mechanical problems, sold well enough to become icons of the 1970s. Attractive to consumers during the ’70s gas shortage, more than 700,000 Gremlins and 900,000 Hornets were sold during the decade. AMC also purchased Jeep from Kaiser Motors in 1970, and the popularity of that brand helped keep the company afloat—just barely—into the 1980s. But for all their efforts, AMC never climbed out of fourth place.