Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (26 page)

 

RESTRICTOR PLATE.
An aluminum plate with four holes in it, placed between the carburetor and the intake manifold, reducing air flowing into the combustion chambers. They were implemented to slow cars down after driver Bobby Allison’s horrific 1987 crash at Talladega Superspeed-way, which tore out a section of fence meant to protect spectators, injuring several fans in the process. They’re required only at Talladega (in Alabama) and Daytona (in Florida), the two fastest tracks on the circuit. Many drivers say restrictor plates actually are
more
dangerous because they equalize the cars’ speeds, causing them to bunch together during races, thereby causing crashes that involve multiple cars.

 

ROAD COURSE.
A long race course with turns to the left and right, as opposed to an oval track. (NASCAR runs two road-course races per year.)

 

Description:
The U.S.’s second-longest river (after the Missouri) begins at Lake Itasca in Minnesota and travels 2,340 miles south, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

Origin:
The name is believed to be a combination of two Indian words, though experts aren’t certain which ones. It may have been the Ottawa
mici
(“great”) and
zibi
(“river”), or the Algonquian
misi
(“father”) and
sipi
(“water”). What is certain is that in 1666 French explorers in the Great Lakes region recorded it as
Messipi
. As they traveled south, that name supplanted all of the other names in use. In 1798 U.S. Congress officially named the new territory after the Algonquin version, “Mississippi.”

Description:
Pronounced “tems,” it flows through several cities in southern England, most notably London.

Origin:
The first known reference comes from the Celtic
Tamïssa
, meaning “dark river.” In Latin it became
Tamesis
and then in Middle English,
Temese
. The “h” was added during the Renaissance, possibly as an homage to the Thyamis River in Greece, but the pronunciation of the hard “T” remained.

Description:
The Nile is actually two rivers—the White Nile and the Blue Nile—that join up in Sudan before flowing north across Egypt and into the Mediterranean. In all, the world’s longest river system travels 4,100 miles through ten African nations.

Origin:
Because many different cultures have lived along the Nile’s banks for at least 5,000 years, this river has gone by many names:
Iteru
(“River of Life”),
Ar
(“Black,” due to the black sediment left behind after the annual floods), and
Nahal
(“Valley”). When the
ancient Greeks traveled to the region, they called it
Nelios
, meaning “River Valley.” It is from this word that we get “Nile.”

Description:
Originating from a glacier on the Tibetan plateau, the Yangtze flows 3,915 miles before emptying into the East China Sea. It’s China’s principal shipping route and Earth’s third-longest river (only the Nile and the Amazon are longer).

Origin:
Yet another river of many names, it was referred to by Western explorers as both “Yangtze,” Chinese for “ocean child,” and “Chang,” for “river.” Those two names are still used interchangeably by the rest of the world. In China, however, the river is called
Chang Jiang
, which means “Long River” and dates back to the Sui Dynasty (A.D. 581–618).

Description:
Flowing from Peru to Brazil and into the Atlantic Ocean, the Amazon is the world’s highest-volume river.

Origin:
The most commonly cited story says that in the 16th century, tribal warriors waiting on the banks attacked Spanish explorers sailing upriver. Because some of these warriors were women, the explorers believed they were Amazons, the female army from Greek mythology—hence the name. Another theory: It’s a derivation of
Amassona
, meaning “boat destroyer.” It was called that by indigenous people because of the Amazon’s tidal bores, or swells, known locally as
pororoca
. These bores occur during the high spring tides, which creates devastating waves that can travel several miles upriver.

Description:
The second-longest river in Europe (after the Volga), the Danube begins in Germany and flows 1,771 miles east through ten countries before emptying into the Black Sea.

Origin:
Ancient Greeks called this river
Ister
. It was also called
Danu
by the Celts after the goddess Danu, a motherly protector of the Indo-European world. When Roman fleets patrolled it roughly 2,000 years ago, they Latinized the Celtic name to
Danuvius
. In 1066, when the Normans conquered Europe, the river took on the French version of the Latin name,
Danube
.

Career:
In the early 1870s, Rimbaud was the rising star of the Paris poetry scene in the midst of its “Decadent movement.” Rimbaud fit perfectly. He drank too much, took drugs, was exceptionally rude (even to his friends), was prone to violence, and almost never bathed. And he wrote what is still considered among the most inspired, imaginative, and visionary poetry in history. And although it didn’t do much for him during his lifetime, after his death Rimbaud became one of the best-known poets in history, even to this day. With works such as
Le Bateau ivre
(
The Drunken Boat
) and
Une Saison en Enfer
(
A Season in Hell
), Rimbaud influenced hundreds of modern poets, novelists, and songwriters, including T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, and John Lennon, to name just a few.

Bye-bye:
Rimbaud quit writing poetry…at the age of 20. He had done most of his writing as a teenager. In fact, the piece “Ophélie,” considered one of his best poems, was written when he was just

15. Rimbaud spent the remainder of his life traveling in Europe, Africa, and Asia, trying to make money. He spent his last 10 years as a merchant in Ethiopia, at one point becoming an arms dealer in a war between rivals for the Ethiopian crown. He died in 1891 after having a leg amputated due to tumors, at the age of 37.

Career:
Brown was drafted by the NFL’s Cleveland Browns in 1956 after a stellar college career that included baseball, basketball, lacrosse, and track in addition to football. He went on to have one of the most successful careers in any sport in history, breaking dozens of NFL records, including most rushing yards in
both a season and a career, most rushing touchdowns, and most seasons leading the league in all-purpose yards, and he is still the only player to average more than 100 yards a game for an entire career.

Bye-bye:
One of the most amazing things about Brown’s record-smashing career is that he completed it in just nine years. He retired in 1965, at the age of only 29, to pursue an acting career and to work on improving race relations in the United States and around the world. He has since made dozens of films, most notably
The Dirty Dozen
(1967), and founded and worked with numerous social organizations, including the Negro Industrial Economic Union and the Amer-I-Can program. He has still not retired from from either of his “secondary” careers.

Career:
In the late 1950s, Novak was Hollywood’s premier starlet and one of its top box-office draws, with hits like
Picnic
(1955),
The Man with the Golden Arm
(1955), and Alfred Hitchcock’s
Vertigo
(1958). She could literally be in any film she chose, with whatever co-stars she chose.

Bye-bye:
Novak was never comfortable with her “sexpot” image or with stardom in general. In 1966, when she was just 33, she went into semiretirement and became a recluse of sorts. She made just 10 more films over the next 27 years, and in 1991 retired altogether. Today she lives with her veterinarian husband and several animals on a ranch in Oregon. And she still gets offers to do films: In a rare interview in 2004 with Larry King, she said she still had an agent, and he was still bugging her about film roles. She said she may still do another film someday.

Career:
Lehrer was a classically trained pianist who wrote satirical songs for fun, and in the 1950s he started selling recordings of his music to people at Harvard, where he was studying mathematics. Songs like “Fight Fiercely, Harvard,” “The Wiener Schnitzel Waltz,” and “We All Go Together When We Go,” a darkly humorous song about the “benefits” of all-out nuclear war, became underground hits, and by the end of the 1950s Lehrer was touring the country to sold-out shows. In the early 1960s, he became a
songwriter for the American version of the BBC news-satire television show
That Was the Week That Was
and got a record deal with Reprise Records.

Bye-bye:
Lehrer chose to become a mathematics professor rather than a star, and performed only rarely after the 1960s. Why? In a 2001 interview, Lehrer said he hated performing. “I didn’t relish the prospect of doing the same show night after night,” he said, “any more than a novelist would enjoy reading his book aloud every night.” In 2000 Rhino Records released a box set of all of Lehrer’s songs (there are only 37), titled
The Remains of Tom Lehrer
. He still has a large cult following all over the world.

Career:
Radio host Bell landed a five-hour, middle-of-the-night, political talk radio show in Las Vegas in 1989. In 1993 it went national under the name
Coast to Coast AM
, and soon thereafter switched to its now-famous “all things weird” format, with Bell and his callers talking about UFOs, paranormal events, government corruption, and every conspiracy theory imaginable. By the late 1990s, the show was on more than 500 stations with an audience of more than 15 million listeners.

Bye-bye, Part 1:
On October 13, 1998, Bell abruptly announced that he was retiring from broadcasting for good—effective immediately. Two weeks later he was back on the air, again without explanation. (He later said it had to do with threats to his family.)
Bye-bye, Part 2:
Citing family problems, in April 2000 Bell retired from broadcasting again, leaving the show to radio host Mike Siegel. Ten months later Bell returned, saying Siegel had taken the show in the “wrong direction.”

Bye-bye, Part 3:
Apparently Bell is the retiring type, because he retired again in late 2002, citing chronic back pain due to a fall from a telephone pole as a kid. (Note to kids: Don’t climb telephone poles.) George Noory took over as host, but Bell still owned the show…and in late 2003 he unretired again, returning to host on weekends.

Bye-bye, Part 4:
In July 2007, Bell, age 62, retired for the very last time. (Really. No kidding.) But stay tuned, because strange things often happen in the middle of the night…