Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader (17 page)

If you’re average, you spend about five years of your life eating.

FILTHY WATER PEOPLE

Did you ever get a lousy nickname that stuck? You’re in good company. Many Native American tribes are known today by unflattering names given to them by their neighbors. Here are a few examples
.

C
HEYENNE
Meaning:
Red-Talkers
Origin:
This Great Plains tribe called themselves the
Tsitsistas
, which means the “Beautiful People.” The neighboring Dakota people may have agreed, but they couldn’t understand what the Tsitsistas were saying, because they spoke a different language. They called the Tsitsistas the “Red-Talkers,” meaning “those who speak unintelligibly,” or, in Dakota, the
Cheyenne
.

APACHE

Meaning:
Enemy

Origin:
Like many Native American tribes, this one, famous for legendary chief Geronimo, called themselves “the People”—
Dine
(di-nay) in their native language. But the neighboring tribe, the Zuni—victim of many of their war parties—called them “the enemy,” or
apachu
. Over time, that evolved into their permanent name, the
Apache
.

ARAPAHO

Meaning:
Tattooed People

Origin:
These Plains Indians called themselves the
Inuna-ina
, which translates to “the People.” Their neighbors, the Crow, identified them by their distinctive body markings and called them “Tattooed People,” or, in their language,
Arapahos
.

HURON

Meaning:
Boar’s Head

Origin:
This tribe lived in the area between Lakes Huron and Ontario and called themselves the
Wyandot
, meaning “Those from the Peninsula.” But the French called them
Hures
, or “Boar’s Head,” because the men in the tribe wore their hair in bristly spikes that resembled boar’s hair—and
Hures
eventually became
Huron
.

India ink comes from…China.

WINNEBAGO

Meaning:
Filthy Water People

Origin:
These Great Lakes Indians were named by the
Chippewa
people. Their own name was
Horogióthe
, or “Fish-Eaters.” But the Chippewa called them the
Winnebago—
the “Filthy Water People,” possibly because the Horogióthe painted themselves with clay when going to war, which made them appear to have bathed in muddy water.

MOHAWK

Meaning:
Man-Eaters

Origin:
This tribe from upper New York State and eastern Canada called themselves
Kaniengehagaóthe
, or “Flint People.” That proved to be a very difficult word to pronounce for Europeans, who called them what their neighbors, the Narragansett, called them:
Mohawk
, or “Man-Eaters.” Why? They engaged in ritualistic cannibalism.

GROS VENTRES

Meaning:
Big Bellies

Origin:
This tribe from what is now Montana and Saskatchewan called themselves the
Ahahninin
, or “White Clay People.” When early French fur trappers and traders asked members of neighboring tribes about the name, they responded—in Native American sign language—by sweeping their hand out from their chest and downward, making what appeared to be a “belly” shape. What were they saying? Historians believe they were saying “Waterfall People,” referring to the part of the Saskatchewan River where they lived. The French mistook the gesture and called them the name they are still called today, the
Gros Ventres—
“Big Bellies.”

*        *        *

“Names are not always what they seem. The common Welsh name Bzjxxllwcp is pronounced Jackson.”

—Mark Twain

The Gregorian calendar is accurate to within half a day per 1,000 years.

WHAT IS LOVE?

We have no idea. Here’s what some other people think
.

“Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your heart or burn down your house, you can never tell.”

—Joan Crawford

“Love doesn’t make the world go ’round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile.”

—Franklin P. Jones

“Love is the irresistible desire to be desired irresistibly.”

—Louis Ginsburg

“Love is the great beautifier.”

—Louisa May Alcott

“Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.”

—H. L. Mencken

“All love is transference, nothing more than two normal neurotics mingling their infantile libidos with one another.”

—
Sigmund Freud

“Brief is life, but love is long.”

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“Love is everything it’s cracked up to be.”

—Erica Jong

“Life is a flower of which love is the honey.”

—Victor Hugo

“Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.”

—Goethe

“Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve the continuation of the species.”

—
W. Somerset Maugham

“Love is the reason you were born.”

—Dorothy Fields

“The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can never end.”

—Benjamin Disraeli

“True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen.”

—La Rochefoucauld

“Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.”

—Leo Tolstoy

“Love stinks.”

—
J. Geils Band

Q: What has 18 legs and catches flies? A: A baseball team.

FOUNDING FATHERS

You already know the names. Here’s who they belong to
.

J
OHANN ADAM BIRKENSTOCK
Background:
Birkenstock was an 18th-century German shoemaker.

Famous Name:
Birkenstock’s family kept the shoemaking tradition going. In 1897 his grandson Konrad Birkenstock introduced a revolutionary concept in footware: the first shoe with a contoured insole that reflected the shape of the human foot. In 1965 Konrad’s grandson Karl took the idea further and created the Birkenstock sandal. Introduced to the United States in 1966, it became the unofficial official footwear of the hippie generation.

ELMER (THE BULL)

Background:
In the 1930s, Elsie the Cow was the logo for Borden dairy products. The company had a live cow named Elsie for personal appearances. There was so much demand for Elsie that Borden had to find another cow to make appearances, too. They found a bull instead, named him Elmer, and called him Elsie’s “husband.”

Famous Name:
Borden’s chemical division originally wanted to use Elsie as “spokescow” for their new white glue. But the dairy division didn’t want Elsie to be associated with a nonfood product (especially one that
looked
like milk). So they decided to use Elsie’s husband…and called it Elmer’s Glue-All.

THOMAS JACOB HILFIGER

Background:
Born in Elmira, New York, in 1951, Tommy knew what he wanted to do from an early age: design clothing.

Famous Name:
While still in high school, he worked at a gas station, saved his money to buy used jeans, which he resold to other kids. He used the money he earned to open a chain of hip clothing stores called People’s Place and got his start as a designer by telling the jeans-makers what styles would sell better. (He was right.) After working for other clothing companies for several years (Jordache fired him—they were wrong), he struck gold in 1985 with a line of urban-preppy clothing—Tommy Hilfiger.

P. T. Barnum staged the first international beauty contest.

RUDOLF DIESEL

Background:
Born in Paris in 1858, Diesel studied mechanical engineering in college. He then dedicated his life to creating efficient heat engines, and in 1893 published his design for a new internal combustion engine.

Famous Name:
At his wife’s suggestion, Diesel named the engine after himself. But the moderate fame and fortune he received from his design were short-lived. Plagued by ill health and legal battles over his patents, he lost most of his money. While traveling on a ship to England in 1913, Diesel threw himself overboard.

MARGE SPENCER

Background:
In 1947 a man named Max Adler decided to start a mail-order gift company. When designing his new catalog, he decided that Adler Gifts didn’t sound quite right.

Famous Name:
So he asked his secretary, Marge Spencer, if she wouldn’t mind lending her name to the catalog. She agreed and Spencer Gifts was born.

ENZO FERRARI

Background:
The man who created one of the world’s most sought-after sports cars began his transportation career shoeing mules for the Italian army in World War I.

Famous Name:
In the 1920s, Ferrari became one of Italy’s most famous race car drivers and a designer for the Alfa Romeo racing team. In 1929 he started his own racing team, building sports cars only to help finance the team. When he died in 1988, Ferrari had sold fewer than 50,000 cars.

TADAO KASHIO

Background: I
n 1946 Tadao founded Kashio Seisakusho, a company that specialized in manufacturing aircraft parts.

Famous Name:
His younger brother Toshio suggested they work on developing a calculator instead. So the Kashio brothers—there were four of them—used technology from telephone relay switching equipment to create an all-electric “gearless” calculator. (Up until that time, calculators used electricity to drive internal gears.) It took a decade of tinkering, but they introduced the Model 14-A calculator in 1957 and changed their name to…Casio Computer.

That stings! Human DNA and jellyfish DNA are 90% identical.

THE MAD BOMBER, PT. I

From our Dustbin of History files, the story of a city, a criminal psychiatrist, and a psycho with a grudge
.

S
PECIAL DELIVERY
On November 16, 1940, an unexploded bomb was found on a window ledge of the Consolidated Edison Building in Manhattan. It was wrapped in a very neatly hand-written note that read,

CON EDISON CROOKS—THIS IS FOR YOU.

The police were baffled: surely whoever delivered the bomb would know that the note would be destroyed if the bomb detonated. Was the bomb not meant to go off? Was the person stupid…or was he just sending a message?

No discernable fingerprints were found on the device and a brief search of company records brought no leads, so the police treated the case as an isolated incident by a crackpot, possibly someone who had a grievance with “Con Ed”—the huge company that provided New York City with all of its gas and electric power.

WAKE-UP CALL

Nearly a year later, another unexploded bomb was found lying in the street a few blocks from the Con Ed building, this one with an alarm clock fusing mechanism that had not been wound. Again the police had no leads and again they filed the case away—there were larger problems at hand: the war in Europe was escalating and U.S. involvement seemed imminent. Sure enough, three months later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, triggering America’s entry into World War II.

Shortly thereafter a strange, neatly written letter arrived at police headquarters in Manhattan:

I WILL MAKE NO MORE BOMB UNITS FOR THE DURATION OF THE WAR—MY PATRIOTIC FEELINGS HAVE MADE ME DECIDE THIS—I WILL BRING THE CON EDISON TO JUSTICE—THEY WILL PAY FOR THEIR DASTARDLY DEEDS…F. P.

True to his (or her) words, no more bombs showed up during the war, or for five years after that. But in that time at least 16 threat letters, all from “F. P.”, were delivered to Con Ed, as well as to movie theaters, the police, and even private individuals. Still, there were no bombs…until March 29, 1950.

Huh? Number of U.S. marine wildlife sanctuaries where fishing is illegal: zero.

CITY UNDER SIEGE

That day, a third unexploded bomb much more advanced than the previous two was found on the lower level of Grand Central Station. “F. P.” seemed to be sending the message that he (or she) had been honing his (or her) bomb-building skills over the last decade. Still, so far none of them had exploded. And police wondered: were these all just empty threats? That question was answered a month later when a bomb tore apart a phone booth at the New York Public Library. Over the next two years, four more bombs exploded around New York City. And try as they might to downplay the threat, the police couldn’t keep the press from running with the story. “The Mad Bomber” started to dominate headlines.

More bombs were found, and more angry letters—some neatly written, others created from block letters clipped from magazines—promised to continue the terror until Con Edison was “BROUGHT TO JUSTICE.”

Heading up the case was Police Inspector Howard E. Finney. He and his detectives had used every conventional police method they knew of, but the Mad Bomber was too smart for them. In December 1956, after a powerful explosion injured six people in Brooklyn’s Paramount Theater, Inspector Finney decided to do something unconventional.