Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (81 page)

TELEVISION

When you watch TV, you are not watching a moving picture. You are watching a moving dot. But this is one mighty fast dot. It races back and forth in a blur, moving line by line from the top of the screen to the bottom, a total of 525 lines. It does this at roughly 21,600 miles an hour.

The dot is actually a stream of electrons projected from the back of the TV to the inner surface of the picture tube, which is coated with phosphorus.

Phosphorus glows when hit by a stream of electrons; the more torrential the stream, the brighter the spot. By varying the brightness of every dot on every line on your screen, the electron beam paints a picture with strategically clustered dots, the same way those computer portraits are done at the mall. Your picture tube paints a different picture on your screen 30 times every second.

So why do you see it as “Seinfeld,” and not a series of stills? Think of those decks of cards you got as a kid, the ones that you could riffle with your thumb to make a moving picture. Same principle. The mind fills in the gaps.

THERMOS

The question is: How come soda keeps cold and coffee keeps hot? How does the Thermos know?

The first thing to remember is that you must always capitalize the word Thermos, because it is a trademarked name for a “vacuum bottle.”

Second, know that it is a container within a container. The inside container is a glass bottle. Between the bottle and the outer container is a No Man’s Land, with close to zero air molecules. A vacuum, almost. Vacuums don’t transfer heat very well. (If you don’t care why, skip to the last paragraph.)

Heat is transferred in one of three ways: conduction, convection, and radiation. Conduction means, basically, molecules smacking into each other like dominoes, sending energy down the line. Since a vacuum means an absence of molecules, there are no molecules against which to smack, conduction doesn’t happen in a Thermos. Convection is when molecules cruise through traffic on their own, weaving and darting, trying to get across town; e.g., steam bubbles rising from the bottom of a boiling pot. But the inside of a Thermos is a solid: it keeps its molecules close to the vest.

Radiation defies easy analogy. It’s kind of like…beauty. There’s a little bit of it in everything. The hotter the source, the greater the radiation. It comes at you in waves, piercing everything in its way, stone or flesh. Like light from the sun, it can leap across a vacuum. Like beauty, it can melt the coldest of hearts. There is no protection from the withering power of beauty, but with a Thermos you can put silver on the inside of the bottle, reflecting back some of the radiant energy from your coffee or soup or what have you, postponing the inevitable.

]So what happens is, the vacuum and silvered side combine to prevent heat from escaping from the inner container if it’s filled with something hot, and prevent heat from entering the inner container if it’s filled with something cold.

TIME, LOST

The year before 1901 A.D. was, of course, 1900 A.D. The year before 101 A.D. was, of course, 100 A.D.

So what was the year before 1 A.D.? Zero A.D.? Was there ever a May 15, Zero A.D?

No. Historians decided they just couldn’t cope with a Zero year. The historical record leaps from December 31,1 B.C. to January 1, 1 A.D.

TOILET

The humble toilet is too often the butt of indelicate jokes. We are going to do our best to refrain from infantile humor here, except to note, as we must, that the toilet was invented by a man named Thomas Crapper.

With the possible exception of the clock, Crapper’s porcelain pew is the most efficient household device that doesn’t require electricity.

Here’s an experiment to perform in the privacy of your own bathroom. Remove the top from your toilet tank. Now fish the curlers and tissues and hair spray and toothpaste and Comet from the bowl, where they have fallen. You should have removed them before lifting the cover. Now, look inside the tank. You’ll see three main things: a rubber stopper at the bottom of the water, a big hollow float at the top of the water, and a tall post connected to the float by a long arm. When you press the handle to flush, the stopper pops up out of a hole in the bottom of the tank, and water, pulled by gravity, rushes down into the bowl. When a bowlful of water (about five gallons) has gone through, the stopper is now hanging in air, and gravity pulls it back into the hole.

Meanwhile, the air-filled float has sunk along with the water level, thereby opening a special valve (called a “ball-cock”) at the top of the tall post. This opening causes water to pour back into the tank from the house’s water pipes, until the float rises again to the top of the tank and shuts off the water.

A very smooth system, until some object—for the sake of argument we will say a Cabbage Patch Doll—stops up the drain at the bottom of the bowl.

Meanwhile, no one has informed the tank, which is continuing to flush water into the bowl, causing the water level to rise toward a disastrous spillover.

Now that you know how a toilet works, you don’t have to stand in helpless horror. Lunge for the float at the bottom of the tank and lift it to the closed position. Then radio for assistance.

TUNNELS,
construction of

How do they dig underwater tunnels? Do they work in scuba gear? And how do they pump the water out afterwards? And how do they protect against leaks that would flood and drown people?

Easy. They dig real deep, under the riverbed.

V

VELCRO

Hooks and eyes. It’s that simple. One strip is covered with tiny nylon hooks, the other with tiny nylon eyes. Invented by Swiss engineer Georges de Mestral in 1948 after he returned from a hunting trip and noticed thistle blossoms clinging to his pants. He looked under a microscope. The blossoms were covered with tiny hooks. Velcro comes from velours, velvet, and crochet hook.

W

WORDS, PRETENTIOUS

Some capsule definitions of pompous, commonly misused terms:

Existentialism
. No God, no fixed human nature. Man on his own, responsible for self. This freedom to define his own life is the source of man’s dread.

Metaphysics
. The big questions. What is ultimate nature of being? Are people basically good or evil? Why am I always late?

Entropy
. Degradation of energy from order to disorder. The natural tendency of everything to degenerate. An ice cube, nice and symmetric, melts into a mess. So does the universe. All neatly put together with planets and stars and meteors all spinning around like clockwork, it is slowly getting messier and messier. Ultimately the galaxies will look like the floor under your refrigerator: nothing but fuzz. Things will be bleak indeed. Suffice it to say that this state is known as The Heat Death of the Universe. The good news is that you’ll never have to clean under your refrigerator again.

Debenture
. An IOU from a corporation to a person.

WORLD, HISTORY OF

One-celled life appeared on Earth about three billion years ago and fitfully evolved into different plants and animals. Human beings proved most adaptive, learning to control their environment as other creatures could not.

After relying solely on hunting and gathering, Man started farming about 10,000 years ago. With their surplus food, they learned to sell. And shop. With their surplus time, they learned to write. So began civilizations. But civilizations were transitory, destroyed by external challenges, internecine tensions, political folly, and presumptions of divinity.

The Greeks developed a remarkably modern society, replete with science, philosophy, dramatic performances, and democracy. The Greeks were routed by the Romans. The Roman empire spanned the West at the birth of Jesus, whose teachings inspired first a cult and then a revolutionary religion. Rome was sacked by barbarians, beginning a thousand years of disorder, poverty, and intellectual stagnation sometimes known as the Dark Ages.

Meanwhile, in the East, a cerebral society was developing that revered age and wisdom but was slowed in its progress by a slavish devotion to custom and tradition. It was very mysterious to Westerners.

A bubonic plague called the Black Death killed a third of Europe. Papal domination subsided, and monarchs consolidated their support through ambitious foreign wars and ostentatious patronage of the arts. The invention of the printing press contributed to the intellectual flowering known as the Renaissance. Mastery of ocean navigation expanded European influence to much of the world. Later, the Industrial Revolution increased wealth and dehumanized the workplace. European empires gradually declined as their colonies revolted. Shifts in the balance of power erupted in world war. Communist revolution swept through Czarist Russia. Fascist Germans, driven by master race hysteria, initiated another world war. The United States and the Soviet Union emerged as superpowers and have since fought proxy wars in poor nations. Meanwhile, in the East, China and Japan modernized, becoming less mysterious and more threatening to Western supremacy.

The accelerated development of technology in this century has led to greater leisure time, a rise in service industries, a decline in reading in favor of television viewing, a fundamental alteration and general contamination of the environment, and the construction of vast arsenals of bombs powered by the force that holds atomic nuclei together. The long-term significance of these changes has been largely ignored.

POLITICALLY CORRECT QUIZ ANSWERS (
page 267
)

1.
b)
She objected to the play’s “blatant heterosexuality.” At a news conference, Brown announced that “until books, film, and the theater reflect all forms of sexuality,” she would not be “involving her tudents in heterosexual culture.” Other school officials talked about sacking her, calling the decision “ideological idiocy ”

2.
a)
They renamed the town’s manholes “personholes.”

3.
a)
They changed it to “Heaven-o.” The man behind the resolution, a local flea market owner named Leonso Canales, Jr., explained: “When you go to school and church, they tell you ‘hell’ is negative and ‘heaven’ is positive. I think it’s time to set a new precedent, to tell our kids that we are positive adults.”

Employees at the county courthouse immediately began answering their phones with the new phrase. County officials called the greeting a “symbol of peace, friendship, and welcome in an age of anxiety.” But linguists called it bizarre. “Linguistically and historically, ‘hello’ has nothing to do with ‘hell,’” said one. “It stems from an old German greeting for hailing a boat.”

4.
c)
Animal rights activists initiated a campaign to change the name of the town of Fishkill to something less “cruel.” Mayor George Carter scoffed at the idea. “I think if they’d look the word up, they’d find out what it means,” he told the press.

5.
a)
Rev. Jerry Buckner of the Tiburon Christian Fellowship demanded that the jockeys be returned to their original color. Why? It turns out that from 1875 to 1900 black jockeys were American sports heroes. According to a story by Mike Dougan, in the
San Francisco Examiner:

      
Buckner says black lawn jockeys were intended to honor—not demean—the real black jockeys who dominated American horse racing in the latter part of the 19th century.

          
“All of the original jockeys were black, and most people aren’t even aware of that fact,” he said. He noted that the first 13 winners of the Kentucky Derby—beginning with Oliver Lewis in 1875—were blacks who often owned the horses they rode.

          
Those who protest the display of black lawn jockeys are “historically illiterate,” Buckner asserted.

But that didn’t matter to people like Kerry Pierson, a black activist from nearby Mill Valley. According to Dougan,

      
Pierson said that regardless of their origin, lawn jockeys have become for blacks a form of “degradation art.”

          
“You usually find them at country clubs and private clubs. What they represent to black people is that when you pass through a portal where those little jockeys are, you are passing into the pre-Civil War era, and you can expect to be treated as such.”

The landlord, caught in the middle, was at a loss. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. (We don’t know what he finally decided.)