The following is an article from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Golden Plunger Awards

By most estimates, the English language includes about one million words, yet native speakers regularly use only about 5,000. And they don't always get the ones they do use correct. Like all languages, English is constantly changing - new words are added, old words are phased out, and new word combinations are formed all the time.

But the following examples of language changes cause trouble for people who like to use their words correctly because these words and phrases have pretty much lost their original meanings.

Beg The Question

If an event or happening raises a question for someone it's almost certain he or she will say, "This begs the question ..." But it doesn't. Begging the question is a verbal trick speakers use to avoid a question, not bring one up. The original definition of begging the question meant to assume that what is being questioned had already been proven to be true, so the answer sidestepped the thing in question. Say you were asked a question that just required a simple yes or no answer. But instead of saying yes, you answer with a statement that assumes the thing in question is already true. That's begging the question.

For example, if the question is, "Senator, will this new crime bill be effective?" and he or she answers with a statement that doesn't answer it - "I've been fighting crime my entire career, and this crime bill is the latest example of that" - then the speaker has begged the question.

It's a common practice in formal debate, and it's especially prevalent in politics. In the example above, the speaker is acting as though the crime bill is definitely effective, even though he or she never answered the basic question with a yes or no. Assuming the question is true is not evidence that it is.

From that, beg the question evolved in the language to mean that the statement invites another obvious question. Anytime you run verbal circles around the question without answering it can be called begging the question in this sense (although strict grammarians frown upon it; they like to keep the original meaning).

Decimate

It's hard to believe that such a simple word hides such a horrific history. The original definition of "decimate" was "to kill one in ten." The brutal practice was used by the Roman army beginning around the 5th century B.C. and was implemented as a way to inspire fear and loyalty. Lots were drawn, and one out of every 10 soldiers would be killed - by their own comrades. If one member of a squad acted up, anybody could pay the ultimate price. Captured armies often fell victim to this practice as well.

Today, "decimate" has lost that meaning, but some grammarians still like to preserve it ... at least in the sense of "to reduce by 10 percent." The "dec" prefix means "ten" - it's the same Latin root that gives us decade, for example. So to use "decimate" to mean just "destroy" contradicts the meaning of that prefix. (Note: Language snobs really get up in arms when someone says "totally decimate." Totally reduce by ten? We don't get it, either.)

Could Care Less

This is an easy mistake to make. The correct phrase, of course, is "couldn't care less" - as in, "I don't care at all, so it wouldn't be possible for me to care any less about this." But over the years, that's morphed into a new phrase (with the same meaning), and even though the Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage criticized the change in 1975, saying it was "an ignorant debasement of language," "could care less" seems to be around to stay.

Language historian say "couldn't care less" was originally a British phrase that became popular in the Untied States in the 1950s. "Could care less" appeared about a decade later. No one knows exactly why the incorrect form came into being, since it doesn't make sense. But the phrase has stuck, and a lot of grammarians care very much that it's not being used correctly. (Regular people, of course, couldn't care less.)

Card Sharp

No, that's not a misspelling. Sure it sounds weird to the ear, but people who know the term's history and meaning prefer the original. "Card sharp" first appeared in the 1880s and meant a card player who tricked or scammed others. "Card shark" appeared much later, in the 1940s.

Many people assume that the mix-up simply comes from speakers who either thought "shark" sounded better or misheard the word originally. But that may not be the case. Linguists have traced the history of both "sharp" and "shark" to their original usages, and though it doesn't appear that either word derived from the other, there are a lot of similarities in meaning. "Shark" comes from a 17th-century German word schurke, which meant "someone who cheats." "Sharping" came about around the same time and meant "swindling or cheating." The words "loan shark" and "sharp practice" come from these words as well.

So technically, "card shark" could be correct. But because "card sharp" appeared first, many linguists want to preserve it. Whether they'll succeed is anyone's guess, but it's a sharp point of contention for many.

Spit and Image

If you think you're the spitting image of your parents, you're forgiven. People have been messing this one up for decades. "Spit and image" was the original term, used from about 1825 on. The Oxford English Dictionary defined it as "the very spit of, the exact image, likeness, or counterpart of." "Spitting image" came about some 80 years later and was followed by a few other variations, including "spitten image" and "splitting image" (neither of which really caught on). In this case, "spitting image" has overtaken the use of "spit and image" for most English speakers. But when you're spitting out this phrase, take a moment to remember its original use and think about the image you're trying to project.

Ironic

Few words cause as much confusion or are used incorrectly as often as "ironic." Not that it's hard to understand why - the definition is not simple: "a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other's false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning ... the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning." What?

In 1996, Alanis Morissette wrote an entire song titled "Ironic," which consistently used the word incorrectly. And even the people who are supposed to know what it means get it wrong. The American Heritage Dictionary gave the word "irony" to its distinguished panel of experts (the ones who help ensure the accuracy of all the words the dictionary defines) and asked them if either of the following sentences used the word correctly:

1. "In 1969, Susie moved from Ithaca to California, where she met her husband-to-be, who, ironically, also came from upstate New York." Seventy-eight percent of the panel's members agreed that this was an incorrect use of the word.

2. "Ironically, even as the government was fulminating against American policy, American jeans and videocassettes were the hottest items in the stalls of the market." In contrast, though, 73 percent agreed that this sentence used it properly.

How "ironic" came to be defined as "coincidence" is anybody's guess, but for our purposes, we like to refer to the following quote from the 1994 film Reality Bites. When Ethan Hawke's character is asked to define "ironic," he says, "It's when the actual meaning is the complete opposite of the literal meaning." Thank goodness for Hollywood.

The article above was reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Golden Plunger Awards

Forget the Oscars and the Grammys - the awards committee at the Bathroom Readers' Institute is handing out its own honors... the highly coveted Golden Plungers. We've scoured the globe to bring you the people, places, and events most worthy of throne-room recognition.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

The following is an article from Uncle John's Triumphant 20th
Anniversary Bathroom Reader

Who says that comic books don't contribute much to literature? Here's a few choice phrases, which origin can be traced back to comic strips:

Security Blanket

Pioneering child psychologist Richard Passman is given credit for identifying the phenomenon of children habitually clutching or carrying a favorite toy for comfort and security.

Charles Schulz first used the concept in June 1, 1954, Peanuts comic strip by giving Linus a blanket to carry everywhere he went. Linus called it his "security blanket." The term is now used by psychologists to define a child's (or anyone's) excessive attachment to a particular object. (Photo: Time Magazine 1965 cover)

"We Have Met The Enemy And He Is Us"

Pogo Earth Day Poster by Walt Kelly (image via Wikipedia)

After winning the Battle of Lake Erie in the War of 1812, Commodore Oliver Perry wrote in a dispatch to General William Henry Harrison, "We have met the enemy, and he is ours." Walt Kelly, author of the comic strip Pogo, reworded the phrase as "We have met the enemy and he is us," in the foreword to his 1953 Pogo collection The Pogo Papers. The meaning: Mankind's greatest threat is ... mankind. The quote became better known when Kelly used it on a poster he was hired to illustrate for the first Earth Day in 1970.

The Heebie-Jeebies

Billy DeBeck coined the term in his hugely popular 1920s comic strip, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, about a community of backwoods hillbillies and moonshiners. It first appeared in a 1923 strip where Barney tells someone to "get that stupid look offa your pan. You gimme the heeby jeebys!" It meant "a feeling of discomfort."

Other phrases coined by DeBeck: "horsefeathers," "hotsie-totsie," and "googly-eyed" (after Barney Google, who had huge, bulbous eyes). The strip also gave us the nickname "Sparky," from the name of Barney's horse, Sparkplug. (Many young comic-strip fans were given the name "Sparky," among them, Peanuts creator Charles Schulz.)

Palooka

Joe Palooka by Ham Fisher - via Wikipedia

It came from the main character of the 1920s strip Joe Palooka. Joe Palooka was a boxer - likeable but dumb, a trait that probably came from repeated blows to his head in the ring. Soon after the strip's debut, any big, dumb guy might be called a palooka.

Milquetoast

"Milk toast" was a simple dish (toast served in milk) frequently served at soup kitchens in the 1920s. Harold Webster named the main character in his late 1920s strip, The Timid Soul, Caspar Milquetoast.

Thanks to the comic strip, by the 1930s the word "milquetoast" had become common slang to describe anybody who, like Milquetoast, was weak and timid.

Sadie Hawkins Day

The First Sadie Hawkins Day, by Al Capp

It's from Al Capp's L'il Abner. One day a year in the comic strip's rural setting of Dogpatch, single women would chase the single men around. If they caught one, they got to keep - er, marry him. The day got its name from Sadie Hawkins, the first woman in Dogpatch who caught a husband that way. High schools in the United States still hold "Sadie Hawkins Dances," to which the girls invite the boys.

Foo Fighter

(photo: Gasoline Alley Antiques - lots of neat vintage books there!)

In Bill Holman's 1930s strip Smokey Stover, the title character rode around in a bizarre-looking two-wheeled fire engine (with a fire hydrant attached to it) that Smokey called a "foo fighter." The term was used by World War II pilots for any unidentified aircraft (including UFOs). The phrase became popular again in the 1990s when it was used as the name of the rock band Foo Fighters.

The article above was reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Triumphant 20th Anniversary Bathroom Reader.

Proving that some things do get better with age, the latest Bathroom Reader is jam-packed with 600 pages of fascinating trivia, forgotten history, strange lawsuits and other neat articles.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

The following is reprinted from Uncle John's Unsinkable Bathroom Reader

Sinking of the Titanic - LIFE Images

We all know the story of the Titanic - but did you know that one man survived the disaster only to be condemned for not dying an honorable death? Here's the story of a lone Japanese onboard of the ill-fated ocean liner whose survival actually became a curse:

THE LONG TRIP HOME

RMS Titanic - photo via abratis.de

In 1910 Japan's Transportation Ministry sent an official named Masabumi Hosono to Russia to study that country's railroad system. Hosono finished his assignment in early 1912 and, following a brief stop in London, began the next leg of his trip home by embarking across the Atlantic on the RMS Titanic. Needless to say, that leg of the trip didn't go quite as planned.

On April 14, at 11:40 p.m., just four days into its maiden voyage, the Titanic struck an iceberg while traveling near top speed and began taking on water.
(Photo: Cheddarbay.com)

RUDE AWAKENING

It's doubtful that anyone on the Titanic, which had been advertised by the White Star Liner as being "practically unsinkable," realized at first that the ship had suffered a mortal blow. There were plenty of people on board who didn't even know the ship had hit anything. Many of those who noticed felt only a slight shudder followed by the sound of the engines coming to a stop.

Hosono apparently slept through the entire thing. The first he learned of it was shortly after midnight, 25 or 30 minutes after the collision, when he was awakened by a knock at the door of his second-class cabin and told to put on his life vest.

Three times when he tried to make his way to the lifeboats, he was turned away by the ship's officers, who ordered him to return to the lower levels of the ship. They likely assumed that, as a Japanese person, he must have been traveling in third class, or "steerage." On his third attempt, Hosono managed to slip past a guard and make his way to the lifeboats.

IN THE DARK

Was the Titanic sinking, or was it just floating dead on the water, waiting to be assisted by the ocean liner Carpathia or one of the half a dozen other ships who'd received her distress calls and were already steaming to her aid?

We know the answer today, of course, but on that fateful night only three men on the Titanic did - Edward J. Smith, the captain; Thomas Andrews, the chief designer; and J. Bruce Ismay, the president of the White Star Line.

They knew not only that the Titanic would sink, but also that it would sink well before help arrived. And they kept the information to themselves, fearing a panic that would cause the passengers to stampede the lifeboats, which when filled to capacity could carry only 1,178 of the more than 2,200 people on board.

Even the officers ordered to organize the loading of the lifeboats had no idea that the Titanic was going down.

THANKS ... BUT NO THANKS

Withholding this information did help to keep the loading of the lifeboats orderly, but probably at the cost of hundreds of needless deaths. Many passengers and even many crew members, not suspecting the gravity of the situation, preferred to remain on board rather than risk climbing into the lifeboats. If you had booked passengers on a ship that was said to be unsinkable, would you be willing to leave its warm, dry, and seemingly safe environs to climb into a tiny, swinging lifeboat in the middle of the night, and be lowered on pulleys 65 feet straight down into the freezing, iceberg-filled Atlantic? Even the captain's order to load women and children first must have cost some passengers their lives, because it meant that married women were being asked to separate from their husbands, which many refused to do.

Besides, what was the rush? As far as the crew members loading the boats knew, the Titanic wasn't sinking. The lifeboats were simply going to ferry passengers to the rescue ships when they arrived, and that was still hours away. There would be plenty of time to load more people into the lifeboats later, if they didn't want to go now. The crew members filled the boats with as many people as wanted to get in, and then lowered them into the water. In the end, only three of Titanic's 20 lifeboats were filled to capacity when they set down in the Atlantic.

Hosono must have sensed what was happening earlier than many of the passengers did, because as he stood next to Lifeboat No. 10 as it was being loaded, he was already steeling himself for the end. "I tried to prepare myself for the last moment with no agitation, making up my mind not to leave anything disgraceful as a Japanese," he explained in a letter to his wife. "But still I found myself looking for and waiting for any possible chance to survive."

That chance came moments later, when the officer loading No. 10 could not coax any more women or children into the boat. "Room for two more!" the officer called out. Hosono watched as another man jumped into the boat.

"I myself was deep in desolate thought that I would no more be able to see my beloved wife and children, since there was no alternative for me than to share the same destiny as the Titanic," he wrote. "But the example of the first man making a jump led me to take this last chance." Hosono hopped in, and at 1:20 a.m. he and 34 other people were lowered to safety in a boat built to hold 65.

One of the lifeboats carrying Titanic survivors (Photo: The National Archives)

FINAL MOMENTS

The Titanic, by now sitting very low in the water, had just one hour left to live. Eight of the 20 lifeboats had already launched and only one of them - Hosono's No. 10 - was filled even halfway to capacity. (Lifeboat No. 1 launched with only 12 passengers out of a possible 40). Many of the passengers still aboard the Titanic were just beginning to realize that the "unsinkable" ship might really be sinking.

When the Titanic finally slipped beneath the waves at 2:20 a.m., Hosono watched from Lifeboat No. 10. He described the experience in a letter to his wife, which he wrote on board the Carpathia as it brought the survivors to New York. "What had been a tangible, graceful sight was not reduced to a mere void. And how I thought about the inevitable vicissitudes of life!"

AFTERMATH

Of the more than 2,200 passengers and crew aboard the Titanic, just over 700 survived, including 316 of the 425 women and 56 of 109 children. Even if every woman and child had been accommodated in the lifeboats, there still would have been enough room for nearly 700 of the 1,690 men, yet only 338 men survived. Not everyone who perished did so because they declined an opportunity to climb into a lifeboat, not by a long shot. But this must surely have been the cause of many deaths.

In the shock and horror that followed one of the worst peace-time disasters in maritime history, many of these subtle details were lost on newspaper-reading public. As they counted up the 162 dead women and children, many readers wondered how 338 men had managed to find their way into the lifeboats, "displacing" those helpless victims. Hosono received some of the harshest criticism of all. Not from the American newspapers, who expected chivalrous self-sacrifice from well-bred gentlemen of the middle and upper classes, but were dismissive of foreigners and the rabble traveling in the steerage. Few American papers even took an interest in Hosono's story. One that did celebrated the good fortune of the "lucky Japanese boy."

SAVED ... AND CONDEMNED

No, the harshest attack against Hosono came from his own countrymen. For in surviving the Titanic disaster, he had broken two cultural taboos. Not only had Hosono chosen ignominious life over an honorable death, he had done so in public - on a European passenger liner with the eyes of the world upon him.

Hosono was denounced as a coward by Japanese newspapers and fired from his job with the Transportation Ministry. The ministry hired him back a few weeks later, but his career never recovered. College professors denounced him as immoral, and he was written up in Japanese textbooks as a man who had disgraced his country. There were even public calls for him to commit hara-kiri - ritual suicide - as means of saving face.

Hosono never did kill himself, but there must have been times when he wished he'd died on the Titanic. He never spoke of the experience again, and forbade any mention of it in his home. After he died in 1939, a broken and forgotten man, his letter to his wife, written on what is believed to be the only surviving piece of Titanic stationery, sat in a drawer until 1997, when the blockbuster film Titanic staged its Tokyo premiere. Then the Japanese public's interest in the doomed liner's lone Japanese passenger was renewed again, this time with much more sympathy.

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Unsinkable Bathroom Reader.

The Bathroom Readers' Institute has sailed the seas of science, history, pop culture, humor, and more to bring you Uncle John's Unsinkable Bathroom Reader. Our all-new 21st edition is overflowing with over 500 pages of material that is sure to keep you fully absorbed.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute has published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute.

The following is a reprint from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader
Plunges Into the Universe.

Why should dinosaurs have all the fun? Here are a few prehistoric critters that are every bit as bizarre as the strangest of the dinos:

Opabinia

Artist's rendering of Opabinia. Image: ArthurWeasley [Wikipedia]

Opabinia regalis fossil from the Burgess shale on display at the Smithsonian in Washington DC. Image: Jstuby [Wikipedia]

It might be a distant cousin of shrimp salad or it might be unrelated to anything alive today. Although it looked like something out of a science fiction movie, this weird four-inch-long animal lived in the sea that covered what is now Canada about 530 million years ago. Instead of legs, it had 14 pairs of oarlike gills used for swimming. But the real strangeness was saved for the head. It had five eyes - two pairs on stalks and another sitting in the middle of the top of the head. In front of all these eyes was a long flexible nozzle with a claw at the end. Scientists think the claw captured food and carried it to the mouth.

Hallucigenia

Hallucigenia fossil. Photo: Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

This appropriately named little beast bears no resemblance to any animal alive or dead. Like Opabinia, it lived in Canada about 530 million years ago. Hallucigenia is so bizarre that scientists are uncertain which end is the front and which side is up. The most-accepted version shows a wormlike body supported by seven pairs of spines. Along the top of the body were seven long tentacles with two-pronged tips. One end had a bulbous feature that looked a bit like a head but with no sign of eyes or mouth. At the other end was a long tube that curved up over the "back," which may have been a mouth or an anus.

Carpoids

Bundenbach Carpoid fossil. Photo: Fossil Museum

Virtually all animals have some kind of symmetry - either bilateral like humans where your right hand is the mirror image of your left hand, or radial like a starfish, which looks the same no matter which arm is pointing up. But carpoids were completely asymmetrical. This distant relation of the sand dollar lived in the oceans of the Northern Hemisphere from 500 to about 350 million years ago. It looked something like a misshapen armored tadpole, with a bulging body covered with stony plates and a long, segmented tail that it used for swimming. Some scientists think that carpoids may have been the ancestors of vertebrates.

Conodonts

Various conodonts. Image: USGS

For more than a century scientists kept finding microscopic, teethlike objects in marine rocks dating from 510 to 210 million years ago. They looked like tiny, cone-shaped teeth or combs, but there was no sign of a jaw or any other bit of skeleton associated with them. There were quite a few theories about what class of animal these conodonts belonged to, but it wasn't until about 20 years ago that a fossil of the whole animal was found. In appearance it was not spectacular. It was long and thin like a worm, but it had eyes and a low dorsal fin, and the teeth were located in the mouth. Many scientists now believe that the conodont may be one of the earliest-known vertebrates.

Ostracoderms

Some of the earliest vertebrates were armored, jawless fish that were most common between 430 and 370 million years ago. These fish had skeletons made of cartilage, but their bodies were covered with plates of bone, so it could be said that they were wearing their skeletons on the outside. Ostracoderms could be up to 3 feet (1 m) long, but most were under a foot. Their heads were usually covered by a semicircular shield with two small holes for eyes. The rest of the body was surrounded by articulated plates that allowed the animal to swim slowly by moving its tail from side to side. These animals preferred a quiet environment like a lagoon where they could drift along the bottom, straining edible particles out of the mud.

Diplocaulus

Diplocaulus magnicornis. Image: ArthurWeasley [Wikipedia]

This 3-foot (1 m) long amphibian lived in what is now Texas about 270 million years ago. In most respects it looked like a large salamander, but its head made it unique. The skull was shaped like a boomerang with two small eyes in the front corners and the wings on either side. Scientists are not sure why Diplocaulus's head is such an odd shape, but they think it was either to make the animal swim better near the bottom of the lakes and streams it lived in - or the wide head made it more difficult for predators to swallow.

Lystrosaurus

Lystrosaurus georgi. Image: Dmitry Bogdanov [Wikipedia]

Before the age of the dinosaurs, there were a lot of strange-looking reptiles, but few odder than Lystrosaurus. This 3-foot-long plant-eater had a squat body and splayed legs like a lizard, but its muzzle was shortened a bit like that of a bulldog. As if this wasn't attractive enough, from the corners of its mouth hung two long tusks. The eyes and nostrils were set high up, making some scientists think that the animal had lived the way hippos do now, but recent findings show that Lystrosaurus could also have lived in arid environments that were common about 230 million years ago.

Ambulocetus

[YouTube Link]

Halfway between the land-dwelling ancestors of whales and the modern marine mammals, Ambulocetus lived in what is now Pakistan about 50 million years ago. This 12-foot-long animal looked a bit like a cross between an otter and an alligator. It had a large head with long jaws and pointed teeth designed for catching and holding fish like an alligator, but the body was more like that of an otter. Scientists think it swam by moving its tail up and down like a modern whale rather than from side to side like a fish.

Phorusrhacos

About 20 million years ago, South America was an island continent with its own unique forms of birds and mammals. Because no large mammalian predators had evolved there, the top carnivore was a bird - Phorusrhacos. These flightless birds stood up to 10 feet (3 m) tall and had a head the size of that of a horse. Although they couldn't fly, they were very fast runners. They could run down their prey, catch it with their powerful talons, and tear it apart with their long, hooked beaks. These frightening birds survived until about 3 million years ago, when a land bridge formed between North and South America, allowing modern carnivores to invade South America and give Phorusrhacos a little carnivorish competition. (Image: Drawing of Phorusrhacos by Charles R. Knight [wikipedia])

Diprotodon

Diprotodon optatum. Image: Dmitry Bogdanov [Wikipedia]

Diprotodon australis in the British Museum of Natural History.

Before humans arrived in Australia about 40,000 years ago, marsupials were larger and more varied than they are today. The largest of all was the Diprotodon, which was about the size of a hippopotamus. It looked like a gigantic wombat (one of those furry, bearlike things), and it ate leaves and grass. It wasn't a fast runner, but it was too large for any of the native predators to tackle until humans came along. (We're not pointing fingers or anything, but the Diprotodon became extinct suspiciously soon after the first humans arrived. Coincidence?)

Glyptodon

Glyptodon asper in Naturhistorisches Museum Wien. Image: Arent [Wikipedia]

The most heavily armored mammal of all time has to have been the Glyptodon. About the size of a VW Beetle, this distant relation of the armadillo roamed the plains of South American until 15,000 years ago. The first humans in that part of the world encountered these strange beasts and incorporated them into their legends. Glyptodon resembled a turtle with patches of fur except that the high, rounded shell was made of many small plates of bone. It had a long tail with a ball at the end of it like the mace of a medieval knight.

Moropus

Moropus elatus, on display at the National Museum of Natural History.
Image: Claire H. [Wikipedia]

When scientists first discovered the Moropus, they couldn't believe that the horselike head and body belonged with the long claws and massive feet found nearby. This 10-foot-long distant relative of the horse looked like a mixed-up bag of spare parts. The head and neck looked like a stunted giraffe, but the body was more like that of a bear. The front legs were quite a bit longer than the back legs, and all four feet were armed with long claws. Some scientists believe that Moropus fed by rearing up on its hind legs and pulling down branches so it could strip off the leaves with its long tongue. This animal lived in tropical Asia until about 12,000 years ago.

Mammuthus

Woolly Mammoth at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, British Columbia.
Image: Tracy O [Wikipedia]

Everyone knows what a woolly mammoth looked like - a big hairy elephant with long, curling tusks. Everyone also knows that they died out at the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago. Guess again. For one thing, the last mammoths weren't very mammoth; they were about the size of a buffalo. They lived on Wrangel Island, off the northern coast of Siberia, and survived after other mammoths became extinct. Scientists believe that the dwarf mammoths were still around about 4,000 years ago, after the pyramids were built!

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

Previously on Neatorama: Strangest Dinosaur Names

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The following is reprinted from Uncle John's Unstoppable Bathroom Reader book.

Psst! Do you need a sure-fire way to make money on bets that you absolutely, positively cannot lose? (Bar fights afterwards not guaranteed, mmkay?) Here are some sucker bets, courtesy of Uncle John of Bathroom Reader:

I'll Bet ... "I can make you say the word 'black.'"
Setup: Start asking your mark the colors of various objects in the room, making sure that none of them are black or blue. After three or four objects, ask "What are the colors of the American flag?"
Payoff: When they respond, "Red, white, and blue," you say, "I win, I told you I could make you say 'blue'!" Nine times out of ten they'll come back with, "You didn't say blue, you said black." Then you say, "Now I really do win!"

I'll Bet ... "I can make you say what I want you to."
Setup: When the other person agrees to the bet, tell them to say "mutifarious verbiage."
Payoff: When they say they won't or that they don't know what that means, you've won the bet. Why? To say multifarious verbiage means to say a variety of words ... which they've just done.

I'll Bet ... "I can roll the cue ball underneath the cue stick without holding it and without the ball touching the stick."
Setup: To demonstrate the difficulty, place the cue stick over the two long side rails of the pool table. Then have the sucker try to roll the cue ball underneath the stick, which they won't be able to do - the space between the stick and the tabletop is too small.
Payoff: But you can do it. Pick up the cue ball, put it on the floor under the table, and roll it underneath the table so it passes below the cue stick above. It will never touch the stick.

I'll Bet ... "You can't lift my hand off the top of my head"
Setup: Put your palm on the top of your head and instruct the person to try to remove it by pushing up on your forearm. It works best when a smaller person challenges a bigger, stronger person.
Payoff: They won't be able to. We're not sure why; it's one of those freaks of nature (not you, the trick).

I'll Bet ... "I can remove this quarter from underneath this napkin without touching the napkin or blowing on it."
Setup: Put a quarter under a napkin. After you've set up the trick, discreetly put another quarter into your hand. Then put that hand underneath the table, say some magical incantations, and after a moment, reveal that the quarter is magically in your hand!
Payoff: The person will most likely go straight for the napkin to prove you wrong. When they remove it, pick up the quarter and you've won the bet.

I'll Bet ... "You can't taste the difference between an apple and a raw potato if you close your eyes and plug your nose."
Setup: The best way to ensure success with this one is to make them try it three times. Just once is a 50/50 guess. Three times put the odds in your favor.
Payoff: It's not really a trick. According to experts, smell and sight are more important in tasting things than most people realize. Without those two senses, the taste buds don't have enough info to send to the brain.

I'll Bet ... "You can't eat eight saltines in 60 seconds."
Setup: Make sure that you stipulate the person isn't allowed to wash them down with anything - and that they have to eat them one by one.
Payoff: Because of the saltiness of the crackers, most people will get "cotton mouth" and not be able to eat more than five or six. Don't wager too much, though, because there is the occasional big mouth that can pull this one off. But at least you've gotten them to make a fool of themselves.

I'll Bet ... "I can jump higher than this house."
Setup: Just jump up in the air six inches or so.
Payoff: You've just jumped higher than any house ever could.

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Unstoppable Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

Science fiction is supposed to predict future events - and to be entirely honest, some of us are getting impatient waiting for our own rocket cars to the Moon, which we understood we'd have by now. Be that as it may, here are some things dreamed up by science fiction writers that are part of our real world.

1. Moon Visits

Lots of science fiction writers had this one covered, but the question is: Who got closest to the real thing first?

The best candidate is good ol' Jules Verne, whose 1865 novel, From the Earth to the Moon, and the 1870 follow-up, Around the Moon, nailed a lot of the minutiae of a moon visit, including weightlessness, the basic size of the space capsule, the size of the crew (three men), and even the concept of splashdown into the ocean on return to Earth. In one of those fun coincidences, the fictional splashdown in Around the Moon was just a few miles from where the actual Apollo 8 capsule splashed down (and, interestingly enough, the fictional launch pad was just a few miles from Cape Canaveral).

Verne was tremendously prolific, writing two novels a year for much of his creative life and dying with quite a few novels unpublished. It's not entirely surprising that he's credited with a number of other predictions, including trips by balloon, helicopters, tanks, and electrical engines. One "discovery" he's famously credited for, the submarine, is inaccurate, since submarines existed prior to the 1870 publication of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

2. Robots (and Robot Pets!)

"Robot" comes from the Czech word robota, which means "drudgery"; robotnik is a word for "serf." Since today's robots are typically found in industrial setting doing mindlessly repetitive work, this is a strangely appropriate term.

The word "robot" was popularized in Karel Capek's 1920 play R.U.R., which stood for Rossum's Universal Robots. In the play, robots were manufactured humans who were used as cheap labor. One day they got fed up with this and decided to have a revolution and kill all the humans, proving once again that good help really is hard to find.

One thing people don't seem to know about Capek's "robots" is that they're not actually mechanical - they're made out of synthetic flesh, although that flesh was then put into a stamping mill to make the bodies.

The concept of robots as mechanical beings came later and was most famously popularized in fiction by writer Isaac Asimov in his Robot series. It's probably not a coincidence that a humanoid robot manufactured by Honda is called "Asimo."

Robot pets, like the Sony Aibo robot dog, have also been a staple of science fiction. The most famous example of this is probably Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the Philip K. Dick novel that was the source material for the movie Blade Runner.

The main character in the book is saving up to buy a realistic electric sheep for his lawn, so he'll be the envy of his neighbors (the movie had none of this suburban one-upmanship going on).

Woody Allen, of all people, nailed the robot dog in 1973's Sleeper, in which we're introduced to Rags ("Hi! I'm Rags! Woof woof!"). Allen's reaction: "Is he housebroken? Or will he be leaving little piles of batteries all over the place?"

3. Cloning and Genetic Engineering

Humans haven't been cloned yet (as far as we know), but sheep, cats, cow, and rabbits have. And humans have used genetic engineering and gene therapy to improve their bodies. In June 2002, for example, it was announced that genetically modified cells helped to create functioning immune systems in two "bubble boys" who were born without immune systems of their own.

The most famous work of science fiction with cloning and genetic engineering is also one of the earliest: 1932's Brave New World , by Aldous Huxley. In it, humans are "graded" into jobs and social classes based on the number of clones that were made from their originating embryos; the higher the number of clones, the less bright they are and the more menial their jobs (this was backed by a social agenda that assured each level of humanity that they were actually the best, so everyone went along with it).

4. The Internet

Okay, now, who wants to be blamed for this one? There are so many culprits. Author William Gibson is credited with coining the term "cyberspace" in his 1981 short story "Burning Chrome," and kick-started the whole media fascination with computers and the Internet and all that geekiness with his seminal 1984 novel Neuromancer.

But even before Gibson, John Brunner's 1975 novel, The Shockwave Rider, posited a continent-wide information net, "hackers" who broke into the net, identity theft (when someone pretends to be someone else online), and most famously, computer viruses and worms - the terminology for these, in fact, comes from Brunner's book. Brunner imagined using viruses and worms as part of warfare - something that worries today's military quite a bit.

It should be noted that in 1975 a proto-form of the Internet did exist, thought not in the scope and complexity imagined by Brunner. It existed in the form of ARPANET, a decentralized computer system that the US Department of Defense created and which by 1975 also included several research universities as "nodes." Internet features created by 1975 include E-mail, online chat, and mailing lists. The most popular mailing list in 1975? One on science fiction, of course.

5. The World Wide Web

... which, despite the propaganda of the 1990s, is not the whole Internet, just a subsection of it - was created in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee and hit the big time with the creation of the Mosaic Web browser in 1993.

The dynamic of the Net had been described before then. In 1990's Earth, David Brin imagined a streaming audio and video and clickable hypertext links. And in a 1989 short story, "The Originist," based in Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" universe, Orson Scott Card also created a linking system similar to today's hyperlinking.

6. Webcams?

Imagined (sort of) by every single science fiction author who ever wrote about a picture phone. There are too many of those to bother counting.

7. Waterbeds

Yes, waterbeds. Robert Heinlein used them in 1961's Stranger in a Strange Land ; the first modern waterbed was created in 1967 in San Francisco by design student Charles Hall, who dubbed it the "pleasure pit" (naughty boy).

Heinlein also thought up the idea of remotely controlled machines to manipulate dangerous materials; he called them "waldoes," and that's what they're called today.

8. Communications Satellites

Science fiction master Arthur C. Clarke is famous for having thought of these in 1945.

9. Space Tourists

When millionaire Dennis Tito put down his $20 million and hitched a ride into space with the Russians, he became the first tourist in space.

The idea of punting rich folks beyond the stratosphere is not new; in 1962's A Fall of Moondust , Arthur C. Clarke told the tale of some rich tourists who get stranded in a moon crater.

More whimsically, author Roald Dahl imagined a "Space Hotel, USA" in 1973's Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, complete with a staff of "managers, assistant managers, desk-clerks, waitresses, bellboys, chambermaids, pastry chefs, and hall porters."

10. Miniaturized Surgery

Doctors these days use miniaturized tools to perform surgery that's less invasive and more precise than traditional surgery, a practice suggested by Isaac Asimov in his 1966 novel, Fantastic Voyage.

It's worth noting, however, that along with miniaturized surgical tools, Asimov also shrunk the doctors to fit into the patient's body. We haven't managed that one yet.

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

The following is reprinted from Bathroom Reader Plunges Into History Again

Smithsonian Castle in Washington Mall, in HDR by jculverhouse [Flickr]

You haven't experienced American history until you've experienced the wonders of the Smithsonian Institution.

Ironically, the Smithsonian came into being as a bequest to the United States by British scientist James Smithson, who had never visited the United States himself (while alive, anyhow - see below).

Here's a glimpse of this All-American institution, courtesy of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader:

0 - Number of bag lunches you're allowed to take into the Smithsonian. Collectively, there are more than 20 sit-down restaurants among the Smithsonian museums, not counting outdoor courtyard grub.

2 - Percentage of the Smithsonian Institution's holdings on display at any given time.

3 - Number of one-cent stamps affixed to the first piece of mail flown across the Atlantic, which is housed in the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum.

4.5 - Millions of botanical specimens housed by the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History; this represents around 8 percent of all plants collected in the United States.

17 - Number of museums that make up the Smithsonian. Among others, these include the American Art Museum and its Renwick Gallery, the National Museum of the American Indian, the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (Asian art), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gallery (modern and contemporary art), and - whew! - the National Museum of Natural History.

24 - Number of 2004 Smithsonian visitors, in millions.

25 - The number, in thousands, of Africana books in the institution's Warren M. Robbins Library at the National Museum of African Art.

32 - The number of huge, metal buildings dedicated just to restoring and storing aircraft on display at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum and related centers. Smithsonian airplanes include the Enola Gay, the Wright 1903 Flyer, the Ryan NYP Spirit of St. Louis, the Space Shuttle Enterprise, the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, and the Concorde.

37.2 - Weight, in tons, of a section of Route 66 delivered to the Hall of Transportation in the National Museum of American History for a recent exhibit.

40 - Number, in thousands, of three-dimensional objects housed in the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, including Irish cut glass, Soviet porcelains, and Japanese sword fittings. The museum has more than 250,000 objects - drawings, prints, books, and textiles - all dedicated to the study of design.

45.52 - Number of carats in the Hope Diamond at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. It glows in the dark after exposure to UV rays and is semiconductive, too! If it truly belongs to the people of America to enjoy, Mrs. Uncle John wants to know when it'll be her turn to wear it out to dinner.

75 - Number of years after the institution's namesake, James Smithson, died that Smithsonian regent, Alexander Graham Bell, brought Smithson's body from his place of death in Italy to a tomb at the Smithsonian Institution.

100,000 - Amount of money, in British pound sterling, that James Smithson originally willed to the United States upon his death in 1826. This eventually became the financial start of the Smithsonian.

7,635,245 - That same willed amount adjusted to reflect 2002 U.S. dollars.

78,000,000 - Visitors that the website, www.smithsonian.org [now www.si.edu - Ed], hosted in 2004.

143,500,000 - Approximate number of objects, works of art, and specimens in the Smithsonian Institution.

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into History Again.

The book is a compendium of entertaining information chock-full of facts on a plethora of history topics. Uncle John's first plunge into history was a smash hit - over half a million copies sold! And this sequel gives you more colorful characters, cultural milestones, historical hindsight, groundbreaking events, and scintillating sagas.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute

The following reprinted from Uncle John's Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader.

It's interesting to study the paintings of the great masters ... but sometimes it's even more fun to study the work of the great fakers. Like these folks:

Han van Meegeren

Han van Meegeren painting his last forgery Jesus among the Doctors

Background: At the end of World War II, Dutch authorities began investigating the sale of Dutch national treasures to Nazi officials. They learned that Han van Meegeren, a struggling Dutch artist, had sold a priceless 17th-century Vermeer called Christ and the Adulteress to Nazi leader Hermann Goering for $256,000. Once the painting was repossessed and authenticated as a work painted during Vermeer's "middle period," Van Meegeren was arrested and charged with collaborated with the Nazis - a crime punishable by death.

The Truth: Van Meegeren defended himself by saying that there was no Vermeer "middle period," and that he had faked all six of the paintings attributed to those years of the artist's life. Van Meegeren also claimed to have painted two works by Pieter de Hooch, and one by ter Borch.

The judge didn't believe him. But to be sure, he sent the artist back to the studio (under guard) and told him to "paint another Vermeer." Van Meegeren quickly created something called Jesus Among the Doctors. It was, by all appearances, painted in the style of Vermeer.

What Happened: The judge dropped the treason charges. But as each of the paintings Van Meegeren took credit for were tested and proved to be fakes, he was arrested again - this time for forgery and fraud. He was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison; he died from a heart attack one month after the trial.

David Stein

Background: In the mid-60s, a 30-year-old art collector named David Stein walked into the shop of one of New York's top art dealers with three watercolor paintings by Russian painter Marc Chagall. The dealer bought all three for $10,000.

The Truth: Stein had painted all three "Chagalls" that morning before lunch. He made the new canvases look old by soaking them in Lipton's tea, and forged letters of authentication at the frame shop while waiting for the paintings to be framed.

What Happened: As Stein put it, "I should have stuck to dead men." By pure coincidence, Marc Chagall happened to be in New York that very same day ... and the art dealer who bought the paintings had an appointment to meet with him. The dealer brought the paintings to the meeting, and Chagall immediately denounced them as fakes. Stein was arrested and spent nearly four years in American and French prisons. But the bust was such a boost to his reputation that when he got out of prison, he was able to make a living from his own original paintings.

(Photo: Greatest art forgers and fakers in the world - lots more info about art forgery there!)

Pavel Jerdanowitch

Exaltation by Pavel Jerdanowitch

Background: In the spring of 1925, the Russian-born Jerdanowitch submitted a painting called Exaltation to a New York art exhibit. The red and green colors were unusual for the period, and the face of the woman in the painting was distorted, but art critics admired the work, and Jerdanowitch was invited to exhibit at a New York show in 1926. He did - this time displaying a painting called Aspiration and explaining that he was the founder of the "Disumbrationist" school of painting. The following year, he showed two more paintings, Adoration and Illumination. Jerdanowitch's groundbreaking work caused a storm, and he was hailed as a visionary.

The Truth: "Pavel Jerdanowitch" was actually Paul Jordan-Smith, a Latin scholar who hated abstract and modernist trend in art. When an art critic criticized his wife's realistic painting as "definitely of the old school" in 1925, he set out to prove that critics would praise any painting they couldn't understand. "I asked my wife for paint and canvas," he recounted after admitting the hoax. "I'd never tried to paint anything in my life." The Disumbrationist School was born.

What Happened: Smith admitted the ruse to the Los Angeles Times in 1927, but the confession only fueled interest in his work. A Chicago gallery owner displayed the paintings in 1928, and later called the show "the most widely noticed exhibition I have ever heard of."

More on Pavel Jerdanowitch at the Museum of Hoaxes.

D. S. Windle

Background: In 1936 Windle entered a painting called Abstract Painting of Woman in the International Surrealist Exhibition taking place in London. The work was one of the most talked-about and admired paintings of the show.

The Truth: D. S. Windle ("De Swindle") was actually B. Howitt-Lodge, a portrait painter who hated surrealist art. He created his painting out of "a phantasmagoria of paint blobs, variegated beads, a cigarette stub, Christmas tinsel, pieces of hair, and a sponge." Howitt-Lodge chose the materials, he later admitted, because he wanted to create "the worst possible mess" and enter it in "one of the most warped and disgusting shows I've ever seen."

What Happened: Modernists were unmoved by his confession - they accepted Howitt-Lodge's work as a genuine surrealist art, even if he didn't. "He may think it's a hoax," one fan told reporters, "but he's an artist and unconsciously he may be a surrealist. Aren't we all?"

Alceo Dossena

Background: In 1922 the Boston Museum of Fine Arts paid $100,000 for the marble tomb of a wealthy Italian woman named Maria Caterina Savelli, who died in 1430. The tomb was supposedly carved by a famous Florentine sculptor named Mino de Fia-Savelli, and was so impressive that the museum set the exhibit up right at the building's entrance.

The Truth: As Kathryn Lindskoog writes in Fakes, Frauds & Other Malarkey, "No one seemed to notice that the Mino Tomb was dated one year after its sculptor was born, and that the brief Latin inscription on the tomb, which was naively copied from a book about the Savelli family, said, "At last the above-mentioned Maria Caterina Savelli died."

What Happened: No one realized it was a fake until 1928, when an obscure Italian sculptor named Alceo Dossena sued art dealer Alfredo Fasoli for $66,000, claiming that without his knowledge, Fasoli had been selling copies of his Renaissance art as the genuine article.

The Boston Museum of Fine Arts refused to accept that the Mino Tomb was a fake ... until Dossena produced photographs of the work in progress, as well as a toe that had broken off a figure carved in the tomb.

Museums all over the world scoured their collections looking for Dossena's fakes - hundreds were found. The Cleveland Museum of Art was particularly hard hit - after finding modern nails deep inside a "13th-century" Madonna and child, it replaced the piece with a marble statue of Athena that cost $120,000. That statue also turned out to be a Dossena fake. For what it's worth, not everyone suffered from the scandal: Alceo Dossena flourished. People became so interested in his work that he was able to launch a career as a legitimate artist.

(Photo: A History of Art Forgery)

Tom Keating

Background: In 1976 thirteen paintings by Samuel Palmer, a famous English artist, inexplicably came on the market at the same time.

The Truth: When the London Times challenged their authenticity, an English painter named Tom Keating wrote in to confess that he had forged the paintings - as well as 2,500 other paintings during his illicit 20-year career, including works attributed to Rembrandt, Degas, Goya, Toulouse-Lautrec, Monet, Van Gogh, and others. Keating claimed he left a clue in every painting that proved it wasn't authentic - sometimes he used modern materials; other times he painted "this is a fake" on the canvas using lead-based paint, which would show up on X-rays. But he was never caught.

What Happened: Keating was in such poor health when he confessed that he was never put on trial. He became a cult hero in England for fooling art experts for so long, and his own paintings soared in value. One which he called Monet and his Family in their Houseboat, sold at an auction for $32,000. By the time of his death in 1983, his work was so popular that other forgers were cashing in by copying his work.

(Photo: Rod Ebdon via Fine Art of the Fake Makers)

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader, which comes packed with 504 pages of great stories.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

The following is reprinted from Uncle John's Unsinkable Bathroom Reader

If you think about it, Pac-Man is a strange game concerning a tiny, pie-shaped creature who ate power pills so that he could catch ghosts. That's an odd premise, but nothing compared to these ... behold, the 14 weirdest video games in history:

SOCKS THE CAT ROCKS THE HILL (1992)

Socks, the pet cat of President Bill Clinton, must get to the Oval Office to warn the president about a stolen nuclear bomb. To do that, he must defeat villains including Russian spies, the press corps, and former presidents Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush.

CHAOS IN THE WINDY CITY (1994)

Basketball superstar Michael Jordan battles an army of basketball-headed zombies that has invaded Chicago. To defeat them, he uses an arsenal of magic basketballs (including fiery-hot basketballs and ice-block basketballs).

TOOBIN' (1988)

Toobin' Atari game (Source: World of Spectrum)

At the beginning of the game, the player floats down a backwoods river in an inner-tube race. Things suddenly take a turn for the worse as the player is chased by dinosaurs, ancient Inca warriors, and angry hillbillies.

BILL LAIMBEER'S COMBAT BASKETBALL (1991)

Basketball is supposed to be a non-contact sport. Not the way Laimbeer played it. As a Detroit Piston in the 1980s, he was well-known for frequent flagrant fouls and starting fights on the court. His notoriety led to this futuristic basketball game in which players punch, kick, push, and throw bombs at each other.

COOL SPOT (1993)

In the early 1990s, 7-Up created a mascot - an anthropomorphic dot (with arms, legs, and sunglasses) based on the red dot in the 7-Up logo.

The Spot was licensed for this game, which was essentially one long 7-Up ad in which the character wanders around a beach firing soda bubbles at enemies.

MICHAEL JACKSON'S MOONWALKER (1990)

[YouTube Link]

A drug dealer named Mr. Big has kidnapped some children and takes them to the Moon, where he plans to use a laser cannon to destroy the Earth. As Michael Jackson, you have to defeat Mr. Big and his cronies by using dance moves that shoot "magic rays."

THE TYPING OF THE DEAD (2000)

Screenshot of Typing of the Dead from Just Games Retro

This semi-educational game is supposed to teach kids to type and spell. In order to fend off hungry zombies, you have to accurately type words. Get them right, the zombies leave you alone. Misspell, and the zombies will eat your b-r-a-i-n.

EXODUS (1991)

After solving some difficult logic puzzle, you have to answer questions about the Bible. Get those right, and you get to control Moses. The goal is to spread the word of God by shooting large Ws (for "word of God") at ancient Israelites.

THE FANTASTIC ADVENTURES OF DIZZY (1991)

A walking egg named Dizzy must save his family from an evil wizard by solving puzzles. One of the puzzles: Dizzy must pick certain plants and mix them in a bottle to make medicine for his sick grandpa egg.

DRUM MASTER (2006)

In the game Guitar Hero, you get a plastic guitar and play along with well-known rock songs. Drum Master is made for the handheld Nintendo DS - you get to drum along with popular songs with two toothpick-sized sticks.

JOHN DEERE'S HARVEST IN THE HEARTLAND (2007)

IGN has the review of this unusual game, John Deere: Harvest in the Heartland

Using various John Deere tractors and farm implements, you have to plant crops, fertilize crops, harvest crops, and milk cows. (And it's one giant ad for John Deere.)

FACE TRAINING (2007)

[YouTube Link]

Using a small camera that attaches to the TV, you have to copy the facial expressions the game tells you to make.

PRINCESS TOMATO IN THE SALAD KINGDOM (1991)

On a mission from the dying King Broccoli, the noble knight Sir Cucumber has to rescue Princess Tomato from her captor, Minister Pumpkin. Sir Cucumber is assisted by Percy, a baby persimmon.

TOILET KIDS (1992)

[YouTube Link]

A little kid gets up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and is sucked through the toilet into another dimension populated by creatures who look like bathroom fixtures. The Toilet Kid must then battle with tough toilet bodyguards and an evil giant urinal.

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Unsinkable Bathroom Reader.

The Bathroom Readers' Institute has sailed the seas of science, history, pop culture, humor, and more to bring you Uncle John's Unsinkable Bathroom Reader. Our all-new 21st edition is overflowing with over 500 pages of material that is sure to keep you fully absorbed.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute has published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute.

The following reprinted from Uncle John's Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader.

Got an idea but no paper to write it down? Don't worry, just do what these people did and grab whatever's in front of you and start scribbling:

Written on: A cocktail napkin
By: Rollin King and Herb Kelleher
The Story: Kelleher was a lawyer. King was a banker and pilot who ran a small charter airline. In 1966, they had a drink at a San Antonio bar. Conversation led to an idea for an airline that would provide short intrastate flights at a low cost. They mapped out routes and a business strategy on a cocktail napkin. Looking at the notes on the napkin, Kelleher said, "Rollin, you're crazy, let's do it," and Southwest Airline was born.

[editor's note: This issue of the Bathroom Reader was printed in 1997. In 2007, in an interview with The Dallas Morning News, Rollin King admitted that the napkin story was "a hell of a story" but not true]

Written on: Toilet paper
By: Richard Berry
The Story: Berry, an R&B performer, was at a club in 1957 when he heard a song with a Latin beat that he liked. He went into the men's room, pulled off some toilet paper, and wrote down the lyrics to "Louie, Louie."

Written on: The back of a grocery bill
By: W.C. Fields
The Story: In 1940 Fields needed money quickly. He scribbled down a plot idea on some paper he found in his pocket, and sold it to Universal Studios for $25,000. Ironically, the plot was about Fields trying to sell an outrageous script to a movie studio. It became his last film, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941). Fields received screenplay credit as Otis Criblecoblis.

Written on: The back of a letter
By: Francis Scott Key
The Story: In 1814 Key, a lawyer, went out to the British fleet in Chesapeake Bay to plead for the release of a prisoner. The British agreed, but since Key had arrived as they were preparing to attack, they detained him and his party until the battle was over. From this vantage point Key watched the bombardment, and "by the dawn's early light" saw that "our flag was still there." He was so inspired that he wrote the lyrics to "The Star Spangled Banner" on the only paper he had, a letter he'd stuck in his pocket.

Written on: A cocktail napkin
By: Arthur Laffer
The Story: In Sept 1974, Arthur Laffer (professor of business economics at USC) had a drink at a Washington, D.C. restaurant with his friend Donald Rumsfeld (then an advisor to President Gerald Ford). The conversation was about the economy, taxes, and what to do about recession. Laffer moved his wine glass, took the cocktail napkin, and drew a simple graph to illustrate his idea that at some point, increased taxes result in decreased revenues. The graph, known as the "Laffer Curve," later became the basis for President Reagan's "trickle-down" economics.

Written on: A napkin
By: Roger Christian and Jan Berry
The Story: In the early 1960s Roger Christian, one of the top DJs in Los Angeles, co-wrote many of Jan and Dean's hits with Jan Berry. One night he and Jan were at an all-night diner and Christian began scribbling the lyrics to a new song, "Honolulu Lulu," on a napkin. When they left the restaurant, Jan said, "Give me the napkin ... I'll go to the studio and work out the arrangements." "I don't have it," Christian replied. Then they realized they'd left the napkin on the table. They rushed back in ... but the waitress had already thrown it away. They tried to reconstruct the song but couldn't. So the two tired collaborators went behind the diner and sorted through garbage in the dumpster until 4 a.m., when they finally found their song. It was worth the search. "Honolulu Lulu" made it to #11 on the national charts.

Written on: The back of an envelope
By: Abraham Lincoln
The Story: On his way to Gettysburg to commemorate the battle there, Lincoln jotted down his most famous speech - the Gettysburg Address - on an envelope. Actually, that was just a myth. Several drafts of the speech have been discovered - one of which was written in the White House on executive stationery.

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader, which comes packed with 504 pages of great stories.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

The following is reprinted from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe.

Most of the time we're willing to shovel down the popcorn and watch Yoda lift X-Wings out of the swamp using nothing but the Force and a smattering of questionably parsed English, or let Jean-Luc Picard get the Enterprise out of a scrape by the convenient discovery of yet another type of particle beam. But every once in a while we just have to vent about some of the truly egregious "fiction" in science fiction.

1. Sounds in Space

The tag line from Alien got it right: "In Space, no one can hear you scream". The reason no one can hear you scream is that sound needs air to travel in, and there's none in space.

Most of space is a hard vacuum, with a molecule or two of hydrogen floating around in every cubic meter - not nearly enough to transmit sound. Every sound in the movies, from photon torpedoes and laser beams to exploding starships and hyperspace booms, would never happen in real life.

For that matter, you'd never see laser beams in space either, since in a vacuum there's no medium to reveal them. So a real-life laser dog fight in space would be really boring to watch.

2. Faster-Than-Light Travel

Warp drives and hyperspace are very useful in science fiction, but there's one catch. According to Einstein, the speed of light isn't just a good idea, it's the law. Nothing can go faster than the speed of light in a vacuum (that's about 186,000 miles per second).

Even inching toward the speed of light is difficult - immense energy is required to get to even a fraction of the speed of light, and the closer you get to the speed of light, the more energy is required. The amount of energy you'd need to achieve the speed of light is infinite (i.e., more than you've got, even with those supercool long-lasting batteries). So just tossing in a few more dilithium crystals into the warp drives isn't going to make it happen.

There are loopholes in our understanding of the physics that make faster-than-light travel theoretically possible. For example, it's theoretically possible to create a "bubble" of space that breaks itself off from other space and moves faster than light relative to that space (all the while everything inside both "spaces" moves no faster than the speed of light). This is known as an Alcubierre Warp Bubble. The catch (there had to be one) is that these bubbles require the existence of exotic matter that has negative energy, and wouldn't you know, there isn't really any lying around, and it's not clear that any actually exists.

3. Laser Bolts You Can Dodge

Aside from the issue of Imperial Stormtroopers being bad shots, let's review a fundamental fact of light (which is what lasers are): It travels at 186,000 miles per second. So the idea of ducking before the laser hits you is just plain silly.

Not to mention (of course) the idea of a laser bolt being visible as a streak that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. If you were zapped by a laser from a laser gun, it would look like a single stream of light, with one end attached to the barrel of said gun, and the end attached to whatever portion of your head had not melted yet (assuming you're having a laser battle somewhere where there is enough air around to illuminate the entire beam).

Most "laser" beams in science fiction movies travel slower than bullets do today. Let's see Obi Wan whip his light saber around fast enough to stop the spray of a Mac-10 (and let's not even begin to talk about all the things wrong with a sword made of light).

4. Human-Looking Aliens

This is endemic on the various Star Trek series, where creatures from entirely different sectors of the universe look just like humans except for the occasional bulging ridge on their foreheads. Yes, this is the result of having only humans at casting calls, but in a large sense, all these "humanoid" variations ain't gonna happen.

Look, humans evolved on earth and shared a basic body format (four limbs, one head, side-to-side symmetry) with just about every other vertebrate on the planet. It's a form that works fine for this planet, but not even every vertebrate sticks with it (see: snakes, whales, seals, etc).

Given that any planet with life on it will have that life evolve in it's own way, the chances of the universe being stocked with chesty alien princesses who crave human starship captains is slim at best.

Related to this is the following.

5. Half-Breed Aliens

Humans don't even interbreed with other species here on earth. Our DNA is simply too different from other species to allow such a mating to produce offspring.

Given this, what are the chances of successful mating with an alien species that may not even have DNA as its genetic encoding medium?

Also going back to the idea that aliens probably won't look like Humans, how would you do it anyway? It's not exactly the "Insert Tab A Into Slot B" proposition it would be here at home.

6. Brain-Sucking Aliens

The Good News of an Alien Facehugger Attack T-Shirt, art by Mike Jacobsen

Ditto aliens that control your body by using your brains, or gestate in your chest, or whatnot. Let's posit that any creature that controls the brain of any other creature (not that any exist here on Earth) does so only after a few million years of what's called "speciation" – i.e., one species eventually enters a symbiotic relationship with another species. This relationship would have to be pretty specific, as symbiotic relationships are here on Earth.

Which is to say just because you're in a symbiotic relationship with one species doesn't mean it transfers over to another species, especially an alien species, who's body chemistry, DNA, brain wiring, etc., isn't even remotely close to your own. So don't worry about the "Puppet Master" scenario too much, or that you'll be nothing more than a glorified egg sac for some nasty breed of space monster.

7. Shape-Shifting Aliens

Shape-changing aliens are all very well, but there's a tiny problem in having a roughly human sized lump of alien protoplasm turning itself into, say, a rat, to scurry around in the ventilation shaft: Where does rest of the alien go? You can't just make 99% of your mass disappear into thin air (or reappear, as the case may be); it has to go somewhere.

Unless that "rat" is running around with a highly compressed mass of a human-sized object (which presents its own problems), shape-shifting in to different sized objects is not very likely (one of the smart things about Terminator 2 was that the T-1000 only shape shifted into things of roughly the same mass, like human beings or a floor).

8. Time Travel

Got an itch to spend time in the Arthurian England? Or perhaps Gettysburg during the Civil War?

The same relativistic principles that keep us from going faster than light also keep us rom traveling backward in time and messing with the past. It's possible to slow down time - the closer you get to the speed of light, the slower time moves for you relative to your original frame of reference - but to get the clock spinning in the other direction would require you to go faster than light, and you can't do that.

Again, there are theoretical loopholes that could allow it - worm holes, actually, which are "tunnels" in the fabric of space-time that could possibly allow travel back in time. but once again, keeping these wormholes open would require exotic matter with negative energy. Got any? Neither do we.

9. The Planetary Gravity Scam

Everywhere you go in science fiction, people are walking around like they weigh just what they do on Earth. Chances of that happening in the real universe? Slim. Consider our own solar system. On Mars, a 180-pound man would weigh just 70 pounds; on Jupiter, 424 pounds (not that you can walk on Jupiter, as it has no solid surface). That man on the moon? Just 30 pounds. The man's mass is the same, it's just that different planets have different gravitational pulls.

The idea that all the planets that humans might visit would exactly match Earth's own gravitational profile is a little much. As is, alternately, the idea that all alien creatures would be as comfortable in our gravitational field as we are.

10 The Planetary Sameness Principle

Tatooine looks just like the Yuma Desert in Arizona. Actually, it is the Yuma Desert of Arizona! I stand corrected, it's Tunisia ... y'know, on the continent of Africa, Earth. Photo via Wookieepedia

The desert planet of Tatooine. The ice planet of Hoth. The jungle planet of Dagobah. What do these planets all have in common? One planetary-wide ecosystem. Which isn't too likely.

Our own planet has varying zones and ecological areas: desert, tundra, jungle, and so on; other planets in the system also show marked zones of varying atmospheric and weather patterns. Mars has ice caps as well as (relatively) temperate zones; Jupiter has distinct weather systems based in different areas on its globe. The planets that show a sameness are the ones we couldn't live on. Venus is all desert, but that's because a runaway greenhouse effect makes it hot enough to melt lead. Pluto is all ice, but it's so far away from the Sun that its atmosphere freezes for most of its orbit.

There may well be purely desert or jungle planets, but most planets we'd want to live on would probably be able to accommodate both.

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

The following is reprinted from Uncle John's Unsinkable Bathroom Reader

Sometimes, tragically, in the middle of shooting a movie, an actor dies. It's actually happened many times. So what's a director to do? Turns out they have quite a few options:

Actor: Oliver Reed
Movie: Gladiator (2000)
Story: Reed had a well-earned reputation as an extremely heavy drinker and partygoer, and he died the way he lived. While shooting Gladiator on the island of Malta in 1999, he went to a bar and reportedly drank three bottles of rum, eight bottles of beer, and several shots of whiskey. At the end of the night, Reed, 61, dropped dead from a heart attack.

Most of his scenes had been shot, but for the few that weren't, director Ridley Scott used a body double and then, using digital technology, placed Reed's face on the stand-in's body (they were fight scenes). Cost of the re-creation: $3 million. Gladiator was released in 2000 and won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Photo: The Big Picture, who has more on the CGI trick used in Gladiator

Link: Gladiator DVD

Frank Morgan as the Wizard of Oz, one of five roles he played in the movie.
Photo: herbynow [Flickr]

Actor: Frank Morgan
Movie: Annie Get Your Gun (1950)
Story: Morgan (best known as the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz) was cast as Wild West legend Buffalo Bill Cody in the screen version of this Broadway musical. Just days into filming, Morgan died and was replaced by Louis Calhern. But in the scene where Buffalo Bill first rides into town, when the audience sees Cody from a distance, the actor on horseback is Morgan. The actor in the close-up - and from then on - is Calhern.

Link: Annie Get Your Gun DVD

Actor: Heath Ledger
Movie: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)
Story: Ledger died at the age of 28 in 2008, under the influence of a range of sleeping pills and antidepressants. At the time, he was on a break from shooting The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, a fantasy about a magical theater show. Director Terry Gilliam decided to keep going. The movie's premise, in which Ledger's character travels through different worlds, was adapted so that the character's appearance could change as well. Ledger's friend Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell split the role between them (and donated their salaries to Ledger's three-year-old daughter, Matilda).

Photo: Howie_Berlin [Flickr]

Actor: John Candy
Movie: Wagons East! (1994)
Story: While filming the comic western in March 1994, the 43-year-old actor suffered a heart attack and died in his sleep in a hotel in Mexico.

Almost all of Candy's scenes had been completed, so director Peter Markle used a body double for the remaining footage. Wagons East! was released later that year and bombed with critics and audiences.

Photo: cineone [Flickr]

Link: Wagons East!

Actor: Bela Lugosi
Movie: Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959)
Story: Plan 9 is often called the worst film ever made, but Director Ed Wood was able to hire horror movie icon Bela Lugosi because the actor was 73, past his prime, addicted to morphine, and up for anything that paid. Wood cast Lugosi as "the Ghoul Man." After compiling just a few minutes of footage (with no dialogue because Wood hadn't actually written the script yet), Lugosi died of a heart attack.

Not wanting to lose out on the publicity from having a recently departed screen legend in his film, Wood shot the rest of Plan 9 with Tom Mason, a Los Angeles chiropractor, standing in for Lugosi. To account for the two men looking nothing alike, in all of his scenes, Mason held a black cape over his face.

Link: Plan 9 from Outer Space

Actor: River Phoenix
Movie: Dark Blood
Story: In the fall of 1993, Phoenix (Stand By Me, My Own Private Idaho) was shooting Dark Blood, portraying a man who lived alone on a nuclear testing site and spent his time making strange dolls.

With 11 days to go on the production, Phoenix, then 23 years old, overdosed on cocaine and heroin, and died on the sidewalk outside The Viper Room, a Los Angeles nightclub. There were too many pivotal scenes left to shoot, so producers completely scrapped the movie.

Photo: One From RM [Flickr]

Actor: Vic Morrow
Movie: Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983)
Story: In a horrific morality tale, Morrow played a vicious racist who has the tables turned on him and suddenly finds himself in the jungles of Vietnam, being hunted down by American soldiers.

While filming a scene involving gunfire and a helicopter, the pyrotechnics used for the gunfire exploded prematurely, causing the helicopter to crash. The helicopter's blades decapitated Morrow, 53, and also killed two extras, both of whom were children.

The movie was released anyway, but it didn't do as well as expected at the box office - probably due to distaste over the accident. Director John Landis was later charged (but acquitted) with involuntary manslaughter and child endangerment.

Link: Twilight Zone - The Movie

Actress: Natalie Wood
Movie: Brainstorm (1983)
Story: Wood, a star in her childhood and early adulthood with films like Miracle on 34th Street, Splendor in the Grass, and West Side Story, died in 1981 while filming the virtual reality-themed Brainstorm. While partying on a yacht off Catalina Island with her husband Robert Wagner and Brainstorm co-star Christopher Walken, Wood disappeared.

It was later discovered that she had tried to leave the yacht on a dinghy but fell into the water and drowned. She had one scene left to shoot in Brainstorm. Paramount Pictures debated for nearly two years about what to do, ultimately completing Wood's final scene with a body double and dubbed dialogue. Brainstorm was quietly released in 1983.

(Photo: IMDb)

Link: Brainstorm

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Unsinkable Bathroom Reader.

The Bathroom Readers' Institute has sailed the seas of science, history, pop culture, humor, and more to bring you Uncle John's Unsinkable Bathroom Reader. Our all-new 21st edition is overflowing with over 500 pages of material that is sure to keep you fully absorbed.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute has published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute.

The following is reprinted from The Best of The Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

Dr. Norman Borlaug. Photo: khalampre [Flickr]

Ever heard of Norman Borlaug? Most people haven't, yet he's credited with a truly amazing accomplishment: saving more life than anybody else in history.

THE POPULATION BOMB

In his 1968 best seller, The Population Bomb , author and biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote that "the battle to feed all of humanity is over."

Ehrlich's chilling book predicted that a rapidly growing world population would soon lead to massive worldwide food shortages, especially in third-world countries. World population was just over 3.5 billion at the time and was increasing at a faster rate than food production. "In the 1970s and 1980s," Ehrlich wrote, "hundreds of millions of people will starve to death." Most experts agreed with Ehrlich's dire predictions ... but they hadn't anticipated Dr. Norman Borlaug.

(Photo: Center for Conservation Biology, Stanford University)

FARM BOY

Borlaug was born in 1914 and grew up on a farm in Saude, Iowa. In 1942 he graduated from the University of Minnesota with PhDs in plant pathology and genetics. In 1944 he was invited by the Rockefeller Foundation, a global charitable organization, and the Mexican government to head a project aimed at improving wheat production in Mexico. His assignment: to develop a more productive strain of wheat that was also resistant to stem rust, a fungal disease that was becoming a major problem in Latin America.

Borlaug chose two locations with an 8,500-foot altitude difference for his testing. He grew and crossbred thousands of different strains of wheat, and worked with the latest fertilizers, looking for plants that could grow in both environments. Reason: they had to be able to grow anywhere.

Over the next several years Borlaug was able to develop hardy, highly productive strains, but he found that the tall wheats he was using would not support the weight of the added grain. So he crossed the tall wheats with dwarf varieties that were not only shorter but had thicker, stronger stems. And that was his breakthrough: a semi-dwarf, disease-resistant, high-output wheat. He worked incessantly to get the seeds distributed to small farmers throughout Mexico, and by 1963 Borlaug's wheat varieties made up 95 percent of the nation's total production, with a crop yield that was more than six times greater than when he'd arrived. Not only could Mexico stop importing wheat, they were now an exporter - a huge boost to any nation's nutritional and economic health, but especially to an underdeveloped one. And now Borlaug wanted to take his high-yield farming global. He wanted, he said, to secure "a temporary success in man's war against hunger and deprivation."

ANOTHER VICTORY

In 1963 the Rockefeller Foundation sent Borlaug to Pakistan and India, two nations with severe hunger and malnutrition problems. Borlaug's help was resisted at first; there was cultural opposition to new farming methods. But when acute famine struck in 1965 (1.5 million people would die by 1967), the barriers came down. And the results were incredible: by 1968 Pakistan, which just a few years earlier relied on massive grain imports, was entirely self-sufficient. By 1970 India's production had doubled ad it too was getting close to self-sufficiency.

At four o'clock in the morning one day in 1970, Margaret Borlaug got a phone call. She raced out to the fields and informed her husband, already hard at work, that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. "No, I haven't," he said. He thought it was a hoax. But he had indeed won it for having saved the lives of millions - perhaps hundreds of millions - of people in India and Pakistan and for the message it had sent to the world. "He has given us a well-founded hope," the Nobel committee said, "an alternative of peace and of life - the green revolution."

NOTHING ESCAPES CONTROVERSY

Borlaug had also been working on other grains, such as corn and rye, and in the 1980s began developing more productive strains of rice to increase production in China and Southeast Asia. He was setting up similar programs in Africa, but ran into a major hurdle: environmentalists opposed his methods. Among their charges: spreading the same few varieties of grains all over the planet is harming biodiversity; huge farms are benefiting from his high techniques and killing off the small farmer; inorganic fertilizers used in the Borlaug method are harmful to the environment; and genetically engineered food is unnatural and potentially dangerous.

"Some of the environmental lobbyist are the salt of the earth," Borlaug said," but many of them are elitists. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things." He admitted that he would rather his work benefited small farmers, but added, "Wheat isn't political. It doesn't know that it's supposed to be producing more for poor farmers than for rich farmers." Supporters argue that Borlaug's high-yield method has actually been a boon for the environment, saving hundreds of millions of acres of wild land from being turned into farms. The controversy continues, but none of it has stopped Borlaug from his mission.

KEEP ON PLANTING

In 1984, with the help of Japanese philanthropist Ryoichi Sasakawa, Borlaug set up the Sasakawa Africa Association (SAA), training more than a million farmers throughout Africa. Result: using Borlaug seed and methods, cereal grain yields have increased from two- to four-fold.

As of 2005 - at the age of 91 - Norman Borlaug is still at it. He continues to work with Mexico's International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, still heads the SAA, runs research programs, teaches young scientists, gives lectures, and of course, still works in the field.

Over his 50-plus-year career he has been credited with saving as many as a billion people from starvation, and has received numerous international awards. In May 2004, he was presented with another: at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral in Borlaug's college town of Minneapolis, he was shown their new "Window of Peace." The Minneapolis Star Tribune described the event: "He gazed upward to see the sun shining through a 30-foot-tall stained glass window. There - along with depictions of Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, and other modern-day peacemakers - was a life-size likeness of Borlaug, holding a fistful of wheat."

The article above is reprinted with permission from The Best of the Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

The Bathroom Reader Institute handpicked the most eye-opening, rib-tickling, and mind-boggling articles from everything they have written over the last ten years and carefully crammed them into 576 pages of the book.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute has published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute.

Norman Borlaug was featured on Penn and Teller's BS on genetically modified food:

[YouTube Link]

The following is reprinted from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe.

The question of which science fiction books are the best ever is a pointless one for most people, since many of the "greatest science fiction novels" are books that no one but science fiction fans will read. A better question to ask might be: What are the best science fiction books that you don't have to be a hard-core science fiction fan to enjoy? We scanned our library and came up with these 10 (well, 12) books that not only provide great SF fun, but also are approachable enough for the casual reader. Some old, some new - but all good reads.

Dune by Frank Herbert

David Lynch made this book into a 1984 film that was so incomprehensible that the actual novel - 600 pages on the future of religion, politics, desert ecology, and drug trafficking - look positively streamlined in comparison. When the book came out in the mid 1960s its multiple story threads were daunting. (Photo: Robert E. Nylund, via Wikipedia)

But (ironically) thanks to shows like The X-Files and even The West Wing, in which several things are happening all at once, people got used to following intersecting story lines. The result is that Herbert's magnum opus now comes across more like an epic historical novel that happens to be set in the future, not the past.

Herbert wrote several Dune sequels of varying quality. More recently, Herbert's son Brian teamed up with SF author Kevin J. Anderson to write a trio of prequels that Uncle John doesn't think are on par with the rest. Stick with the original.

Links: Dune | More by Frank Herbert

Earth by David Brin

Scientists in the near future create a tiny black hole and - oops - allow it to sink into the earth's core; in the process of digging it out, they discover there's another black hole down there, and that one's origin is a mystery - and a problem. (Photo: David Brin)

This plot line is the skeleton on which author and real-life physicist Brin hangs some fascinating episodic story lines that involve problems the world faces today (global warming, privacy, energy crunches), carried out to their possible outcomes 50 years from now.

Originally published in 1991, Earth has already pegged a couple of items correctly (such as a version of the World Wide Web and the idea of futzing with old movies using new computer graphics). Plus, scientists have begun trying to generate tiny little black holes in labs. So imagine what else Brin might (eventually) be right about.

Links: Earth | More by David Brin

Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card

Supersmart child-warriors are used by the military to battle an invasion of buglike aliens. That's the setup of Ender's Game; the meat of the story comes from the struggle of one of these extraordinary children (named Ender) to keep a grip on his humanity even as he's being turned into the perfect killing machine. (Photo: nihonjoe via Wikipedia)

Card sets up a lot of questions about morality, war, and man's purpose in Ender's Game; in the sequel, Speaker for the Dead, these questions get a payoff as the grown-up Ender finds himself in a position to save a new sentient species or allow it to be destroyed. Proof that interesting philosophical questions can be asked (and even answered) in the form of a purely entertaining story.

Links: Ender's Game | More by Orson Scott Card

Grass by Sheri Tepper

Like Dune, this is a large tale involving nobility, religion, politics, and the fate of the human race - but for a change, the hero is a heroine. (Photo: Charles N. Brown, via Locus Online)

Marjorie Westriding is dispatched with her family to a far-off planet to find a cure for a plague, but she ends up confronting questions of original sin among aliens. Lots of philosophy, and even some sex (well, sort of), but also lots of action, plus a group of purely malevolent creatures who love nothing better than to toy with humans. Hand this to someone who enjoys those massive romantic epics for a change of pace.

Links: Grass | More by Sheri Tepper

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Earth is destroyed to make an intergalactic bypass, launching the interstellar travels of one completely ordinary and befuddled human being named Arthur Dent. (Photo Jill Furmanovsky, via DouglasAdams.com)

Geeks love this one, but for the right reasons - namely because it'll make you laugh so hard that you may vomit involuntarily. Note that this is humor of the distinctly British, Monty Python-like variety, so if you're not into that, you may wonder what the fuss is about.

But if you ever laughed at Monty Python and the Holy Grail (or even A Fish Called Wanda), you'll be laughing at this one, too. Hitchhiker has several sequels, each progressively less funny than the one before (but still worth a chuckle or two).

Links: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy | More by Douglas Adams

Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons

It takes guts to snatch the format of The Canterbury Tales and use it to crank out epic science fiction, but the extraordinarily talented Dan Simmons (who also writes bang-up horror and action novels) is just the guy to do it. (Photo: Dan Simmons)

Over the course of these two novels, Simmons creates a galaxy-wide human civilization that's pitted against a mysterious enemy. Hyperion uses the overlapping stories of a clutch of pilgrims to paint the picture of this future civilization; Fall of Hyperion describes its downfall, as seen through the eye of a clone of the great Romantic poet John Keats.

Great storytelling, great action, great plotting; not just a couple of the best science fiction novels ever, but two of the best adventure novels in a long time, period.

Links: Hyperion | The Fall of Hyperion | More by Dan Simmons

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

This one shows up on a lot of high school reading lists, and for good reason. It's a fine combination of science fiction and fantasy and an increasingly neglected literary form - a series of short stories, hung together with a single thread: they all take place on Mars. (Photo: Alan Light, via Flickr)

The stories include encounters with real live Martians (who may or may not be happy to see humans), the stories of the humans who leave Earth to come to Mars, and, in the end, the stories of the humans who are left behind, each short enough to be read in a single sitting.

It's Bradbury at the top of his form, which means these are some of the better short stories you'll find almost anywhere.

Links: The Martian Chronicles | More by Ray Bradbury

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville

The perfect book for anyone who thinks that science fiction can't be literary and/or adventurous in form. Miéville's genre-buster of a novel is not unlike what you would get if you spliced together the genes of Charles Dickens and horror master H.P. Lovecraft and raised the resulting creature on the writings of Orwell, Huxley, and Philip K. Dick (the fellow who wrote the story that was the basis of the movie Blade Runner). (Photo: Andrew M Butler, via Flickr)

It's difficult to describe the novel, except to say that it involves mad scientists, interspecies romance, vampiric moth creatures, Tammany Hall-like urban politics, the value systems of alien species, interdimensional spiders, and a rip-roaring final action scene that takes place on the rooftops of a city you really can't imagine. All written by someone who uses the English language like Yo-Yo Ma uses a cello. Fabulous writing, regardless of genre.

Links: Perdido Street Station | More by China Mieville

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

William Gibson's Neuromancer may be considered the first "cyberpunk" novel, but the fact is, it's kind of a deadly bore. Snow Crash, on the other hand, is a real hoot right from its first scene, which involves a madcap pizza delivery and is written with the same sort of delirious cinematic urgency that you'll find in the best novels of William Goldman (Marathon Man). (Photo: Bob Lee via Flickr)

The novel's plot involves a computer virus that (get this) dates back to Sumeria, but it doesn't really hang together, so instead, enjoy the book for its portrayal of both an insanely Balkanized America and a huge cyberworld so vividly imagined that a whole bunch of Internet companies bankrupted themselves in the 1990s trying to create a world just like it.

Also, any book that features a large Aleutian with a nuclear bomb in a motorcycle sidecar and the words "Poor Impulse Control" tattooed on his forehead is one you know you're going to have fun with.

Links: Snow Crash | More by Neal Stephenson

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

The expiration date for this novel and its ideas regarding love and sex and human transcendence has sort of passed (people used the novel for years as a foundation for their own desire for hippie polygamy, and now they don't so much), but it still make for a good read for two reasons. (Photo: Dd-b, via Wikimedia Commons)

One, Robert Heinlein wrote damn fine dialogue, which makes him more fun to read than most other writers today (and how sad is that, since Heinlein's been dead coming up on 15 years now). Two, Heinlein thought seriously about the nature of God and the interrelationship between God and His followers, which is interesting to contemplate even if you're not interested in the polysexual hijinks.

Also, Jubal Harshaw, the cranky old man who counsels the "Stranger" is like a dyspeptic Yoda advising an extraordinarily horny Luke Skywalker, is one of the great curmudgeons of the 20th century writing, and you don't want to miss out on a character like that.

Links: Stranger in a Strange Land | More by Robert A. Heinlein

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

The following is reprinted from Uncle John's Unsinkable Bathroom Reader

CSI's Gil Grissom - via Wikipedia

FAMILIAR FORMULA

If there were no cops, prosecutors or defense attorneys, the television airwaves would probably be far less crowded. Over the past 60 years, these professions have dominated prime-time schedules. Why? They offer formulas ready-made for drama: A brand-new conflict is presented to the protagonist each week, promising to be full of mystery, intrigue, and ... predictability. Viewers can rely on the fact that near the end of the viewing hour, one crucial piece of evidence will appear and lead to the capture of the elusive killer, or to the acquittal of the wrongly accused defendant. Then comes the philosophical musing that wraps everything up neatly, providing a clean slate for next week's episode.

Real life is rarely so cut-and-dried. And while some may argue that cop and lawyer shows are merely entertainment, actual cops and lawyers claim these shows can make their already-difficult jobs even harder.

JURORS' PRUDENCE

The "CSI effect" occurs primarily inside the courtroom. Its first incarnation was referred to as the Perry Mason effect, based on the popular fictional defense attorney's trademark ability to clear his client by coercing the guilty party into confessing on the witness stand. During Mason's TV heyday, from the 1950s to the '80s, many prosecutors complained that juries were hesitant to convict defendants without that "Perry Mason moment" of a confession on the stand - which in real life is very, very rare. (Photo: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Science, via The Perry Mason TV Show Book)

After Perry Mason went off the air, a new kind of law enforcement program appeared: the scientific police procedural (which started with Quincy, M.E., a drama about a crime-solving medical examiner that aired from 1976 to '83). But few cop shows have matched the success of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which debuted in 2000 and has spawned two successful spin-offs. A 2006 TV ratings study in 20 countries named CSI "the most watched show in the world."

MYTH-CONCEPTIONS

Along with similar shows such as NCIS, Diagnosis: Murder, and Bones, CSI focuses on forensic evidence and lab work as the primary means of catching killers. These drama may be "ripped from the headlines," but when it comes to telling an entertaining story, certain liberties must be taken by the writers:

• On television shows, detectives work one case at a time; in real world, they juggle a deep backlog of cases.
• Experts who perform scientific analyses are rarely the same people who do the detective work and make arrests, unlike TV where one team tackles every aspect of the investigation. (And few real forensic scientists ever drive a Hummer to a crime scene.)
• The almost instant turnaround of DNA tests is what TV writers refer to as a "time cheat," a trick necessary to get the story wrapped up. In reality, due to the screening, extraction, and replication process (not to mention the backlog), DNA test can take months. And the results are rarely, if ever, 100% conclusive.
• Just about every murder investigation on TV leads to an arrest and conviction. In the real world, less than half of these cases are solved.

"If you really portrayed what crime scene investigators do," said Jay Siegel, a professor of forensic science at Michigan State University, "the show would die after three episodes because it would be so boring."

SHOW ME THE SCIENCE

The main problem caused by the CSI effect: Juries now expect conclusive forensic evidence. According to Staff Sergeant Peter Abi-Rashed, a homicide detective from Hamilton, Ontario, "Juries are asking, 'Can we convict without DNA evidence?' Of course they can. It's called good, old-fashioned police work and overwhelming circumstantial evidence." In the worst-case scenarios, guilty people may be set free because a jury wasn't impressed with evidence that - as recently as the 1990s - would have led to a conviction.

In fact, many forensic experts find themselves on the stand explaining to a jury why they don't have scientific evidence. Some lawyers have even started asking potential jurors if they watch CSI. If so, they may have to be reeducated.

Shellie Samuels, the lead prosecutor in the 2005 Robert Blake murder trial, probably wishes that her jury had been asked beforehand if they were CSI fans. Samuels tried to convince them that Blake, a former TV cop himself (on Baretta), shot and killed his wife in 2001. Samuels illustrated Blake's motive: she presented 70 witnesses who testified against him, including two who stated - under oath - that Blake had asked them to kill his wife. Seems like a lock for a conviction, right? Wrong. "They couldn't put the gun in his hand," said jury foreman Thomas Nicholson, who along with his peers acquitted Blake. "There was no blood splatter. They had nothing." The verdict sent a clear message throughout the legal community: Juries will convict only on solid forensic evidence.

This new trend affects cops, too. CSI-watching detectives tend to put unrealistic pressure on crime scene investigators not only to find solid evidence, but also to give them immediate results. Henry Lee, chief emeritus of Connecticut's state crime lab (and perhaps the world's most famous forensics scientist), says that, much to the dismay of the police, his investigators can't provide "miracle proof" just by scattering some "magic dust" on a crime scene. And there is no machine - not even at the best-equipped lab in the country - in which you can place a hair in at one end and pull a picture of a suspect out of the other. "And our type of work always has a backlog," laments Lee, who's witnessed the amount of evidence turned in to his lab rise from about five pieces per crime scene in the 1980s to anywhere from 50 to 400 today.

MIRANDA WRONGS

The CSI effect doesn't stop at science - the entire judicial process is being presented in a misleading fashion. Mary Flood, editor of a website called The Legal Pad, asked a dozen prominent criminal lawyers to rate the most popular shows. Her findings: "Generally, they hate it when Law & Order's Jack McCoy extracts confessions in front of a speechless defense lawyers. Not real, they say. They go nuts over the CSI premise of the exceedingly well-funded, glamorous lab techs who do a homicide detective's job. Even less real, they say. And they get annoyed when The Closer's heroine ignores a suspect's request for a lawyer. Unconstitutional, they say."

DUMB CROOKS

In the real world, it's usually neither the crusading prosecutor nor the headstrong cop who solved the case. Most criminals, cops admit, are their own worst enemies. Either they don't cover their tracks or they brag to friends about what they did, or both. People tend not to think clearly when they commit crimes. But in the past few years there has appeared a new kind of criminal: the kind that watches CSI ... and learns.

In December 2005, Jermaine "Maniac" McKinney, a 25-year-old man from Ohio, broke into a house and killed two people. He used bleach to clean his hands as well as the crime scene, then carefully removed all of the evidence and placed blankets in his car before transferring the bodies to an isolated lakeshore at night, where he burned them along with his clothes and cigarette butts - making sure that none of his DNA could be connected to the victims. One thing remained: the murder weapon, a crowbar. McKinney threw it into the lake ... which was frozen. He didn't want to risk walking out on the ice to get it, so he left it behind. Big mistake: The weapon was later found - still on the ice - and linked to McKinney, which led to his arrest. When asked why he used bleach to clean his hands, McKinney said that he'd learned that bleach destroys DNA. Where'd he learn that? "On CSI." (Photo: Steve Schenk/AP, article at The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Using bleach to clean a crime scene was almost unheard of until CSI used it as a plot point. Now the practice is occurring more and more often. "Sometimes I believe it may even encourage criminals when they see how simple it is to get away with murder on television," said Captain Ray Peavy, head of the homicide division at the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. It's difficult enough to investigate a crime scene with the "normal" amount of evidence left behind.

MAYBE DON'T SHOW THEM THE SCIENCE?

So should these shows be censored? Should they tone down the science or, some have argued, use fake science to throw criminals a red herring? "The National District Attorneys Association is deeply concerned about the effect of CSI," CBS News consultant and former prosecutor Wendy Murphy reported. "When CSI trumps common sense, then you have a systemic problem."

But not everyone agrees. "To argue that CSI and similar shows are actually raising the number of acquittals is a staggering claim," argues Simon Cole, professor of criminology at the University of California, Irvine. "And the remarkable thing is that, speaking forensically, there is not a shred of evidence to back it up."

And furthering the debate about whether criminals learn from CSI, Paul Wilson, the chair of criminology at Bond University in Australia, stated, "There is no doubt that criminals copy what they see on television. However, I don't believe these shows pose a major problem." Prison, Wilson maintains, is where most of these people learn the tricks of their trade. So while law enforcement officials may agree that cop and lawyer shows do have an effect on modern investigations and trials, the jury is still out on exactly what that effect is.

THE SILVER LINING

The shows do have their positive aspects. For one thing, they teach basic science, saving the courts time and money by not having to call in experts to explain such concepts as what DNA evidence actually is. Anthony E. Zuiker, creator of the CSI franchise, is quick to point this out. "Jurors can walk in with some preconceived notion of at least what CSI means. And even if they are false expectations, at least jurors aren't walking in blind."

Perhaps most significantly, though, ever since CSI became a hit in 2000, student admissions into forensic field have skyrocketed. So even if Zuiker's show is confusing jurors, misinforming police, and helping to train criminals, at least it's proven to be an effective recruiting tool. "The CSI effect is, in my opinion, the most amazing thing that has ever come out of the series," he said, "For the first time in American history, you're not allowed to fool the jury anymore." (Photo: Mathieu Ramage [Flickr])

And finally, a message from Zuiker to anyone who walks up and points out his shows' inherent flaws: "Folks, it's television."

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Unsinkable Bathroom Reader.

The Bathroom Readers' Institute has sailed the seas of science, history, pop culture, humor, and more to bring you Uncle John's Unsinkable Bathroom Reader. Our all-new 21st edition is overflowing with over 500 pages of material that is sure to keep you fully absorbed.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute has published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute.

Photo: Shenghung Lin [Flickr]

Once in a Blue Moon: A neat description of "not very often," it refers to the second full moon within a month - a rare thing indeed. Full moons happen about every 29.5 days, and since a typical month runs between 30 to 31 days, the likelihood of two in a month is slim. But over the course of a century there'll be 41 months with two full moons, so once in a blue moon really means - if you want to get literal - once every 2.4 years.

Mad as a Hatter: Today we know enough to keep clear of mercury, but hat makers once used it to make the brims of hats. When absorbed through the skin, it could wreak havoc on the nervous system: tremors, fatigue, not to mention behavioral dysfunction - that is, crazy behavior. Just think of Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Raining Cats and Dogs: In 1600s England it was common practice to discard any waste into the streets - even dead household pets. Once it rained so much that the now-deceased Tabbies and Fidos became buoyant and floated along the streets, thus inspiring writer Richard Brome in 1651 to record, "it shall rain dogs and polecats."

Saved by the Bell: Before modern medicine, it was hard to determine if a person was really dead or simply in a really, really deep sleep. As a precaution, the presumed dead were buried with a string that ran from the corpse's finger to a bell. If there was a mistake, the person could twitch the finger and thus be saved from being buried alive.

The Acid Test: Gold Rush miners tested possible gold nuggets in acid. Unlike other metals, gold won't corrode in acid, so if the nugget didn't dissolve it passed the acid test and therefore must be pure gold. If a person passes a figurative acid test, they're telling the truth, as opposed to the literal acid test, which would be quite painful, not to mention corrosive.

In the Limelight: Theater stages used to be illuminated by heating lime (calcium oxide) until it glowed brightly. Lime has a high melting point, and when heated, gives off a brilliant white light. The light was then focused into a spotlight, so if an actor was in the limelight, he was certainly the center of attention (and probably very hot as well.)

Dog Days: The ancient Romans noticed that the Dog Star, Sirius, rose at the same time as the sun on the hottest days of the year, so they made the natural assumption that Sirius in the sky added to the heat of the day. Today it's generally accepted that the "dog days" of summer are July 3 through August 11. But they have nothing to do with Sirius.

Chew the Cud: If you figuratively chew the cud, you're chatting with an acquaintance. If you literally chew the cud, you're regurgitating food from your stomach to be chewed a second time (don't even try it). Cows are ruminants - this means that to properly digest grass to pass through their four-chambered stomachs, they need to rechew it. Consequently, a cow's mouth seems to go nonstop, just like a person who is "chewing the cud."

Don't Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth: In other words, don't be ungrateful when someone gives you something. You can tell a horse's age by looking at its teeth, particularly the incisors, but if someone gave you a horse as a gift, it would be considered rude to examine its teeth. (This would be like looking for the price tag on the present.)

The Bee's Knees: It's 1920s slang for something wonderful - but why would the knees of the Apis mellifera, the common honeybee, be something to be excited bout? Well, when bees find pollen they carry it back to the hive on pollen baskets located on their hind legs near their knees (yes, bees have knees.) The pollen is then used to make honey.

Cold Turkey: To completely abandon an addictive habit is to go cold turkey. As a result, the habit-kicker may experience cold sweats and goose bumps as blood rushes from the surface of the skin to internal organs. That bristling gooseflesh looks like the skin of a plucked goose (which looks quite similar to a plucked turkey). And doesn't it sound better to go cold turkey than to go cold goose?

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

The following is reprinted from The Best of The Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

First Thanksgiving 1621 by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, via Library of Congress

It's one of American history's most familiar scenes: A small group of Pilgrims prepare a huge November feast to give thanks for a bountiful harvest and show their appreciation to the Indians who helped them survive their first winter. Together, the Pilgrims and the Indians solemnly sit down to a meal of turkey, pumpkin pie, and cranberries.

Just how accurate is this image of America's first Thanksgiving? Not very, it turns out. Here are some common misconceptions about the origin of one of our favorite holidays.

MYTH: The settlers at the first Thanksgiving were called Pilgrims.
THE TRUTH: They didn't even refer to themselves as Pilgrims - they called themselves "Saints." Early Americans applied the term "pilgrim" to all of the early colonists; it wasn't until the 20th century that it was used exclusively to describe the folks who landed on Plymouth Rock.

MYTH: It was a solemn, religious occasion.
THE TRUTH: Hardly. It was a three-day harvest festival that included drinking, gambling, athletic games, and even target shooting with English muskets (which, by the way, was intended as a friendly warning to the Indians that the Pilgrims were prepared to defend themselves.)

MYTH: It took place in November.
THE TRUTH: It was some time between late September and the middle of October - after the harvest had been brought in. By November, said historian Richard Erhlich, "the villagers were working to prepare for winter, salting and drying meat and making their houses as wind resistant as possible."

MYTH: The Pilgrims wore large hats with buckles on them.
THE TRUTH: None of the participants were dressed anything like the way they've been portrayed in art: the Pilgrims didn't dress in black, didn't wear buckles on their hats or shoes, and didn't wear tall hats. The 19th-century artists who painted them that way did so because they associated black clothing and buckles with being old-fashioned.

MYTH: They ate turkey ...
THE TRUTH: The Pilgrims ate deer, not turkey. As Pilgrim Edward Winslow later wrote, "For three days we entertained and feasted, and [the Indian] went out and killd five deer, which they brought to the plantation." Winslow does mention that four Pilgrims went "fowling" or bird hunting, but neither he nor anyone else recorded which kinds of birds they actually hunted - so even if they did eat turkey, it was just a side dish.

"The flashy part of the meal for the colonists was the venison, because it was new to them," says Carolyn Travers, director of research at Plimoth Plantation, a Pilgrim museum in Massachusetts. "Back in England, deer were on estates and people would be arrested for poaching if they killed these deer ... The colonists mentioned venison over and over again in their letters back home."

Other foods that may have been on the menu: cod, bass, clams, oysters, Indian corn, native berries and plums, all washed down with water, beer made from corn, and another drink the Pilgrim affectionately called "strong water."

A few things definitely weren't on the menu, including pumpkin pie - in those days, the Pilgrims boiled their pumpkin and ate it plain. And since the Pilgrims didn't yet have flour mills or cattle, there was no bread other than corn bread, and no beef, milk, or cheese. And the Pilgrims didn't eat any New England lobsters, either. Reason: They mistook them for large insects.

MYTH: The Pilgrims held a similar feast every year.
THE TRUTH: There's no evidence that the Pilgrims celebrated again in 1622. They probably weren't in the mood - the harvest had been disappointing, and they were burdened with a new boatload of Pilgrims who had to be fed and housed through the winter.

The article above is reprinted with permission from The Best of the Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

The Bathroom Reader Institute handpicked the most eye-opening, rib-tickling, and mind-boggling articles from everything they have written over the last ten years and carefully crammed them into 576 pages of the book.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute has published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute.

The following is reprinted from Uncle John's Unsinkable Bathroom Reader

Botulinum neurotoxin serotype A (Botox) - Lacy, D.B., Tepp, W., Cohen, A.C., DasGupta, B.R., Stevens, R.C. (1998) Crystal structure of botulinum neurotoxin type A and implications for toxicity. Nat.Struct.Biol. 5: 898-902 - via Wikipedia

You have probably heard of Botox - but did you know that it is actually a toxin that's so deadly that one pound of it is enough to kill all humans on Earth? Did you know that botulism got its name from ... sausage poisoning? Here's a few facts about the toxin that has the power to kill you and to eliminate your wrinkles ...

1. Botulism is a rare and serious disease caused by the toxin botulin, which is produced by a bacterium called Clostridium botulinum. The Center for Disease Control says that about 145 cases are reported in the United States each year, although modern medicine makes deaths rare.

2. Symptoms of botulinum poisoning can begin between six hours and two weeks after eating. They include: double vision, blurred vision, slurred speech, difficulty swallowing, dry mouth, and muscle weakness that starts in the upper body, descends down the arms, down the torso, and then down the legs. Breathing muscles can become paralyzed, and death can occur if emergency medical treatment is not given.

3. C. botulinum occurs naturally in soils around the world. Its main activity is the consumption of dead organic material - and the toxin is its "poop." The bacteria and their waste can also contaminate plants, and from there, or from the soil itself, can contaminate birds, fish, and mammals.

4. Bacteria are single-celled organisms and some of the most primitive life forms on Earth. C. botulinum has probably been making animals and humans sick for as long as it has existed - and by doing so, it has helped shape their eating habits.

5. In times of stress (such as a very cold or very hot weather that cause food shortages), C. botulinum, like other bacteria species, can produce an endospore - a protective structure in which it can survive in a dormant state until conditions improve. How long can it stay in that state? Microbiologists have found dormant bacterial spores that were hundreds of millions of years old. These ancient spores were able to "wake up" and start eating again.

6. Botulism timeline:

• In the 10th century, Emperor Leo VI of Byzantium bans the manufacture of blood sausage. Historians believe this, as well as many other food regulations passed throughout history, could have been due to botulism outbreaks. (Raw and undercooked meats are common botulism poisoning culprits.)
• In 1735 the first authenticated case of the mysterious disease is recorded in southern Germany, again linked to contaminated sausage.
• Between 1817 and 1822, German doctor Justinus Kerner publishes the first accurate description of botulism and calls the illness "sausage poison." This later led to its scientific name: botulus is Latin for "sausage."
• In 1895 the cause of a botulism outbreak in the small Belgian village of Ellezelles is identified: a smoked ham eaten at a funeral dinner. Emile Pierre van Ermengem, professor of bacteriology at the University of Ghent, studies the victims and becomes the first person to isolate and identify C. botulinum bacterium.

In 1944 American Dr. Edward Schantz becomes the first to identify the toxin botulin.

7. There are three main types of botulism:

• Foodborne botulism makes up about 15% of all cases and occurs when a person ingests food that has already-formed botulin toxin in it.
• Infant botulism makes up approximately 65% of cases and occurs when spores are ingested by infants. The bacteria colonize the intestines, release the toxin, and poison the child.
• Wound botulism makes up the remaining 20% and occurs when wounds are infected with the bacteria and secrete the toxin.

8. Why is honey sold with the warning label, "Do not feed to infants under one year of age"? Botulism. Bees naturally collect the spores when they gather nectar, and they mix the bacteria in with their honey. Most adults have strong enough immune system to handle it, but babies don't, making honey a common cause of infant botulism.

9. C. botulinum is anaerobic: Oxygen kills it. That's why, if the spores are already in the food, home-canned foods can be particularly dangerous. The canning process depletes oxygen, and if a high-enough temperature is not maintained for long enough during the cooking and canning process, the spores can survive, and they'll feed on the food until it's eaten ... by humans.

10. Those bacteria also prefer alkaline environments, so the most common canned-food culprits are low-acid foods such as asparagus, lima beans, green beans, corn, meats, fish, and poultry.

11. Ever seen "swollen" cans of food? Hopefully you threw them away. C. botulinum creates gases when it eats, and swollen cans are a sign that the food inside might be infected. (The FDA recommends double-plastic-bagging such cans before disposal.)

12. How toxic is it? A little over a pound of botulin is enough to kill every human on Earth.

13. You've probably heard of Botox. That's the brand name for the drug BTX-A. What's that stand for? "Botulin Toxin Type A." The popular cosmetic treatment is actually made form the bacterial toxin: It paralyzes the face muscles, making them flatten out and appear to be less wrinkled. (It's also used for medical purposes, including treating muscle spasms, clubfoot, and crossed eyes.)

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Unsinkable Bathroom Reader.

The Bathroom Readers' Institute has sailed the seas of science, history, pop culture, humor, and more to bring you Uncle John's Unsinkable Bathroom Reader. Our all-new 21st edition is overflowing with over 500 pages of material that is sure to keep you fully absorbed.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute has published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute.

The following is reprinted from Bathroom Reader Plunges Into History Again

Hate all that newfangled technology? Someone may just call you a Luddite. The origin of the term dates back to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Here's how the whole thing got started:

It all started with the weavers. For centuries, the weavers and lace makers of Nottingham, England, were some of the most respected artisans in the world. But the invention of the power loom and other machines, which produced fabric much more quickly and cheaply than the hand-weavers, put them out of business. Just to survive, a lot of them started working for miserly wages at the factories that produced cheap and inferior cloth they hated. But they simmered with rage at the factory owners who appropriated their life's work - and the machines that helped them do it.

WHOOPS!

All of the sudden, factory looms started to break down. At first, just a couple. Then a few more. When asked what had happened, the workers would just shrug and attribute the damage to the mythical Ned Ludd.

In fact, the disgruntled ex-workers were already meeting in private to plot their revenge. In the early months of 1811, they began sending menacing letters, signed by General Ned Ludd, to Nottingham factory owners, warning of dire consequences if factory conditions and wages didn't improve.

Some of the bolder Luddites showed up in person to make their demands. Intimidated, most factory owners complied. Those who didn't found their expensive machines smashed, by the dozens, in after-hours Luddite attacks.

THE POWDER KEG IGNITES

The rebellion leaked to nearby British regions. The first Luddites had been strictly nonviolent, venting their anger only on the hated machines. But in Yorkshire, the owner of Rawfolds Mill, aware of worker unrest at his factory, had prepared for an attack on April 11, 1812, by hiring private guards. Two men were killed in the clash. Seven days later, the Luddites killed a mill owner in the region, William Horsfall.

The violence didn't end there. On April 20, an angry mob of thousands attacked Burton's Mill in Manchester. Like the Rawfolds mill owner, Burton knew trouble was coming and had hired private guards who fired on the crowd and killed three men. The furious Luddites dispersed, returning the following day and burning down Burton's house. In clashes with the military (who rushed into the fray) and Burton's guards, a total of 10 men were killed.

THE UPRISING COOLS DOWN

A police crackdown ensued. Scores of leaders and rank-and-file Luddites were arrested and tried for their crimes. A lot of men were hanged; others were imprisoned or exiled to Australia, which put an effective end of the immediate uprising. There were further sporadic outbreaks of violence, but by 1817 the Luddite movement ceased to be active in Britain.

Of course, the Luddites were right all along: the hated machines were making their jobs obsolete. These days, only a tiny fraction of the world's cloth is made by hand. And machines make almost every article that is found in the modern home, from shoes to electronics to furniture.

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into History Again.

The book is a compendium of entertaining information chock-full of facts on a plethora of history topics. Uncle John's first plunge into history was a smash hit - over half a million copies sold! And this sequel gives you more colorful characters, cultural milestones, historical hindsight, groundbreaking events, and scintillating sagas.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute

The following is an article from Uncle John's Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader, by Kathy Kemp, author of Welcome to Lickskillet: And Other Crazy Places in the Deep South

Plan to hit the road next summer, but don't know where to go? We don't mean to be rude, but have you considered Hell? Hell, Michigan, that is. (And you thought you had to drive south.) For a different kind of vacation, check out this tour of off-road America, where unusual names are the main attraction:

Photo: David Ball [Wikipedia]

1. Hell, Michigan
If you've always wanted to see Hell freeze over, visit this place in winter, when the Highland Lake dam often gets icy enough to stop the water flow. In summer, when temperatures are moderate, the town has a "Satan's Holidays" festival and a road race called "Run to Hell." In October is the "Halloween in Hell" Celebration. The town got its name in 1841, when George Reeves, an early settler in this low, swampy place in southeast Michigan, was asked what the thought the town should be named. "I don't care," Reeves said. "You can name it 'Hell' if you want to."

2. Slapout, Alabama
Oscar Peeples, the town grocer in the early 1900s, was forever waiting on customers who asked for things he didn't have. "I'm slap out of it," Peeples would say. This central Alabama community, north of Montgomery, is now little more than a crossroads, with a church, bank, barber shop, and the tumbledown remains of Peeples' old store.

3. Noodle, Texas
In the late 1800s, Texans often used the word noodle to mean "nothing," which is exactly what they found when they arrived at this locale near Abilene. Now there are two churches, a store and an old gin.

For nearly a century, the population has held steady at about 40 people. (Photo: Jack Williams via TexasEscapes.com)

4. Joe, Montana
When quarterback Joe Montana signed on with the Kansas City Chiefs in 1993, a Missouri radio station urged the folk of Ismay, in southeast Montana near the North Dakota border, to change the town's name to "Joe." The sports-minded citizenry, all 22 of them, voted in favor of the change, and a new industry was born. In fact, money raised from selling, "Joe, Montana" souvenirs enabled the town to build a new fire station.

Photo: digitalhooligan [Flickr]

5. Lizard Lick, North Carolina
Since 1972, the residents of this town, 16 miles east of Raleigh, have held lizard races every fall to herald the farming community's unusual name. It dates back to the days when the area was home to a federally operated liquor still, and lizards were brought in to cut down on the insects. Traveling salesman noticed the creatures and dubbed the community Lizard Lick.

Downtown Chicken Alaska Photo by J. Higgs - via Wikipedia

6. Chicken, Alaska
The village, in the Alaskan wild near the Canadian border, is named for a bird, but not the one you think. In the late 1800s, gold miners found a reliable meal in the abundance of ptarmigan, a grouse-like critter whose white feathers make it look, from a distance, like a chicken. When the townsfolk decided to incorporate in 1902, none of them knew how to spell ptarmigan. So they went with the look-alike Chicken to avoid the jokes of misspelled name would incur. Unfortunately, poultry jokes now abound. The town has a full-time population of about 30 people and mail delivery every Tuesday and Friday. There's a saloon, but no telephones or central plumbing. Incidentally, the ptarmigan is now the Alaska state bird.

7. Spot, Tennessee
A dot in the road about an hour west of Nashville, Spot was named by a sawmill operator who was always writing folks about business. One day, pen in hand, the sawmill operator sat at his desk, worrying over a letter from postal authorities wanting to know what to call the town. A spot of ink dropped onto the sawmill operator's white stationery, and the town had its name. By town, we mean a couple of houses and a ramshackle store.

8. Peculiar, Missouri
In the spring of 1868, Postmaster E.T. Thomson decided to name his town "Excelsior," but postal officials told him it was already taken. Thomson reapplied with new names, and received the same response time after time. Exasperated, he finally told postal officials to assign the town a unique name, one that was "sort of peculiar." Peculiar, near the Kansas border just south of Kansas City, is home to about 1,800 people.

9. Zap, North Dakota
A Northern Pacific Railroad official, in charge of naming settlements on the line, named Zap after Zapp, Scotland, because both places had coal mines. The city, about 15 miles south of Lake Sakakawea, encompasses one square mile and is home to about 300.

10. Embarrass, Minnesota
If faces are red here, it's only because the town - 205 miles north of St. Paul - is typically the coldest spot in the continental United States. The midwinter temperature often drops to -60 °F, and snow has been known to fall in June. The name comes from early settlers, who used the French word for obstacle - embarras - to describe the hardships they faced in the frigid territory. Today, the population is largely Finnish. They celebrate their thriving community with a Finnish-American Festival every summer.

And Don't Forget ...

Think the preceding towns have nutty names? Here are some more:

- Idiotville, Oregon
- Knockemstiff, Ohio
- Monkey's Eyebrow, Kentucky
- Satan's Kingdom, Vermont
- Toad Suck, Arkansas

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

The following is reprinted from The Best of The Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

Some people call them roadside attractions; we call them tourist traps. Either way, it's an amazing phenomenon: There's nothing much to see there, nothing much to do there. Yet tourists go by the millions ...

WALL DRUG, Wall, South Dakota

Build It ... One summer day in 1936, Dorothy and Ted Hustead had a brilliant idea: they put signs up along U.S. 16 advertising their struggling mom-and-pop drugstore. As an afterthought, they included an offer for free ice water. Wall Drug was situated 10 miles from the entrance to the South Dakota badlands, and on sweltering summer days before air conditioning, the suggestion of free ice water made rickety old Wall Drug seem like an oasis. When Ted got back from putting up the first sign, half a dozen cars were already parked in front of his store.

They'll Come: The Husteads knew they were on to something. Ted built an empire of billboards all over the United States, planting signs farther and farther away from his drugstore. There's now a sign in Amsterdam's train station (only 5,397 miles to Wall Drug); there's one at the Taj Mahal (10,728 miles to Wall Drug); and there's even one in Antarctica (only 10,645 miles to Wall Drug).

Today, Wall Drug is an enormous 50,000-square-foot tourist mecca with a 520-seat restaurant and countless specialty and souvenir shops; if it's hokey, odds are that Wall Drug sells it. They also have a collection of robots, including a singing gorilla and a mechanical Cowboy Orchestra. Wall Drug spends over $300,000 on billboards, but every cent of it pays off. The store lures in 20,000 visitors a day in the summer and grosses more than $11 million each year. And they still gave away free ice water - 5,000 glasses a day.

SOUTH OF THE BORDER, Dillon, South Carolina

Photo: Trenchfoot [Flickr]

Build It ... Driving south on I-95 near the South Carolina border, one object stands out from the landscape: a 200-foot-tall tower with a giant sombrero on top. The colossal hat is Sombrero Tower, centerpiece of the huge South of the Border tourist complex.

SOB, as the locals call it, began as a beer stand operated by a man named Alan Schafer. When Schafer noticed that his building supplies were being delivered to "Schafer Project: South of the [North Carolina] Border," a lightbulb lit over his head and he decided his stand needed a Mexican theme.

They'll Come: Today, SOB sprawls over 135 acres and imports - and sells - $1.5 million worth of Mexican merchandise a year. It has a 300-room motel and five restaurants, including the Sombrero Room and Pedro's Casateria (a fast-food joint shaped like an antebellum mansion with a chicken on the roof). There's also Pedro's Rocket City (a fireworks shop), Golf of Mexico (miniature golf), and Pedro's Pleasure Dome spa. Incredibly, eight million people stop into SOB every year for a little slice of ... Mexi-kitsch.

TREES OF MYSTERY, Klamath, California

Photo: geeksplosion [Flickr]

Build It ... When Carl Bruno first toured the towering redwood forests around the DeMartin ranch in 1931, he was awestruck by a handful of oddly deformed trees. Dollar signs in his eyes, Bruno snapped up the property and began luring in travelers to see trees shaped like pretzels and double helixes. He called his attraction Wonderland Park, and for the first 15 years of its existence, it did modest business - but something was missing ...

They'll Come: He decided the park needed a 49-foot-tall statue of Paul Bunyan. In 1946 Bruno had the massive mythical logger installed near the highway and changed the park's name to Trees of Mystery. Business began to pick up. He added a companion piece, 35-feet-tall Babe the Blue Ox, in 1949. (When Babe was first introduced, he blew smoke out of his nostrils, which made small children run away screaming. The smoke was discontinued.)

Trees of Mystery prospered and is still open today. It recently added an aerial gondola ride, but the park is primarily a bunch of oddly shaped trees and a tunnel through a giant redwood. The gift shop, which sells cheesy souvenirs and wood carvings, has been hailed as "a model for other tourist attractions." The park was honored by American Heritage magazine as the best roadside attraction in 2001.

The article above is reprinted with permission from The Best of the Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

The Bathroom Reader Institute handpicked the most eye-opening, rib-tickling, and mind-boggling articles from everything they have written over the last ten years and carefully crammed them into 576 pages of the book.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute has published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute.

The following is reprinted from The Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

HOW THEY STARTED

There are so many different stories about the Stooges' origin that it's hard to know which is correct. Probably none of them. Anyway, here's one that sounds good:

There was a vaudevillian named Ted Healy, a boyhood friend of Moe and Shemp Horwitz. One night in 1922, some acrobats working for him walked out just before a show. Desperate, he asked Moe to fill in temporarily, as a favor.

Moe, in turn, got his brother Shemp out of the audience, and the three of them did an impromptu routine that had the audience in stitches. Moe and Shemp loved the stage, so they changed their name from Horwitz to Howard and hit the road with their friend as "Ted Healy and the Gang" (or "Ted Healy and His Stooges," depending on who tells the story.)

In 1925, the trio was on the lookout for another member and spotted Larry Fine (real name: Louis Feinberg) playing violin with an act called the "Haney Sisters and Fine." Why they thought he'd be a good Stooge isn't clear, since he's never done comedy before. But he joined as the third Stooge, anyway.

They traveled the vaudeville circuit for years under a variety of names, including Ted Healy and His Racketeers ... His Southern Gentlemen ... His Stooges, etc. Then they wound up in a Broadway revue in 1929, which led to a movie contract.

In 1931, Shemp quit and was replaced by his younger brother, Jerry. Jerry had a full head of hair and a handsome mustache - but Healy insisted he shave them both off ... hence the name "Curly."

Three years later, after a bitter dispute, the boys broke up with Healy. They quickly got a Columbia film contract on their own, and the Three Stooges were born.

Here's the very first Three Stooges short film, "Woman Haters" (1934)
[YouTube Link Part I | Part II], about 10 min. each.

Over the next 23 years, they made 190 short films - but no features. For some reason, Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures, wouldn't allow it (despite the Stooges' popularity and the fact that they were once nominated for an Oscar.)

From the '30s to the '50s, the Stooges had four personnel changes: In 1946, Curly suffered a stroke and retired; Shemp then returned to the Stooges until his death in 1955; he, in turn, was replaced by Joe Besser (Joe) and Joe DeRita (Curly Joe).

INSIDE FACTS

Two-Fingered Poker
One day backstage in the '30s, Larry, Shemp, and Moe were playing cards. Shemp accused Larry of cheating. After a heated argument, Shemp reached over and stuck his fingers in Larry's eyes. Moe, watching, thought it was hilarious ... and that's how the famous poke-in-the-eyes routine was born.

Profitable Experience
By the mid-'50s, the average budget for a Three Stooges' episode - including the stars' salaries - was about $16,000. Depending on the time slot, Columbia Pictures can now earn more than that with one showing of the same film ... in one city.

So What If He's Dead?
By the mid-'50s the demand for short films had petered out. So, in 1957, Columbia unceremoniously announced they weren't renewing the Stooges' contracts. Moe and Larry were devastated. After 23 years, what else would they do? Moe was rich from real estate investments, but Larry was broke - which made it even harder. They decided to get a third Stooge (Curly and Shemp were dead) and go back on tour. Joe DeRita, "Curly Joe," was selected. They started making appearances in third-rate clubs, just to have work.

Meanwhile, Columbia, hoping to get a few bucks out of its old Stooge films, released them to TV at bargain prices. They had no expectations, so everyone (particularly Moe and Larry) was shocked when, in 1959, the Stooges emerged as the hottest kids' program in America. Suddenly the Stooges had offers to make big-time personal appearances and new films. And they've been American cult heroes ever since.

The article above is reprinted with permission from The Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

Product names don't necessarily reflect the truth of the products. Ever heard of Corinthian Leather? Think New Jersey, not Corinth, Greece. How about Häagen Dazs? Nothing Scandinavian about it. Read on to find out how a product's name can deceive you ...

CORINTHIAN LEATHER

[YouTube Link]

Sounds Like: Fancy leather from some exotic place in Europe - specifically, the Greek city of Corinth. The phrase "rich Corinthian leather" was made famous by actor Ricardo Montalban, in ads for Chrysler's luxury Cardoba in the 1970s. (The seats were covered with it.)

The Truth: There's no such thing as Corinthian leather. The term was made up by Chrysler's ad agency. The leather reportedly came from New Jersey.

HÄAGEN DAZS

Sounds Like: An imported Scandinavian product.

The Truth: It was created by Ruben Mattus, a Polish immigrant who sold ice cream in New York City, who used what the New York Times called the "Vichyssoise Strategy":

Vichyssoise is a native New Yorker. Created at the Ritz Carlton in 1917, it masqueraded as a French soup and enjoyed enormous success. When Mattus created his ice cream, he used the same tactic ... He was not the first to think Americans would be willing to pay more for a better product. But he was the first to understand that they would be more likely to do so if they thought it was foreign. So he made up a ridiculous, impossible to pronounce name, [and] printed a map of Scandinavia on the carton.

The ice cream was actually made in Teaneck, New Jersey.

JELL-O PUDDING POPS

Photo: knellotron [Flickr]

Sounds Like: There's pudding in the pops.

The Truth: There isn't. Family secret: One of Uncle John's relatives was involved with test-marketing the product several decades ago. When John asked him about it, he laughed, "Our research shows people think that if it says 'pudding' on the label, it's better quality or better for you. They're wrong. It's really the same."

Anyway, we suppose that's why they still sell it with "pudding" on the label.

PACIFIC RIDGE PALE ALE

Sounds Like: A small independent brewer in Northern California. The flyer says:

Brewmasters Gery Eckman [and] Mitch Steele ... always wanted to brew a special ale in Northern California just for California beer drinkers ... so they created Pacific Ridge Pale Ale. It's produced in limited quantities, using fresh Cascade hops from the Pacific Northwest, two-row and caramel malts and a special ale yeast for a rich copper color ... Handcrafted only at the Fairfield brewhouse.

The Truth: In tiny letters on the bottle, it says: "Specialty Brewing group of Anheuser-Busch, Inc., Fairfield, California."

(Photo: Bottle Cap-O-Rama)

SWEET'N LOW SODA

Sounds Like: The drink was sweetened with nothing but Sweet'N Low.

The Truth: As Bruce Nash and Allan Zullo write in The Misfortune 500, "MBC Beverage, Inc.", which licensed the Sweet'N Low name ... discovered that consumers wanted the natural sweetener NutraSweet rather than the artificial saccharine of Sweet'N Low. So they sweetened Sweet'N Low soda with NutraSweet, a Sweet'N Low competitor."

DAVE'S CIGARETTES

Sounds Like: "A folksy brand of cigarette, produced by a down-to-earth, tractor-driving guy named Dave for ordinary people who work hard and make an honest living." According to humorist Dave Barry, here's the story sent to the media when the cigarettes were introduced in 1996:

Down in Concord, N.C., there's a guy named Dave. He lives in the heart of tobacco farmland. Dave enjoys lots of land, plenty of freedom and his yellow '57 pickup truck. Dave was fed up with cheap, fast-burning smokes. Instead of just getting made, he did something about it ... Dave's Tobacco Company was born.

The Truth: Dave's was a creation of America's biggest cigarette corporation, Philip Morris, whose ad agency unapologetically called the story a "piece of fictional imagery."

(Photo: SourceWatch)

The article above is reprinted with permission from The Best of the Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

The Bathroom Reader Institute handpicked the most eye-opening, rib-tickling, and mind-boggling articles from everything they have written over the last ten years and carefully crammed them into 576 pages of the book.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute has published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute.

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into History Again.

The book is a compendium of entertaining information chock-full of facts on a plethora of history topics. Uncle John's first plunge into history was a smash hit - over half a million copies sold! And this sequel gives you more colorful characters, cultural milestones, historical hindsight, groundbreaking events, and scintillating sagas.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute

The following is reprinted from The Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

The biggest mystery by Agatha Christie may turn out to be her own unexplained disappearance. Here's the story of how the best-selling "Queen of Crime" author may have set up her own murder to frame her cheating husband ...

Agatha Christie started writing detective stories to show up her sister, Madge. They were discussing Sherlock Holmes one day, when Agatha said she'd like to try her hand at writing one. "I don't think you could do it," said Madge. "They are very difficult to do. I've thought about it."

Since then, Christie has become one of the most popular detective science fiction writers of all time, selling over 2 billion copies of her books in 104 languages.

Still, one of the most sensational and mysterious events in her life was her own 11-day disappearance in December 1926. Although her defender believe Agatha was suffering from some kind of amnesia, all available evidence suggest that she used her expertise as a mystery writer to set her husband as the prime suspect in a murder case - with herself as the supposed victim.

HERE'S WHAT HAPPENED

On a chilly December night, Agatha's car was found at the bottom of a chalk pit some distance from her home. Although it was cold, her fur coat was still in the car. There was no driver in sight, and the car was turned off - indicating that someone had pushed it into the pit. Police suspected foul play.

THE SUSPECT

Agatha's husband, Colonel Archibald Christie, was immediately questioned by the police. Where had he been that night? At a dinner party. What was the occasion? The Colonel, abashed, admitted that it was a party to announce his engagement to his new love, Nancy Neele. Had he and Agatha been getting along? No. In fact, he had recently told her that he was having an affair and wanted a divorce. They'd even had a screaming battle about his infidelity the morning before she disappeared.

The questions took a harder edge. Was he at the party all evening? No, he admitted. while at the party, he had received a call from his wife, who'd threatened to come and make a scene. He drove home to try to placate her, but when he arrived, no one was there. So he went back to the party. The detectives let the Colonel go, but told him not to leave town.

FINDING AGATHA

A massive search began for the missing celebrity. Two thousand volunteers searched 40 square miles of countryside, while the police dragged nearby rivers and lakes looking for her body.

But Agatha was still alive. She had fled to the far side of England and checked into a hotel in Harrogate under the name Mrs. Neele (the name of her husband's true love). And after 11 days of intense publicity, hotel employees (who had seen a reward offered in the paper) recognized her and called the police. They informed the Colonel, and he rushed to Harrogate to be with his wife. The next day, the Christies sneaked out of the hotel's back door to escape the press.

A CASE OF AMNESIA?

Two physicians were called in to examine Agatha, and shortly afterward, Archibald Christie announced to the press that his wife had amnesia and remembered nothing of the previous 11 days. She had no idea why her car was miles away from her home, how it got into the pit, how she got from one end of England to the other, or where she got the large sum of money she used to rent her hotel room ... and buy an expensive new wardrobe.

Skeptical, the press accused Agatha of playing an elaborate hoax - a hoax that cost taxpayers thousands of dollars, and police and volunteers hours of needless labor. The novelist's extreme dislike of publicity throughout her life can perhaps be traced back not just to her natural shyness, but to the overdose of attention she received at the time.

AFTERMATH

Agatha claimed that her very unusual case of "amnesia" obscured the complete truth for her for the rest of her life. According to her authorized biography, under psychotherapy, she regained some of her memories of staying in the hotel. But she never discussed the incident publicly, even in an autobiography that she wrote for publication after her death.

The article above, written by Bathroom Reader Institute contributor Jack Mingo, is reprinted with permission from The Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

The following is reprinted from Uncle John's Unstoppable Bathroom Reader book.

Here are 7 stories of people who made their fortunes and those who lost it all ...

From Rags to Riches ...
	JIM CARREY From Rags ... He had to drop out of high school and take a job as a janitor in a factory. In fact, his entire family worked in that factory, living in a small cottage on the grounds. At his lowest low, Carrey wrote a $10 million check to himself ... to be redeemed when he made the big time. ... to Riches: After working the comedy circuit for years, Carrey landed a role on In Living Color, which led to a movie deal. In 1996 he became the highest paid actor ever when he received $20 million to star in Cable Guy. When his father died, Carrey placed the check he had written to himself in his dad's burial suit.
	J.K. ROWLING From Rags ... As a single mother living on public assistance, Rowling started writing Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in a café while her baby daughter napped. Why the café? Because it was warmer than the tiny flat she lived in. When Bloomsbury Books bought her manuscript in 1996, she was thrilled. The £1,500 (about $2,400) she was advanced was more money than she'd ever received at one time in her life. ... to Riches: Four years and three more books later, Rowling was worth more than $400 million ... and she's not done yet. [ed note: this article was written in 2003, now Rowling is worth more than $1.1 billion]
	OPRAH WINFREY From Rags ... Born in Mississippi to unwed teenage parents, Winfrey grew up in poverty. While living in Milwaukee, she was molested by relatives. Not knowing what else to do, her mother sent her to live in a detention home. ... to Riches: Fortunately the detention home was full and Winfrey went to live with her father. He nurtured her abilities and helped her get to college. Now, as the queen of the talk show, Winfrey is worth an estimated $1 billion. [ed note: by 2007, Winfrey is worth $2.5 billion]
From Riches to Rags ...
	WILLIE NELSON From Riches ... By 1988 Willie Nelson had been a country music star for nearly 20 years and had two multiplatinum albums under his belt. ... to Rags: Due to years of "creative" accounting, in 1990 Nelson owed the IRS $16.7 million. To pay it, he had to auction off just about everything he owned. [ed note: Nelson's debts were settled in 1993, and he continued to write music and perform.]
	M.C. HAMMER From Riches ... "U Can't Touch This," released in 1990, became a pop phenomenon, making Hammer an overnight superstar. A world tour and endorsement deals with Pepsi and KFC followed. ... to Rags: Hammer went on a $30 million spending spree that included mansions and $500,000-a-month payroll. After two mediocre follow-up albums and some poor investments, Hammer declared bankruptcy in 1996, more than $13 million in debt. [ed note: Hammer is now a blogger and a preacher]
	NIKOLA TESLA From Riches ... In his heyday in the 1890s, Tesla was a rich and famous inventor and held more than 700 patents. He is best known for developing alternating current (AC) electricity. ... to Rags: He was also naive. Thomas edison, who saw Tesla as competition, did all he could to undermine Tesla's work. It worked. A series of patent lawsuits left Tesla with no money or credit, despite his many inventions. He died broke in 1943.
	MIKE TYSON From Riches ... The youngest heavyweight champion in boxing history had earned $300 million. ... to Rags: By 2003 it was all gone. Tyson blames his former promoter, Don King, for mismanaging his earnings. King claims that Tyson blew the money himself. The two will duke it out in court.

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Unstoppable Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

The following is an article from Uncle John's Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader

William O. "Wild Bill" Douglas (1898 - 1980) was the longest-serving justice in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court. Here's what he has to say about free speech, freedom, and the government:

"The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom."

"It was against a background poignant with memories of evil procedures that our Constitution was drawn."

"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we must be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."

"An arrest is not justified by what the subsequent search discloses."

"The framers of the Constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They had lived in dangerous days; they knew the suffocating influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions for restrained speech and thought against the abuses of liberty. They chose liberty."

"Those who won our independence believed ... liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty."

"Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us."

"Whatever the reason, words mean what they say."

"What a man thinks is of no concern to government."

"A requirement that literature or act conform to some norm prescribed by an official smacks of an ideology foreign to our system."

"Words uttered under coercion are proof of loyalty to nothing but self-interest."

"Common sense often makes good law."

"When a man knows how to live dangerously, he is not afraid to die. When he is not afraid to die, he is, strangely, free to live."

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

The following is reprinted from The Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

FLY OFF THE HANDLE
Meaning: Get very angry, very quickly.
Origin: Refers to axe heads, which, in the days before mass merchandising, were sometimes fastened poorly to their handles. If one flew off while being used, it was a dangerous situation ... with unpredictable results.

HIGH ON THE HOG
Meaning: Luxurious, prosperous.
Origin: The tastiest parts of a hog are its upper parts. If you're living high on the hog, you've got the best it has to offer.

PULL THE WOOL OVER SOMEONE'S EYES
Meaning: Fool someone.
Origin: "Goes back to the days when all gentlemen wore powdered wigs like the ones still worn by the judges in British courts. The word wool was then a popular, joking term for hair ... The expression 'pull the wool over his eyes' came from the practice of tilting a man's wig over his eyes, so he couldn't see what was going on."

HOOKER
Meaning: Prostitute.
Origin: Although occasionally used before the Civil War, its widespread popularity can probably be traced to General Joseph Hooker, a Union soldier who was well-known for the liquor and whores in his camp. He was ultimately demoted, and Washington prostitutes were jokingly referred to as "Hooker's Division."

LET THE CAT OUT OF THE BAG
Meaning: Reveal the truth.
Origin: Refers to a con game practiced at country fairs in old England. A trickster tried to sell a cat in burlap bag to an unwary bumpkin, saying it was a pig. If the victim figured out the trick and insisted on seeing the animal, the cat had to be let out of the bag.

STEAL SOMEONE'S THUNDER
Meaning: To preempt; to draw attention away from someone else's achievement in favor of your own.
Origin: English dramatist John Dennis invented a gadget for imitating the sound of thunder and introduced it in a play in the early 1700s. The play flopped. Soon after, Dennis noted that another play in the same theater was using his sound-effects device. He angrily exclaimed, "That is my thunder, by God; the villains will play my thunder, but not my play." The story got around London, and the phrase grew out of it.

PAY THROUGH THE NOSE
Meaning: To pay a high price; to pay dearly.
Origin: Comes from the ninth-century Ireland. When the Danes conquered the Irish, they imposed an exorbitant Nose Tax on the island's inhabitants. They took a census (by counting noses) and levied oppressive sums on their victims, forcing them to pay by threatening to have their noses actually slit. Paying the tax was "paying trough the nose."

CHARLEY HORSE
Meaning: A muscle cramp.
Origin: In 1640, Charles I of England expanded the London police force. The new recruits were nicknamed "Charleys." There wasn't enough money to provide the new police with horses so they patrolled on foot. They joked that their sore feet and legs came from riding "Charley's horse."

NOT UP TO SCRATCH
Meaning: Inadequate, subpar.
Origin: In the early days of boxing, there was no bell to signal the beginning of a round. Instead, the referee would scratch a line on the ground between fighters, and the round began when both men stepped over it. When a boxer couldn't cross the line to keep a match going, people said that he was not "up to the scratch."

CAUGHT RED-HANDED
Meaning: Caught in the act.
Origin: For hundreds of years, stealing and butchering another person's livestock was a common crime. But it was hard to prove unless the thief was caught with a dead animal ... and blood on his hands.

GIVE SOMEONE "THE BIRD"
Meaning: Make a nasty gesture at someone (usually with the middle finger uplifted).
Origin: There are many versions. The "cleanest": Originally "the bird" referred to the hissing sound that audiences made when they didn't like a performance. Hissing is the sound that a goose makes when it's threatened or angry.

LAY AN EGG
Meaning: Fail.
Origin: From the British sport of cricket. When you fail to score, you get a zero - which looks like an egg. The term is also taken from baseball, where a zero is a "goose egg."

BURY THE HATCHET
Meaning: Make peace with an enemy.
Origin: Some Native American tribes declare peace by literally burying a tomahawk in the ground.

CHEW THE FAT
Meaning: Chat; engage in idle conversation.
Origin: Originally a sailor's term. Before refrigeration, ships carried food that wouldn't spoil. One of them was salted pork skin, a practically inedible morsel that consisted largely of fat. Sailors would only eat it if all other food was gone... and they often complained as they did. This (and other) idle chatter eventually became known as "chewing the fat."

TO THE BITTER END
Meaning: To the very end - often an unpleasant one.
Origin: Surprisingly, it has nothing to do with bitterness. It's a sailing term that refers to the end of a mooring line or anchor line that is attached to the bitts, sturdy wooden or metal posts that are mounted on the ship's deck.

HAVE A SCREW LOOSE
Meaning: Something is wrong with the person or mechanism.
Origin: The phrase comes from the cotton industry and dates back as far as the 1780s, when the industrial revolution made mass production of textiles possible for the first time. Huge mills sprang up to take advantage of the new technology (and the cheap labor), but it was difficult to keep all the machines running properly; any machine that broke down or produced defective cloth was said to have "a screw loose" somewhere.

SPEAK OF THE DEVIL
Meaning: Someone appears after you mention them.
Origin: People once believed that you could actually summon the Devil by saying his name.

BORN WITH A SILVER SPOON IN YOUR MOUTH
Meaning: Pampered; lucky; born into wealth or prosperous circumstances.
Origin: At one time, it was customary for godparents to give their godchild a silver spoon at the christening. These people were usually well-off so the spoon came to represent the child's good fortune.

TO CLOSE RANKS
Meaning: To present a united front.
Origin: "In the old-time European armies, the soldiers were aligned side by side, in neat rows, or ranks, on the battlefield. When the enemy attacked, officers would order the troops to close ranks; that is, to move the rows close together, so that the enemy faced a seemingly impregnable mass of men." (From Fighting Words, by Christine Ammer)

FOR THE BIRDS
Meaning: Worthless.
Origin: According to Robert claiborne in Loose Cannons and Red Herrings, it refers to city streets as they were before cars. "When I was a youngster on the streets of New York, one could both see and smell the emissions of horse-drawn wagons. Since there was no way of controlling these emissions, they, or the undigested oats in them, served to nourish a large population of English sparrows. If you say something's for the birds, you're politely saying it's horseshit."

BEYOND THE PALE
Meaning: Socially unacceptable.
Origin: "The pale in this expression has nothing to do with the whitish color, but comes originally from the Latin palus, meaning a pole, or stake. Since stakes are often used to mark boundaries, a pale was a particular area within certain limits." The pale that inspired this expression was the area around Dublin in Ireland. Until the 1500s, that area was subject to British law. "Those who lived beyond the pale were outside English jurisdiction and were thought to be uncivilized." (From Getting to the Roots, by Martin Manser)

I'VE GOT A FROG IN MY THROAT
Meaning: I'm hoarse from a cold.
Origin: Surprisingly, this wasn't inspired by the croaking sound of a cold-sufferer's voice, but by a weird medical practice. "In the Middle Ages," says Christine Ammer in It's Raining Cats and Dogs, "infections such as thrush were sometimes treated by putting a live frog head first into the patient's mouth; by inhaling, the frog was believed to draw the patient's infection into its own body. The treatment is happily obsolete, but its memory survives in the 19th century term frog in one's throat."

SOMETHING FITS TO A "T"
Meaning: It fits perfectly.
Origin: Commonly thought of as a reference to the T-square, which is used to draw parallel lines and angles. But this phrase was used in the 1600s, before anyone called it a T-square. "A more likely explanation is that the expression was originally 'to a tittle.' A tittle was the dot over the 'i,' so the phrase meant 'to a dot' or 'fine point.'" (From Why Do We Say It, by Nigel Rees)

X X X
Meaning: A kiss, at the end of a letter.
Origin: In medieval times, when most people were illiterate, "contracts were not considered legal until each signer included St. Andrew's cross after their name." (Or instead of a signature, if the signer couldn't write.) To prove their sincerity, signers were then required to kiss the X. "Throughout the centuries this custom faded out, but the letter X [became associated] with a kiss." This is also probably where the phrase "sealed with a kiss" comes from. (From I've Got Goose Pimples, by Martin Vanoni)

READ BETWEEN THE LINES
Meaning: To perceive or understand a hidden meaning.
Origin: In the 16th century it became common for politicians, soldiers, and businesspeople to write in code. To ordinary folks, this writing was unintelligible. They concluded that the meaning was not in the lines of gibberish, but in the space between them.

YOU'RE NO SPRING CHICKEN
Meaning: You're not young anymore; you're past your prime.
Origin: Until recent generations, there were no incubators and few warm hen houses. That meant chicks couldn't be raised during winter. New England growers found that those born in the spring brought premium prices in the summer market places. When these Yankee traders tried to pass off old birds as part of the spring crop, smart buyers would protest that the bird was "no spring chicken."

SON OF A GUN
Meaning: An epithet.
Origin: In the 1800s, British sailors took women along on extended voyages. When babies were born at sea, the mothers delivered them in a partitioned section of the gundeck. Because no one could be sure who the true fathers were, each of these "gunnery" babies was jokingly called a "son of a gun."

PUT UP YOUR DUKES
Meaning: Raise your fists and get ready to fight.
Origin: In the early 1800s, the Duke of York, Frederick Augustus, shocked English society by taking up boxing. He gained such admiration from boxers that many started referring to their fists as the "Dukes of York," and later "dukes."

HAVE AN AXE TO GRIND
Meaning: Having a hidden agenda.
Origin: The expression comes from a story told by Benjamin Franklin. A man once praised Franklin's father's grindstone and asked young Benjamin to demonstrate how the grindstone worked. As Franklin complied, the stranger placed his own axe upon the grindstone, praising the young boy for his cleverness and vigor. When the axe was sharpened, the man laughed at Franklin and walked away, giving the boy a valuable lesson about people with "an axe to grind."

UPPER CRUST
Meaning: Elite.
Origin: In the Middle Ages, the highest-level nobility and royal were served the choice part of a loaf of bread, the "upper crust," before it was offered to other diners.

MEET A DEADLINE
Meaning: Finish a project by an appointed time.
Origin: The phrase was born in prisoner-of-war camps during the Civil War. Because resources were scarce, the prison camps were sometimes nothing more than a plot of land surrounded by a marked line. If a prisoner tried to cross the line, he would be shot. So it became known as the "deadline."

TOE THE LINE
Meaning: Behave or act in accordance with the rules.
Origin: In the early days of the British Parliament, members wore swords in the House of Commons. To keep the members from fighting during heated debates, the Speaker of the House of Commons forced the Government and Opposition parties to sit on opposite sides of the chamber. Lines, two sword-lengths plus one foot apart, were drawn in the carpet. Members were required to stand behind the lines when the House was in session. To this day, when a member steps over the line during a debate, the speaker yells: "Toe the line!"

SECOND STRING
Meaning: Replacement or backup.
Origin: You might have caught William Tell without an apple, but not without a second string. In medieval times, an archer always carried a second string in case the one on his bow broke.

IN THE LIMELIGHT
Meaning: At the center of attention.
Origin: In 1826, Thomas Drummond invented the limelight, an amazingly bright white light, by running an intense oxygen-hydrogen flame through a lime cylinder. At first, the bright light was used in lighthouses to direct ships. Later, theater began using the limelight like a spotlight - to direct the audience's attention to a certain actor. If an actor was to be the focal point of a particular scene, he was thrust "into the limelight."

FLASH IN THE PAN
Meaning: Short-lived success.
Origin: In the 1700s, the pan of a flintlock musket was a part that held the gunpowder. If all went well, sparks from the flint would ignite the charge, which would then propel the bullet out of the barrel. However, sometimes the gun powder would burn without igniting a main charge. The flash would burn brightly but only briefly, with no lasting effect.

HAM ACTOR (HAM)
Meaning: Someone who enjoys putting on a show, or who plays rather obviously to an audience (though not necessarily on stage).
Origin: An American phrase originating in the 1880s. Minstrel shows, the mass entertainment of the time, often featured less-than-talented performers who overacted. They frequently appeared in blackface, and used ham fat to remove their makeup. Thus, they were referred to as "ham-fat men," later shortened to "hams."

WHIPPING BOY
Meaning: A scapegoat, or something who is habitually picked on.
Origin: Hundreds of years ago, it was normal practice for a European prince to be raised with a commoner of the same age. Since princes couldn't be disciplined like ordinary kids, the commoner would be beaten whenever the prince did something wrong. The commoner was called the prince's "whipping boy."

GO BERSERK
Meaning: Go crazy or to act with reckless abandon.
Origin: Viking warriors were incredibly wild and ferocious in battle, probably because they ate hallucinogenic mushrooms in prebattle ceremonies. They charged their enemies recklessly, wearing nothing more than bearskin, which in Old Norse was pronounced "berserkr" or "bear-sark."

PULL SOMEONE'S LEG
Meaning: Fool someone.
Origin: Years ago back-alley thieves worked in pairs. One thief, known as a "tripper up," would use a cane, rope, or piece of wire to trip a pedestrian, knocking them to the ground. While the victim was down, the second thief would rob them. Pulling your leg originally referred to the way the "tripper up" tried to make someone stumble. Today it only refers to tripping someone figuratively.

RAINING CATS AND DOGS
Meaning: Torrential rain.
Origin: In the days before garbage collection, people tossed their trash in the gutter - including deceased housepets - and it just lay there. When it rained really hard, the garbage, including the bodies of dead cats and dogs, went floating down the street.

PIE IN THE SKY
Meaning: An illusion, a dream, a fantasy, an unrealistic goal.
Origin: Joe Hill, a famous labor organizer of the early 20th century, wrote a tune called "The Preacher and the Slave," in which he accused the clergy of promising a better life in Heaven while people starved on Earth. A few of the lines: "Work and pray, live on hay, you'll get pie in the sky when you die (That's a lie!)."

HACK WRITER
Meaning: Writer who churns out words for money.
Origin: In Victorian England, a hackney, or "hack," was a carriage for hire. (The term is still used in reference to taxi drivers, who need their "hack's licenses" to work.) Hack became a description of anyone who plies their trade strictly for cash.

LONG IN THE TOOTH
Meaning: Old.
Origin: Originally used to describe old horses. As horses age, their gums recede, giving the impression that their teeth are growing. The longer the teeth look, the older the horse.

STOOL PIGEON
Meaning: Informer, traitor.
Origin: To catch passenger pigeons (now extinct), hunters would nail a pigeon to a stool. Its alarmed cries would attract other birds, and the hunters would shoot them by the thousands. The poor creature that played the traitor was called a "stool pigeon."

BEAT AROUND THE BUSH
Meaning: Go about things in a circuitous manner, go around an issue rather than deal with it directly.
Origin: In the Middle Ages, people caught birds by dropping a net over a bush and clubbing the ground around it to scare the birds into flying into the net. Once a bird was caught, you could stop beating around the bush and start eating.

The article above is reprinted with permission from The Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into History Again.

The book is a compendium of entertaining information chock-full of facts on a plethora of history topics. Uncle John's first plunge into history was a smash hit - over half a million copies sold! And this sequel gives you more colorful characters, cultural milestones, historical hindsight, groundbreaking events, and scintillating sagas.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute

Reprinted from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader: Fast-Acting Long-Lasting.

There are scientific findings that expand our knowledge and make life better for mankind. These, however, aren't such findings, but they are darned interesting. Here are a few things that science has proven:

E-mail Rots Your Brain

Study: In 2004 scientists at the King's College, London University were commissioned by Hewlett-Packard to see what toll compulsive e-mail checking and Internet chatting have on a worker's "functioning IQ." Eighty volunteers participated in clinical trials and another 1,100 people were interviewed for the study.

Findings: Sixty-two percent of the interviewees were "addicted" to checking e-mail and exchanging text messages, which they did not only at their desks, but also "during meetings, in the evenings, and on weekends." The scientists dubbed this phenomenon "infomania."

Infomania takes a noticeable toll on productivity. "An average worker's functioning IQ falls 10 points when distracted by ringing telephones and incoming e-mails ... more than double the four-point drop seen in studies on the impact of smoking marijuana," the scientists concluded. A 10-point drop is the equivalent of trying to put in a full day of work after missing an entire night of sleep.

Traffic Jams Can Kill You

Study: Researchers with Germany's National Research Center for Environment and Health interviewed 691 people who'd suffered heart attacks between 1999 and 2001. The researchers asked them to describe all of their activities in the four days leading up to their heart attacks. The results of the study were published in the November 2004 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Findings: People who've been stuck in traffic in the past hour are nearly three times more likely to suffer a heart attack than people who haven't been stuck in traffic. Overall, nearly 1 in 12 heart attacks was linked in some way to traffic congestion. Men are at a greater risk than women, and people over age 60 are at a greater risk than those under 60.

If you have to be stuck in traffic, you're actually better off in a car than you would be riding the bus, the subway, or a bicycle. Heart attacks were 2.6 times more likely for people stuck in a car, 3.1 times more likely for people on public transportation, and 3.9 times greater for bike riders. "Because the association was also observed for persons who used public transportation, it is unlikely that the effect is entirely attributable to stress linked with driving a car," researchers say.

So is it the stress associated with being stuck in traffic that causes heart attacks, or is it the exhaust fumes - or some other factor? Who knows? "Given our current knowledge, it is impossible to determine the relative contribution of risk factors such as stress and traffic-related air pollution," the researchers say.

Dudes Say "Dude" More Than Dudettes Do

Study: In 2004 University of Pittsburgh linguist-dude Scott Kiesling published a paper in the journal American Speech on the word "dude" and its many uses.

Findings: Blame it on Spicoli, dude: Kiesling traces the current popularity of the word "dude" to the 1982 movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High, featuring that Sean Penn dude.

Men are more likely to use the word "dude" than women are. They're also more likely to use it with men than with women. When they do use it with women, the woman is usually just a friend; women with whom dudes are intimate are rarely if ever referred to as "dude."

According to Kiesling, "dude" owes much of its popularity to the fact that it connotes "cool solidarity" - young men use it to express friendship or closeness, without being so close as to invite suspicion that they are gay. Dude!

Crosswords and Sex Grow Brain Cells

Study: Conducted by Dr. Perry Bartlett of the University of Queensland's Brain Institute, in Australia.

Findings: In April 2004, Dr. Bartlett announced that mental and physical exercise may delay the onset of brain disease such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's by creating and nurturing new brain cells to replace ones that have been lost. Brain cell creation and growth appear to be stimulated by a chemical called prolactin - and prolactin levels rise during mental and physical exertion. (They're also high when you're pregnant.) "Perhaps one should run a long distance or do crossword," Dr. Bartlett suggests. "Prolactin levels also go up during sex," he says, "so one could think of a number of more interesting activities than going jogging in order to regulate the production of nerve cells."

Parents Favor Cute Kids Over Ugly Ones

Study: Researchers at the University of Alberta in Canada went to 14 different supermarkets and observed the interactions between 400 different parents and their children. They also ranked the "physical attractiveness" of each child on a scale of 1 to 10.

Findings: When Mom did the shopping, 13.3% of the children judged "most attractive" were secured with the seat belt in the shopping cart seat; only 1.2% of the "ugliest" children were. With Dad the disparity was even greater: 12.5% of the "most attractive" children were belted in; none of the ugliest children were.

Ugly children were allowed to wander away from their parents more of then than attractive kids, and were allowed to wander farther away than attractive children were.

Good-looking boys were kept closer to their parents than pretty girls were, although the researchers concede that this may be because girls are perceived to be more mature and responsible than boys of the same age.

What does all this mean? Scientists aren't sure. Some speculate that evolution may play a role: parents may unconsciously perceive attractive children as being genetically more valuable. But Emory University psychologist Dr. Frans de Waal disagrees. "If the number of offsprings are the same for ugly people and handsome people, there's absolutely no evolutionary reason for parents to invest less in ugly kids," he says.

Dumb Blonde Jokes Slow Blondes Down

Study: German researchers at Bremen's International University asked 80 women with different hair colors to take intelligence tests, then monitored them carefully as they took the tests. Half of the women were told "dumb blonde" jokes before they took the test. (Jokes like: "Why do blondes open containers of yogurt while they're still in the supermarket? Because the lid says, 'Open here.'")

Findings: No word on how well the blondes or anyone else did on the intelligence tests - that wasn't the point, and the university didn't release the results. But it did keep track of how quickly the women completed the tests: The blondes who were told dumb blonde jokes took longer to complete their tests than the blondes who weren't told jokes. Did the dumb blond jokes make blondes dumber? No, the researchers say: the jokes made them more self-conscious, which caused them to work more slowly and cautiously so they wouldn't make mistakes. "The study shows that even unfounded prejudices generally dismissed as untrue can affect an individual's confidence in their own ability," says Jens Foerster, one of the social psychologists who administered the study.

Germans Prefer Money to Sex

Study: In December 2004, the German edition of Playboy magazine commissioned a poll of 1,000 Germans. The pollsters asked participants if they were given a choice between more free time, more money, and more sex, which one they would choose.

Findings: 62% of Germans said cash, 26% said more free time, and only 6% said more sex. (That might explain why Germany has a declining birth rate.)

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Fast-Acting Long Lasting Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!