Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader (35 page)

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Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute

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Beaver State
.
There were once so many beavers in Oregon that it became the official state animal. Sadly, there aren’t many left today—early settlers and trappers nearly eradicated the animal from the state.

Lone Star State
.
From 1836 to 1845, Texas was an independent republic. When it became a state in 1845, it kept its flag, which features a single, or “lone,” star.

Beehive State
.
Utah picked the beehive as its state logo, not because there’s a preponderance of bees there, but to represent industry and perseverance.

Green Mountain State
.
Vermont is home to the Green Mountains. In French,
Vermont
means “green” (
ver
) “mountain” (
mont
).

Old Dominion
.
Virginia became a British colony in 1607. It was among the English territories that remained loyal to the crown during the English civil war in the 1640s. King Charles II called his loyal lands his “old dominion.”

Rockhopper penguins can travel as far as five feet with one hop.

PERUVIAN PUNCH

Here’s a spirited piece of American history from the Culinary Division of the Bathroom Readers’ Institute
.

T
HE RUSH
In 1848 the total population of San Francisco was only 900. Then gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill, and the Gold Rush was on, luring thousands of fortune seekers to the area. By the time California entered the union as the 31st state in 1850, the population of San Francisco had exploded to 35,000. More than half of the new San Franciscans were foreigners who had sailed into the port, including hundreds of “ladies of the night” who had come from Peru to help the forty-niners spend the gold they dug out of the Sierra Nevadas. But the ladies weren’t the only Peruvian imports. Some of the food—and most of the brandy—consumed in the City by the Bay also came from that country, too.

Why Peru, and not the eastern United States? In 1850 the states were “united” in name only. The eastern portion stretched from Texas back to the Atlantic; the western part comprised California and the Oregon Territory. There was no railroad across the thousand-mile gap, and no Panama Canal. Goods from the East had to be shipped all the way around the horn of South America. Peru, on the north end of South America, was much closer, so shipping its goods to California was cheaper and faster.

Pisco, a brandy from the town of the same name, was the most popular import from that South American republic. And one of the most popular places to drink it was the Bank Exchange and Billiard Saloon at the corner of Montgomery and Washington Streets, where the Transamerica Pyramid now stands in San Francisco’s Financial District.

PUNCH IT UP

Four decades later, a Scottish immigrant named Duncan Nicol bought the Bank Exchange, which was still serving Pisco brandy. To advertise his new saloon, Nicol invented a new cocktail, which he called “Pisco Punch.” One local writer described it thus: “It tastes like lemonade, but comes back with the kick of a roped steer.”

Going postal: America’s first post office was established in Boston in 1639.

Pisco brandy was distilled from grapes grown in volcanic soil, which gave it an acidic, slightly sweet flavor…that masked its potency. With no quality-control regulations, some bottles had the same alcoholic content as whiskey. So, to protect customers from the hidden “punch” of his sweet concoction, Nicol posted a restriction: A patron could be served only two Pisco Punches; the drink was too powerful to let anyone exceed that limit. (The rule was tested when John Mackay, a miner who’d struck it rich in Nevada and was supposedly the wealthiest man in America, had two drinks and then ordered another. Nicol stuck to his principles—technically. He made Mackay leave the saloon, walk around the block, and re-enter to qualify as a new customer.)

A PUNCH WITH PUNCH

The cocktail earned rave notices from all over the world.

• American journalist Thomas W. Knox wrote of it: “The second glass was sufficient. I felt I could face smallpox, all the fevers known to man, and Asiatic cholera if need be.”

• Rudyard Kipling wrote about it when he visited San Francisco in 1889. “I have a theory,” he said, “that it is composed of the shavings of cherub’s wings, the glory of a tropical dawn, the red clouds of sunset, and the lost epics of dead masters.”

THE LAST DROP

Duncan Nicol was forced to close the Bank Exchange when the U.S. Congress passed the Volstead Act in 1919, making the sale of alcohol illegal. But Nicol never divulged the recipe for his Pisco Punch, and he took the secret formula with him when he died in 1926. Several recipes have surfaced throughout the years, but none has been proven to be the real thing. Here’s an easy recipe that is said to give a good approximation of the original:

Ingredients

3 oz. Pisco brandy

1 tsp. lime juice

1 tsp. pineapple juice

2 oz. cold water (optional)

Combine ingredients in a brandy snifter; stir. For a touch of authenticity, add two or three cubes of fresh pineapple.

False advertising: There’s no mercury on Mercury—most of it is solid iron.

MOVIE REVIEW HAIKU

The classic Japanese poetry form—three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables each—collides with pop culture
.

Planet of the Apes
Like
Batman
—great sets, Bad plots, and promised sequels. Damn them all to Hell!

Duck Soup
A fine collection Of skits destined to inspire The great Bugs Bunny.

2001: A Space Odyssey
Great special effects, Without help from computers! (Except HAL, of course.)

Apocalypse Now
Brilliant filmmaking Overly long indulgence Don’t get off the boat

Erin Brockovich
Julia Roberts Is Erin Brockovich in
Erin Brockovich
!

The Matrix Revolutions
Directors, take note: Franchise isn’t everything. Just let it die. Please.

March of the Penguins
An interesting And exciting adventure—if you’re a penguin.

Cast Away
Made fire? Big deal. Girlfriend dumped you anyway. Stop talking to balls.

The Sixth Sense
One of those movies I’d have rather seen before I saw the preview.

American Pie
Rated R: No one Over 17 allowed Without teenager.

Airplane
“Surely you are not Critiquing this!” “I am. And Don’t call me Shirley.”

Groundhog Day
You will want to see This movie several times. Uh, sorry. Bad joke.

Forrest Gump
Mama always said, “Stupid is as Stupid does.” Stupid rakes it in.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding
My big fat romance Disguised as a really long Windex commercial.

Actress Mary Pickford, nicknamed “America’s Sweetheart,” was Canadian.

TURKMENBASHI

After the USSR broke up in 1991, the Soviet Republic of Turkmenistan became an independent nation but had no identity of its own. Enter Turkmenbashi
.

B
ACKGROUND
Turkmenistan had been under the control of Russia for more than a quarter century when it was declared part of the Soviet Union in 1924. In 1991, after the fall of Communism and the USSR, the country found itself independent for the first time in a hundred years. The new president, Saparmurat Niyazov, was the obvious successor—he’d been the Communist Party’s puppet governor since 1985. But easing a country of five million people into a new era of self-sufficiency and autonomy was not the highest item on Niyazov’s agenda. He was more concerned that decades of Soviet control had left Turkmenistan with no national identity. So, in 1993, Niyazov took it upon himself to create the country in a new image: his own.

First he took the name
Turkmenbashi
(Leader of All Ethnic Turkmen) and declared himself President for Life. Since then, he’s undertaken scores of self-aggrandizing—and bizarre—measures to make Turkmenistan a very unique place:

• The airport in the capital city of Ashgabat was renamed… Turkmenbashi.

• Dozens of streets and schools across the country are now called… Turkmenbashi.

• In 1998 a 670-pound meteorite landed in Turkmenistan. Scientists named it…Turkmenbashi.

• The name of the large port city Krasnovodsk was changed to… Turkmenbashi.

• The new president also renamed the months. January is now called…Turkmenbashi. April is called Gurbansoltan edzhe, after his mother. (Bread, once called
chorek
, is now also called
gurbansoltan edzhe
.)

• The image of Turkmenbashi’s face is used as the logo of all three state-run TV stations, and is legally required to appear on every clock and watch face as well as on every bottle of Turkmenbashi brand vodka.

In Turkmenistan,
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader
is called
Turkmenbashi’s Turkmenbashi Reader
.

• In 2001 Turkmenbashi wrote a book—a combination of poetry, revisionist history, and moral guidelines—called
Ruhnama
(Persian for “Book of the Soul”). It is now required to be prominently displayed in all bookstores and government offices, and next to the Koran in mosques. Memorization of the book is required to graduate from school and to get a state job or even a driver’s license. Schoolchildren spend one entire day every week reading it. Since all Soviet-era books have been banned, most Turkmen libraries have only the
Ruhnama
and other books written by Turkmenbashi. In 2006 Turkmenbashi made reading the
Ruhnama
a requirement for entry into heaven.

• There’s a 30-foot
Ruhnama
in Ashgabat, not far from a 50-foot solid-gold statue of Turkmenbashi.

• Not surprisingly, Turkmenbashi recently “won” the Magtymguly International Prize, honoring the best pro-Turkmen poetry, which is awarded by…Turkmenbashi himself.

MORE STRANGE ACTS OF TURKMENBASHI

• In 2004 Turkmenbashi banned newscasters from wearing makeup. Why? He said he couldn’t tell the male and female news readers apart and that made him uncomfortable.

• After he quit smoking in 1997, he banned smoking for everybody else, too (but only in public places).

• In 2006, to mark Turkmenistan’s independence day, Turkmenbashi gave each female resident a gift of 200,000
manat
(about $38).

• He banned gold tooth caps and gold teeth, and suggested that tooth preservation could be more easily accomplished by chewing on bones.

• In 2000 he ordered that a giant lake be created in the desert along with a huge forest of cedar trees, which, he said, would help to moderate Turkmenistan’s climate.

• In 2004 he ordered that a giant ice palace be built in the middle of that same desert, the Karakum—the hottest location in central Asia. It will include a zoo with penguins.

Who owned the last cow to be kept at the White House? William Howard Taft (1909–1913).

AMAZING ANAGRAMS

What’s an anagram for “anagrams”? The Latin phrase
ars magna,
which means “great art.” We’re not sure if it’s great art, but rearranging the letters in a word or phrase to make a similar word or phrase sure is fun
.