But Enough About You: Essays (20 page)

The spell Easter Island cast was slightly altered for me on my return, when a publisher friend told me that Dan Aykroyd went there in the 1970s along with a writer for
Saturday Night Live
. They dropped acid and, inspired by the
moai
, came up with the Coneheads.

—
ForbesLife
, November 2009

Volume IV: Ancient Egypt to the 1980s

1340 B.C.—The desk clerk of the Luxor Suites Hotel fails to waken Alexandrian grain merchant Memhotep, who is consequently tardy for his important meeting with Rekmos, grand vizier to Pharaoh Thott III. The fastidious Rekmos expresses his displeasure by forcing Memhotep to eat dung beetles while being suspended upside down over a pool of Nile crocodiles. Memhotep twitches for the rest of his life and exhibits a morbid fear of dung beetles. On his deathbed, he continually asks the time. His son Shephotep (“The Punctual”) continues in the family trade, taking with him on business trips caged roosters to wake him up. Innkeepers take note and begin offering rooms with caged bedside cocks at premium prices.

212 B.C.—Emperor Shi Tzu tasks his court with devising a means of waking him one hour before sunrise so that he might get a good start on pleasuring his six hundred concubines. For the next twenty-three years, an estimated fourteen thousand engineers labor to invent a fail-proof emperor-waking instrument, but fail, despite impressive contemporaneous advances in the fields of astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and wonton, in the process bankrupting the imperial treasury and encouraging invasion by Mongolian warlords, who look upon Shi Tzu’s obsession as a sign that he is
wufen nuxi
(“one brick shy of a load”). The Great Waking-Up ensues, precipitating centuries of unrest.

A.D. 197—Timex, a Greek slave in the household of the Roman general Drusus Nervus, is tasked by his master with devising a foolproof
means of waking him during the ill-fated Fourth Germanic Campaign before hordes of howling Allemani tribesmen do it by crushing his skull. Timex experiments with candles placed on the heads of goats and sheep, but abandons the scheme when animal rights advocates complain to the emperor in Rome. Instead, he installs candles on top of beehives. The bees become annoyed when the flame burns down and sets fire to their abode, which encourages them to sting the soundly sleeping general, thus rousing him from his slumbers. A contemporary account of the death of Nervus (“swatting and scratching himself, howling mightily for mud packs and cursing his servant”—Livy) persuades historians that he may have died of anaphylactic shock and not from an ax in his skull. The method catches on throughout the Roman empire, making Timex—who at Nervus’s dying command was placed alive on his master’s funeral pyre—originator of the buzzing-type alarm now prevalent in hotels throughout the world.

500–875—Irish monks introduce the concept of the “alarm” clock during their missionary travels through heathen Europe, banging spoons on pots over their heads every morning precisely at 5:45 a.m., while simultaneously shouting biblical passages in Greek and Latin. The monks are able to reckon the time accurately by the morning steam rising off cow pies. This practice of “rude awakening” (
exsomnolentia molestias
) is not broadly popular among their converts and results in a number of on-the-spot martyrdoms.

1065—The first Norman conquest fails when Norway’s Harald Hardraade, who is to join forces with Tostig of Northumbria and William of Normandy against Harold II of England, sleeps through his primitive alarm at the Stavanger Odin Inn. Harald dismembers the staff and threatens to decapitate the Odin Group chairman, Ragnar Mintpillow. Mintpillow sends Harald a written apology but gently suggests that Harald was “pig-drunk” on honey wine and “would not have woken up if Thor himself had tattooed the theme from Pippi Longstocking on [Harald’s] forehead with walrus tusks”—and
then cc’s everyone involved in the invasion. Under pressure from Tostig and William, who are eager to get on with the Norman conquest, Harald backs off his threat to pursue the matter in the courts, but he remains rancorous, and at the victory celebration in Hastings one year later, beheads two Norman knights who tease him by calling him Harald Haardetowakeup.

1791—Louis XVI, fleeing the Revolution with his family, stops at an inn in the town of Varennes-en-Argonne. His chamberlain urges the monarch to press on, but the king insists that he is so hungry he could eat a horse (
cheval
) and orders an eight-course meal that causes him to fall asleep. He sets the alarm clock in his room to wake him at “V” (Latin for five), but neglects to wind it, since as king he is accustomed to other people doing that for him. He is arrested at Vxx.

1919—President Woodrow Wilson, staying at the Crillon Hotel in Paris for the Versailles Peace Conference, sets his bedside alarm clock to wake him in time for his speech at the opening session. But anarcho-syndicalists, hoping to sabotage the conference and precipitate World War II, sneak into the president’s suite and depress the
ALARM
button so that it will not go off. Wilson sleeps until late morning, when maids force open the door and vehemently demand to change his sheets. Wilson returns to the United States and has a stroke. Fourteen years later, Hitler rises to power on a platform of rearmament, Aryanism, and hotel alarm clocks that will “make the world tremble.”

1927—The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York installs electric alarm clocks in every room. Juan Trippe inaugurates Pan American World Airways.

1928—Pan American World Airways nearly goes under as vast numbers of passengers staying at the Waldorf-Astoria fail to show up on
time for their flights. President Coolidge asks Congress to appropriate money for the development of a reliable hotel alarm clock that can be operated by an “average American simpleton.” The effort fails.

1957—The Soviet Union launches
Sputnik
. President Eisenhower is handed a top-secret CIA report revealing that
Sputnik
’s real mission is to jam electric hotel alarm clocks so that American businessmen will sleep through important meetings, thereby giving the Russians the edge in competing for hydroelectric, tractor-building, and steroid-manufacturing contracts. Congress steps up the pace of hotel alarm clock R&D.

1961—President Kennedy vows to “put a functioning alarm clock on the moon so that our astronauts will know when it is time to return to earth.”

1972—The Hilton Hotel chain installs “easy-to-use” AM/FM clock radios in their rooms. Cumbersome, boxy, hard-to-use, and in some cases radioactive, they malfunction and, no matter what music station they are programmed to play, jolt guests awake in the middle of the night with a fierce buzzing that causes them to dream that they are being electrocuted and to wet their beds.

1974—The Confraternité Internationale des Hôteliers commissions master Swiss watchmaker Dieter Zeitz to design a hotel alarm clock so simple that it can be programmed “even by drugged rock ’n’ roll musicians in the dark.” Zeitz produces the Dum-Klock (later renamed EZ Clock). It is a triumph of simplicity, but still requires the user to distinguish between “am,” “pm,” and “FM,” resulting in a failure rate of 67 percent. Despondent, Zeitz pens a scathing indictment of human intelligence and gives up clock-making for the study of eugenics.

1984—Hotels worldwide introduce the “digital” alarm clock. Slightly more complicated than its “analog” predecessor, it features a
SNOOZE
button. It is hailed as a breakthrough, but unless it is precisely programmed in combination with the
MUSIC
,
SLEEP
,
GMT SYNCH.
,
ELEV
., and
LAT/LONG
switches, the alarm goes off every five minutes starting at 2:30 a.m. Because of the high number of smashed alarm clocks, an impact-resistant titanium outer shell is subsequently added, along with half-inch bulletproof plastic facing and backup battery-operated power plant. The clocks are then heat mounted on the bedside tables, which in turn are bolted to the floor, making it necessary for guests wanting to silence the clocks to smash them repeatedly with the steam iron or toilet seat.

1986—To stem the flood of requests for wake-up calls resulting from the introduction of the digital alarm clocks, hotels install
WAKE UP
buttons on the room telephones. The buttons are not connected to the switchboard, but to a sixteen-minute-long recording of a ringing telephone, followed by a recorded announcement that the hotel has been hit by an earthquake. The system is designed to encourage guests to study the 23-page alarm clock user’s manual chained to the clock, entitled, “Please to Pushing the Ante-Meridien Function/Preference Switch, While Bewaring of Electrical Shock!” as well as the
Malay-English Dictionary of Technical Terms
, provided for guests attempting to program their clocks to wake them with soft classical FM music within one quarter hour of the desired rising time.

—
Forbes FYI
, April 2001

I spent this winter in London, specifically in Chelsea, near the Thames embankment. The first day, on my way up Tite Street to the corner grocery, I noticed three contiguous Victorian row houses, each sporting a gleaming blue-and-white enamel plaque.

The first indicated that the house had been the residence of a medical and political eminence named Lord Haden-Guest; the second, of Oscar Wilde; and the third of a composer with the quaint pseudonym of Peter Warlock. The name Guest you might recognize from his grandson Christopher’s movies, most conspicuously
This Is Spinal Tap
. Oscar Wilde you know all about. He lived in this house but clearly didn’t spend enough time there with his wife and children. Maestro Warlock was new to me.

The next day, a block north, I turned the corner and was arrested in my tracks by another plaque. Mark Twain (“American Writer”) had lived here 1896–7. Twain would have been here when he received the dreadful cable that his beloved daughter Susy had died in Hartford; an event all the more heartrending as Twain’s wife, Livy, was incommunicado in the mid-Atlantic, rushing to her stricken daughter’s side.

Trying to clear my mind of that gloomy meditation, and now in need of a pint, I walked on toward the pub and three blocks later came upon the home of Bram Stoker, author of
Dracula
.

Interesting ’hood, I thought. And so I became a plaque collector, a pastime I heartily commend in London. It’s free and the exercise will do you good.

In a book appropriately titled
London Plaques
(Shire Publications, 2010), I learned that there are some 1,800 of them in the Greater London area. Charles Dickens leads, with ten plaques; Churchill has only five, but then he got a statue facing Big Ben and an immense floor tablet at the threshold of Westminster Abbey—in effect, England’s leading floor mat. The first person to be plaqued was the
notorious Lord Byron; and—hmm—his is no longer there. Leafing through the book inclines you to agree with its author that this abundance of lustrous plaquery supports London’s claim to be truly the coolest city in the world.

I decided that trying to collect all 1,800 was futile, so I confined myself to Chelsea. The fun was in connecting them like dots. This turned out to be strangely easy. On my way to meet friends at the Cadogan Hotel, where Wilde was arrested on the charge of gross indecency, I spotted a plaque a few yards from the hotel’s front door indicating the former home of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, actor, theatre manager, and Wilde’s great friend. Leaving the Cadogan and rounding the corner onto Pont Street, I saw another noting that Lillie Langtry had lived there. It’s said that it was her close friend Oscar Wilde who suggested to her that she try her hand at acting. She made her debut at the Haymarket Theatre, managed by Herbert Beerbohm Tree.

Continuing down Pont Street, I got even luckier. There in a grimy doorway was a plaque dedicated to Sir George Alexander. The name rang familiar, and what do you know: He inaugurated the role of John Worthing on February 14, 1895, the opening night of
The Importance of Being Earnest
.

Next to Chelsea Old Church is a little square of quiet greenery called Roper’s Garden, once the site of St. Thomas More’s orchard. (More himself lived a bit up the street.) In Roper’s Garden, you’ll find a relief sculpture by Sir Jacob Epstein, commemorating his studio, which stood here 1909–14. If you’ve visited Wilde’s grave in Père-Lachaise in Paris, you already know that his tomb was carved by Jacob Epstein, between 1909 and 1912. Thus did I learn the strange coincidence that Oscar’s gravestone was carved only a few blocks from where he lived.

—
ForbesLife
, May 2011

BEFORE YOU GO

The longer the flight number, the smaller the plane.

Reconfirm your reservation every fifteen minutes, beginning two months before date of departure. Increase frequency to every six minutes forty-eight hours prior to departure.

Send baggage on ahead by FedEx. If feasible, have yourself sent on ahead by FedEx.

Reserve a room at the hotel airport for three days on either side of theoretical departure date.

AT THE AIRPORT

Arrive at least three days prior to departure. (See above.)

When they ask how much you weigh, do not lie.

Carry on no more than can comfortably fit in a dental cavity. The overhead compartments on most small planes were designed for pressing wildflowers—and apple cider—though they can, in a pinch, be used for crushing expensive cameras, computers, hats, etc.

When you are told that the flight is overbooked and you have no seat, remain calm. This is a test to see if you have “the right stuff” and are worthy of the seat you booked to Bangor eight months ago. Screaming at the gate agent that you are extremely important, a close friend of the president of the airline, or a cardinal (in plainclothes) of the Catholic Church, etc., is a sign that you have “the wrong stuff.” So is telling the agent that he is a baboon.