Uncle John’s Briefs (26 page)
Read Uncle John’s Briefs Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
This classic style of pun was originally invented in the 1920s. They’re atrocious and corny, so of course we had to include them
.
“I’ve had my left and right ventricles removed,” Tom said half-heartedly.
“We’ve taken over the government,” Tom cooed.
“Dawn came too soon,” Tom mourned.
“My hair’s been cut off,” Tom said distressfully.
“Company should be here in about an hour,” Tom guessed.
“Where did you get this meat?” Tom asked hoarsely.
“You dropped a stitch,” Tom needled.
“Blow on the fire so it doesn’t go out,” Tom bellowed.
“I suppose there’s room for one more,” Tom admitted.
“That’s no purebred,” Tom muttered.
“I couldn’t believe we lost the election by two votes,” Tom recounted.
“I’m losing my hair,” Tom bawled.
“Measure twice before you cut,” Tom remarked.
“Thanks for shredding the cheese,” Tom said gratefully.
“Please put some folds in these trousers,” Tom pleaded.
“I’ve located the dog star,” Tom said seriously.
“You look like a goat,” Tom kidded.
“I used to own that gold mine,” Tom exclaimed.
“Another plate of steamers all around!” Tom clamored.
“I memorized the whole thing,” Tom wrote.
“That’s the last time I’ll pet a lion,” Tom said offhandedly.
“No thanks to that Frenchman,” said Tom mercilessly.
“You’re not a real magician at all,” Tom said, disillusioned.
“I’ve never had a car accident,” said Tom recklessly.
“It’s made the grass wet,” said Tom after due consideration.
The real winner: Simon Cowell earned $22,000 per minute as an
American Idol
judge in 2009.
You already know these names. Here’s where they came from
.
Q
-TIPS
. In the early 1920s, the owner of the Gerstenzang Infant Novelty Company noticed that his wife cleaned their daughter’s ears by wrapping cotton around a toothpick. Inspired, he built a machine that made “ready-to-use cotton swabs.” At first he called the product Baby Gays. In 1926 they became Q-Tips (“Q for Quality”) Baby Gays…and finally just Q-Tips.
FORMULA 409
. The two scientists who invented the “all-purpose cleaner” in the late 1950s didn’t get the formula right until their 409th attempt.
LEE JEANS
. At the turn of the 20th century, Henry D. Lee was one of the Midwest’s biggest wholesalers of groceries, work clothes, and other items. In 1911, because he wasn’t getting shipments of work clothes on time, he decided to build his own factory. In 1924 he started making jeans for cowboys. In 1926 Lee made the first jeans with zippers.
TURTLE WAX
. In the early 1940s, Ben Hirsch mixed up a batch of car wax in a bathtub. He called it Plastone Liquid Car Wax and started selling it around the country. Several years later while walking along Turtle Creek in Beloit, Wisconsin, he began thinking about how his product gave cars a hard shell like a turtle’s. “Plastone” became “Turtle Wax.”
CONVERSE ALL-STARS
. Named for Marquis M. Converse, who founded the Converse Rubber Company in 1908. He introduced the canvas-topped All-Star—one of the world’s first basketball shoes—in 1917.
SARAN WRAP
. In 1933 Dow researchers discovered a plastic called
monomeric vinylidene chloride
. They called it VC Plastic. In 1940 a salesman suggested they rename it Saran (the name of a tree in India). Dow liked the new name because it had only five letters and had no negative connotations. During World War II, Saran was used in everything from belts to subway seats. After the war, it was marketed as a plastic film called Saran Wrap.
4 of the 6 largest European cities have 6-letter names. (Moscow, London, Berlin, Madrid.)
In centuries past, families had special symbols carved into gravestones to tell something about their loved ones, to express their grief, or to reflect their faith or belief in eternal life. So, next time you’re strolling through a cemetery, look around—the dead are talking to you
.
Anchor:
Steadfast hope
Tree trunk:
The brevity of life
Birds:
The soul
Snake in a circle:
Everlasting life in heaven (also called
ouroboros
)
Cherub:
Divine wisdom or justice
Broken column:
An early death
Cross, anchor, and Bible:
Faith, hope, and charity
Cross, crown, and palm:
Trials, victory, and reward
Crown:
Reward and glory
Horseshoe:
Protection against evil
Gourds:
Deliverance from grief
Lamb:
Innocence (usually on a child’s grave)
Swallow:
Motherhood
Hourglass:
Time and its swift flight
Arch:
Rejoined with partner in heaven
Ivy:
Faithfulness, memory, and undying friendship
Laurel:
Victory
Lily:
Purity and resurrection
Mermaid:
Dualism of Christ—half God, half man
Conch shell:
Wisdom
Oak:
Strength
Palms:
Martyrdom
Shattered urn:
Old age
Peacock:
Eternal life
Poppy:
Eternal sleep
Column:
Noble life
Garland:
Victory over death
Rooster:
Awakening, courage, vigilance
Shell:
Birth and resurrection
Six-pointed star:
The creator
Olive branch:
Forgiveness
Heart:
Devotion
Dolphin:
Salvation, bearer of souls across water to heaven
Skeleton:
Life’s brevity
Broken sword:
Life cut short
Crossed swords:
Life lost in battle
About 1 in 4 American employees say they’re always angry on the job.
A
lonely plastic bag blows across a parking lot. It tumbles down a hill and into a creek, where the water carries it downstream to a river. Down the river it goes until it’s swept out to sea. Day after day it floats in the expanse until, there in the distance
—
another plastic bag! And another, and another…and millions of others. What is this strange place?
A
LARMING DISCOVERY
In the late 1990s, a sea captain and ocean researcher named Charles Moore entered a yacht race in Hawaii. As he was sailing back home to California, he came upon an odd sight: “There were shampoo caps and soap bottles and plastic bags and fishing floats as far as I could see. Here I was in the middle of the ocean, and there was nowhere I could go to avoid the plastic.”
Around the same time, oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer was researching ocean currents by tracking debris that had washed up on beaches around the world. When he heard of Moore’s discovery, he named it the Eastern Garbage Patch (EGP).
Moore put together a team to survey the area in August 1998. Onboard the research ship
Alguita
, they pulled all sorts of strange objects out of the ocean: an inflated volleyball dotted with barnacles, a picture tube for a 19" TV, a truck tire on a steel rim, and even a drum of hazardous chemicals. But most of what they saw was plastic…and something else. Moore described it as a “rich broth of minute sea creatures mixed with hundreds of colored plastic fragments—a plastic-plankton soup.” But there was six times more plastic than there was plankton.
TROPIC OF PLASTIC
Just how large is the Eastern Garbage Patch? No one knows for sure—it’s growing all the time, and the translucent plastic floats just below the water’s surface. “It’s one of the great features of the planet Earth, but you can’t see it,” said Ebbesmeyer. Estimates, however, say that it’s larger than the state of Texas. And that’s just on the surface. Much of the
debris—up to 30%—sinks to the ocean floor and lands on top of animal and plant life.
Most-common trash items found on the beach: cigarette butts, bottle caps, and plastic bags.
Just how fast is the EGP growing? In a survey conducted in 2007, Moore found that in less than a decade the “patch” had become a “superhighway of junk” running between San Francisco and Japan. He believes that the amount of plastic could now be 10 times higher than it was in 1998; some of the samples he gathered have as much as 48 parts plastic to 1 part plankton.
IN THE DOLDRUMS
How did all that garbage accumulate there? The answer is ocean currents. The EGP is located in an area known as the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, about 1,000 miles from any landmass. The Gyre is formed by air and water currents that travel between the coasts of Washington, Mexico, and Japan. The clockwise currents form a vortex in the center, just as if a giant soup spoon were constantly stirring it or, as Moore says, “the same way bubbles gather at the center of a hot tub.”
The Gyre is part of the Doldrums—an area named by ancient sailors for its weak winds. For centuries sailors avoided it for fear of stalling there, and fishermen knew there was nothing there to catch but plankton or jellyfish. The Gyre has always accumulated marine debris such as driftwood, as well as “flotsam and jetsam”—stuff that washes offshore from beaches or falls overboard from ships and is caught by the currents and pulled into the middle, where it swirls continuously. But the difference in the last century is that the never-ending influx of trash has made it larger and larger. A plastic bag that flows into the ocean from a California river will ride the currents for up to a year before finally making it to the EGP. And because ocean currents travel only about 10 miles per day, depending on where a object enters the ocean, it could float for much longer—even decades.
REVENGE OF THE NURDLES
Most garbage breaks down over time, but plastic is different. No one really knows how long it takes for plastic to biodegrade because, so far, none of it has. Instead of biodegrading, plastic
photodegrades
—the sun’s UV rays cause it to become brittle, which breaks it down into small pieces…and then into minute particles that resemble tiny confetti.
A whale of a trip: On a week-long cruise, the average traveler gains 8 pounds.
Sailors call these plastic bits “mermaid tears,” but the technical term is
nurdles
. They’re light enough to float in the air (think of tiny packing peanuts and how impossible it is to keep them from spilling everywhere). Everything made out of plastic is made out of nurdles, and every year 5.5 quadrillion of them are manufactured around the world. Just how many end up in the oceans is anyone’s guess, but it’s a huge amount.
Moore has another name for nurdles: “poison pills.” They absorb oily toxic chemicals called
persistent organic pollutants
, or POPs, which include DDT and PCBs. Though many of these chemicals were banned in the 1970s, they still linger in the environment and attach themselves to plastic debris. Japanese environmental researchers found that nurdles can absorb one million times their weight in POPs from surrounding water.
Even more troubling: The “poison pills” resemble plankton in how they seem to “swim” near the surface. Jellyfish and “filter feeder” fish that strain their food out of the water—and who have been eating plankton for eons—are now eating the nurdles instead. And then fish eat the nurdle-eaters. And then those fish are caught by fishing boats…which means there’s a good chance you’re getting more plastic in your diet than you realize. And not just plastic, but all of those toxic chemicals it absorbed.
NO END IN SIGHT
The problem might not be so severe if the EGP were the only garbage patch in the world. But each major ocean has its own gyre, and each gyre has its own vortex of swirling garbage. There are five major patches in all, covering 40% of the world’s oceans. “That corresponds to a quarter of Earth’s surface,” Moore says. “So 25% of our planet is a toilet that never flushes.”
The question now becomes: How do you get rid of millions of tons of tiny bits in the middle of the sea? “Any attempt to remove that much plastic from the oceans—it boggles the mind,” Moore says. “There’s just too much, and the ocean is just too big.” So chances are that the garbage patches will be here for a very long time. About the only thing we can do right now is to stop adding to them.
How long does it take a major-league fastball to reach home plate? About 4/10ths of a second.
Golf isn’t just popular in England, Scotland, and the United States
—
it’s loved all over the world
.
D
OMO ARIGATO
Before World War II, there were 23 courses in all of Japan. Today, the number exceeds 3,000—in a country slightly smaller than California. Despite the volume of courses and their distance from urban centers (most are an hour’s drive or more), the courses are almost always busy. Although available tee times are scarce, the clubs compete so fiercely that all kinds of specials abound, such as free caddies, or, more commonly, half-price greens fees on Monday. And that’s a generous discount, as Japanese golf (or
gorufu
) is very expensive—18 holes might cost $400. Even the driving ranges are expensive: it can cost 50 cents to hit a
single ball
.
