The following is an article from Uncle John's Triumphant 20th
Anniversary Bathroom Reader (BRI is having a sale through June 15: everything is 30% off!)

Downtown Modesto, California, on a Sunday night. One of the oldest corners in downtown Modesto is dominated by bail bonds businesses. Photo: Inkyhack [Flickr]

Every city has something to be proud of, but some cities, despite their beauty, charm, or cultural importance, also have features of which they might be a little less proud. Here are a few cities with dubious distinctions.

• According to a survey by AutoVantage (an auto club like AAA), Miami, Florida, is the city with the rudest drivers.

• A Cornell University study determined that New York City has the lowest quality of housing. The World Health Organization says that New York is also the noisiest city in the United States.

• Because of high divorce and unemployment rates and consistently gloomy weather, the city statistics analyzing firm BestPlaces named Tacoma, Washington, the country's most stressful place to live.

• Breathe easy if you don't live in these places: Greenville, South Carolina (where residents suffer the most respiratory tract infections); Scranton, Pennsylvania (the worst city for asthma sufferers); and Tulsa, Oklahoma (the pollen capital of America).

• Based on the number of accidents and fatalities, the International Federation of Bike Messenger Associations named Boston the most dangerous place to ride a bike.

• Zero, a group dedicated to slowing population growth, determined what cities were the best and worst in which to raise children based on the quality of healthcare, education, public safety, transportation, the job market, and the natural environment. The best was Fargo, North Dakota; the worst was Newark, New Jersey.

• According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, Sarasota, Florida, is the city most hostile toward homeless people.

• Forbes magazine named Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the worst city for single people. Reasons: expensive beer, few nightclubs, and not enough single people.

• Worst traffic congestion: Los Angeles. (Not coincidentally, it also has the worst air pollution.)

• City with the bumpiest, most pothole-infested roads: Seattle.

• In 2007 Men's Health magazine analyzed various cities' obesity rates, eating habits, and other data, including how much time people spend exercising and sitting in traffic. Result: Las Vegas was judged the nation's "fattest city."

• The city with the most suicides per capita is Medford, Oregon.

• Decatur, Illinois, has the highest skin cancer fatality rate.

• America's most rat-infested city is Baltimore.

• New Orleans leads in both gun- and diabetes-related deaths per capita.

• Hallmark Cards call El Paso, Texas, the city with the worst sense of humor, based on polls in which very few people said they considered themselves funny. (The city also has very low sales of Hallmark's humorous cards.)

• City with the highest percentage of lawyers: Washington, D.C. Nearly 2% of all residents are attorneys.

• According to the book Cities Ranked and Rated, the worst overall city in America is Modesto, California. The city scored a 0 on the book's 100-point scale for its high cost of living, high unemployment rate, lack of activities, and the highest car theft rate in the United States.

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 Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader

Pong, Atari's most popular game (Image: screenshot of Pong from the Atari Arcade Hits #1, 1972, by Hasbro Interactive [wikipedia])

If you know anything about the pop culture of the 1970s, the name Atari is synonymous with video games. So what happened? Where did Atari go? Here’s the story.

THE GAMBLER

In the early 1960s, a University of Utah engineering student named Nolan Bushnell lost his tuition money in a poker game. He immediately took a job at a pinball arcade near Salt Lake City to make back the money and support himself while he was at school.

In school, Bushnell majored in engineering and, like everyone else who had access to the university’s supercomputers, was a Spacewar! Addict. But he was different. To his fellow students, Spacewar! Was just a game; to Bushnell, it seemed like a way to make money. If he could put a game like Spacewar! Into a pinball arcade, he figured that people would line up to play it. (Photo: Stibbe.net)

FALSE START

Bushnell graduated form college in 1968 and moved to California. He wanted to work for Disney but they turned him down, so he took a day job with an engineering company called Ampex. At night he worked on building his arcade video game.

He converted his daughter’s bedroom into a workshop (she had to sleep on the couch) and scrounged free parts from Ampex and from friends at other electronics companies. The monitor for his prototype was a black-and-white TV he got at Goodwill; an old paint thinner can was the coinbox.

When he finished building the prototype for the game he called Computer Space, he looked around for a partner to help him manufacture and sell it. On the advice of his dentist, he made a deal with a manufacturer or arcade games, Nutting Associates. Nutting agreed to build and sell the games in exchange for a share of the profits, and in return, Bushnell signed on as an engineer for the firm.

If you’ve never heard of Computer Space, you’re not alone. The game was a dud. It sounded simple - the player’s rocket has to destroy two alien flying saucers powered by the computer - but it came with several pages of difficult-to-understand instructions.

The fact that it was the world’s first arcade video game only made things worse. Neither players nor arcade owners knew what to think of the strange machine sitting next to the pinball machines. “People would look at you like you had three heads,” Bushnell remembered. “ ’You mean you’re going to put the TV set in a box with a coin slot and play games on it?’ ” (Photo: Flippers [wikipedia])

NUTTING IN COMMON

Still, Bushnell was convinced that Nutting Associates, not the game, was to blame for the failure. And he was convinced that he could do a better job running his own company. So he and a friend chipped in $250 a piece to start a company called Syzygy (the name given to the configuration of the sun, the earth, and the moon when they ‘re in a straight line in space).

That’s what Bushnell wanted to name it … but when he filed with the states of California, they told him the name was already taken. Bushnell liked to play Go, a Japanese game of strategy similar to chess. He thought some of the words used in the game would make a good name for a business, and company legend has it he asked the clerk at the California Secretary of State’s office to choose between Sente, Hane, and Atari.

She picked Atari.

FAKING IT

Bushnell hired an engineer named Al Alcorn to develop games. Meanwhile, Bushnell installed pinball machines in several local businesses, including a bar called Andy Capp’s Tavern. The cash generated by the pinball machines would help fund the company until the video games were ready for market.

Alcorn’s first assignment was to build a simple Ping-Pong-style video game. Bushnell told him that Atari had signed a contract to deliver such a game to General Electric and now it needed to get built.

According to the official version of events, Bushnell was fibbing - he wanted Alcorn to get used to designing games and wanted to start him out with something simple. Ping-Pong, with one ball and two paddles, was about as simple as a video game can be. In reality, there was no contract with G.E. and Bushnell had no intention of bringing a table tennis game to market. He was convinced that the biggest moneymakers would be complicated games like Computer Space. “He was just going to throw the Ping-Pong game away,” Alcorn remembers. But then Alcorn gave him a reason not to.

OUT OF ORDER

Instead of a simple game, Alcorn’s Ping-Pong had a touch of realism: if you hit the ball with the center of the paddle, the ball bounced straight ahead, but if you hit it with the edge of a paddle, it bounced off at an angle. With Alcorn’s enhancements, video Ping-Pong was a lot more fun to play than Bushnell had expected.

As long as the game was fun, Bushnell decided to test it commercially by installing Pong, as he decided to call it, at Andy Capp’s Tavern.

Two weeks later, the owner of Andy Capp’s called to complain that the game was already broken. Alcorn went out to fix it, and as soon as he opened the machine he realized what was wrong - the game was so full of quarters that they had overflowed the coin tray and jammed the machine. (Photo: ProhibitOnions [wikipedia])

That was only half of the story. The bar’s owner also told Alcorn that on some morning when he arrived to open the bar, people were already waiting outside. But they weren’t waiting for beer. They’d come in, play Pong for a while, and then leave without ordering a drink. He’d never seen anything like it.

That was their first indication that Pong was going to be a hit.

JUST A COINCIDENCE

But did Nolan Bushnell really come up with the idea for Pong … or did he lift it from another video game company? Video game history buffs still debate the issue today.

Here’s what we do know: In the late 1960s, a defense industry engineer named Ralph Baer invented a video game system that could be played at home on a regular television. The system featured 12 different games, including Table Tennis. (Photo: Ralph H. Baer Consultants)

Magnavox licensed Baer’s system in 1971 and prepared to market it as Odyssey, the world’s first home video game system. The company planned to sell the system through its own network of dealers and distributors. In May 1972, the company quietly began demonstrating the product around the country … and on May 24 it demonstrated it at a trade show in Burlingame, California.

“In later litigation,” Steven Kent writes in The Ultimate History of Video Games, “it was revealed that Bushnell not only attended the Burlingame show but also played the tennis game on Odyssey.”

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

Did Bushnell have a revelation when he played the Odyssey game? Did it convince him that simple games like Pong would be more popular than complicated games like Computer Space?

Or was it just as he claimed - that he instructed Alcorn to invent a ping-pong game, perhaps inspired by he Magnavox Odyssey, only because it was the simplest one he could think of? We’ll probably never know for sure.

As far as the law was concerned, the only thing that really mattered was that, unlike Willy Higginbotham (Tennis for Two) and Steve Russell (Spacewar!), Ralph Baer actually had patented his idea for playing video games on a TV screen and had even won a second patent for video Ping-Pong. His patents predated the founding of Atari by a couple of years.

Bushnell never applied for a patent for Pong, and didn’t have a case for proving he’d invented it. And even if he did, he didn’t have a chance fighting a big corporation like Magnavox in court.

SMART MOVE

So why did Atari become synonymous with video games instead of Magnavox? It was skillful maneuvering by Bushnell.

Since he couldn’t win in court, Bushnell paid a flat fee of $700,000 for a license to use Baer’s patents. That meant that Atari bought the rights free and clear and would never have to pay a penny in royalties to Magnavox. And because Magnavox was now the undisputed patent holder, they had to sue Atari’s competitors in court whenever competing game systems infringed the patents. Atari didn’t even have to chip in for the legal fees.

Magnavox Odyssey, signed by Ralph Baer. (Photo: Wgungfu [wikipedia])

Magnavox had Odyssey on the market while Atari was still years away from manufacturing a home version of Pong. But Magnavox wouldn’t capitalize on their exclusive market. Their first mistake was selling the product exclusively through their own network of dealers, when it would have been smarter to sell them in huge chain stores like Sears and Kmart. Their second mistake was implying in their advertising that Odyssey would only work with Magnavox TVs. That wasn’t true, but the company was hoping to increase TV sales. All they ended up doing was hurting sales of Odyssey.

In 1975 they discontinued the 12-game system and introduced a table tennis-only home video game to compete against the home version of Pong. Then in 1977 they introduced Odyssey2 to compete against Atari’s 2600 system.

Yet in spite of all the effort - and in spite of the fact that they, not Atari, owned the basic video game patents - Magnavox was never more than a me-too product with a marginal market share. Magnavox finally halted production in 1983.

KING PONG

From the moment it was introduced in 1972, Atari’s arcade game, Pong, was a money maker. Placed in a busy location, a single Pong game could earn more than $300 a week, compared to $50 a week for a typical pinball machine. Atari sold more than 8,000 of the machines at a time when even the most popular pinball machines rarely sold more than 2,500 units.

Atari would have sold a lot more machines, too, if competing game manufacturers hadn’t flooded the market with knockoffs. But there was no way that Atari could fight off all the imitators.

Instead, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell managed to stay one step ahead of the competition by inventing one new arcade game after another . (One of these games, Breakout, in which you use a paddle and a ball to knock out holes in a brick wall, was created by an Atari programmer named Steve Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak, an engineer at Hewlett-Packard. Do their names sound familiar? They should - a few years later, they founded Apple Computer.)

THE ATARI 2600

In 1975 Atari entered the home video game market by creating a home version of Pong. Selling its games through Sears Roebuck and Co., Atari sold 150,000 games that first season alone.

Bushnell was ready to introduce more home versions of arcade games, and he’d decided to do it by copying an idea from a competing video game system, Channel F. The idea: game cartridges. It was a simple concept: a universal game system in which interchangeable game cartridges plugged into a game player, or “console.”

There was just one problem: inventing a video game cartridge system from scratch and manufacturing it in great enough volume to beat out his competitors was going to cost a fortune. The only way that he could come up with the money was by selling Atari to Warner Communications (today part of AOL Time Warner) for $28 million in 1976. Bushnell stayed on as Atari’s chairman and continued to work on the cartridge system.

Atari 2600. Photo: joho345 [wikipedia]

Introduced in mid-1977, the Atari Video Computer System (VCS) - later renamed the Atari 2600 - struggled for more than a year. Atari’s competitors didn’t do much better, and for a while it seemed that the entire video game industry might be on its last legs - the victim of the public’s burnout from playing too much Pong.

ALIEN RESURRECTION

Then in early 1979, Atari executives hit on the idea of licensing Space Invaders, an arcade game manufactured by Taito, a Japanese company. The game was so popular in Japan that it actually caused a coin shortage, forcing the national mint to triple its output of 100-yen coins.

Space Invaders on the Atari 2600. Image: Kudla.org

Just as it had in Japan, Space Invaders became the most popular arcade game in the United States, and the most popular Atari game cartridge. Atari followed up with other blockbuster cartridges like Defender, Missile Command, and Asteroids; by 1980 it commanded a 75% share of the burgeoning home video game market. Thanks in large part to soaring sales of the VCS system, Atari’s annual sales grew from $75 million in 1977 to more than $2 billion in 1980, making Atari the fastest growing company in U.S. history. But it wouldn’t stay that way for long.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

Within months of bringing VCS to market, Bushnell was already pushing Warner to begin work on a next-generation successor to the system, but Warner rejected the idea out of hand. They had invested more than $100 million in the VCS and weren’t about to turn around and build a new product to compete with it. Warner’s determination to rest on their laurels was one of the things that led to Bushnell’s break with the company.

By the time Space Invaders revived the fortunes of the VCS, Noland Bushnell was no longer part of the company. Warner Communications had forced him out following a power struggle in November 1978.

If Bushnell had been the only person to leave the company, Atari’s problems probably wouldn’t have gotten so bad. But he wasn’t - Warner also managed to alienate nearly all of Atari’s best programmers. While Atari made millions of dollars, Warner paid the programmers less than $30,000 a year, didn’t share the profits the games generated, and wouldn’t even allow them to see sales figures.

The programmers didn’t receive any public credit for their work, either. Outside of the company, few people even know who had designed classic games like Asteroids and Missile Command; Warner was afraid that if it made the names public, the programmers would be hired away by other video game companies.

BREAKOUT

So Atari’s top programmers quit and formed their own video game company, called Activision, then turned around and began selling VCS-compatible games that competed directly against Atari’s own titles.

Activision dealt a huge blow to Atari, and not just because Activision’s games were better. Atari’s entire marketing strategy was based around pricing the VCS console as cheaply as possible - $199 - then reaping huge profits from sales of its high-priced game cartridges. Now the best games were being made by Activision.

Atari sued Activision several times to try to block it from making games for the VCS but lost every time, and Activision kept cranking out hit after hit. By 1982 Activision was selling $150 million worth of cartridges a year and had replaced Atari as the fastest growing company in the United States.

THE ATARI GLUT

Activision’s spectacular success encouraged other Atari programmers to defect and form their own video game companies, and it also prompted dozens of other companies - even Quaker Oats - to begin making games for the VCS.

Many of these games were terrible, and most of the companies that made them soon went out of business. But that only made things worse for Atari, because when the bad companies went out of business, their game cartridges were dumped on the market for as little as $9.99 apiece. If people wanted good games, they bought them from Activision. If they wanted cheap games, they pulled them out of the discount bin. Not many people bought Atari’s games, and when the cheap games proved disappointing, consumer blamed Atari.

Meanwhile, just as Bushnell had feared, over the next few years, new game systems like Mattel’s Intellivision and Coleco’s ColecoVision came on the market and began chiseling away at Atari’s market share. With state-of-the-art hardware and computer chips, these game systems had higher-resolution graphics and offered animation and sound that were nearly as good as arcade video games … and vastly superior to the VCS. Adding insult to injury, both ColecoVision and Intellivision offered adapters that would let buyers play the entire library of VCS games, which meant that if consumers wanted to jump ship to Atari’s competitors, they could take their old games with them. (Photo: Fritz Saalfeld [Wikipedia])

EATEN BY PAC-MAN

But what really finished Atari off was Pac-Man. In April 1982, Atari released the home version of Pac-Man in what was probably the most anticipated video game release in history. At the time, there were about 10 million VCS systems on the market, but Atari manufactured 12 million cartridges, assuming that new consumers would buy the VCS just to play Pac-Man.

Big mistake - Atari’s Pac-Man didn’t live up to its hype. It was a flickering piece of junk that didn’t look or sound anything like the arcade version. It wasn’t worth the wait. Atari ended up selling only 7 million cartridges, and many of these were returned by outraged customers demanding refunds.

ATARI PHONE HOME

Then Atari followed its big bomb with an even bigger bomb: E.T., The Extra-Terrestrial. Atari guaranteed Steve Spielberg a $25 million royalty for the game, then rushed it out in only six weeks so that it would be in stores in time for Christmas (video games typically took at least six months to develop). Then they manufacture five million cartridge without knowing if consumers would take any interest in the game.

[YouTube Link]

They didn’t. The slap-dash E.T. was probably the worst product Atari had ever made, worse even than Pac-Man. Nearly all of the cartridges were returned by consumers and retailers. Atari ended up dumping millions of Pac-Man and E.T. game cartridges in a New Mexico landfill and then having them crushed with steamrollers and buried under tons of cement.

TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE

That same year Atari finally got around to doing what Noland Bushnell had wanted to do since 1978: they released a new game system, the Atari 5200.

But in the face of stiff competition from ColecoVision, which came out with Donkey Kong (the 5200 didn’t) and had better graphics and animation, it bombed. Staggering from the failures of Pac-Man, E.T., and the 5200, Atari went on to lose more than $536 million in 1983.

THE LAST BIG MISTAKE

In 1983 Atari had what in retrospect might have been a chance to revive its sagging fortunes … but it blew that opportunity, too. Nintendo, creators of Donkey Kong, decided to bring its popular Famicom (short for Family Computer) game system to the United States. The Famicom was Nintendo’s first attempt to enter the American home video game market, and rather than go it alone, the company wanted help. It offered Atari a license not just to sell the Famicom in every country in the world except Nintendo’s home market of Japan, but also to sell it under the Atari brand name. Consumers would never know that the game was a Nintendo. In return, Nintendo would receive a royalty for each unit sold and would have unrestricted rights to create games for the system.

Atari and Nintendo negotiated for three days, but nothing ever came of it. Nintendo decided to go it alone - and it was good choice.

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader.

Where else but in a Bathroom Reader could you learn how the banana peel changed history, how to predict the future by rolling the dice, how the Jivaro tribes shrunk heads, and the science behind love at first sight? Get ready to be thoroughly entertained while occupied on the throne. Uncle John rules the world of information and humor. It's simply Ahh-Inspiring!

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 from Uncle John’s All-Purpose Extra Strength Bathroom Reader.

We’ve all made mistakes … but probably not big mistakes like making snot beer, saying no to The Beatles, or turning down the patent for the telephone. In fact, here are some of the biggest business blunders in history:

Turning Down The Beatles

SHOULD WE SIGN THEM UP?

The Beatles on Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 (Source: Wikipedia)

Executives: Mike Smith and Dick Rowe, executives in charge of evaluating new talent for the London office of Decca Records.

Background: On December 13, 1961, Mike Smith traveled to Liverpool to watch a local rock ‘n’ roll band perform. He decided they had talent, and invited them to audition on New Year’s Day 1962. The group made the trip to London and spent two hours playing 15 different songs at the Decca studios. Then they went home and waited for an answer.

They waited for weeks.

Decision: Finally, Rowe told the band’s manager that the label wasn’t interested, because they sounded too much like a popular group called The Shadows. In one of the most famous of all rejection lines, he said: "Not to mince words, Mr. Epstein, but we don’t like your boys’ sound. Groups are out; four-piece groups with guitars particularly are finished."

Impact: The group was The Beatles, of course. They eventually signed with EMI Records, started a trend back to guitar bands, and ultimately became the most popular band of all time. Ironically, "within two years, EMI’s production facilities became so stretched that Decca helped them out in a reciprocal arrangement, to cope with the unprecedented demand for Beatles records."

Turning Down E.T.

SHOULD WE LET THAT DIRECTOR USE OUR CANDY IN HIS FILM?

Executives: John and Forrest Mars, the owners of Mars Inc., makers of M&M’s

Background: In 1981, Universal Studios called Mars and asked for permission to use M&M’s in a new film they were making. This was (and is) a fairly common practice. Product placement deals provide filmmakers with some extra cash or promotion opportunities. In this case, the director was looking for a cross-promotion. He’d use the M&M’s, and Mars could help promote the movie.

Decision: The Mars brothers said "No."

Impact: The film was E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, directed by Stephen Spielberg. The M&M’s were needed for a crucial scene: Eliott, the little boy who befriended the alien, uses candies to lure E.T. into his house.

Instead, Universal Studios went to Hershey’s and cut a deal to use a new product called Reese’s Pieces. Initial sales of Reese’s Pieces had been light. But when E.T. became a top-grossing film - generating tremendous publicity for "E.T.’s favorite candy" - sales exploded. They tripled within two weeks and continued climbing for months afterward. "It was the biggest marketing coup in history," says Jack Dowd, the Hershey’s executive who approved the movie tie-in. "We got immediate recognition for our product. We would normally have to pay 15 or 20 million bucks for it."

Selling M*A*S*H For Peanuts

HOW DO WE COME UP WITH SOME QUICK CASH?

Executives: Executives of 20th Century Fox’s TV division (pre-Murdoch)

Background: No one at Fox expected much from M*A*S*H when it debuted on TV in 1972. Execs simply wanted to make a cheap series by using the M*A*S*H movie set again - so it was a surprise when it became Fox’s only hit show. Three years later, the company was hard up for cash. When the M*A*S*H ratings started to slip after two of its stars left, Fox execs panicked.

Decision: They decided to raise cash by selling the syndication rights to the first seven seasons of M*A*S*H on a futures basis: local TV stations could pay in 1975 for shows they couldn’t broadcast until October 1979 - four years away. Fox made no guarantees that the should would still be popular; $13,000 per episodes was non-refundable. But enough local stations took the deal so that Fox made $25 million. They celebrated …

Impact: … but prematurely. When M*A*S*H finally aired in syndication in 1979, it was still popular (in fact, it ranked #3 that year). It became one of the most successful syndicated shows ever, second only to "I Love Lucy." Each of the original 168 episodes grossed over $1 million for local TV stations; Fox got nothing.

What Use is the Telephone, the Electrical Toy?

SHOULD WE BUY THIS INVENTION?

Executive: William Orton, president of the Western Union Telegraph Company in 1876.

Background: In 1876, Western Union had a monopoly on the telegraph, the world’s most advanced communications technology. This made it one of America’s richest and most powerful companies, "with $41 million in capital and the pocketbooks of the financial world behind it." So when Gardiner Greene Hubbard, a wealthy Bostonian, approached Orton with an offer to sell the patent for a new invention Hubbard had helped to fund, Orton treated it as a joke. Hubbard was asking for $100,000!

Decision: Orton bypassed Hubbard and drafted a response directly to the inventor. "Mr. Bell," he wrote, "after careful consideration of your invention, while it is a very interesting novelty, we have come to the conclusion that it has no commercial possibilities… What use could this company make of an electrical toy?"

Impact: The invention, the telephone, would have been perfect for Western Union. The company had a nationwide network of telegraph wires in place, and the inventor, 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell, had shown that his telephone worked quite well on telegraph lines. All the company had to do was hook telephones up to its existing lines and it would have had the world’s first nationwide telephone network in a matter of months.

Instead, Bell kept the patent and in a few decades his telephone company, "renamed American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), had become the largest corporation in America … The Bell patent - offered to Orton for a measly $100,000 - became the single most valuable patent in history."

Ironically, less than two years of turning Bell down, Orton realized the magnitude of his mistake and spent millions of dollars challenging Bell’s patents while attempting to build his own telephone network (which he was ultimate forced to hand over to Bell.) Instead of going down in history as one of the architects of the telephone age, he is instead remember for having made one of the worst decisions in American business history.

Let’s Make Snot Beer!

HOW DO WE COMPETE WITH BUDWEISER?

Executive: Robert Uihlein, Jr., head of the Schlitz Brewing Company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Background: in the 1970s, Schlitz was America’s #2 beer, behind Budweiser. It had been #1 until 1957 and has pursued Bud ever since. In the 1970s, Uihlein came up with a strategy to compete against Anheuser-Busch. He figured that if he could cut the cost of ingredients used in his beer and speed up the brewing process at the same time, he could brew more beer in the same amount of time for less money … and earn higher profits.

Decision: Uihlein cut the amount of time it took to brew Schlitz from 40 days to 15, and replaced much of the barley malt in the beer with corn syrup - which was cheaper. He also switched from one type of foam stabilizer to another to get around new labeling laws that would have required the original stabilizer to be disclosed on the label.

Impact: Uihlein got what he wanted: a cheaper, more profitable beer that made a lot of money … at first. But it tasted terrible, and tended to break down so quickly as the cheap ingredients bonded together and sank to the bottom of the can - forming a substance that "looked disconcertingly like mucus." Philip Van Munchings writes in Beer Blast:

Suddenly Schlitz found itself shipping out a great deal of apparently snot-ridden beer. The brewery knew about it pretty quickly and made a command decision - to do nothing … Uihlein declined a costly recall for months, wagering that not much of the beer would be subjected to the kinds of temperatures at which most haze forms. He lost the bet, sales plummeted … and Schlitz began a long steady slide from the top three.

Schlitz finally caved in and recalled 10 million cans of the snot beer. But their reputation was ruined and sales never recovered. In 1981, they shut down their Milwaukee brewing plant; the following year the company was purchased by rival Stroh’s. One former mayor of Milwaukee compared the brewery’s fortunes to the sinking of the Titanic, asking "How could that big of a business go under so fast?"

Model T is Forever!

SHOULD WE INTRODUCE A NEW CAR?

Ford Model T (Photo: State Library of Victoria)

Executive: Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company

Background: When Henry Ford first marketed the Model
T in 1908, it was a state-of-the-art automobile. "There were cheaper cars on the market," writes Robert Lacey in Ford: The Men and Their Machine, "but no one could offer the same combination of innovation and reliability." Over the years, the price went down dramatically … and as the first truly affordable quality automobile, the Model T revolutionized American culture.

Decision: The Model T was the only car that the Ford Motor Co. made. As the auto industry grew and competition got stiffer, everyone in the company - from Ford’s employees to his family - pushed him to update the design. Lacey writes:

The first serious suggestions that the Model T might benefit from some major updating had been made when the car was only four years old. In 1912 Henry Ford had taken [his family] on their first visit to Europe, and on his return he discovered that his [chief aides] had prepared a surprise for him. [They] had labored to produce a new, low-slung version of the Model T, and the prototype stood in the middle of the factory floor, its gleaming red lacquer-work polished to a high sheen.

"He had his hands in his pockets," remembered one eyewitness, "and he walked around the car three or four times, looking at it very closely … Finally, he got to the left-hand side of the car that was facing me, and he takes his hands out, gets hold of the door, and bang! He ripped the door right off! God! How the man done it, I don’t know!"

Ford proceeded to destroy the whole car with his bare hands. It was a message to everyone around him not to mess with his prize creation. Lacey concludes: "The Model T had been the making of Henry Ford, lifting him from being any other Detroit automobile maker to becoming car maker to the world. It had yielded him untold riches and power and pleasure, and it was scarcely surprising that he should feel attached to it. But as the years went by, it became clear that Henry Ford had developed a fixation with his masterpiece which was almost unhealthy."

Ford had made his choice clear. In 1925, after more than 15 years on the market, the Model T was pretty much the same car it had been when it debuted. It still had the same noisy, underpowered four-cylinder engine, obsolete "planetary" transmission, and horse-buggy suspension that it had in the very beginning. Sure, Ford made a few concessions to the changing times, such as balloon tires, an electric starter, and a gas pedal on the floor. And by the early 1920s, the Model T was available in a variety of colors beyond Ford black. But the Model T was still … a Model T. "You can paint up a barn," one hurting New York Ford dealer complained, "but it will still be a barn and not a parlor."

Impact: While Ford rested on his laurels for a decade and a half, his competitors continued to innovate. Four-cylinder engines gave way to more powerful six-cylinder engines with manual clutch-and-gearshift transmissions. These new cars were powerful enough to travel at high speeds made possible by the country’s new paved highways. Ford’s "Tin Lizzie," designed in an era of dirt roads, was not.

Automobile buyers took notice and began trading up; Ford’s market share slid to 57% of U.S. automobile sales in 1923 down to 45% in 1925, and to 34% in 1926, as companies like Dodge and General Motors steadily gained ground. By the time Ford finally announced, that a replacement for the Model T was in the works in May 1927, the company had already lost the battle. That year, Chevrolet sold more cars than Ford for the first time. Ford regained first place in 1929 thanks to strong sales of its new Model A, but Chevrolet passed it again the following year and never looked back. "From 1930 onwards," Robert Lacey writes, "the once-proud Ford Motor Company had to be content with second place."

MORE BAD BUSINESS DECISIONS

ROSS PEROT

In 1979, Perot employed some of his well-known business acumen and foresaw that Bill Gates was on his way to building Microsoft into a great company. So he offered to buy him out. Gates says Perot offered between $6 million and $15 million; Perot says that Gates wanted $40 million to $60 million. Whatever the numbers were, the two couldn’t come to terms, and Perot walked away empty-handed. Today Microsoft is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

In 1979, the Washington Post offered the Chronicle the opportunity to syndicate a series of articles that two reporters named Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were writing about a break-in at the Democratic headquarters at Washington, D.C.’s Watergate Hotel. Owner Charles Thieriot said no. "There will be no West Coast interest in the story," he explained. Thus, his rival, the San Francisco Examiner, was able to purchase the rights to the hottest news story of the decade for $500.

W.T. GRANT CO.

Photo: Historic Columbus Indiana

In the mid-1970s, executives at the W.T. Grant variety store chain, one of the nation’s largest retailers, decided that the best way to increase sales was to increase the number of customers … by offering credit. It put tremendous "negative incentive" pressure on store managers to issue credit. Employees who didn’t meet their credit quotas risked complete humiliation. They had pies thrown in their faces, were forced to push peanuts across the floor with their noses, and were sent through hotel lobbies wearing only diapers. Eager to avoid such total embarrassment, store managers gave credit "to anyone who breathed," including untold thousands of customers who were bad risks. W.T. Grant racked up $800 million worth of bad debts before it finally collapsed in 1977.

ABC-TV

Cast of The Cosby Show (source: Wikipedia)

In 1984, Bill Cosby gave ABC-TV first shot at buying a sitcom he’d created - and would star in - about an upscale black family. But ABC turned him down, apparently "believing the show lacked bite and that viewers wouldn’t watch an unrealistic portrayal of blacks as wealthy, well-educated professionals."

So Cosby sold his show to NBC instead. What happened? Nothing much - The Cosby Show remained #1 show for four straight years, was a rating winner throughout its eight-year run, lifted NBC from its 10-year status as a last-place network to first place, resurrected TV comedy, and became the most profitable series ever broadcast.

DIGITAL RESEARCH

IBM once hired Microsoft founder Bill Gates to come up with the operating software for a new computer that IBM was rushing to market … and Gates turned to a company called Digital Research. He set up a meeting between owner Gary Kildall and IBM … but Kildall couldn’t make the meeting and sent his wife, Dorothy McEwen, instead. McEwen, who handled contract negotiations for Digital Research, felt that the contract IBM was offering would allow the company to incorporate features from Digital’s software into its own proprietary software - which would then compete against Digital. So she turned the contract down. Bill Gates went elsewhere, eventually coming up with a program called DOS, the software that put Microsoft on the map.

The 13th book in the series by the Bathroom Reader’s Institute has 504-all new pages crammed with fun facts, including articles on the biggest movie bombs ever, the origin and unintended use of I.Q. test, and more.

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.

In the 1920s, a crossword puzzle craze swept the nation that drove some people over the edge: a man shot his wife when she wouldn’t help him and another man killed himself leaving a suicide note in the form of a crossword puzzle.

Here’s the story of how crossword puzzles came to be and why it took over twenty years for The New York Times to convince itself to carry the puzzles.

Origin

Arthur Wynne was a writer for the game page of the New York World at the turn of the 19th century. One winter afternoon in 1913, while trying to think up new types of games for the newspaper’s special Christmas edition, he came up with a way to adapt the "word squares" his grandfather had taught him when he was a boy. In a word square, all of the words in the square have to read the same horizontally and vertically, like the example below.

But in the new puzzle Wynne came up with, the "across" words were different from the "down" words. It was more challenging, since there were more words to work on.

Wynne’s puzzle, which he called a "Word-Cross," debuted on Sunday December 21 as planned. And it was well-received. So many people wrote in to praise the puzzle that he put one in the paper the following Sunday and again on the third Sunday. (See if you can solve the World’s First Crossword Puzzle)

Reversal of Fortune

Four weeks after the puzzle first appeared, typesetters at the newspaper inadvertently transposed the words in the title to read "Cross-Word." For some reason, the name stuck - and so did the puzzle. When the World tried to drop it a few months later, readers were so hostile that the paper reversed itself and decided to make it a permanent feature of the puzzle page instead.

Though the puzzles were popular with readers, they were decidedly unpopular with editors. Crosswords were difficult to print and were plagued with typographical and other errors. In fact, no other newspaper wanted any part of them. So for the next 10 years, if you wanted to work on a crossword puzzle, you had to buy the World.

Enter Simon and Schuster

According to legend, in 1924 a young Columbia University graduate named Richard L. Simon went to dinner at his Aunt Wixie’s house. A World subscriber and a cross-word devotee, she asked where she could buy a book of crossword puzzles for her daughter. Simon, who was trying to break into the publishing business with college chum M. Lincoln Schuster, told her there were no such books … and then hit on the idea of publishing one himself.

M. Lincoln Schuster (R) and Ricahrd L. Simon (L). Photo: Simon & Schuster

The next day, he and Schuster went to the World’s offices and made a deal with the paper’s crossword puzzle editors. They would pick the newspaper’s best crossword puzzles and pay $25 apiece for the rights to publish them in a book. The pair then used all their money to print The Cross Word Puzzle Book.

Hot off the Presses

It was literally an overnight success. The World’s crossword puzzlers flocked to stores to get copies, and by the end of the year more than 300,000 crossword books had been sold.

The book turned Simon & Schuster into a major publisher. (Today it’s the largest U.S. publishing house and the second-largest publisher on earth). It also started a major craze. Crossword puzzles became a way of life in the 1920s. Newspaper started adding them to increase circulation. They inspired a Broadway hit called Games of 1925 and a hit song called "Crossword Mama, You Puzzle Me." Sales of dictionaries soared, and foot traffic in libraries increased dramatically. Clothes made with black-and-white checked fabric were the rage. The B&O Railroad put dictionaries on all of its mainline trains for crossword-crazy commuters.

Crossword Casualties

Some folks were driven over the edge by the craze. In 1924, a Chicago woman sued her husband for divorce, claiming "he was so engrossed in solving crosswords that he didn’t have time to work." The judge ordered the man to "limit himself to 3 puzzles a day and devote the rest of his time to domestic duties." In 1925, a New York Telephone Co. employee shot his wife when she wouldn’t help with a crossword puzzle. And in 1926, a Budapest man committed suicide, leaving an explanation in the form of a crossword puzzle. (No one could solve it.) Eventually, the craze died down. It took The New York Times to revive it.

Today, The New York Times crossword puzzle is considered the puzzle of choice for hardcore addicts, but that hasn’t always been true. Believe it or not, the Times resisted crosswords for more than two decades. Here’s the story of how the newspaper changed its mind.

Hard Times

By the late 1930s, the crossword puzzle boom that started in 1924 had begun to fizzle - largely because the crossword puzzles in most newspapers had become predictable. They constantly repeat boring clues like "Headgear" (hat), "Writing instrument" (pen) and "Woody plant" (tree).

But readers of The New York Times never got bored with their crossword puzzle … because the Times didn’t have one. Then, as now, the Times considered itself America’s "newspaper of record" and the guardian of journalistic standards. It scoffed at crossword puzzles as "a primitive form of mental exercise" in a1924 editorial, and refused to print them.

Eighteen years later, it was one of the last puzzle holdouts among America’s major newspapers.

All this and World War II

Still, the Times had crossword puzzle fans on its staff. Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger is said to have loved crosswords almost as much as he hated having to buy copies of the rival New York Herald Tribune in order to get them. And as America teetered on the brink of war in the early 1940s, the mood at the paper began to change.

Less than two weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Lester Markel, the Times‘ Sunday editor, dashed off a memo to his superiors suggesting that they consider adding a puzzle to the Sunday paper. The pressures and demands of the war played heavily on his mind. "We ought to proceed with the puzzle," he wrote, "especially in view of the fact that it is possible that there will now be bleak blackout hours - or if not that, then certainly a need for relaxation of some kind of other … We ought not to try to do anything essentially different from what is now being done - except to do it better."

Markel had met with Margaret Petherbridge Farrar, senior crossword puzzle editor at Simon & Schuster, and he attached a memo from her:

The Herald Tribune runs the best puzzle page in existence so far, but they have gotten into a bit of a rut. Their big puzzle never ventures even one imaginative definition, and lacks the quality that I believe can be achieved and maintained. We could, I dare to predict, get the edge on them.

I don’t think I have to sell you on the increased demand for this kind of pastime in an increasingly worried world. You can’t think of your troubles while solving a crossword …

Getting Started

The argument worked. The Times hired Farrar away from Simon & Schuster and made her its crossword editor, a position she held until she retired in 1969. The first puzzle appeared on February 15, 1942, in the Sunday magazine section. (Weekday puzzles weren’t added until September 1950.) "The puzzle," writes Times reporter Richard Shepard, "was an instant success."

Under Margaret Farrar’s direction, the crossword "constructors" (freelance puzzle makers) developed a clever and elaborate style. Instead of giving clues like "Stinging insect" (bee) and "Bird’s home" (nest), they phrased them as "Nectar inspector" and "Nutcracker’s suite." The Times‘ clever, whimsical style almost single-handedly ushered in a crossword renaissance, as newspapers all over the U.S. followed its lead.

Today, more than 90 percent of newspapers around the world have crossword puzzles, and, according to a study by the U.S. Newspaper Advertising Bureau, 26 percent of people who read newspapers regularly attempt to solve them.

Setting the Pace

The New York Times crossword puzzle sets the standard that other puzzles follow. Here are just some of the informal (but strictly followed) "rules" that were established by the Times‘ example:

There can be no unkeyed letters - letters that appear in only one word of the puzzle. Every single letter of the puzzle must be part of both a horizontal and a vertical word.

• The black and white pattern must be "diagonally symmetrical."
• The black squares should not take up more than one-sixth of the total design.
• The puzzle shouldn’t have "dirty double-crossers" - that is, obscure words should not intersect one another.

Puzzling Facts

• The Times estimates that it takes the average puzzler half an hour to solve the 15-square-by-15-square daily puzzle, and two hours to solve the much larger Sunday puzzle.
• The Times daily puzzles are designed to get progressively harder from Monday through Saturday. The Saturday puzzle is nearly impossible for anyone but experts to solve. The Sunday puzzle is even worse. The paper figures that the weekend puzzles should be the hardest, because that’s when people have the most time to work on them.
• Constructing the crossword puzzles take a lot more time than solving them. "It takes me a day to make a Times Sunday puzzle," says Maura B. Jacobson, one of the Times‘ constructors. "I spend at least 10 or 12 hours making definitions. My research takes a day, then a day to get the words into the diagram to make them cross. But the hardest is making the definitions."
• Making a puzzle that lives up to The New York Times standards isn’t easy - Eugene Maleska, the paper’s crossword editor in 1992, estimates that there aren’t more than 600 people in the entire country skilled enough to do it. And the puzzles have to be thoroughly edited before the go to press. "I and all editors change about a third of the definitions," Maleska told reporters in 1992. "I have a notebook filled with definitions so I don’t repeat them."
• The New York Times goes to great length not to offend anyone with its puzzles. Words as innocuous as "bra" are forbidden, as are the names of illegal drugs. Words such as "ale" and "rum" are considered to be at the extreme limit of good taste - they are permitted but aren’t used often.

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 following is from Uncle John’s All-Purpose Extra Strength Bathroom Reader.

Selling to kids is big business - children directly control and spend $24.4 billion worth of goods every year, and they influence parents to spend upwards of $300 billion. Naturally, corporations are very interested. Here are some of the tricks of the trade businesses use to get your kids (and their parents) to spend the big bucks. (From a Mothering Magazine piece by Gary Ruskin).

NAG, NAG, NAG

Cheryl Idell knows a lot about nagging. She’s written reports for major corporations with such titles as "The Nag Factor" and "The Art of Fine Whining." She tells her clients that nagging spurs about a third of a family’s trips to a fast-food restaurant, to buy children’s clothing, or to rent a video.

Idell, chief strategic officer for a major market-research firm, speaks with the cold precision of a physicist. "Nagging falls into two categories," she explains. "There is ‘persistent nagging,’ the fall-on-the-floor kind, and there is ‘importance nagging,’ where a kid can talk about it."

[She considers] either a good first step. But alone they’re not enough. Idell advises Chuck E. Cheese and numerous other corporations that getting kids to whine is even better. Better yet is to give them "a specific reason to ask for the product." In other words, Idell’s job is to make your life miserable. She even rates brands according to their "nag factor" - that is, their capacity to make your children badger you - and companies toil mightily to rate high on her list. Some of the most successful are McDonald’s, Levi’s, Discovery Zone, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Disney, and OshKosh. (Like we couldn’t have guessed.)

WANTED: YOUR KID

Now meet George Broussard. He is co-founder of 3D Realms, a company that makes a video game called Duke Nukem. A violent "first-person shooter"
game, Duke Nukem comes complete with strip bars, porno theaters, and lots of gore. Even with the "mature" rating, and all the violence and sexual imagery, Broussard wants to sell this game to your kids. "Duke is a mass-market character that can sell two million games," Broussard says." It’d be suicide to make the game unplayable by younger people."

Idell and Broussard are typical of something endemic in America today. Thousands of the brightest minds in the country devote their great talents, and use sophisticated psychological techniques, to influence your children to purchase products - o rather, to want products - regardless of whether or not they are good for your kids. Name something you don’t
want your kids to have, and chances are, people are trying to entice your kids into wanting it.

WHAT ARE CHILDREN ANYWAY?

James U. McNeal, a professor of marketing at Texas A&M, is perhaps the foremost expert on selling to children. He is the elder statesman advocating a shift in our thinking from viewing children as trusting, impressionable humans to be protected to seeing children "as economic resources to be mined." His emotional response to this contrast isn’t the same as yours. McNeal sees the money in your kids and helps corporations get access to it: "Children are the brightest star in the consumer constellation," he writes.

McNeal divides the booming kiddie market into three parts: There’s the "primary" market - the $24.4 billion each year that kids directly control and spend. There’s the "influence" market, perhaps as high as $300 billion, the amount of parental spending that children can directly or indirectly influence. And there’s the "future" market, which is the purchasing that children will do for the rest of their lives.

BUY-BUY BABY

"Virtually every consumer-goods industry, from airlines to zinnia-seed sellers, targets kids," McNeal enthuses. Johann Wachs, the vice president of Saatchi and Saatchi’s Kid Connection unit, agrees: "Marketers are just waking up to the enormous possibility of kid-targeted products," he says. "As kids become more powerful as consumers, they are being targeted more directly."

Children aren’t hard to take advantage of. They tend to trust adults even when they shouldn’t - sometimes especially when they shouldn’t. Marketers know this, while most children don’t grasp the motives behind advertising or realize that the products advertised may not be good for them.

However, none of this is troubling to the new breed of advertisers and marketers. If they have any qualm, they do a good job of repressing them. Like investors in prime real estate, they see children’s mind as kind of cash cow. "If you own this child at an early age, you can own this child for years to come," explained Mike Searles, president of Kids-R-Us, a major children’s clothing store. Companies are saying, ‘Hey, I want to own the kid younger and younger.’" Wayne Chilicki, a General Mills executive, agrees: "When it comes to targeting kid consumers, we at General Mills follow the Proctor & Gamble model of ‘cradle to grave,’" he says. "We believe in getting them early
and having them for life."

BE COOL

Advertisers infuse their pitches with messages that target the weaknesses and insecurities of children. "Advertising at its best is making people feel that without their product, you’re a loser," explained Nancy Shalek, president of the Shalek Agency. "Kids are very sensitive to that. If you tell them to buy something, they are resistant. But if you tell them that they’ll be a dork if they don’t, you’ve got their attention. You open up emotional vulnerabilities, and it’s very easy to do with kids because they’re the most emotionally vulnerable."

Moreover, some marketers try to sell by tapping into destructive and antisocial urges. According to Rick Litman, a partner at Kid 2 Kid Market Research, the goal is "to use youth rebellion to more effectively target a product and sell a product."

More than anything, they want your children’s minds. "Kids marketing in general is becoming more sophisticated," says Julie Halpin, CEO of Gepetto Group, which specializes in marketing to kids. It is a competition for what she calls "share of mind."

Corporations claim this "share of mind" from every possible angle. They seek to engulf your children with ads. "Imagine a child sitting in the middle of a large circle of train tracks," one market researcher explains. "Tracks, like the tentacles of an octopus, radiate to the child from the outside circle of tracks. The child can be reached from every angle. This is how the [corporate] marketing world is connected to the child’s world."

MARKETERS GO TO SCHOOL

Marketers are resorting to extreme measures to gain access to our children. They’re invading sanctums that were previously off-limits, such as schools. For example, Channel One is a marketing company that uses TV "news" shows as a come-on. Its daily broadcast shows 10 minutes of "news" and 2 minutes of ads to captive audiences of 8 million children in 12,000 schools across the country. While promoted as "education," the real appeal is to advertisers. "The biggest selling point to advertisers," says Joel Babbit, former president of Channel One, lies in "forcing kids to watch two minutes of commercials." The atmosphere of the school is an advertiser’s dream, Babbit says. "The advertisers get a group of kids who can’t go to the bathroom, who can’t change the station, who can’t listen to their mother yell in the background, who can’t be playing Nintendo, who can’t have their headsets on."

A new company called ZapMe! has extended this strategy to computers. Like Channel One, ZapMe! offers free equipment to schools - computers and Internet browsers. In return, it advertises to kids, plus it gets a market-research gold mine. The company snoops on schoolchildren as they browse the Internet and then delivers the information to advertisers and marketers. According to Associated Press, ZapMe! "breaks down the data by age, sex, Zip Code. It delivers this information to advertisers and marketers, who use it to target students in school with laserlike precision."

THE LESSON IN THE ADS

Kids are eager learners. "Advertising targeted at elementary school children," Professor McNeal says, "on programs just for them works very effectively in the sense of implanting brand names in their minds and creating desires for the products."

Further, it is well known that RJR Nabisco’s Joe Camel ads hooked hundreds of thousands of children into smoking. And Anheuser-Busch created Budweiser ads so captivating - with frogs, penguins, and lizards - that they were kid’s favorite ads in 1999.

This is great news for ad agencies and for the corporations they work for. Business is booming. Some win kudos from their corporate peers. The owner of McFarlane Toys, Todd McFarlane, was recently given an award by Ernst & Young for creating a bestselling line of grotesque and violent "Spawn" toys and comic books. Would McFarlane let his own daughters have these toys or comic books? "Are you kidding?" he says. "I’m still a dad after five o’clock."

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s All-Purpose Extra Strength Bathroom Reader, which was published in 2000. Note: Channel One has continued financial loss until it was sold in 2007 whereas ZapMe! has gone bankrupt, but I’m sure the message is still relevant today.

The 13th book in the series by the Bathroom Reader’s Institute has 504-all new pages crammed with fun facts, including articles on the biggest movie bombs ever, the origin and unintended use of I.Q. test, and more.

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

Ever heard of Prince Philip? He’s the Duke of Edinburgh and husband of Queen Elizabeth II of England. About the only time he makes headline is when he, as one newspaper puts it, "uses his royal status to insult and belittle people." His public gaffes are so frequent that they’ve earned him the title "The Duke of Hazard." (Photo: NASA/Paul E. Alers [Wikipedia])

To a driving instructor in Scotland: "How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?"

To a Nigerian diplomat in traditional Nigerian garb: "You look as if you’re ready for bed."

On seeing a fuse box filled with wires, during a visit to an electronics company: "This looks like it was put in by an Indian."

To a chubby 13-year-old boy at a space exploration exhibit, pointing to a space capsule: "You’ll have to lose weight if you want to go in that."

To a smoke-detector activist who lost two of her children in a house fire: "My smoke alarm is a damn nuisance. Every time I run my bath, the steam sets it off and I’ve got firefighters at my door."

To members of the British Deaf Association, while pointing to a loudspeaker playing Caribbean music: "No wonder you are deaf."

To a tourist, during a state visit to Hungary: "You can’t have been here long, you’ve not potbelly."

Speaking to British students studying in China: "If you stay here much longer, you’ll all be slitty-eyed."

On the "key problem" facing Brazil: "Brazilians live there."

On his daughter Princess Anne: "If it doesn’t fart or eat hay, she isn’t interested."

On seeing a picture once owned by England’s King Charles I in the Louvre in Paris: "So I said to the Queen, ‘Shall we take it back?’"

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 Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Presidency

Superstition is an American tradition in which even the presidents have taken part. Sometimes, though, their superstitions have been eerily justified.

Athletes are notorious for their pre-game rituals and good luck charms. It turns out that American presidents are no different, using superstition as one way to chart the course of their administrations.

Lincoln’s Prefiguration

The supernatural shaded Abraham Lincoln’s White House, perhaps more than any other presidents. His wife Mary Todd had visions of their children who had died young. She conducted séances - some of which Abe attended, although he thought the mediums were hucksters – to try to communicate with them.

This skepticism notwithstanding, Abe himself had dreams and visions that he took very seriously. He announced once at a Cabinet meeting when he was waiting for a report from General Sherman that he knew good news was imminent, because he had just had a recurring dream that always was a good omen for him.

Lincoln’s most famous dream vision is described by his friend War Lamon in a book of recollections. The dream began with Lincoln hearing the sound of crying far away. He traveled through a number of rooms in the White House searching for the source of the sound, then arrived in the East Room to find a crowd surrounding a shrouded, dead body. The body’s face was covered by the shroud, making it unidentifiable. He asked one of the soldiers guarding the body who was dead. The soldier replied, “The President! He was killed by an assassin!” The dream ended there. Sadly, Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth soon afterward, and the story of premonition circulated far and wide.

McKinley’s Carnation

William McKinley made a habit of wearing a red carnation in his lapel for luck. Occasionally, when he wanted to share the luck with others, he would give it away.

For example, if someone asked him for a favor he couldn’t grant, he would offer the carnation as a consolation prize. Once when two boys were visiting him in the White House, he gave one boy the carnation from his lapel, then he shrewdly took another out of a vase to put into his lapel for a while before giving that one to the other boy so his blossom would be lucky too.

McKinley’s assassination (Credit: Library of Congress)

When visiting the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, in 1901, McKinley only had a short period scheduled for meeting, greeting, and shaking hands. At one point he gave his lucky red carnation to a young girl in the receiving line. Now without his good luck charm, McKinley was approached by a man with a bandage over his right hand. The man was Leon Czolgosz, and the bandage was hiding a gun. Czolgosz fired two shots at McKinley, and McKinley died eight days later.

Roosevelt’s Numbers Game

Superstition also figured in the day-to-day life of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He strongly believed that it was bad luck to light three cigarettes with one match. Once a young man tutoring some of the Roosevelt children at their Hyde Park home received a warning from Roosevelt for doing this. When he did it again at lunch, Roosevelt laid into him, in what his lifelong secretary called, “one of the few occasions I know of when the President actually reprimanded someone brusquely in public.”

Roosevelt had an acute case of triskaidekaphobia, or fear of the number 13. He would invite his secretary to come to dinner with him if there were otherwise going to be 13 guests present at the function. If his party was going to travel on the 13th of the month, he would reschedule the departure for 11:50 p.m. on the 12th or 12:10 a.m. on the 14th. He avoided the date even in death, passing away in April 1945, on the afternoon of Thursday the 12th.

The Truth is Out There, Says Carter

UFOs are the kind of thing the government usually gets accused of covering up. Contrary to the stereotype, Jimmy Carter publicized his UFO sighting, which occurred when he was a fledgling politician in Georgia in 1969.

Carter was standing outside with several other members of a Lions Club chapter in Leary, Georgia, before a meeting where he was scheduled to speak. Then, according to Carter’s report, the group saw an object in the sky that was as bright as the moon; changed color from blue to red; and moved toward and away from the observers twice. During his presidential campaign Carter promised, after having a personal experience with UFOs, to open any existing government UFO files if he were elected.

Most of those who have researched Carter’s sighting have figured that he probably saw the planet Venus, which was particularly bright in the evening on the night in question (the date of which was definitely established by finding the record of his speech in the Lions Club archives). Some of the Lions who were there with him reported that it could have been Venus. Carter never did release any government UFO files, which sounds like the making of a good episode of The X-Files.

The Reagans See Stars

Ronald and Nancy Reagan (Photo: National Archives and Records Administration)

In May 1988, former White House chief of staff Donald Regan published his book For the Record, in which he revealed that one of his tasks for President Ronald Reagan was to integrate his schedule with the advisements of an astrologer, whose reports came through First Lady Nancy Reagan.

The astrologer, Joan Quigley, credited her work for President Reagan’s surviving until the end of his second term and thwarting the 148-year curse by which the presidents elected in 1840, 1860, 1880, 1900, 1920, 1940, and 1960 had died in office.

Joan Quigley Photo: history.andiego.edu

She also claimed to have almost total control over the timing of important public events. For example, after Congress nixed two of Reagan’s appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, Quigley advised that his third candidate, Anthony Kennedy, be nominated as precisely 11:32:25 a.m. On November 11, 1987. (Kennedy was confirmed 97-0). Coincidence? You be the judge.

Quigley had been introduced to Nancy by talk show host Merv Griffin in 1973, and she stayed in sporadic contact with Mrs. Reagan for a number of years, with a spike during the 1980 presidential election.

Then, after John Hinckley Jr.’s attempted assassination of Reagan, Nancy hired Quigley in May 1981 to be the Reagans’ full-time astrologer after Quigley said she could have foreseen the assassination attempt had she been studying Ronald Reagan’s chart. Nancy asked Quigley if she would waive her fee, but Quigley refused because, as she said, “People tend not to value advice they don’t have to pay for.”

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

This book is jam-packed with everything you could ever want to know about the highest office in the United States … you’ll find the slogans and smears, the legends and lore, the people and places, and the digs and the dirt - everything about the U.S. Presidency bound up in one book.

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 Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader book.

The famous Mojave Phone Booth in the middle of nowhere. Photo: Lara Hartley

In the 1960s, some miners put a phone booth in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Long after they left, the booth remained … waiting for someone to call.

HELLO? ANYBODY THERE?

Miles from the nearest town, the old phone booth stood at the junction of two dirt roads. Its windows were shot out; the overhead light was gone. Yet the phone lines on the endless rows of poles still popped and clicked in anticipation - just as they’d been doing for nearly 30 years. Finally, in 1997, it rang.

The windows were shot out and the overhead light was gone, but the phone worked! (photo: Azfoo.net)

A guy named Deuce had read about the booth and called the number … and continued to call until a desert dweller named Lorene answered. Deuce wrote a story about his call to nowhere, posted it on his website … and the word spread through cyberspace. Someone else called. Then another person, and another - just to see if someone would answer. And quite often someone did. Only accessible by four wheel drive, the lonely phone booth soon became a destination. Travelers drove for hours just to answer the phone. One Texas man camped there for 32 days … and answered more than 500 calls.

REACH OUT AND TOUCH SOMEONE

Someone posted a call log in the booth to record where people were calling from: as close as Los Angeles and as far away as New Zealand and Kosovo. Why’d they call? Some liked the idea of two people who’ve never met - and probably never will - talking to each other. Just sending a call out into the Great Void and having someone answer was reward enough for most.

Unfortunately, in 2000 the National Park Service and Pacific Bell tore down the famous Mojave phone booth. Reason? It was getting too many calls. The traffic (20 to 30 visitors a day) was starting to have a negative impact on the fragile desert environment.

The end of the Mojave Phone Booth. Photo: Lara Hartley, Desert Dispatch
From The Original Mojave Phone Booth Site

The old stop sign at the cattle grate still swings in the wind. And the phone lines still pop and click in anticipation. But all that’s left of the loneliest phone on Earth is a ghost ring.

So if the urge strikes you to dial (760) 733-9969, be prepared to wait a very, very long time for someone to answer.

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 reprinted from Uncle John’s Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader

Lots of companies have ad campaigns that flop, but Pepsi seems to have more than its share. Here are a few classic bombs.

Keep On Truckin’

For its "Pepsi 400" contest in the summer of 2001, Pepsi offered to send the holders of five winning tickets on an all-expenses-paid trip to Florida’s Daytona 400 auto race. One of the five would get to drive home in the grand prize, a brand-new Dodge truck; the other four would each get $375 worth of free gas.

There was just one problem: contest organizers accidentally printed 55 winning tickets instead of five. Rather than risk alienating the winners - not to mention millions of Pepsi drinkers - Pepsi sent all 55 winners to Daytona, gave away five trucks instead of one, and spent $20,625 on free gas instead of $1,825. Estimated cost of error: about $400,000.

Over-Stuffed

Pepsi Stuff catalog page featuring Cindy Crawford. Image: PepsiCo, Inc. (1996) from Wikipedia

In April 1996, Pepsi canceled its "Pepsi Stuff" merchandise giveaway campaign months ahead of schedule. Reason: Too many winners. The company underestimated how many people would redeem the points by 50%, forcing it to spend $60 million more than expected on free merchandise. "We’re outpacing our goals on awareness," a company spokesperson explained.

Jet Lag

Another disaster from the "Pepsi Stuff" campaign: 21-year-old John Leonard tried to redeem seven million award points for the Harrier fighter jet he saw offered in a Pepsi Stuff TV ad. The rules stipulated that contestants could buy poi