Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (25 page)

JIM BEDERKA

Proposed:
During a college graduation ceremony

Story:
Paige Griffin was sitting with her class, ready to graduate from Ramapo College in Mahwah, New Jersey, when her boyfriend Jim showed up and asked her to leave the group for a minute. She said no—she didn’t want to cause a disturbance. He kept insisting, getting more and more aggravated. Finally she gave in. As she stepped into the aisle, she saw two trumpeters decked in medieval garb standing at the stage. Between them: a sign reading “Paige, will you marry me?” When she accepted, the trumpeters held up a “She said yes” sign; 1,500 people applauded.

MARK STEINES

Proposed:
At an AIDS benefit

Story:
Leanza Cornett, 1993’s Miss America, paused during her performance at the 1994 AIDS mastery Benefit in Los Angeles to select a raffle winner. She stuck her hand in a bag, pulled out a piece of paper, and read: “Let’s get married. Wanna? Check the appropriate response: Yes or Yes.” She thought it was a joke…until she realized there was a ring attached.

BOB BORNACK

Proposed:
On a billboard

Story:
In the Chicago suburb of Wood Dale, Bornack put up a billboard that read: “Teri, Please Marry Me! Love, Bob.” The sign company immediately got 10 calls from women named Teri who wanted to know if it was “their” Bob. “One Teri called in a total panic because she’s dating two Bobs,” said an employee. “She didn’t know which one to answer.” (It wasn’t either of them.)

Here are more origins of commercial names.

A
DIDAS.
Adolph and Rudi Dassler formed Dassler Brothers Shoes in Germany in 1925. After World War II, the partnership broke up, but each brother kept a piece of the shoe business: Rudi called his new company Puma; Adolph, whose nickname was “Adi,” renamed the old company after himself—
Adi Dassler.

PENNZOIL.
In the early 1900s, two motor oil companies—Merit Oil and Panama Oil—joined forces and created a brand name they could both use: Pennsoil (short for William Penn’s Oil). It didn’t work—consumers kept calling it Penn-soil. So in 1914 they changed the
s
to a
z
.

DIAL SOAP.
The name refers to a clock or watch dial. The reason: It was the first deodorant soap, and Lever Bros, wanted to suggest that it would prevent B.O. “all around the clock.”

WD-40.
In the 1950s, the Rocket Chemical Company was working on a product for the aerospace industry that would reduce rust and corrosion by removing moisture from metals. It took them 40 tries to come up with a workable Water Displacement formula.

LYSOL.
Short for
lye solvent.

MAZDA.
The Zoroastrian god of light.

NISSAN.
Derived from the phrase
Nissan snagyo,
which means “Japanese industry.”

ISUZU.
Japanese for “50 bells.”

MAGNA VOX.
In 1915 the Commercial Wireless and Development Co. created a speaker that offered the clearest sound of any on the market. They called it the
Magna Vox
—which means great
voice
in Latin.

TV comments about everyday life, from
Primetime Proverbs,
by Jack Mingo and John Javna.

ON FIGHTING

Farrah:
“A swordsman does not fear death if he dies with honor.”

Doctor Who:
“Then he’s an idiot.”

—Doctor Who

Student:
“What is the best way to deal with force?”

Teacher:
“As we prize peace and quiet above victory, there is a simple and preferred method—we run away.”

—Kung Fu

“If all the men who lived by the gun were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

—Pappy Maverick,
Maverick

ON BIG IDEAS

Ralph Kramden
(working on a new scheme): “This is the biggest thing I ever got into!”

Alice Kramden:
“The biggest thing you ever got into was your pants.”

—The Honeymooners

“If we ever needed a brain, now is the time!”

—Squiggy Squiggman,

Laverne and Shirley

ON TV

“Dealing with network executives is like being nibbled to death by ducks.”

—Eric Sevareid, CBS
News

“Imitation is the sincerest form of television.”

—Mighty Mouse,
The New

Adventures of Mighty Mouse

ON EDUCATION

School principal:
“I’m sure your children will be very happy here.”

Gomez:
“If we wanted them to be happy, we would’ve let them stay at home.”

—The Addams Family

Jane:
“Do you like Kipling?”

Jethro:
“I don’t know—I ain’t never kippled.”

—The Beverly Hillbillies

“You know somethin’? If you couldn’t read, you couldn’t look up what’s on television.”

—Beaver,
Leave It to Beaver

ON SUICIDE

“I don’t believe in suicide. It stunts your growth.”

—Vila Restal,
Blake’s 7

Many Americans don’t recall that Eleanor Roosevelt was the first modern first lady (1933-1945) to take an active interest in America’s political life, supporting causes and speaking out about issues.

“Courage is more exhilarating than fear, and in the long run it is easier.”

“We started from scratch, every American an immigrant who came because he wanted a change. Why are we now afraid to change?”

“For a really healthy development of all the arts, you need an educated audience as well as performers.”

“People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. That is how character is built.”

“Every effort must be made in childhood to teach the young to use their own minds. For one thing is sure: If they don’t make up their own minds, someone will do it for them.”

“It is curious how much more interest can be evoked by a mixture of gossip, romance, and mystery than by facts.”

“The important thing is neither your nationality nor the religion you professed, but how your faith translated itself in your life.”

“In this world, most of us are motivated by fear—governments more, perhaps, even than individuals.”

“Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual; you have the obligation to be one. You cannot make any useful contribution in life unless you do this.”

“The idea of rugged individualism, completely divorced from the public interest, has a heroic sound, a kind of stalwart simplicity. The only trouble is that for many years it has been inapplicable to American life.”

“The function of democratic living is not to lower standards, but to raise those that have been too low.”

BRI member Ben Brand sent us this information about a couple of experiments conducted by a Stanford professor a few years ago. The results are a little scary—but frankly, they’re not that surprising, are they?

E
XPERIMENT #1

Researchers:
Dr. David Rosenhan, a professor of psychology and law at Stanford University. He was assisted by eight people, carefully chosen because they were “apparently sane in every measurable respect, with no record of past mental problems”: three psychologists, a psychiatrist, a pediatrician, an artist, a housewife, and a psychology graduate student.

Who They Studied:
The people who run America’s mental institutions.

• Using pseudonyms, the researchers presented themselves at 12 different mental institutions around the U.S. as patients “worried about their mental health.” They were admitted and diagnosed as insane. According to Ron Perlman in the
San Francisco Chronicle,
“All told the same tale of trouble: they had been hearing voices which seemed to be saying ‘empty’ or ‘hollow’ or ‘thud.’ This was the only symptom they presented, and the pseudopatient’s were scrupulously truthful about all other aspects of their lives during interviews and therapy sessions.”

• Perlman adds; “As soon as they were admitted to the hospitals, they stopped simulating any symptoms at all, and whenever they were asked they all said they felt fine and that their brief hallucinations were gone. They were cooperative as patients and behaved completely normally. The only symptom they might then have shown was a little nervousness at the possibility of being found out.”

• They remained in the institutions for as long as 52 days, getting regular treatment.

• The eight “mental patients” scrupulously kept a written record of both their treatment and the things that happened around them in the mental wards. At first they did it furtively, hiding their notes so the staff wouldn’t find them. But gradually they realized that the staff didn’t care, and never even bothered to ask what they were writing. “One nurse,” writes Perlman, “noticing that a pseudopatient was taking regular notes, saw it as a symptom of a crazy compulsion. ‘Patient engages in writing behavior,’ she wrote portentously in his chart day after day.”

What They Learned:
“We cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals,” Rosenhan reported. Moreover, he added, “it’s the hospitals themselves that might be ‘insane’ rather than the patients confined there.”

Some of the evidence:

• Of the eight experimenters, seven were diagnosed as schizophrenics; one was diagnosed as “a victim of manic-depressive psychosis.”

• And when they were released, they were described “improved,” or “in remission,” but no doctors listed
any
of them as “cured.”

• The staff at the institutions never suspected the eight experimenters weren’t crazy…but the real patients did.

• Perlman writes: “Many of the real patients challenged them. ‘You’re not crazy,’ they insisted. ‘You’re a journalist, or a professor. You’re checking up on the hospital,’” Rosenhan’s wry comment on the subject: “The fact that the patients often recognized normality when staff did not raises important questions,”

EXPERIMENT #2

At one of the hospitals included in the experiment, administrators doubted Rosenhan’s results. It was, they insisted, impossible for professionals to make such egregious mistakes. So Rosenhan suggested a new experiment that would prove either the hospital or his own findings right.

Researchers:
Rosenhan and, an undetermined number of additional “pseudopatients.”

Who They Studied:
The hospital staff. Rosenhan told the hospital that his new assistants would pull the same stunt they’d tried before, and challenged hospital officials to detect them.

What They Learned:
Rosenhan’s original findings could well have been correct.

Some of the evidence:

• “The hospital staffs took extra pains diagnosing the next 193 patients admitted for psychiatric treatment,” Perlman writes, “and sure enough, 41 new patients were determined by at least one staff member to be a “pseudopatient”—a sane person posing as insane. Twenty-three patients were judged to be sane by at least one psychiatrist.”

• Actually,
not a single one of the 193 was sent there by Rosenhan.

• That didn’t mean they were really insane, of course—Rosenhan offered no conclusions about them. He merely pointed out that as soon as doctors and their staff
expected
to find sane people among the patients, they did.

• His conclusion: “Any diagnostic process that lends itself so readily to massive errors of this sort cannot be a very reliable one.”

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AND NOW…BEHIND THE TITLE

Here’s how a pair of well-known books got their titles.

1984,
by George Orwell

Readers assume that Orwell was predicting the year his bleak vision would come true. He wasn’t. He was concerned that people would interpret his story as a description of contemporary life. So, to put it into the future, he just transposed the numbers of the year he completed it—1948 became 1984.