Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader (30 page)

In 1950 the Ralston Purina Company started using a cooking extruder to make their Chex cereal. Here’s how it worked: ingredients were pushed through a tube, cooked under high pressure, and puffed up with air. This allowed Chex to stay crisp when milk was added.

At about the same time, manufacturers were getting complaints about the appearance, texture, and digestibility of dry dog food. Purina’s pet food division borrowed an extruder from the cereal division and experimented with it in secret for three years. The result: Purina Dog Chow. Dogs loved it, it digested well, and it quickly became the number one dog food in the nation—and still is today.

NO PEOPLE FOOD FOR YOU

In the early 1950s, Ken-L Ration made the jump from radio to TV advertising, running commercials on wholesome shows like
The Adventures of the Ozzie and Harriet.
(“This dog food uses only USDA, government-inspected horse meat!”)

In 1964 the Pet Food Institute, a lobbying group for the now-gigantic pet food industry, began a campaign to get people to stop feeding their dogs anything
but
packaged dog food. They funded “reports” that appeared in magazines, detailing the benefits of processed dog food, and even produced a radio spot about “the dangers of table scraps.”

The dog food industry was spending an incredible $50 million a year on advertising. Commercials centered around the “beef wars,” with competing companies all claiming to have the most pure beef. (
Bonanza
star Lorne Greene did a TV commercial for Alpo…holding a sirloin steak.)

In the 1960s and 1970s, factors such as increased numbers of breeds and rising crime rates made dog ownership skyrocket. By 1975 there were more than 1,500 dog foods on the market.

Today, more than 1,600 square miles of soybeans, 2,100 square miles of corn, and 1.7 million tons of meat and poultry products are made into pet food every year. There are more than 65 million dogs in the U.S., and pet food is an $11 billion industry…and growing.

Drew Barrymore’s first acting role: A commercial for
Gaines Burgers
. (She was 11 months old.)

COOL BILLIONS

There are 1,000,000,000 reasons to read this page.

• If you had $1 billion and spent $1,000 a day, it would take 2,740 years to spend it.

• One billion people would fill roughly 305 Chicagos.

• It took from the beginning of time until 1800 for the world’s population to reach one billion, but only 130 years more for it to reach two billion—in 1930.

• One billion people lined up side by side would stretch for 568,200 miles.

• First magazine in history to sell a billion copies:
TV Guide
, in 1974.

• More than one billion people on Earth are between the ages of 15 and 24.

• One Styrofoam cup contains one billion molecules of CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons)—harmful to the Earth’s ozone layer.

• Nearly one billion Barbie dolls (including friends and family) have been sold since 1959. Placed head to toe, the dolls would circle the Earth more than three times.

• To cook one billion pounds of pasta, you’d need two billion gallons of water—enough to fill nearly 75,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.

• The first billion-dollar corporation in the U.S. emerged in 1901—United States Steel.

• The ratio of billionaires to the rest of the U.S. population is 1 to 4.5 million.

• A single ragweed plant can release a billion grains of pollen.

• One teaspoon of yogurt contains more than one billion live and active bacteria.

• The first year in which the U.S. national debt exceeded $1 billion was 1863.

• There are about one billion red blood cells in two to three drops of blood.

• It’s estimated that by 2005 there will be more than one billion cell phone users.

• Earth’s oceans will completely disappear in about one billion years due to rising temperatures from a maturing sun.

Soak up this fact: Sponges form an amazing 99% of all marine species.

DUMB JOCKS?

Sports stars say the darnedest things. Are they trying to be funny…or just not all there? You be the judge.

“My wife doesn’t care what I do when I’m away as long as I don’t have a good time.”

—
Lee Trevino

“Be sure to put some of them neutrons on it.”

—
Mike Smith, baseball player,
instructing a waitress on how to prepare his salad

“This taught me a lesson, but I’m not sure what it is.”

—
John McEnroe

“I want all the kids to do what I do, to look up to me. I want all the kids to copulate me.”

—
Andre Dawson, Chicago Cubs outfielder

“They shouldn’t throw at me. I’m the father of five or six kids.”

—
Tito Fuentes, baseball player,
after getting hit by a pitch

“That’s so when I forget how to spell my name, I can still find my clothes.”

—
Stu Grimson, hockey player,
on why he has a photo of himself above his locker

“I’ve won on every level, except college and pro.”

—
Shaquille O’Neal

“I could have been a Rhodes Scholar, except for my grades.”

—
Duffy Daugherty, Michigan State football coach

“People think we make $3 million and $4 million a year. They don’t realize that most of us only make $500,000.”

—
Pete Incaviglia, baseball player

“If history repeats itself, I think we can expect the same thing again.”

—
Terry Venables, professional skier

“After a day like this, I’ve got the three Cs: I’m comfortable, I’m confident, and I’m seeing the ball well.”

—
Jay Buhner, outfielder,
after a perfect 5-for-5 day

“Just remember the words of Patrick Henry—‘Kill me or let me live.’”

—
coach Bill Peterson,
giving a halftime pep talk

Huh? The following statement is true. The previous statement was false.

CELEBRITY RUMORS

Oh, those poor celebrities. Just because they’re out in the public eye, people want to make up weird stories about them. At the BRI we hear rumors about celebrities all the time, and we decided to look into some to see if they were true.

R
UMOR:
Movie critic Gene Siskel, half of TV’s Siskel and Ebert, was buried with his thumb pointing upward (“Two Thumbs Up” was the Siskel and Ebert trademark), as he’d requested in his will.

HOW IT SPREAD:
From a UPI news story that began circulating over the Internet shortly after Siskel’s death in February 1999. “Gene wanted to be remembered as a Thumbs-Up kind of guy,” Siskel’s attorney was quoted as telling the wire service.

THE TRUTH:
The “news” article is fake. It was probably intended as a joke, but at some point people started passing it around as if it were true. Just to be safe, though, reporters at
Time Out New York
obtained a copy of Siskel’s will from the Chicago court where it was filed. Their finding: “There are no digit-placement requests in the critic’s last wishes.”

RUMOR:
Vanna White of
Wheel of Fortune
fame starred in a stage version of
The Diary of Anne Frank.
Her performance was so bad that when the Nazis came in the house, people in the audience stood up and shouted, “She’s in the attic!”

HOW IT SPREAD:
By word of mouth and on the Internet.

THE TRUTH:
Another example of a story that started out as a joke but came to be passed along as true. White has never played Anne Frank on stage, on TV, in the movies, or anyplace else. Over the years, the “She’s in the attic!” story has been attributed to numerous actresses of questionable talent, including Pia Zadora.

RUMOR:
Cher had her lowest pair of ribs surgically removed to make her waist look slimmer.

HOW IT SPREAD:
In 1988
Paris Match
magazine published a story claiming that she’d had the procedure done. From there the story was published in newspapers and magazines all over the world. (Jane Fonda, Tori Spelling, Janet Jackson, and even Marilyn Manson are rumored to have had the same procedure.)

The Roma (derogatorily called “Gypsies”) began wandering in the 11th century, originating from India.

THE TRUTH:
Neither Cher nor anyone else could have the procedure done even if they wanted to, because no such procedure exists. Cher got so fed up with the rumor that she sued
Paris Match
(they retracted the story). She even hired a physician to examine her for evidence of the “procedure” (there was none) and release his findings to the public. It didn’t do any good—the rumor persists to this day.

RUMOR:
Playboy
magazine founder Hugh Hefner used to place a number of small stars on the cover of his magazine to indicate how many times he’d slept with that month’s cover girl. If he found her satisfactory, he placed them
inside
the “P” of the magazine’s mast-head. If he was disappointed, he placed them
next
to the “P.”

HOW IT SPREAD:
By word of mouth from one fantasizing
Playboy
reader to another. The story was helped along by the fact that from 1955 until 1979, there really
were
a series of small stars on the cover, sometimes inside the “P”…and sometimes alongside it.

THE TRUTH:
The stars were marketing codes—
Playboy
was published in several different regional editions, and the company used different numbers of stars to identify the different editions. The stars were always printed in a dark color. If the cover was a dark color, the masthead was white and the stars went inside the “P.” But on a light-colored cover, the stars went alongside it.

RUMOR:
Iron Eyes Cody, the famous “crying Indian” of the Keep America Beautiful anti-littering ad campaign of the 1970s…was actually Italian.

HOW IT SPREAD:
By word of mouth. Cody, who died at the age of 94 in 1999, went to his grave insisting his father was a member of the Cherokee tribe and his mother was full-blooded Cree.

THE TRUTH:
When reporters from the
New Orleans Times-Picayune
went to Cody’s hometown of Kaplan, Louisiana, in 1996 to check birth records, they found that he’d actually been born Espero DeCorti, to Italian immigrant parents. DeCorti assumed Indian identities in the 1920s to get jobs in Hollywood westerns. Once “Iron Eyes” became a Native American, he never stopped pretending. As DeCorti’s half-sister May Abshire remembered of their childhood, “He always said he wanted to be an Indian.”

HOW’D YOU METER?

A few strange—yet 100% real—measuring devices.

L
ICK-O-METER

Remember the commercial that asked, “How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?” This device from
WonderfullyWacky.com
answers the all-important question. Insert a lollipop into the counter and start licking—an LCD readout tells you how many licks you’ve licked. Bonus: It’s also a key chain.

BOA CONSTRICT-O-METER

As a gimmick for an upcoming TV special, producers asked scientists at Carnegie Mellon University for a way to measure a snake’s squeezing power. Connected to a laptop computer, the quarter-sized device was put between a Burmese python and its prey—a frozen 10-pound rabbit. The results: About 12 pounds per square inch.

STING-O-METER

The USDA patented this inexpensive device for beekeepers so they can tell whether they’re dealing with gentle European honeybees or the dangerous “Africanized” kind (they look virtually the same). This simple black plastic container is swung in front of the hive. An electronic sensor inside counts how many “hits” are made by attacking bees over 10 seconds. Too many hits? Run.

SPAWN-O-METER

Dr. Phil Lobel of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts designed this underwater microphone to listen in on sounds made by fish. What’s he listening for? According to Lobel, some species produce a shrill shuddering whistle when they mate.

GRUNT-O-METER

The British newspaper
The Sun
claimed to have set up this device to measure the loudness of the grunts made by tennis star Monica Seles during play at Wimbledon. The paper reported that the star had a grunt volume of 82 decibels, somewhere “between a pneumatic drill and a diesel train.”

In the 1860s, Thomas Edison developed a device to electrocute cockroaches.

REAL TOYS OF THE CIA

Uncle John loves those clever spy gadgets in the James Bond movies devised by Q. It turns out that some of them are real. Here are a few actual spy tools.

I
T LOOKS LIKE:
A cigarette

BUT IT’S REALLY:
A .22-caliber gun

DESCRIPTION:
This brand of cigarette packs a powerful puff. Intended as an escape tool, the weapon only carries a single round, but with good aim it can inflict a lethal wound from close range. To fire the cigarette, the operator must twist the filtered end counterclockwise, then squeeze the same end between the thumb and forefinger. Warning: Don’t shoot the weapon in front of your face or body—it has a nasty recoil.

IT LOOKS LIKE:
A pencil

BUT IT’S REALLY:
A .22-caliber pistol

DESCRIPTION:
Like the cigarette gun, this camouflaged .22 comes preloaded with a single shot. The weapon is fired in the same manner as the cigarette: simply turn the pencil’s eraser counterclockwise and squeeze. The only difference between the weapons is that the pencil has a greater firing distance—up to 30 feet.