Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader (42 page)

*        *        *

Celebrity Coincidence:
While filming an action scene for the movie
Troy
in 2004, actor Brad Pitt tore his Achilles tendon. The character he was playing: Achilles.

According to surveys, the average American 12-year-old gets $9.58 in weekly allowance.

WHY YOUR MOM SAYS, “WASH YOUR HANDS!”

Here’s a little science experiment to remind you that Mom was right—you really should wash your hands before you eat. One note before you start: If you’re a kid, you’ll need adult supervision and assistance. (And if you have a germ phobia, skip this story and read something else.)

W
HAT YOU’LL NEED
1.
Hands that haven’t been washed for several hours.
2.
A pair of rubber gloves.

3.
Cotton balls and rubbing alcohol.

4.
Masking tape or labels, and a pen.

5.
A vegetable peeler and a paring knife that can be boiled.

6.
Two apples and a dish to set them on. (If you don’t have apples handy, you can substitute potatoes, pears, or any other fruit or vegetable that can be peeled.)

7.
Two glass jars with screw-top lids, each large enough to hold cut pieces of apple.

8.
A cutting board.

WHAT TO DO

1.
Wearing the rubber gloves, wash the jars, lids, dish, and cutting board in warm soapy water. Dry them off with a clean dish towel, then rub them inside and out with a cotton ball soaked in rubbing alcohol.

2.
Boil the vegetable peeler and the paring knife in a pot of water, then drain and let them cool to room temperature before handling them.

4.
Label the jars. Write “Jar 1—Unwashed Hands” on the label for the first jar, and “Jar 2—Washed Hands” on the second jar.

5.
Now, still wearing the rubber gloves, wash both apples in warm, soapy water. Rinse them with clean water and set them on the dish.

6.
Remove the gloves. Pick up one of the apples and peel it with the apple peeler. When you finish, cut the apple into pieces small enough to fit inside one of the jars. Now rub your unwashed hands all over the pieces of apple. When finished, put them in the jar marked “Jar 1—Unwashed Hands” and screw the lid on tight.

Good girl! Tia, an English mastiff, gave birth to a world-record 24 puppies in one litter in 2004.

7.
Wash your hands thoroughly in soap and water for at least 30 seconds. Wash the potato peeler, paring knife, and cutting board, too, so that the second apple isn’t contaminated by anything that touched the first apple.

8.
Now that your hands are clean, peel the second apple and cut it into pieces just like you did with the first apple. Rub your clean hands all over the pieces of apple, then put them in the jar marked “Jar 2—Washed Hands” and screw the lid on tight.

9.
Put the jars in a warm place and let them sit there for a week; then come back and see what they look like. Notice any difference in the two jars?
That’s
why your mom wants you to wash your hands before you eat.

EXPLANATION

If you did a good job cleaning your equipment and your hands were good and grubby when you peeled the first apple, you should see plenty of mold growing on the first apple and noticeably less on the second apple, even after a week has passed. The mold growing on the apples started out as invisible mold spores on the skin of your hands.

Mold is only the beginning—there’s plenty of other stuff, including bacteria and possibly cold and flu viruses, on your unwashed hands, too. Washing your hands thoroughly removes the things you can see…and the things you can’t.

HANDS-ON SCIENCE

If you find the results of this experiment fascinating, try another. How does washing your hands for 5, 10, or 15 seconds compare to washing for 30? How does washing with regular soap compare to washing with antibacterial soap? What happens if you wash, but don’t use any soap? How dirty are your hands one hour after washing them? After six hours? After 24 hours? Keep going. You’ll learn a lot and—who knows?—if the sight of all those moldy apples kills your appetite, maybe you’ll even lose a few pounds.

One isn’t enough? Two rivers in Florida are named Withlacoochee.

THE GOLDEN AGE OF RADIO, PART II

What happened when a “ham” radio operator put a microphone in front of a record player? Modern radio was born. Here’s Part II of our story (Part I is on
page 77
)
.

M
ORE THAN JUST MUSIC
Radio offered numerous advantages over phonographs in the 1920s: Listeners weren’t limited to the records in their own collections, and they didn’t have to get up every five minutes to flip the record over and wind the record player back up. (Long playing, or “LP,” records, which had about 30 minutes of playing time on each side instead of four and a half minutes, weren’t introduced until 1948.) Even better: radio broadcasts were
free
. Yet as early as 1926, opinion polls began showing that listeners were hungry for something to listen to besides music. The networks responded by developing a variety of shows for every member of the family.

WHAT WAS ON

Comedies:
Comedy shows were some of the earliest hits on radio—it was easy for vaudeville stars like Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor, and the husband/wife team of George Burns and Gracie Allen to move their acts to the new medium. At first these comedians did their usual standup routines, but over time they pioneered the “situation comedy” format that’s still being used on TV today: A situation is set up at the beginning of the episode—Jack Benny has to go to the doctor, for example—and then it’s milked for jokes for the rest of the show.

Kiddie Shows:
These shows were on in the afternoon when kids got home from school, in the early evening, and on Saturday mornings. Established movie and comic-strip characters like Superman and Little Orphan Annie were quickly adapted for radio. In later years the trend reversed itself, as characters created for radio—like Captain Midnight, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, and Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy—moved on to comic books, movies, and eventually television.

Only English-speaking country in Central America: Belize.

Soap Operas:
Soaps appealed primarily to housewives, and dominated the daytime. The soap-opera format came about only by chance in 1932, when NBC moved a show called
Clara, Lu ’n’ Em
from its evening time slot to the middle of the day because that was the only place for it in the schedule.
Clara, Lu ’n’ Em
was more of a satire than a soap, but it did so well that NBC began programming other shows for women during the day. Soaps proved to be the most popular shows; by 1940 the four networks offered more than 60 hours of soap operas a week.

Dramas:
One of the nice things about radio is that you can transport the listener anywhere using only sound effects. You want to tell a story about space colonists on Mars? About cops in L.A.? Maintaining order in Dodge City, Kansas? You don’t need fancy costumes or sets—you just need the right background sounds. Police and detective shows came early to radio. They were easy to produce because they were dialogue-heavy, filled with characters who spent a lot of time standing around trying to solve crimes. And they were popular with audiences.

Surprisingly, science fiction shows and Westerns targeted at adults appeared relatively late in radio and never really caught on. All four networks introduced science fiction series for adults in the 1950s, but only two of them,
2000 Plus
(Mutual, 1950–52) and
X Minus One
(NBC, 1955–58) lasted longer than two years.

Gunsmoke
, the first adult-themed Western, didn’t appear until 1952, but it fared much better than the science fiction shows. It became one of the most popular programs on the air and ran until the summer of 1961. (The TV version ran for 20 years, from 1955 to 1975, making it the longest-running drama in history.)

SIGNING OFF

What ended the Golden Age of Radio? TV, of course. In retrospect it’s amazing that radio lasted as long as it did—both NBC and CBS began making experimental television broadcasts from their New York stations in 1939, and both stations were issued commercial licenses in 1941. Were it not for World War II, TV might have swept the country over the next few years. But when the United States entered the war, further development was halted as the stations cut their broadcasts back to almost nothing and TV manufacturers switched over to making electrical equipment for the war effort.

Animal sounds: Apes gibber, deer bell, hippos bray.

AS SEEN ON TV

When World War II ended in 1945, fewer than 10,000 American households had a television, and most of the sets were in the New York City area. The industry got a big boost in 1947, when the World Series was broadcast on television for the first time. It’s estimated that of the nearly 4 million people who watched the game, at least 3.5 million of them watched it on sets in their neighborhood taverns. Many of these patrons then went out and bought TVs for their own homes—and when curious neighbors came over to watch, they wanted TVs too. The TV craze was on.

By 1951 television broadcasts were available coast to coast and six million homes had TVs. People were buying them as fast as manufacturers could make them. By the end of the decade more than 60 million homes had TVs, and as Americans abandoned their radios in favor of television, so did the advertisers, and so did the stars. The most successful radio shows like
Gunsmoke
and
The Jack Benny Show
moved to TV (
Gunsmoke
stayed on the radio for a time as well); less successful shows just went off the air.

As the big advertising dollars left radio, big-budget shows became impossible to air. Many radio stations with hours of programming to fill and very little money to do it with went back to what radio had been in the very beginning: a single person, sitting alone in a booth, playing records for anyone who happened to be listening.

THEY’RE BAAACK

Today the classic shows of the Golden Age of Radio are largely absent from AM and FM radio, but thanks to satellite radio and the Internet, they’re more widely available now than they’ve been since they originally aired. Both XM Radio and Sirius offer channels that play classic radio shows 24 hours a day; and you can buy collections of old shows in bookstores or download them on iTunes. If you’ve never heard them, you’re in for a treat.

For a list of our favorite shows, check out
“Audio Treasures” on pages 298 and 451
.

If your cat snores, or rolls over on his back to expose his belly, it means he trusts you.

STATE V. BIG HAIR

Names of actual court cases tried in the good old U.S. of A
.

Friends of Kangaroo Rat v. California Dept. of Corrections

U.S. v. Pipe on Head

United States of America v. 2,116 Boxes of Boned Beef, Weighing Approximately 154,121 Pounds, and 541 Boxes of Offal, Weighing Approximately 17,732 Pounds

Schmuck v. Dumm

Jones v. God, Jesus, Others

Julius Goldman’s Egg City v. United States

Pam-To-Pee v. United States

Klink v. Looney

United States ex rel. Gerald Mayo v. Satan and His Staff

Lexis-Nexis v. Beer

Muncher v. Muncher

People v. Booger

Short v. Long

State of Indiana v. Virtue

United States v. $11,557.22 in U.S. Currency

Advance Whip & Novelty Co. v. Benevolent Protective Order of Elks

Fried v. Rice

United States v. 1,100 Machine Gun Receivers

Plough v. Fields

Frankenstein v. Independent Roofing & Siding

Big v. Little

Ruff v. Ruff

State v. Big Hair

Hamburger v. Fry

I am the Beast Six Six Six of the Lord of Hosts in Edmond Frank MacGillevray, Jr., et. al. v. Michigan State Police

Louisiana is the only state that still refers to the Napoleonic Code in its state law.

IRONIC, ISN’T IT?

There’s nothing like a good dose of irony to put the problems of day-to-day life into perspective
.

A
NIMAL IRONY
n 2005 Bob Schwartz, crime advisor to the governor of New Mexico, authored a law that would allow felony charges to be brought against any owner of a dangerous dog involved in a vicious attack. A few months after the law passed, Schwartz was in his backyard when his own dog attacked him, biting both of his arms and sending him to the hospital. (Schwartz recovered but was not arrested.)

• John Fleming was riding his motorcycle on a road in Canberra, Australia, when a kangaroo hopped onto the road and collided with him. Fleming’s job: making road signs that warn people about kangaroo crossings.

• A building in Dundee, Scotland, was overrun by mice. “They’ve been eating biscuits in our cupboard,” says Johanna Girling, who works in the building. “One of our staff even got an electric shock because the mice had bitten through wires and left them bare.” But what the mice were feasting mostly upon was cat food—the building is home to the Cat Protection League, and houses dozens of stray cats. (The cats didn’t take care of the problem—there were too many mice—so an exterminator was called in.)