Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader (14 page)

EMERGENCY CHAT.
On April 1, 1994, a prankster released a fake Associated Press news story claiming that a company called Century Communications was launching a new phone service to help pay for the cost of installing the 911 emergency service. “The 911 Chatline” would let callers “choose an area of the country, listen to 911 emergency calls, and discuss the details of the emergencies with each other as they happen…before police have even arrived.”

BARD BUCKS.
In 2000 the
Motley Fool
investment newsletter announced that William Shakespeare’s investment portfolio had been discovered among his remains and had been earning dividends and interest since his death in 1616. The
Fool
reported that the Bard had invested the equivalent of $100 in 1585 and had earned 6% per year. Current value of the portfolio: $18.7 billion.

Shocking news: There are about 500 species of fish capable of producing electricity.

SOFTWARE TO KEEP YOU UP NIGHTS.
In April 1992 Apple Computer announced that it was releasing an extension for its Macintosh operating system called “Caffeine Manager,” that would allow Macs to network with coffee makers and soda machines. “Users and programmers alike now can immediately have access to a wide variety of commercial beverages form their desktop, all with the familiar Macintosh mouse-driven interface,” the announcement read.

COME ON BACK.
While Glenn Howlett, general manager of community services in London, Ontario, was on vacation in 2003, three other city officials sent him a gag letter dated April 1 saying the deadline for the report he’d been working on had been pushed up and was now due in two weeks. Howlett cancelled the rest of his vacation and flew home to finish the report. The stress caused heart palpitations that eventually forced him into early retirement. When Howlett learned the letter was a joke, he filed a lawsuit that ended up costing the city $75,000 to resolve.

YOU’VE GOT MAIL.
In April 1999,
Red Herring
magazine ran an article about an entrepreneur named Yuri Maldini who had invented a way to send e-mails telepathically. When the interviewer asked Maldini how big the market for such an application would be, he paused and then replied, “I just e-mailed you my answer.” Later that afternoon the interviewer checked his e-mail and, sure enough, there it was: “It’s going to be huge, simply huge.”

TRAFFIC REPORT.
On April 1, 1991, the London
Times
reported a British government plan to ease traffic congestion on the M25, the highway that circles London, by forcing all traffic to move in one direction. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, they said, traffic would travel clockwise around the city; on Tuesdays and Thursdays, it would travel counterclockwise; and on weekends traffic would be allowed to travel in both directions, as before. The BBC was taken in by the ruse and broadcast interviews with irate motorists in the village of Swanscombe, Kent, who complained bitterly that on Tuesdays and Thursdays their 5-mile shopping trips to nearby Dartford would now be 127 miles long.

Q: What do you call a bear with no teeth? A: A gummy bear.

JARGON.COM

A few origins to help you brush up on your Web-cabulary
.

M
ODEM:
It’s short for “MOdulator-DEModulator.” Modulation refers to the process of converting the digital language that computers “speak” into the analog language of telephone lines. Demodulation is the reverse. (That high-pitched warbling sound modems make is digital language being translated into analog language.)

PHISHING:
Refers to people who “fish” the Internet using e-mails designed to acquire sensitive information such as credit card numbers and passwords. It was first used in the mid-1990s to describe people who used false data to get free AOL accounts, which they would then use to steal other members’ data for criminal purposes. Today it refers to any similar online scheme. The altered spelling comes from “phreaking,” a 1970s term for schemes that manipulated phone systems in order to get free long-distance service.

SURFING:
A librarian named Jean Armour Polly (a.k.a. “Net Mom”) wrote an article entitled “Surfing the Internet” for the University of Minnesota’s
Wilson Library Bulletin
in 1992. That’s the first published use of the phrase, and she is usually credited with coining it. But it had been used before—some people referred to “information surfing” on an early version on the Internet called the Usenet system in 1991. Why “surfing”? It may simply have come from “channel surfing” on TV, but some insiders claim it’s actually an homage to Vinton Cerf (pronounced “surf”), a computer engineer considered one of the fathers of the Internet.

COOKIE:
Cookies are small packets of data that are transferred to your computer when you visit a Web site. They’re used for storing information—your name, password, and shopping habits, for example—that your computer can access quickly if you revisit the site. The term originated in the 1970s with one of the earliest operating systems, UNIX (which is still in use today), which used “magic cookies” to identify users and make using the system faster.

The scientific term for left-handedness is
sinistrality
. Right-handedness is
dextrality
.

SPAM:
There are many theories about the origin of using the word “spam” to describe bulk or junk e-mail. One says that people on a very early, very slow, network communications system known as BITNET used to annoy each other by sending files containing the words to Monty Python’s “Spam Song,” and the term came to mean any similarly annoying use of the Internet. Another version says that a user on the popular mid-1980s system BBS (Bulletin Board System) claimed to be posting photographs of nude women. BITNET was also a very slow system, so downloading a photo could take up to an hour. And in this case, it wasn’t a photo of a naked woman—it was of a photo of a can of Spam. However the term originated, by the late 1980s it was common to say “someone spammed me.”

PING:
To “ping” a computer is to send it an “echo request” message and see how long it takes to respond, thereby testing how good the Internet connection is. The code that allows “pinging” was written by programmer Mike Muuss (he also helped create the architectural program CAD) as a freeware tool. He named it “ping” after the submariners’ term for a sonar signal.

BLOG:
Short for “weblog,” a type of Web site where entries are made similarly to a personal diary or journal (or log), covering a wide variety of subjects, from politics to sports to knitting. The term “weblog” was coined December 17, 1997, by blog pioneer Jorn Barger on his site,
Robotwisdom.com
. Fellow pioneer Peter Merholz at
Peterme.com
is credited with shortening it to “blog” in 1999, saying, “I’ve decided to pronounce the word ‘weblog’ as ‘wee’-blog. Or ‘blog’ for short.” It quickly spread and was soon being used as a verb—
to blog
. Merholz later said, “I like that it’s roughly onomatopoeic of vomiting. These sites (mine included) tend to be a kind of information upchucking.”

*        *        *

It ain’t what you don’t know that makes you look like a fool; it’s what you do know that ain’t so.

—
Appalachian proverb

What do Google, Apple, and
Amazon.com
have in common? They were all started in home garages.

A few forays into famous folks’ food fixations
.

• Three days a week,
Mariah Carey
eats only purple foods, such as plums, because they contain high levels of antioxidants, which she believes will stop her from developing wrinkles.

• Comedian
Paula Poundstone
eats six brown-sugar-and-cinnamon Pop-Tarts and drinks 16 cans of Diet Pepsi each day.

• Singer
Fiona Apple
eats split pea soup every day when she’s on tour.

• While he’s writing a book, author
Michael Crichton
eats the same thing for lunch every day to help him concentrate. When he was writing
Jurassic Park
, he ate egg salad sandwiches every day for nine months.

•
Billy Bob Thornton
supposedly eats only orange-colored foods.

•
Daphne Zuniga
(
Melrose Place
) used to eat fish daily, including sushi four times a week. After a severe bout of mercury poisoning, she no longer eats fish of any kind.

•
Ben Stiller
brings his own plastic-sealed bagels to restaurants and asks the staff to toast them.

• Avant-garde composer
Erik Satie
ate only white foods: eggs, sugar, shredded bones, animal fat, coconuts, rice, and white cheese. To drink: wine that had been boiled, then chilled.

•
Janine Turner
(
Northern Exposure
) has the same breakfast every day: a quesadilla and a Coke.

• Soccer player
David Beckham
has three refrigerators: One has only salad, one has all his other food, and the third has only Diet Coke. All the sodas are arranged symmetrically and in pairs.

• During the six-month shoot of the movie
What’s New, Pussycat?
,
Woody Allen
ate only potato soup and sole.

• French actress
Brigitte Bardot
says she needs to eat only once a day. It’s usually a croissant and a slice of toast.

POLI-TALKS

John F. Kennedy said, “Mothers want their sons to grow up to be president, but they don’t want them to become politicians in the process.” Here’s why
.

“I like the color red because it’s a fire. And I see myself as always being on fire.”

—
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger

“I will never apologize for the United States of America. I don’t care what the facts are.”

—
George H. W. Bush

“We have a lot of kids who don’t know what work means. They think work is a four-letter word.”

—
Hillary Clinton

“People tell me that Senator Edwards got picked to run as vice president for his good looks, sex appeal, and great hair. I say to them, ‘How do you think I got the job?’”

—
Dick Cheney

“I made no attempt to be inaccurate, but I want to be clear I was never attempting to be precise”

—
Josh Steiner, Treasury Chief, explaining comments leaked from his diary

“I was with some Vietnamese recently, and some of them were smoking two cigarettes at a time. That’s the kind of customers we need!”

—
Sen. Jesse Helms

“That’s George Washington. The interesting thing about him is that I read three or four books about him last year. Isn’t that interesting?”

—
George W. Bush, to a German reporter looking at Washington’s portrait

“I am not going to give you a number for it because it’s not my business to do intelligent work.”

—
Donald Rumsfeld

“Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans, a city that has been destroyed, things are going relatively well.”

—
Michael Brown, FEMA director

“I’m electable if you vote for me.”

—
Rep. Dennis Kucinich

An adult turkey has about 3,500 feathers.

MAKING
THE GODFATHER
, PT. I

The Godfather
is considered one of the best movies ever made—the American Film Institute ranks it #3, after
Citizen Kane
and
Casablanca.
The story of
how
it got made is just as good
.

B
OOKMAKER

In 1955 a pulp-fiction writer named Mario Puzo published his first novel,
The Dark Arena
, about an ex-GI and his German girlfriend who live in Germany after the end of World War II. The critics praised it, but it didn’t sell very many copies.

It took Puzo nine years to finish his next novel,
The Fortunate Pilgrim
, which told the story of an Italian immigrant named Lucia Santa who lives in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York City. After two bad marriages, Lucia is raising her kids alone and worries about her daughter, who has become too Americanized, and her son, who is being pulled into the Mafia.

Today
The Fortunate Pilgrim
is widely considered a classic work of Italian American fiction; Puzo himself considered it the best book he ever wrote. But it sold as poorly as
The Dark Arena—
together the two books had earned Puzo only about $6,500. By then he was 45 years old, $20,000 in debt, and tired of being broke. He wanted his next novel to be a success. “I looked around and said…I’d better make some money,” he recalled years later.

HIT MAN

Puzo figured that a story with an entire family of gangsters in it instead of only one would have more commercial appeal than
The Fortunate Pilgrim
had. He titled his third novel
Mafia
, and in a sign of how his fortunes were about to change, he received a $5,000 advance payment from the publisher. Then, after he’d completed only an outline and 114 pages, Paramount Pictures acquired the movie rights for $12,000 and agreed to pay an additional $50,000 if the movie actually got made.

Puzo’s decision to pack his story with wiseguys paid off.
Mafia
, by now retitled
The Godfather
, was a publishing phenomenon. The most successful novel of the 1970s, it spent 67 weeks on the bestseller list and sold more than 21 million copies before it even made it to the big screen.