Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (28 page)

Happy Patricks Jamie

Wee Your 3!

I Want Sprinkles

Happy Fater’s Doty!

Happy Bitrdhay!

My eyes cry to see you.
My lips to kiss you.
My arms to huge you.

Contragulations Ian

Last Daz of School

In 2008 the Tehran (Iran) Women’s Committee set out to beat the record for building the world’s largest sandwich. The previous record was 1,378 meters, set in Italy. The Iranian women brought together more than 1,000 cooks with a goal of building a 1,500-meter sandwich—about 5,000 feet long. The event drew a crowd, but even with 1,000 cooks, the sandwich took several hours to make. Finally, the crowd got too hungry to wait, stormed past the cooks, and ate the sandwich before the cooks could finish assembling it.

In the early 1950s, Harley Earl, the legendary head of General Motors’ Styling department, began to notice an uptick in interest in small, imported sports cars. The soldiers who fought in World War II had taken a liking to the Fiats, Triumphs, Jaguars, Morgans, and other convertible roadsters they had seen in Europe, and they’d been buying modest numbers of them from import auto dealers ever since. When Earl went to auto races, he was struck by the affection that drivers had for their little sports cars, and now even his own employees were beginning to drive them to work.

Earl had devoted his entire working life to making GM’s cars ever longer, wider, lower, more powerful, more streamlined, and more fanciful, as his automobile designs drew inspiration from everything from locomotives to bombers to rocket ships. He’d worked on plenty of cars that might be considered sporty, but he’d never really designed a
sports car
, at least not one that had found its way into dealer showrooms. Sports cars may have looked pretty and been fun to drive, but they didn’t sell very well. Of the more than 4.6 million vehicles sold in the U.S. in 1952, barely 11,000 of them were sports cars. That’s less than ¼ of one percent.