Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader (9 page)

Also Gone:
The Betsy Ross bar, the Lindy (for Charles Lindbergh), Amos ’n’ Andy, Poor Prune, Vita Sert, and Doctor’s Orders.

During the Middle Ages you could be accused of witchcraft if your pets disobeyed you.

You think it’s a pain to take out the garbage at home? Just be glad you haven’t got these problems.

G
arbage:
400,000 pounds of “pizza sludge” (flour, tomato paste, cheese, pepperoni, etc.)

Location:
Wellston, Ohio

Source:
A Jeno’s, Inc., frozen pizza plant

Problem:
Jeno’s produced so much waste in their pizza factory that the local sewage system couldn’t accommodate it. They couldn’t bury it either, because environmental experts said it would “move in the ground” once they put it there. They had to truck it out.

Garbage:
27 years’ worth of radioactive dog poop

Location:
Unknown

Source:
Department of Energy experiments. For almost three decades, the DOE studied the effects of radiation by feeding 3,700 beagles radiation-laden food. Each ate the food for a year and a half, and was then left to live out its life.

Problem:
No one anticipated that while the experiment was going on, the dog-doo would be dangerous and would have to be treated as hazardous waste. They saved it for decades...and finally took it to a hazardous waste facility.

Garbage:
1,000 pounds of raspberry gelatin and 16 gallons of whipped cream

Location:
Inside a car in Provo, Utah

Source:
Evan Hansen, a student at Brigham Young University. He won a radio contest for “most outrageous stunt” by cutting the roof off a station wagon and filling the car with the dessert.

Problem:
Hansen couldn’t find any way to get rid of the Jell-O. He finally drove to a shopping center parking lot, opened his car doors, and dumped it down a storm drain. He was fined $500 for violating Utah’s Water Pollution Control Act.

An estimated 61% of American adults read the newspaper every day.

Mad magazine has a place in American pop culture as one of the most successful humor magazines ever published. It’s also great bathroom reading. Here’s a brief history.

B
ACKGROUND
In 1947 Max Gaines, owner of Educational Comics (which published biblical, scientific, and historical comic books), was killed in a boating accident. He left the business to his 25-year-old son, William, a university student.

The younger Gaines renamed the company Entertaining Comics (EC) and got rid of the stodgy educational stuff. Instead, he started publishing more profitable crime, suspense, and horror comics like
Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horrors
, and
House of Fear
.

THE BIRTH OF
MAD

Gaines paid his writers and artists by the page. Most of his employees preferred this—but not Harvey Kurtzman. Kurtzman was a freelancer who worked on
Frontline Combat
, a true-to-life battle comic that portrayed the negative aspects of war. He enjoyed writing it, but it took so long to research and write that he couldn’t make a living doing it. So he went to Gaines and asked for a raise. Gaines refused, but suggested an alternative—in addition to his current work, Kurtzman could produce a satirical comic, which would be easier and more profitable to write. Kurtzman liked the idea and immediately started creating it.

The first issue of
Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad: Humor in a Jugular Vein
debuted in August 1952. It was a flop...and so were the next two issues. But Gaines didn’t know it; back then, it took so long to get sales reports that the fourth issue—which featured a
Superman
spoof called
Superduperman
—was already in the works before Gaines realized he was losing money. By then,
Mad
had started to sell.

RED SCARE

Gaines didn’t expect
Mad
to be as successful as his other comics, but it turned out to be the only one to survive the wave of anti-comic hysteria that swept the country during the McCarthy era.

Can you tell which president is on the $20 bill without looking? Only 16% of Americans can.

In 1953, Frederic Wertham, a noted psychiatrist and self-proclaimed “mental hygienist,” published a book called
The Seduction of the Innocents
, a scathing attack on the comic book industry. Few comics were left untouched—Wertham denounced Batman and Robin as homosexuals, branded Wonder Woman a lesbian, and claimed that words such as “arghh,” “blam,” “thunk,” and “kapow” were producing a generation of illiterates. The charges were outlandish, but the public believed it; churches across the country even held comic book burnings.

To defend themselves, big comic book publishers established the Comics Code Authority (CCA) to set standards of “decency” for the comic industry and issue a seal of approval to comics that passed scrutiny. (Among the so-called reforms: only “classic” monsters such as vampires and werewolves could be shown; authority figures such as policemen, judges, and government officials could not be shown in a way that encouraged “disrespect for authority,” and the words “crime,” “horror,” and “weird” were banned from comic book titles.) Magazine distributors would no longer sell comics that didn’t adhere to CCA guidelines.

Gaines refused to submit his work to the CCA, but he couldn’t withstand public pressure. By 1954, only four EC titles were left. Amazingly,
Mad
was one of them.

MAD
LIVES

Gaines knew
Mad
wouldn’t survive long unless he did something drastic to save it. So rather than
fight
the CCA, he avoided it: He dropped
Mad’s
comic book format and turned it into a full-fledged, “slick” magazine. Thus, it was no longer subject to CCA censorship.

The first
Mad
magazine was published in the summer of 1955. “We really didn’t know how
Mad
, the slick edition, was going to come out,” one early
Mad
staffer later recalled, “but the people who printed it were laughing and getting a big kick out of it, so we said This has got to be good.’”

The first issue sold so many copies that it had to be sent back for a second printing. By 1960, sales hit 1 million copies, and
Mad
was being read by an estimated 58% of American college students and 43% of high school students.

In 1967, Warner Communications, which owned DC Comics, bought
Mad
, but it couldn’t affect sales or editorial content: as part of the deal, Warner had to leave Gaines alone. In 1973 sales hit an all-time high of 2.4 million copies; since then they’ve leveled off at 1 million annually in the United States. There are also 12 foreign editions. Gaines died in 1992, but
Mad
continues to thrive.

The average bird’s eyes take up 50% of the space in its skull.

WHAT, ME WORRY?

Alfred E. Neuman has been
Mad
magazine’s mascot for years. But his face and even his “What me worry?” slogan predate the magazine by 50 years. They were adapted from advertising postcards issued by a turn-of-the-century dentist from Topeka, Kansas, who called himself “Painless Romaine.”

Mad
artists were able to rationalize their plagiarism, according to Harvey Kurtzman, after they discovered that Romaine himself had lifted the drawing from an illustration in a medical textbook showing a boy who had gotten too much iodine in his system.

Kurtzman first dubbed the boy “Melvin Koznowski.” But he was eventually renamed Alfred E. Neuman, after a nerdy fictional character on the “Henry Morgan Radio Show.” Strangely enough,
that
character had been named after a real-life Alfred Newman, who was the composer and arranger for more than 250 movies, including
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
and
The Grapes of Wrath
.

MAD
FACTS

• In 1965,
Mad
magazine was turned into an off-Broadway play called
The Mad Show
. Notices were sent out to New York theater critics in the form of ransom notes tied to bricks. The show gave performances at 3:00 p.m. and midnight, and sold painted rocks, Ex-Lax, Liquid Drano, and hair cream in the lobby. The play got great reviews from the press and ran for two years, with bookings in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and other major cities. It was reportedly a major influence on the creators of “Laugh In.”

•
The Mad Movie
, Gaines’s first attempt to adapt
Mad
for the silver screen, was dumped before production began, and
Up the Academy
, Mad’s second effort, was so bad that Gaines paid $50,000 to have all references to the magazine edited out of the film. An animated TV series in the early 1970s was pulled before it aired. In the mid-1990s, “Mad TV” debuted on the Fox network.

Bird droppings are the chief export of Nauru, an island nation in the western Pacific.

They’re America’s beloved symbol of bad taste—as designs for lawn ornaments, lamps, cups, and so on. BRI member Jack Mingo tells us how these strange-looking birds became as American as apple pie.

T
HE FLAMINGO BOOM
During the 1920s, Florida was the hottest vacation spot in the United States. Tens of thousands of real estate speculators and tourists swarmed to the semitropical state...and many brought home souvenirs bearing pictures of a bizarre pink bird that lived there—the flamingo.

In the North, these items—proof that their owners were rich enough to travel to exotic places—became status symbols. Everyone wanted them. So manufacturers started incorporating flamingos into a variety of new product designs.

They were so popular that by the 1950s, the image of a flamingo was as much a part of middle-class America as Wonder Bread or poodles.

THE LAWN FLAMINGO

In 1952, the Union Plastics Company of Massachusetts introduced the first flamingo lawn ornament. It was “flat and unappealing.”

• To boost sales, the company decided to offer a more lifelike, three-dimensional flamingo. But the second generation of lawn flamingos “was made of construction foam and fell apart rather quickly,” recalls a company executive. “Dogs loved to chew it up.”

• Finally, in 1956, Union Plastics hired a 21-year-old art student named Don Featherstone to sculpt a new lawn flamingo. “I got a bunch of nature books and started studying them,” says Feather-stone. “Finally, I sculpted one, and I must say it was a beautiful looking thing.”

• The first atomic-pink molded plastic lawn flamingo went on sale in 1957. It was an immediate success; in the next decade, Americans bought millions of them. But by the 1970s, lawn flamingos were, “gathering dust on the hardware store shelves along with other out-of-date lawn ornaments such as the scorned sleeping Mexican peasant and the black jockey.” In 1983, The
New York Times
ran an article titled “Where Did All Those (Plastic) Flamingos Go?”

The Red Sea is the world’s warmest sea.

• Then suddenly, lawn flamingos were flying again. 1985 was a record year, with 450,000 sold in the United States. Why the resurgence? Critics suggested a combination of nostalgia and the popularity of the television show “Miami Vice.” “They are a must for the newest hot social events—‘Miami Vice’ parties,” reported a California newspaper in 1986.

• Featherstone never got any royalties for his creation. But he did become a vice president of Union Plastics...and in 1987, he was honored when the company started embossing its flamingos with his signature. “I’m getting my name pressed into the rump of every flamingo that goes out the door,” he announced proudly.

FLAMINGO: THE BIRD

History.
Flamingos, looking pretty much as they do today, were roaming the earth 47 million years before humans came along.

• They were well known in Egypt during the pyramid-and-sphinx period. A flamingo played a prominent role in Aristophanes’ 414 B.C. play
The Birds
.

• The American flamingo is extinct in the wild—captive flocks (most with wings clipped so they don’t fly away) at zoos and bird sanctuaries are the only ones left.

Body
. Flamingos’ knees don’t really bend backward. But their legs are so long that the joint you see where it seems the knee ought to be is really the flamingo’s ankle, and it bends the same way yours does. The knee is hidden, high up inside the body.

• The flamingo is the only bird that eats with its head upside down—even while it is standing up.

Color.
While flamingos are known to sometimes eat small fish, shrimp, and snails, they are primarily vegetarians. They consume vast quantities of algae, and this is what makes them pink. Without the “food coloring,” flamingos are actually white.

• Flamingos in captivity are, as a result of algae deprivation, quite a bit paler than their wild cousins. Zoos attempt to keep their flamingo flocks in the pink by feeding them carotene to compensate for the algae they’d get in their natural habitats.

There are more plastic flamingos in America than real ones.

Here are a few words from President Harry Truman.

“I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.”

“The C students run the world.”

“The only things worth learning are the things you learn after you know it all.”

“You know what makes leadership? It is the ability to get men to do what they don’t want to do, and like it.”

“You want a friend in this life, get a dog.”

“The best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and advise them to do it.”

“Men don’t change. The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.”

“It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours.”

“If you can’t convince them, confuse them.”

“A politician is a man who understands government—and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who’s been dead ten or fifteen years.”