Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (15 page)

 

• 1933:
Alaska’s Congressional delegate Anthony J. Dimond petitions Congress to build military airfields and army garrisons in Alaska, as well as a highway to link the territory to the mainland U.S. The reason: Dimond believes Japan is a growing threat. He is convinced that the Japanese fishermen who work off Alaska’s coasts are military spies gathering information about weak spots in Alaska’s harbors. Dimond argues that Alaska is as much a key to the Pacific as Hawaii, especially since that’s why the U.S. annexed it in the first place. Nevertheless, Congress declines the requests.

 

• 1942:
A few months after Japan bombs Pearl Harbor and the U.S. enters World War II, Congress allocates funds to build military facilities and a highway to Alaska through Canada.

 

• 1946:
The Alaska Territory’s two highest-ranking politicians, Governor Ernest Gruening and Delegate Bob Bartlett, organize a territory-wide referendum on statehood. Due to frustration over “taxation without representation,” at this point Alaskans are overwhelmingly in favor of statehood, and the referendum passes, 67 to 33 percent.

 

•
1948:
Based on that vote, Bartlett presents another statehood bill to Congress. It never makes it to the House floor, dying in the Public Lands Committee. Committee chairman Hugh Butler opposes statehood because he thinks Alaska’s remoteness will make it a hotbed of Communism. He also thinks Alaska’s low population, about 100,000, doesn’t warrant statehood.

 

• 1949:
A grassroots group called the Alaska Statehood Committee forms to aggressively promote statehood. They solicit labor organizations, state governors, newspaper editors, and celebrities
to join the cause. Among those who speak out in favor: James Cagney, Pearl S. Buck, and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who writes in her newspaper column, “It seems extraordinary that an area of North America as important to our country as Alaska is should not be admitted as a state.”

 

• 1950:
Bartlett avoids Butler’s Senate committee by submitting a statehood bill first to the House of Representatives. If it passes there, then it would
have
to get Senate approval, he figures. The bill passes the House 186–146. But in the Senate, the controlling coalition of Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats vote it down out of the fear that Alaska would send liberal Democrats to Congress, tipping the balance of power.

 

• 1952:
The Alaska Statehood Committee sends members of Congress bouquets of Forget-Me-Nots—the official flower of Alaska. Friends of ASC members in the continental U.S. receive Christmas cards that year that read

• 1955:
In an attempt to force Congress’s hand, the Alaskan Constitutional Convention meets at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks to draw up a state code, even though Alaska isn’t a state. It also organizes elections for one congressman and two senators to send to Washington, another attempt to force Congress into making it a state. Congress doesn’t recognize or seat them, because Alaska
isn’t
a state.

 

•
1957:
After two years of inactivity, the statehood debate is revived when Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn endorses the idea. When asked what changed his mind after years of opposition, Rayburn says, “Bob Bartlett,” referring to the delegate’s years of tireless lobbying for statehood. Senate Democratic leader Lyndon Johnson pledges the support of all Democrats (liberal and Southern) should Alaskan statehood come to a vote. It does, and passes the House 217–172, and the Senate 64–20.

 

• 1959:
On January 3, President Eisenhower signs an official declaration making Alaska the 49th state.

One night in July 2009, 18-year-old Daniel Barr of Stras-burg, Pennsylvania, and a bunch of his friends were driving around and decided it would be fun to throw eggs at a police car. They found a parked cruiser and hurled a dozen eggs at it. They might have gotten away with the crime…had they not chosen a police car that was occupied by a police officer.

In January 2008, a 53-year-old man and his 20-year-old accomplice (names were withheld in police reports) set out to rob the Vernon, British Columbia, branch of the CIBC Bank. The older man went into the bank to commit the actual robbery, while the younger man stayed in the getaway car, listening to the radio. When the older man returned, the car wouldn’t start—the battery was dead. They quickly got out of the car and ran down the street, but were apprehended a few minutes later. Why? The CIBC Bank is located next door to a police station.

Lonnie Meckwood and Phillip Weeks robbed the Quickway Convenience Store in Kirkwood, New York, at knifepoint. They got away with the money and the clerk was unharmed. Here’s the dumb part: Meckwood and Weeks were caught by police less than a mile away from the convenience store when they were spotted standing on the side of the road, next to their car… which had run out of gas. (The store they’d just robbed was also a gas station.)

Thirty-three-year-old Shawn Lester stormed into a Charleston, West Virginia, convenience store, filled up a cup at the soda fountain, then demanded all of the money in the register, claiming he had a gun. But before the clerk could get any money out, Lester got cold feet and didn’t want to go through with the robbery. He started
to walk out of the store…with his drink. The clerk told Lester he had to pay for it, so he did—with his debit card. Even though he signed the receipt “John Doe” (and didn’t actually steal any money), police easily traced the debit card and arrested Lester at his home.

Donald Keene was at a New Chicago, Indiana, police station to report a crime when he happened to see a wall of photos of the area’s most-wanted criminals. One of the photos looked familiar: It was a man wanted for breaking into a home and stealing jewelry, video games, and a shotgun. Keene instantly recognized the man—it was him. He casually mentioned it to the police officer he was speaking with…and was immediately arrested.

One day in June 2009, an employee at Ziggy’s, a hardware store in Spokane, Washington, found a plastic bag filled with small, crystallized rocks on the floor near the checkout. Thinking that it was crystal methamphetamine, the employee called the police. But before they arrived, 34-year-old Christopher Wilson walked in and asked if anyone had found a bag of crystal meth he thought he may have lost in the store. The employee lied and told him they hadn’t, so Wilson left his name and phone number, just in case the drugs turned up. Wilson returned home…where police arrested him a few minutes later.

In 2009 a Massachusetts man showed up at a police station and asked to have a pair of handcuffs removed. Earlier that day, the man’s sister had put the cuffs on him as a joke, but then lost the key. On a whim, the police decided to run the man’s name through their computer and discovered that he had several outstanding warrants. (He was promptly given a brand-new set of handcuffs.)

“People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.”

—
Isaac Asimov

Coined by:
Norman Mailer

Story:
In 1973, while writing his biography of Marilyn Monroe, Mailer was trying to describe made-up facts that are believed because they’re printed in a magazine or newspaper. He combined the word “fact” with the suffix
-oid
, which means “like.” The term held this “invented fact” meaning until the 1990s, when CNN Headline News began displaying trivia and statistics on the screen beneath the title “Factoid.” Result: Now it also means “little fact.”

Coined by:
Thomas H. Huxley, 19th-century biologist

Story:
Huxley’s belief that people can only truly understand what they can see with their own eyes earned him the “atheist” label, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t distance himself from it. So one night at a party in 1860, “I invented the word ‘agnostic’ to denote people who, like myself, confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of matters.” Huxley combined the prefix
a-
, meaning “without,” and
gnostic
, a word derived from the Greek
gnostos
, meaning “knowable,” and used by early Christian writers to mean a “higher knowledge of spiritual things.” The definition has since changed subtly from “admitted ignorance of spiritual things” to the “questioning of spiritual things.”

Coined by:
Robert A. Heinlein, science-fiction writer

Story:
It appears in Heinlein’s 1961 novel,
Stranger in a Strange Land
, as a Martian word that means “to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because of our Earthly assumptions) as color means to a blind man.” Although the humans in
the novel never really grokked the meaning of the word, it has since been adopted by popular culture “to understand a concept, opinion, or philosophy on a deep, profound level.”

Coined by:
Tad Dorgan, American cartoonist

Story:
In 1913 Dorgan drew a cartoon called “Giving the First Edition the Once-Over,” which featured a newspaper editor and his assistants. Attempting to show how weak-kneed the assistants were, above each of them was the word “yes-man.” The term quickly expanded to include any subordinate—in business, sports, or politics—who always agrees with the boss, regardless of whether it’s justified. (Also credited to Dorgan: “23-skidoo,” “cat’s meow,” “dumbbell,” “for crying out loud,” “hard-boiled,” and “Yes, we have no bananas.”)

Coined by:
Charles N. Chadbourn, president of the Minneapolis Real Estate Board

Story:
What do you call a person who sells homes? A realtor? Wrong—a real estate agent. Not all real estate agents are REALTORS
^®
. The term is what’s called a
collective membership trademark
, so only members of the National Association of Realtors (NAR) can legally use it. Chadbourn invented the word in 1916 after reading the headline:
Real Estate Man Swindles a Poor Widow.
“The advantage of a distinguishing mark,” he said, “is so that the public may know the responsible, expert real estate man from the curbstoner who possesses no such qualifications.” He sold the rights of the word to NAR for $1.

Coined by:
Maury Maverick, U.S. Congressman

Story:
To Maverick, a straight-talking Texas politician (and grandson of Samuel Maverick, from whom we get the word “maverick”), most other politicians were like turkeys: “always gobbledy gobbling and strutting around with ludicrous pomposity.” While chairman of Smaller War Plants Corporation in 1944, Maverick sent out a memo: “No more gobbledygook language! Anyone using the words ‘activation’ or ‘implementation’ will be shot.”

 

“I never worry about blackouts,” Tom said delightedly.

 

“What’s my favorite song? ‘I Got You Babe,’ ” Tom shared sunnily.

 

“I just ordered another of these terrific cutlets,” Tom revealed.

 

“I had to come back to the marina,” Tom reported.

 

“I’m wearing this ribbon around my arm,” said Tom with abandon.

 

“Use your own toothbrush!” Tom bristled.

 

“Okay, you can borrow it again,” Tom relented.

 

“This oar is broken,” said Tom robustly.

 

“Would you like to buy some cod?” asked Tom selfishly.

 

“No, I won’t give you a note saying you’re excused,” said Tom unwaveringly.

 

“So only one person arrived at the party before I did?” Tom second-guessed.

 

“I need an injection,” Tom pleaded in vain.