Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (41 page)

 

Soda:
dnL

Year:
2002

Story:
Not learning from the failure of 7-Up Gold, 7-Up once again tried to infuse its product with caffeine. Meant to compete with the caffeine-loaded energy drinks that were gaining popularity at the time (Red Bull, Rockstar, and Monster), dnL tasted exactly like 7-Up…it just had caffeine in it. The product was marketed as “7-Up, turned upside-down,” and “dnL” is actually “7-Up” upside-down. Despite the clever name, it didn’t work, and dnL was gone by 2003.

 

Soda:
Coke Blak

Year:
2006

Story:
By 2005 gourmet-coffee culture had evolved from a fad into a part of the American mainstream. Coca-Cola didn’t want to lose any more business to Starbucks—which had partnered with Pepsi to bottle its own drinks and sell them in supermarkets—so it entered the coffee-drink business in 2006. Its entry: Coke Blak. The recipe: one part Coca-Cola, one part cold coffee, and one part sweet cream (so it wasn’t even
black
coffee, like the name implies). It was pulled from American store shelves in 2007…but it continues to sell very well in France.

“We learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.”

—
George Bernard Shaw

Recently, one of our writers auditioned for and made it on
to the TV game show
Jeopardy!
Here’s his report of how
a game show is made, what it’s really like, and why
he couldn’t tell us if he won. (He didn’t.)

•
Getting an audition is fairly difficult.
Each January,
Jeopardy!
offers an online contestant test: 50 general-knowledge questions in 10 minutes. If you pass (reportedly you have to get at least 48 correct), a contestant coordinator sends you an e-mail a few weeks later and invites you to one of the auditions, held in hotel ballrooms in several major cities around the country.

 

• The audition is a grueling test of you, your smarts, and your personality.
It’s a three-hour ordeal that gauges about 20 potential contestants’ knowledge, personality, and ability to play the game. Part one: another 50-question quiz. Part two: auditioners participate in a mock game of
Jeopardy!
with a computerized game board and buzzers. Scores aren’t kept—it’s a test to see if you speak clearly, phrase your responses in the form of a question, and keep the game moving along briskly. Part three: a personality interview. Three contestant coordinators simply ask you about yourself and what you would do with all that prize money. If you passed the written test and impressed the panel with your sparkling personality, several months later the coordinator calls with congratulations and a show taping date.

 

•
Multiple shows are taped in one day.
Most game shows,
Jeopardy!
included, film five episodes—a week’s worth of shows—in one day. Taping occurs on Tuesday and Wednesday. Because of this, contestants are told to bring three outfits with them in case they win a game and come back as the next episode’s “returning champion.” The different clothes create the illusion for home viewers watching the next day that it’s the next day.

 

• There are no “fabulous parting gifts.”
That may have been a game show standard in the 1960s and ’70s, but it’s no longer true. Gone are the cases of Turtle Wax, Rice-a-Roni, and the board-game version. Contestants receive a
Jeopardy!
tote bag and a silver
picture frame with
Jeopardy!
written on it. (It’s for the photograph they get of themselves with host Alex Trebek.)

 

• …but you do get money…
The player who comes in first gets to keep whatever money they win. Second- and third-place contestants get a flat fee: $2,000 for second place, $1,000 for third.

 

•
…which covers your expenses.
Jeopardy!
tapes in Culver City, California. You have to pay for your own travel and hotel. However, if you are a returning champion and win enough to return for the next week’s taping,
Jeopardy!
pays your airfare.

 

•
It’s a long day.
Each day’s contestants (about 15 people) stay at the same hotel (which offers a special contestant discount), and at 7:00 a.m. they all gather in the lobby to board the
Jeopardy!
Bus, a shuttle that takes them to the Sony Pictures Studio.
Jeopardy!
is one of the many productions filmed there—
Wheel of Fortune
is made on the set next door to
Jeopardy!
Once they reach the studio, contestants are ushered into a “green room” with couches and bottled water, where they get an orientation (“speak clearly, don’t be nervous, phrase your answers in the form of a question”).

 

•
You have to rehearse.
After a mic fitting and a few minutes in the makeup chair, the contestants get to check out the
Jeopardy!
set. Each player gets to test the “clicker” or “answering device” and play a rehearsal game for a few minutes. At about 10:00 a.m., the studio audience is let in and the contestants head back to the green room. The order of who gets to play in each of the five episodes is chosen at random—names are placed on notecards, face down on a table. Until their names are picked, contestants may watch from the studio audience.

 

•
Alex Trebek is kept far, far away.
Since the 1950s quiz-show cheating scandals, FCC rules prohibit the host from interacting with contestants, as he may have prior knowledge of the day’s questions. So contestants do not meet or even see Trebek until the taping begins and he saunters out on stage.

 

•
It’s shot in real time.
The commercial breaks on TV last about two minutes, and they do in taping as well. If Trebek flubbed a question (or “answer”) during the game, he rerecords it during the break. The time can also be used for the judges (an independent
accountant and one of the show’s writers) to deliberate on any disputed answers. If there are no problems to fix, Trebek takes questions from the studio audience. Most commonly asked question: “How many of the answers do you know?” Trebek’s standard response: “All of them, because I have them in front of me.”

 

•
You have to wait.
There’s a three-month lead time between filming and airing. A show shot in January, for example, won’t air until April, although at the time of taping, they tell you exactly what day it will air so you can tell your family and set your TiVo. You also have to wait for your prize money. Whether it’s first-place winnings or the runner-up fee, the check comes three months after the episode airs.

 

•
You can’t tell anyone how you did.
They want to keep the element of surprise, both to discourage betting and for good TV. Producers begrudgingly allow contestants to tell their family how they did, but they’d prefer you didn’t.

In November 1986, Disney CEO Michael Eisner and his wife, Jane, were dining with famed pilots Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager, who had just flown a plane around the world nonstop. Jane Eisner asked what they were doing next, and they said, “We’re going to Disneyland.” The Eisners thought that would make an excellent slogan. So Disney rushed to create an ad around it, and about two months later the first ad was aired. After Super Bowl XXI on January 25, 1987, an unseen reporter asked New York Giants quarterback Phil Simms, “Now that you’ve just won the Super Bowl, what are you going to do next?” Simms’s scripted reply, shot on field amid the postgame chaos: “I’m going to Disneyland!” The ad has been repeated after almost every Super Bowl since and extended to other sports…and beyond. Stars who have appeared include Magic Johnson, Miss America Gretchen Carlson, Joe Montana, Michael Jordan, Nancy Kerrigan, Mark McGwire (after breaking the single-season home run record), Tom Brady, Curt Schilling, and
American Idol
winner David Cook.

In 2009, 58-year-old Michael Anderson of Shawnee, Oklahoma, suffered a stroke. Barely holding on to life in the hospital, he decided it was time to come clean about something that had haunted him for decades. He summoned police to his bed and told them his name was really James Brewer. In 1977, he said, he shot and killed a man in Tennessee named Jimmy Carroll, who he thought was having an affair with his wife. He was arrested but jumped bail, changed his name to Michael Anderson, and settled in Oklahoma. His conscience clean, Brewer could now die in peace. Except he didn’t: A few weeks later, he made a full recovery from the stroke, and police arrested him for murder.

In an April 2009 issue of the
Daily Universe
, the student newspaper at Brigham Young University—which is owned by the Mormon Church—a story referred to the Mormon leadership council as the Quorum of the Twelve Apostates. What’s wrong with that? It should have been the Quorum of the Twelve
Apostles.
An apostle is a faithful religious follower; an apostate is someone who has bitterly abandoned their religion. All 18,000 copies of the
Daily Universe
were recalled and shredded.

Milo Bogisic of Montenegro decided to end it all in 2009. But he wanted the aftermath of his suicide to be clean and easy, so he took his gun to a funeral home, where he bought a coffin (he paid in cash). Then he asked the undertaker to wait a moment while he wrote out his own obituary. Finally, Bogisic got into the casket, put the gun to his head, and pulled the trigger. But he didn’t die: The bullet went through his chin and nose and missed his brain—a serious wound, but not fatal. Despite repeated requests, Palma will not give Bogisic a refund on the casket.

The longest place name in the United States is Lake Chargogga-goggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg in Webster, Massachusetts (most residents just call it “Webster Lake”). But the local
Worcester Telegram & Gazette
recently discovered that the name is actually misspelled on signs, in guidebooks, and in official documents. It turns out that there are more than 20 spelling variants stretching back hundreds of years, and somehow along the line, the lake took on the name Lake Chargoggagoggmanchaoggagog-gchaubunaguhgamaugg, instead of the properly spelled Lake Char-goggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. All signs will be corrected at taxpayer expense.

In 2005 Ohio resident Calvin Wells was convicted of possessing 100 grams of cocaine, which carried a mandatory 10-year prison term. But the bailiff goofed—the verdict form (signed by the jury) had a typo: It listed Wells’s crime as possession of “ten one hundred (100) grams.” An appeals court later ruled that the wording could be interpreted as 10/100th grams—or
of a gram—of cocaine, a misdemeanor whose punishment of four years Wells had already served. So he had to be set free. Or did he? The media attention generated by the case reached court officials in New Jersey, where Wells was wanted on a parole violation from 2000. Before he was released from an Ohio jail, he was extradited to New Jersey, where he faces a 10-year prison term.