Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader (68 page)

REIGN OF TERROR:
Mengistu overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 and turned to the Soviets for help in starting a Marxist regime. During the two-year campaign dubbed “the Red Terror,” tens of thousands of “enemies of the revolution” were murdered. When families came to claim the bodies, they had to pay for the bullets that killed their loved ones before they could take them. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, Mengistu lost support and was finally overthrown in 1991.

WHERE’D HE GO?
He fled to Zimbabwe as a “guest” of President Robert Mugabe, where he still lives in a heavily guarded, luxurious mansion. Though he’s formally charged with “crimes against humanity” in Ethiopia, Zimbabwe refuses to extradite him.

DICTATOR:
Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, Haiti

REIGN OF TERROR:
At the age of 19, he succeeded his father, “Papa Doc,” as president-for-life. During his 15-year reign, tens of thousands of Haitians were tortured and killed. As Haiti turned into one of the world’s poorest nations, Baby Doc stole an estimated $500 million.

WHERE’D HE GO?
Although never officially granted asylum, Duvalier moved to France in 1986, taking the stolen money with him. He lived in a villa in the hills above Cannes, drove a Ferrari, and owned two apartments in Paris and a chateau.

PARTIAL PAYBACK:
According to news reports, Duvalier went broke. How? He lost everything in his divorce from his wife, Michelle Duvalier, in the mid-1990s.

Two out of three adults in the U.S. will need glasses at some point in their life.

THE LADY OF THE LINES

If you’ve ever heard of the Nazca lines, you have this woman to thank for preserving them for posterity. And if you’ve ever doubted that one person can make a difference, think again…

H
ELP WANTED

In 1932 a 29-year-old German woman named Maria Reiche answered a newspaper ad and landed a job in Peru, tutoring the sons of the German consul. After that, she bounced from job to job and eventually found work translating documents for an archaeologist named Julio Tello.

One day she happened to overhear a conversation between Tello and another archaeologist, Toribio Mejia. Mejia described some mysterious lines he’d seen in a patch of desert about 250 miles south of the capital city of Lima, near the small town of Nazca. He tried to interest Tello in the lines, but Tello dismissed them as unimportant. Reiche wasn’t so sure. She decided to go to Nazca and have a look for herself.

MYSTERIOUS LINES

Gazing out across the desert floor, Reiche was amazed by what she saw: More than 1,000 lines crisscrossing 200 square miles of desert, some as narrow as footpaths, others more than 15 feet wide. Many ran almost perfectly straight for miles across the desert, deviating as little as four yards in a mile.

The lines were made by early Nazca people, etched into the desert floor between 200 B.C. and 700 A.D. They had created the lines by removing darkened surface fragments (known as “desert varnish”) to reveal the much lighter stone underneath.

But why?

WAITING FOR SUNDOWN

An American archaeologist and historian named Paul Kosok had a theory. At first he thought the lines might be irrigation ditches, but they weren’t large enough or deep enough to transport water. Then he started to wonder if they might have some kind of astronomical significance. So, on June 21, 1941, the southern hemisphere’s winter solstice, he went out into the desert and waited for the sun to set.

Dressed to kill: During the French Revolution, a woman named Renee Bordereau fought in 200 battles—dressed as a man.

Sure enough, when the sun set, it did so at a point on the horizon that was intersected by one of the Nazca lines. The line seemed to serve as an astronomical marker, telling the Nazca people that the first day of winter had arrived.

BIG BIRD

Kosok had also observed that while most of the Nazca lines were straight, some were curvy. But it wasn’t until he plotted one on a piece of paper, then looked down to see that he’d drawn the outline of a giant bird, that he realized that some of the lines were
drawings
. The drawings were so large that they could not be made out by anyone looking at them from the ground.

With the discovery of the solstice line and the giant bird, Kosok became convinced that the Nazca lines were an enormous astronomical calendar, or, as he put it, “the world’s largest astronomy book,” with each line carefully laid out to correspond to something in the heavens above. Maybe, he speculated, the giant bird represented a constellation in the night sky. He offered Reiche a job helping him survey the lines so that he could prove his theory.

LIFELONG PASSION

She took the job, and after a few months of tramping across the desert each day with little more than a canteen of water and a pencil and paper to record her observations, she found what she was looking for: a line that intersected with the sun on the southern hemisphere’s summer solstice, December 21. That was all it took—Reiche was convinced that Kosok’s theory was correct. And she would spend the rest of her life trying to prove it.

At first Reiche could afford to visit the Nazca lines only occasionally, and because she was German she was not allowed to work at the site at all during World War II. By 1946, however, she was living in Peru year-round and spending nearly all of her waking hours in the desert trying to unlock the secret of the lines. When Kosok left Peru in 1948, she continued without him.

Studying the lines wasn’t as simple as it sounds. In those days, many of them were so obscured by dirt, sand, and centuries of new desert varnish that it was barely possible to find them. That they were distinguishable at all was thanks only to the fact that they were etched a few inches into the desert floor.

CLEAN SWEEP

Reiche decided to “clean” the lines so that they could be more easily seen. First she tried using a rake. When that didn’t work, she switched to a broom. It’s estimated that over the next 50 years, she swept out as many as 1,000 of the lines by herself, carefully mapping the location of each one as she went along, and returning to the same lines at different times of day and in all lights to be certain that she was following their true courses.

In the process Reiche discovered—and
un
covered—as many as 30 drawings similar to the giant bird that Kosok had found, including numerous birds, two lizards, four fish, a monkey, a whale, a pair of human hands, and a man with an owl-like head. The scope of her work is astonishing: When you look at an aerial photograph of the Nazca lines—any photograph of any of the lines or ground drawings—there’s a good chance that Reiche swept those lines herself. Mile after mile after mile of them, using only one tool—an ordinary household broom.

LOST IN SPACE

Just as Reiche was almost single-handedly responsible for restoring the Nazca lines, she was also the first to bring them to public attention. Her 1949 book
Mystery on the Desert
helped to generate worldwide interest in the lines.

But what really put them on the map was a 1968 book written by a Swiss hotelier named Erich Von Daniken. His book
Chariots of the Gods
proposed that some of the lines were landing strips for alien spacecraft. According to Von Daniken’s theory, aliens created the human race by breeding with primates, then returned to outer space. The early humans then etched the drawings into the desert floor, hoping to attract the aliens back to Earth.

Since 1950, more than 600 people have been killed by avalanches in the U.S.

JOIN THE CROWD

Chariots of the Gods
was an international bestseller, and its success prompted other people to write books of their own with more theories about the origin of the lines. One speculated the lines were ancient jogging tracks; another claimed they were launch sites for Nazcan hot-air balloonists. These books turned the Nazca lines into a New Age pop culture phenomenon, helping to attract tens of thousands of tourists to the site each year.

As a result, the Nazca lines began to suffer from overexposure—more and more tourists went out into the desert on foot, on dirt bikes, and in dune buggies, doing untold damage to the lines in the process.

Reiche did what she could to protect them. For years she lived in a small house out in the desert so that she could watch over the lines herself, and she used the profits from her writing and lecturing to pay security guards to patrol the desert. By the end of her life she was crippled by Parkinson’s disease, but she continued to study the lines and was known to chase intruders away in her wheelchair. By the time of her death in 1998 at the age of 95, she was nearly deaf and almost completely blind. Not that it really mattered to her—“I can see every line,” she said, “every drawing, in my mind.”

FINAL IRONY

Though Reiche devoted most of her life to proving that the Nazca lines are a giant astronomical calendar, that theory has been largely discarded. Researchers now believe that while a few of the lines may indeed point to astronomical phenomena such as the summer and winter solstices (with more than 1,000 lines running across the desert floor in all directions, even
that
may be a coincidence), most of the lines are processional footpaths linking various sacred sites in the desert. The ground drawings, they believe, are artwork the Nazcans made for their gods.

Famous forgotten female: Diane Crump—1st woman to ride in the Kentucky Derby (1970).

MORE SIMPLE SOLUTIONS

On
page 305
we told you about some simple inventions that are changing the world. Here are a few more
.

H
IPPO WATER ROLLER

Problem:
In South Africa, more than 15 million people have to carry water from wells or rivers to their homes—sometimes as far as six miles away. It’s traditionally carried by balancing five-gallon buckets on top of the head, requiring many trips and often leading to neck and back injuries. How can people get water from one place to another without breaking their backs doing it?

Simple Solution:
A big plastic drum with handles

Explanation:
It looks like a lawn roller. Fill the large, barrel-shaped drum with water, screw on the lid, lay it on its side, attach the handles, and then just push or pull it home—the barrel becomes a wheel. It holds 20 gallons of water, which weighs 200 pounds. But the design makes the weight feel like 22 pounds, so even kids and the elderly can handle it. And it’s made of UV-stabilized polyethylene, durable enough to ride over roots, rocks, and even broken glass. Cost: about $60. (The manufacturer, Imvubu Projects of Johannesburg, has donated thousands of the rollers to water-needy communities.)

XTRABIKE

Problem:
Bicycles are an extremely popular mode of transportation in developing nations—often it’s the only mode. But carrying a lot of weight on a bicycle can be difficult, if not impossible, and dangerous. How can people carry goods and other large loads on their bikes?

Simple Solution:
The Xtrabike, a heavy-duty bike rack

Explanation:
Working in Nicaragua and Kenya, a company from Berkeley, California, called XAccess designed a steel-frame extension for the back wheels of a bicycle, with fold-down racks that turn it into a hauler of water, kids, or any other cargo. The design carries the weight low to the ground, so it still rides and turns normally, and an average person can comfortably haul as much as a 200-pound load. (Try doing that on a bike rack.) It costs about $50, which is a lot for many people, but XAccess has a solution for that, too. “Can’t afford an Xtrabike?” they ask on their website. “We’ll teach you how to make one.”

Hot air: Iceland has so much geothermal power that it plans to end fossil fuel use by 2030.

BAYGEN FREEPLAY RADIO

Problem:
Many Africans can’t get vital information about healthcare because they lack basic communication devices such as TVs and radios. In many areas there’s no electricity, and the cost of one set of batteries could be an entire month’s salary. How can people get the information they need?

Simple Solution:
A wind-up radio

Explanation:
Englishman Trevor Baylis learned about the problem in 1993 while watching a documentary on the spread of AIDS in Africa. Working with Andy Davis, who helped design the first Sony Walkman, by 1995 he had invented the BayGen Freeplay, a spring-driven radio. By 1997 tens of thousands had been sold—cheaply—in developing countries all over the planet. Wind the crank, and a specially designed coil spring powers a small generator, which in turn powers the receiver. How well does it work? Turn the crank for 30 seconds and you can listen to AM, FM, or shortwave stations for more than 30 minutes. And the spring can take 10,000 windings before it wears out. The BayGen has won endorsements from Prince Charles, Nelson Mandela, and the International Red Cross.