Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Golden Plunger Awards (40 page)

In the 1984 NBA draft, Portland had the #2 pick, and guard Michael Jordan of North Carolina was available. Instead, Portland took Kentucky center Sam Bowie, passing on Jordan because they already had a star guard, Clyde Drexler. Jordan went as the #3 pick to the Chicago Bulls and became one of the best basketball players ever. Bowie was a reserve player for the next decade for several teams, averaging 10 points per game.

Pop-Ups

So many things about the Internet experience are irritating. Everyone hates spam, and the creators of those e-mails are always finding new ways to get around spam-blockers. But you don’t have to open those spam e-mails, and they’re easy to delete.

Pop-up windows, though, are almost universally reviled and show no signs of disappearing. They appear when you least expect them, sometimes slowing down the bandwidth of your computer, sometimes using voices and sounds to announce their presence, and often using lots of flashing lights and colors to get your attention.

Let’s include pop-unders, too. Those are the windows that open behind a Web page, so you don’t notice them until you close or minimize the window. They can sit there unnoticed on your computer for a long time—lurking, waiting.

In theory, pop-unders were created to be less intrusive. So many users had complained about pop-ups appearing and covering up their Web pages that Internet designers tried to hide them down below. It may sound good, but let’s face it: people like to see what’s going on with their computers.

Dr. Jakob Nielsen, a Web-design expert who founded the online research company Nielsen Norman Group, has done some studies
on how people act online. Most importantly, he wanted to know how a computer-user’s eyes react. Overwhelmingly, people don’t look at static ads. In fact, they don’t even look at regular Web site content that looks like an ad.

This is why pop-ups are so popular. Advertisers know they’re ticking off their potential customers by using pop-ups, but studies have found that pop-ups work.
Advertising.com
reported in 2003 that users clicked on pop-up ads 13 percent more often than they did with banner ads. And Web sites that allow them can earn four times as much for a pop-up ad than for a banner ad.

As users become savvier to the ways of the pop-up, advertisers, too, have become slyer. The most successful pop-up ads, according to Nielsen, are the ones that look like dialog boxes. They look harmless enough, but if you try to click the “close” button, they take you to another page. Deception is the name of the game. Crawling pop-ups, sometimes featuring cute animated characters, are here to stay. Hiding the way to close a pop-up is a new method, too. The longer it takes a user to shut down the pop-up, the longer the ad has the person’s attention.

By far, though, the worst offender in the pop-up world is a spyware program, one of the many reasons some people are afraid to go online. If you download a file or program, you could be getting more than you intended because when spyware gets loaded onto your computer, you’re in trouble. Spyware can clog up your computer with unwanted programs that monitor your Internet usage and generate unwanted pop-up ads. It’s enough to make people fear they will never be free of the ads. But don’t give up hope just yet.

As recently as 2002, Forrester Research, which focuses on the technology sector, reported that only one percent of American Web users had pop-up blockers installed on their computers. But by 2006, Forrester noted that more than half of all users in the United States were using them. Pop-ups are starting to decline as more and more users install pop-up blockers.
Advertising.com
noted in 2006 that, for the first time in years, pop-up ads were not expected to be profitable for advertisers. Finally!

Female-Inspired
Men’s Wear

Men have long been known for flexing their muscles, but nowadays they’re just as likely to be found flexing their fashion sense. We’re not talking just about men wearing colorful clothes or designer jeans. The most current men’s wear trend involves borrowing from the ladies. Metrosexuals—those style-conscious heterosexual men—helped break the ice. And these latest looks for men may be based on personal appearance perfection, but they’re also focused on practicality.

American men have been laughing at European “man-purses” for decades. (Remember the
Seinfeld
episode when Jerry carried one?) The small, square leather bags with shoulder straps reminded late 20th-century guys too much of the handbags the women in their life carried. To be a real man meant you couldn’t leave the house with anything but a simple wallet. (Briefcases were OK for the deskbound, and male students were allowed backpacks.)

In recent years, though, the trend toward bags for both sexes has spilled over into urban chic. After all, it’s a lot easier to tote your cell phone, work files, energy bars, and bottle of water if you’ve got a bag instead of just a back pocket.

For their part, designers have come out with all manner of “murses” (i.e., man purses), from the clean-lined Jack Spade flap bag to the high-end Louis Vuitton Geronimo bag to ubiquitous
(and vegan-friendly) nylon laptop bags. Many designers are also now creating rectangular or square bags with shoulder straps. Nowadays, you can find a man bag that’s suitable for any taste, style, or use.

There are kilts for Scotsmen, sarongs for Sri Lankans, cassocks for priests, djellabahs for Moroccans, and dashikis . . . Wait! Men have been wearing skirts and dresses for how long? Plenty of native and ethnic costume variations include skirts for men, but over the centuries, Western culture developed a definite pants-for-boys and skirts-for-girls mentality—and impressed it on other cultures around the globe.

One group advocating a change in this mentality is the Bravehearts, “an international band of men who enjoy the freedom, comfort, pleasure, and masculine appearance of kilts or other male unbifurcated (skirt-like) garments, and who reject the absurd notion that males must always be confined to trousers.” The Bravehearts call their man-skirts “unbifurcated garments,” MUGs for short.

The best-known U.S. purveyor of MUGs is the Utilitkilt Company, which makes kilt-like pleated skirts for men with many of the same features of men’s cargo and work pants. (Their “Survival Model” claims to accommodate up to 20 bottles of water or energy drinks.) These man-skirts aren’t cheap; they start at about $140 for a basic model, and the all-leather version is well over $600. Like its Scottish predecessor, the Utilikilt derives its comfort and versatility from its pleats, which require many more yards of fabric than the typical women’s straight short skirt would . . . hence the cost.

Modern women felt oppressed by the girdle, so now they’re compressed instead by stretchy bodyshapers. Why shouldn’t guys be able to take advantage of more comfortable shapewear, too?

As the
Wall Street Journal
pointed out, the latest “mirdles” (man girdles) aren’t really anything new. Nineteenth-century men could choose from gender-specific items at the local corsetiere, and Go Softwear, a company that now is having great success with men’s
shapewear, was basically laughed out of the market in the late 1990s when it first attempted to sell its male paunch-slimmers. Now that men in their twenties and thirties have gotten used to the idea of holding it all together with a little help from some Lycra, they’re looking for specific garments.

In a word . . . yes. Activskin, a Missouri-based company, sells what they call “NOT your mother’s pantyhose!” These full-cover tights are made specifically for men. As the company’s ads say, “Think of it as invisible underwear and socks for men!” (Although you needn’t shave your legs like the male models in their ads.) Activskin isn’t a novelty—there are a couple of dozen companies around the world that make men’s pantyhose, stockings, and knee-high hosiery. The items are marketed to improve athletic performance, to energize muscles, and to improve circulation (compression from hose or tights can help reduce swelling and decrease the dangers of circulatory problems). Of course, there also just may be some men who like the soft, smooth feeling of hose beneath slacks . . . like the ladies do.

In Season 6, Episode 17 of
Seinfeld
, Frank Costanza was living with his son George. When he took off his shirt, George and Kramer saw that Frank had developed the dreaded “man boobs,” and Kramer decided to invent an undergarment to solve the problem. The duo wanted to market a garment for “older men who have excess flab in the upper chest area that gives the appearance of having breasts.”

Of course, solving a problem on
Seinfeld
just means creating another problem. When they pitched the idea to a lingerie company, the trio couldn’t decide on a name. Kramer wanted to call their new undergarment the “bro,” but Frank deemed that name “too ethnic” and proposed that it be the “manziere.”

The Golf Tee

We know golf originated in Scotland, even if we don’t know exactly when: a game called “gowf” was being played in the 15th century, but it may have been more like modern field hockey than golf. However, by the 17th century, the precursor of modern golf was definitely being played on the “auld sod.”

In early golf, the area in which the ball could be played was known as the “tigh,” or “house,” which referred to the circle around the ball. The first “appliance” for the tigh area wasn’t invented until 1882, when Scottish golfers William Bloxsom and Arthur Douglas patented a device made from rubber that had three vertical rubber prongs to keep it upright. However, this “tee” did not pierce the ground, so it was unsteady.

A few others tried to make a moveable golf tee: Percy Ellis’s 1892 “Perfectum” tee did pierce the ground, and Scotsman P. M. Matthews’ was the first American to patent a tee device.

However, it took a dentist (perhaps owing to familiarity with rooting teeth in gums) to devise a golf tee worthy of future generations. Dr. George Grant graduated from Harvard Dental School in 1870, one of the first two African Americans to do so, and was an avid golfer. In 1899, Grant applied for (and received) a patent for his golf tee design. Like many golfers before him, Grant had grown frustrated trying to keep the ball from rolling away in his tee-off attempts. He didn’t want to take a swing at a moving ball and
send off a wild shot. So he came up with a device that held the ball (then made of rubber) in place and raised it just enough off of the ground so that a player could control the direction and speed of his drive.

Grant’s innovation didn’t catch on in golf circles. No one is sure why, but for at least two decades, most golfers continued to use small piles of sand to tee off. The golf club provided the sand, which is why many golfers still refer to the “teeing ground”—the place where they tee off—as “tee boxes.” (The sand also proved useful for filling in divots on the course.)

It wasn’t until 1922 when Dr. William Lowell, Sr. (interestingly enough, also a dentist) patented and began marketing his “Reddy Tee”—a simple (red, so it was easy to see) wooden peg like Grant’s, but with a flared top—that the golf tee became the sport’s must-have accessory. And although there have been some minor innovations since 1922, Lowell’s flared wooden peg is still the basic, must-have golf tee: about two and one-eighth inches long and now available in a variety of colors so that groups can identify each other’s tee-off points.