Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (63 page)

BUBBLE TEA

If you live in a city or college town, bubble tea may not seem so unusual anymore: Shops selling the drink have been popping up all over North America since the 1990s. Also called pearl milk tea or boba tea, it’s is basically a mixture of instant black, red, or green tea, fruit flavoring, and creamer (dairy or non-dairy), into which a generous handful of “boba balls” are dropped. The bobas (corrupted into English as “bubbles”) make the drink chewy. About a quarter-inch in diameter, they’re made from a gummy blend of tapioca and seaweed powder. Alone, the bobas pack about 2 calories each, but a pint of bubble tea is around 300 calories. Invented in the 1980s in Taiwan, the drink spread through Asia, and then to every city in the world with an Asian population. It’s usually served in a disposable cup with a clear plastic lid—and an industrial-size straw to accommodate the passing of the bulbous bobas.

Nauseous by nature: About 3 lbs. of your body weight is bacteria and parasites.

GEODUCK

Pronounced “gooey duck,” this is the world’s largest burrowing clam. Sometimes called a “mud duck” or “king clam,” it gets its name from a Native American word meaning “dig deep.” (Alternate spellings:
gweduc
,
geoduc
, and
guiduch
.) Geoducks live in the sandy beaches off the Pacific Northwest, feeding on the plankton and algae that wash over them. The clam’s most notable feature: its protruding
siphon
, which can be more than three feet long. This part of the geoduck is soft, fatty, and especially chewy, so it’s often deep-fried. True to their Indian name, geoducks burrow far below the surface and have to be removed from the sand with manually operated water jets. The wholesale price of about $15 per pound reflects the difficulty of digging them up. The delicacy is especially popular in Asia, where it’s served boiled, stir-fried or raw, sashimi style.

MOCHI

This paste made of glutinous rice is eaten year-round in Asia, but is traditionally most popular during the Japanese New Year. In fact,
mochi
-pounding, or
mochitsuk
i, is one of the biggest events of the New Year’s celebration. Here’s how it’s made: Sweetened rice is soaked overnight, then cooked and pounded with wooden mallets into a sticky, elastic heap. Then it’s hand rolled into small balls and formed into shapes. Although it’s commonly baked like pastry and eaten as a snack, or used in savory dishes (often roasted and added to soups and noodles, for example), in the United States it’s most often served as a pastry-like shell filled with ice cream and sold frozen. First mass-produced by the Japanese food conglomerate Lotte in 1981, mochi ice cream has become increasingly popular in the West—pastel-tinted shells about the size of a small hen’s egg, filled with vanilla, strawberry,
adzuki
(red bean), or
matcha
(green tea) ice cream.

CODFISH SPERM SOUP

You read that right. This Japanese delicacy, also known as cod’s milk soup, is composed primarily of the sperm of the cod fish. It can be served raw on a plate or heated in a bowl. (Warm, it has about the same consistency as clam chowder.) Its Japanese name,
shirako
, means “white children.”

One billion $1 bills could buy 160 M1 tanks, and would weigh as much as 15 of them.

CROSS THAT BRIDGE

Random facts about something you never think about...until you have to cross a river
.

• Three types of bridges: a beam bridge (a single beam, like a log over a brook), an arch bridge (the arch is below the roadway), and a suspension bridge (the road deck is hung on cables suspended from towers).

• Oldest bridge still in use in the United States: the stone Frankford Avenue Bridge in Philadelphia. It was built for horse traffic in 1697; it’s used for car traffic today.

• Japan’s Akashi-Kaikyo Bridge is the world’s longest cable suspension bridge. It took 10 years to build (at a cost of $6 billion) and has the world’s highest toll: $29.

• Contrary to popular belief, covered bridges weren’t covered to protect travelers from the weather. Most covered bridges were built out of wood. The purpose of the roof was to protect the wooden deck from the elements.

• World’s busiest bridge: India’s Howrah Bridge near Kolkata (Calcutta). A million travelers walk across it daily.

• World’s saddest bridge: San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. To date, more than 1,400 people have plunged to their deaths from it.

•
Gephyrophobia
is the fear of crossing bridges.

• The Maryland Transportation Authority, which operates the four-mile Chesapeake Bay Bridge, offers a service for gephyrophobes: They’ll arrange for someone to drive you (and your car) over it for you.

• The longest bridge in the world is the Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge, linking Shanghai and Nanjing in East China. The bridge is 102 miles long and almost a football field wide (260 feet). It runs mostly over land and was built to accommodate high-speed trains.

• A week after the Brooklyn Bridge opened in May 1883, a panicked pedestrian shouted out that the bridge was collapsing. Hundreds of people on the bridge also panicked and fled, trampling 15 pedestrians to death.

Giant tortoises never stop growing.

HE SAID...

Men think they’re sooooo funny
.

“Men are superior to women. For one thing, men can urinate from a speeding car.”

—
Will Durst

“Women want to fight men for equal pay, but how often do they fight a man for the check?”

—
Bill Maher

“Women exist in the main solely for the propagation of the species.”

—
Arthur Schopenhauer

“Charity is taking an ugly girl to lunch.”

—
Warren Beatty

“I don’t think a prostitute is more moral than a wife, but they are doing the same thing.”

—
Prince Philip

“Henry VIII didn’t get divorced, he just had his wives’ heads chopped off when he got tired of them. That’s a good way to get rid of a woman—no alimony.”

—
Ted Turner

“I hate pants. Neither my mother nor my wife is allowed to go out with me in pants.”

—
Arnold Schwarzenegger

“Marriage is the most expensive way for the average man to get laundry done.”

—
Burt Reynolds

“May there never be in my home a woman who knows more than a woman ought to know.”

—
Euripides

“I listen to feminists and all these radical gals. These women just need a man in the house to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home.”

—
Jerry Falwell

“I love the women’s movement, especially when I’m walking behind it.”

—
Rush Limbaugh

“Woman inspires us to great things, and prevents us from achieving them.”

—
Alexandre Dumas

Bee-bee boomers: Honeybees can be trained to detect explosives.

SHE SAID...

Women think they’re sooooo smart
.

“Men should be like Kleenex: soft, strong, disposable.”

—
Cher

“Don’t accept rides from strange men—and remember that all men are as strange as hell.”

—
Robin Morgan

“Men are beasts, and even beasts don’t behave as they do.”

—
Brigitte Bardot

“If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males.”

—
Mary Daly

“Behind every successful man is a surprised woman.”

—
Maryon Pearson

“The male function is to produce sperm. We now have sperm banks.”

—
Valerie Solanas

“The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness...can be trained to do most things.”

—
Jilly Cooper

“Men know everything—all of them, all the time—no matter how stupid or inexperienced or ignorant they are.”

—
Andrea Dworkin

“If men can run the world, why can’t they stop wearing neckties? How intelligent is it to start the day by tying a little noose around your neck?”

—
Linda Ellerbee

“A man’s home may seem to be castle on the outside. Inside it is more often his nursery.”

—
Claire Booth Luce

“Men think monogamy is something you make dining tables out of.”

—
Kathy Lette

“A man is like sitting in a bathtub. Once you get used to him, he’s not so hot.”

—
Kathryn Maye

The Los Angeles coroner’s department has a gift shop.

THAT SMARTS!

According to the latest research, you may not be as smart as you think you are
.

S
UPERIORITY COMPLEX
“One of the painful things about our time,” observed 20th-century philosopher Bertrand Russell, “is that those who feel certainty are stupid and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.” In 1999 Justin Kruger and David Dunning, two professors at Cornell University, became intrigued by this paradox. They took a personal and professional interest in the topic after running across a survey of fellow college professors. The survey’s finding: 94 percent believed they were “above average” when compared with their peers. (Statistically speaking, no more than half of any group can be above average.) Dunning and Kruger decided to test how some people—and often the wrong ones—arrive at a wildly inflated view of their own abilities.

YOU HAVE BEEN TESTED...AND FOUND WANTING

Dunning and Kruger started small with a sample that could be easily measured. They cornered Cornell students as they walked out of a class in which they’d just taken a test and asked them to estimate how well they’d scored and to what degree they felt they’d mastered the course material. When the professors compared the actual scores to the students’ predictions, they were floored. Not only had the lowest-performing students believed they’d done better than they actually had, they vastly overestimated themselves. In fact, those who had scored in the 12th percentile (that is, lower than 88 percent of their fellow students) believed they’d scored in the
60th
percentile and beaten out nearly two-thirds of their classmates.

Just as surprising, though, was that those who did the best
under
estimated how well they’d done. They weren’t as far off as their underachieving counterparts, but they knocked as much as 20 percentage points off their scores. It turned out that
all
of the groups thought they ranked in the range of the 60th to 70th percentile.

Matt Damon refused to be involved in the
Bourne Conspiracy
video game. (It was too violent.)

I CAN DO ANYTHING YOU CAN DO BETTER

When Dunning and Kruger interviewed the students in depth, they discovered that those who were the least competent at mastering the subject matter were also the least able to define what it meant to be competent in a given subject. Judging their own performances without understanding the criteria for success, they had no idea how profoundly they’d missed the mark.

But then why did the successful test takers underestimate their abilities? Well, it turned out that it wasn’t a matter of not recognizing what success looked like. Instead, they were tripped up by assuming that other students were in their league.

The two professors wondered if this perception/performance gap was unusually wide only among students, who might not have as much life experience as older adults, or if there was any chance they’d find it in other ages and situations as well. So they began testing other people on a variety of skills: the ability to think logically, for example, or the ability to judge how funny a joke would be to an audience. In almost every case, they found that the least competent people overestimated their abilities by 40 to 50 percentage points.

This same principle tended to hold true in a variety of ages and situations, including sports and games such as tennis and chess, but most alarmingly in life-or-death skills like driving, medical proficiency, and laboratory work. They also identified a dynamic that allowed bad performers to remain bad: The less-talented are convinced they’re above average, so they tend to rest on their non-existent laurels instead of working toward a higher level of competence.

There is hope, however. The researchers discovered that when the least-knowledgeable groups were taught what was considered “competent” in their field, they became substantially better at judging their abilities compared to others’. So, ironically, the smarter people became, the lower their self-regard became. The truth might hurt, but it can also set you free.

THE GRAND ILLUSION

Similar to the Dunning-Kruger effect is the “illusory superiority effect,” a delusion that leads large numbers of people to believe
they’re above average. And it shows up in survey after survey.

Leonardo da Vinci believed that working under a purple light increased concentration.

• For example, 68 percent of University of Nebraska faculty believed themselves not only above average, but in the
top 25 percent
of the teaching profession.

• At high-octane Stanford University, 87 percent of the students believed that they were above the general population average
and
better than the typical Stanford student.