Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (5 page)

 

Myth:
Mice love cheese.

Truth:
Sure, they’ll eat it if it’s in a mousetrap, but the fact is that mice will eat pretty much anything—they’re scavengers. They actually prefer sweets. The reason cheese is used in mousetraps is because it’s fragrant, which lures the mouse to the trap.

A Toronto police officer reporting to a robbery in January 2008 parked his squad car next to a convenience store, which was adjacent to some train tracks. While investigating the crime, a train rumbled past the store and demolished his squad car. “Maybe it was a little bit
on
the tracks,” the officer admitted.

Due to a birth defect, a Swedish police officer’s right leg was slightly longer than his left leg. So in 2008, he found a surgeon who agreed to shorten the right one so that his legs would be equal. But the surgery was botched: The knee joint was put back in the wrong position, and one of the screws they used to hold the joint together came loose. During a second surgery, the doctor discovered another problem with the first surgery, which required a third one. That one was slightly botched, too, requiring a fourth. Each time, the surgeon had to take a little more off of the patient’s right leg—which had been two and a half centimeters longer than the left. Now it’s five centimeters shorter than the left.

While firefighters in Honolulu, Hawaii, were at the scene of a traffic accident in 2009, they received a call about a fire…back at their firehouse. The cause: They’d been cooking food on the stove and had forgotten to turn it off when the emergency call came in for the traffic accident. The firehouse fire caused $25,000 in damage.

Police in southern Germany feared that a female serial killer was running loose. After comparing evidence gathered over a period of 15 years, they noticed the same woman’s DNA was present at 40 crime scenes, linking her to dozens of robberies and three murders. It wasn’t until 2009 that police made a major breakthrough in the
case: The matching DNA samples didn’t come from the evidence, they came from the cotton swabs that had been used to collect it. They concluded that a batch of cotton had been accidentally contaminated by a female worker at the factory many years earlier. The crimes remain unsolved.

At the end of the 2008–09 school year, a fifth-grade teacher in California (her name was not released to the press) decided to make a present for her students: a DVD featuring the year’s best class moments. When some of the kids (and their parents) watched it at home, they were shocked when footage of a class field trip suddenly cut to a very naughty scene featuring the teacher and a man in one of
their
best moments. The teacher was mortified when she found out; she apologized profusely and got all of the DVDs back. Because the teacher is otherwise well respected, school officials called it an “honest mistake” and let her keep her job.

In 2009, 42-year-old Dave Chapman was doing a load of laundry at a friend’s house in Waipopo, New Zealand. That evening, thinking his friend had put his laundry in the dryer earlier, Chapman went to the laundry room to change. “By then, I’d had a fair bit to drink,” he later said. Chapman removed all his clothes except his T-shirt, and then looked inside the front-loading dryer for a clean pair of underwear. He couldn’t find any, so he stuck his head inside. Still no underwear. So he climbed in even farther, past his shoulders…and got stuck. And the dryer was still hot. Chapman started thrashing about but couldn’t get out. He did manage to dislodge the dryer from on top of the washer, however, and dryer and drunken man crashed down onto the floor. His friends rushed in but were unable to free him (or stop laughing). So they called for help. A few minutes later, rescue personnel arrived to free the half-naked man, whom they described as “agitated.” It took two firefighters to hold onto the dryer and two more to pull Chapman out by his legs. He was bruised and had mild burns, but was otherwise okay. Only then did he find out that his underwear was still in the washing machine.

If you ordered a
caffe latte
in Italy, you’d get a cup of coffee with some milk in it. (In Italian, it literally means “coffee with milk.”) You
wouldn’t
get espresso combined with steamed milk. That’s an American latte, a variation on cappuccino that was created in 1959 in Berkeley, California. Lino Meiorin, owner of Caffe Mediterraneum, came up with it when customers who were unfamiliar with Italian coffee drinks ordered a cappuccino and, disliking the strong taste, asked for extra milk. Meiorin served his first lattes in bowls and pint glasses.

The first fast-food chain to offer a combo meal of kid-size portions (with a free toy) was Salt Lake City-based Arctic Circle, a burger joint popular on the West Coast from the 1960s to the ’80s. Introduced in 1961, the Arctic Circle Kids’ Meal consisted of a hamburger, fries, soda, and a toy prize, all inside a brightly colored box with games and puzzles on it. The format became a standard part of every fast-food restaurant’s menu. Examples: Burger King’s Kids Club Meal, McDonald’s Happy Meal, and Sonic’s Wacky Pack.

In the 1930s, child actress Shirley Temple was the biggest star in Hollywood and she frequently went to dinner at Chasen’s, a restaurant popular with the film industry. In 1938, on the occasion of her 10th birthday, the bartenders at Chasen’s concocted a drink just for her—alcohol-free and caffeine-free. The original recipe: two parts ginger ale, one part orange juice, a tablespoon of grenadine syrup, and a maraschino cherry garnish. Today, the drink is more commonly made with 7-Up instead of ginger ale, and without orange juice. Temple was such a big star that the drink caught on. Today there are alcoholic variations, such as the Shirley Temple Black, which adds Johnnie Walker Black Whiskey or Kahlua and plays on the star’s married name.

 

TERM:
Jerky

MEANING:
Dried or cured meat

ORIGIN:
It comes from the Quechua language, spoken in the Andes region of South America since before the time of the Incas. Their word
ch’arki
means “dried flesh.” Spanish explorers, possibly as early as the 1500s, borrowed it and it became the Spanish word
charqui
. That migrated to English, and by the 1840s it had become “jerky.”

 

TERM:
Tank

MEANING:
An armored, heavily armed military vehicle that moves on tracks

ORIGIN:
During World War I, the British military started working on a new specialized combat vehicle. The project was so top-secret that the workers who were making the vehicles didn’t even know what they were—the government told them that they’d be used to carry water during desert operations. The workers called them “water-carriers”…until someone pointed out that the name could be abbreviated to “WC”—meaning “water-closet” or “toilet.” So they started calling them “water tanks,” and then “tanks.” (Tanks made their combat debut at the Battle of the Somme in Northern France in September 1916.)

 

TERM:
Hush puppies

MEANING:
A classic food from the American South

ORIGIN:
Hush puppies are deep-fried balls of cornmeal batter, often seasoned with onions or pepper. The most common explanation for the name says that they were originally made around campfires (the story often has the campers being Confederate soldiers), where they were tossed to hungry, yelping dogs with the command “Hush, puppies!” Over time that became the name of
the food. The oldest documented use of the term goes back to a 1918 publication on American English called
Dialect Notes
.

 

TERM:
Chestnut

MEANING:
The nut from a chestnut tree, or the tree itself

ORIGIN:
The Ancient Greek word for chestnut was
kastanea
. That could have meant either “nut from Castanea,” a city in Turkey, or “nut from Castana,” a city in central Greece. Both regions were (and still are) renowned for their chestnuts.
Kastanea
passed into Latin as
castanea
, which became
chastaigne
in Old French. That went to Middle English as
chasteine
, and around 1570 became
chestnut
.

 

TERM:
Urban legend

MEANING:
Modern folktales often thought to be factual

ORIGIN:
Why are they called “urban” when they often don’t involve cities in any way? Because they’re named after Jeffrey Jack Urban, a farmer from Yankton, South Dakota. He was a notorious teller of wild, almost-believable stories in the 1930s. Local people started calling any such tales “Urban legends” after Jeffrey Jack.
(Just kidding. We made that up.)

The truth is that in the 1940s and ’50s, folklorists started collecting modern American legends and noticed that they had different characteristics than older, rural-based legends did. They called these legends “urban belief tales” or “city tales,” the words “urban” and “city” indicating their darker, more modern themes, even though the stories weren’t necessarily based in cities. The name evolved to become “urban legend” in the 1960s. The first recorded use is usually credited to folklorist Richard Dorson in the 1968 book,
Our Living Traditions.
(Dorson is also credited with popularizing the term “fakelore.” For more on that, see page 435.)