Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (68 page)

• DaVinci may have used Phi to define the proportions of his painting of
The Last Supper
, as well as the face of the
Mona Lisa
, and his classic drawing known as
Vitruvian Man
was an effort to prove that the ideal human body is made of building blocks whose proportional ratios always equal Phi.

• The famous opening notes of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony (“duh-duh-duh-duuuuhh”) occur not only in the first and last bars but also exactly at the Phi point of the symphony.

• Antonio Stradivari, still considered the greatest violin maker ever, placed the f-holes in his violins according to Phi ratios.

NATURAL WONDERS

The Phi ratio is frequently found in nature, which may explain much of the mysticism surrounding Phi. Some examples:

• The number of petals on a flower are, for some reason, very often a Fibonacci number. Black-eyed susans and chicory flowers have 21 petals; plantains have 34; daisies have 89.

• The ratio between the number of male and female bees in a beehive can be shown to be related to Phi.

• A nautilus shell is a spiral. The ratio of each spiral’s diameter to the next is Phi. It’s
t
he same for the rate of curve of a DNA spiral.

• The number of and configuration of leaves on the stems of many plants can be measured in Phi ratios.

• A sunflower’s seeds grow in opposing spirals on the flower. The number of seeds in each row grows at the Phi ratio. This is also true of pinecones and pineapples.

Think it has no application to your life? The dimensions of a Kit Kat candy bar are in a Phi ratio, as is the
National Geographic
logo. Trek mountain bikes are proportioned according to Phi, too. Need another example? So is your Visa or MasterCard.

*        *        *

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”

—Douglas Adams

First primates in space: Two spider monkeys named Able and Miss Baker.

NUDES & PRUDES

So what side of the debate do you take—are you offended by public nudity, or are you offended by people who are offended by it?

N
UDE:
When the Boise, Idaho, City Council passed an ordinance outlawing total nudity in public except in cases of “serious artistic merit,” Erotic City Gentleman’s Club (a strip joint) responded with “Art Nights.” On Monday and Tuesday nights they passed out sketch pads and pencils so that patrons could draw the strippers as they danced. “We had a lot of people,” owner Chris Teague told reporters, “drawing some very good pictures.”

PRUDE:
So did Art Night work? Nope: In April 2005, Boise police raided Erotic City on Art Night and cited three of the nude dancers. “The law clearly states that the exemption does not apply to adult businesses,” says Lynn Hightower, spokesperson for the Boise Police Department. “If it were an art studio and models were actually posing, that would be one thing. These women weren’t posing.” Erotic City says it will fight the charges in court…but the dancers will have to wear pasties and G-strings until further notice.

NUDE:
When Stu Smailes died in 2002 at the age of 69, he left the city of Seattle $1 million to buy a new fountain. There’s a catch—Smailes’s will stipulates that in order for Seattle to claim the money, the fountain must include “one or more
unclothed
, lifesize male figure(s).” Furthermore, it must be designed in “the classical style”—in other words, no cheating by making it unrecognizably abstract. “Smailes was a very funny man,” said his attorney, Tim Bradbury. “He had a very strong sense of humor.”

PRUDE:
Satirical news anchor Jon Stewart’s book
America (The Book)
spent more than 15 weeks on the
New York Times
bestseller list and was named Book of the Year by
Publishers Weekly
magazine…but that didn’t stop eight southern Mississippi libraries from banning it. Reason: the satirical book contains a phony photograph of all nine Supreme Court justices in the nude. “We’re not an adult bookstore,” says Robert Willits, director of the Jackson-George Regional Library System. “Our collection is open to the entire public.”

Handy: Prince Philip of Calabria always wore 16 pairs of gloves at the same time.

NUDE:
As of January 2005, the Houston Police Department is relaxing its requirement that undercover vice officers remain fully clothed while trying to bust brothels that masquerade as spas, massage parlors, and “stress relief clinics.” The no-nudity policy made it easy for the prostitutes to spot undercover cops: all they had to do was ask customers to disrobe before propositioning them—anyone who didn’t was obviously a cop. Now, says Harris County District Attorney Ted Wilson, disrobing “is something the officers can do, if necessary, to gather sufficient evidence.”

PRUDE:
In March 2005, Texas State Representative Al Edwards introduced a bill in the state legislature to reduce funding to state schools that permit “sexually suggestive” cheerleading at athletic events. “It’s just too sexually oriented, you know, the way they’re shaking their behinds and going on, breaking it down,” Edwards told a reporter. “And then we say to them, ‘Don’t get involved in sex unless it’s marriage or love, it’s dangerous out there.’ And yet the teachers and directors are helping them to go through those kinds of gyrations.”

NUDE:
Tired of watching CNN and FoxNews? If you live in Europe and subscribe to satellite TV, now you can watch Naked News on the Get Lucky TV channel. On Naked News, strippers read the news as they strip. Caveat: if the news is
really
bad, you won’t get to see much nudity. “We are quite sensitive to certain issues, one, of course, being death,” says stripper/news anchor Samantha Page. “We try to be as respectful as we can, and what we tend to do is leave our clothes on.”

PRUDE:
In 2003 the owner of the Station Cafe in Berlin, Connecticut, posted a gag sign outside his business advertising “Naked Karaoke.” The bar owner, Marty St. Pierre, was only joking, but when the town hall threatened to fine and even arrest him if he held the event, he decided to fight back. He filed suit against the town and won…and attracted more than 120 participants to his first Naked Karaoke night.

Heavy metal: Steel floats in mercury.

WELCOME TO NUNAVUT

Geography quiz: Who’s the biggest landowner in North America? Bill Gates? The Rockefeller family? Not even close—the Inuit of Canada. They recently reclaimed ownership over a giant portion of northern Canada. Here’s the fascinating story
.

P
EOPLE OF THE NORTH
About 1,300 years ago, a small civilization developed on the coast of the Bering Sea in northwest Alaska. The Thule culture was built around the hunting of sea mammals, primarily whales. They lived in permanent villages along the coast and had a wide variety of sophisticated tools: dogsleds, seal skin umiaks and kayaks, harpoons, knives, snow goggles, combs, and sewing gear made from bone and ivory. Thule culture thrived there for about 200 years. Then they got some help from Mother Nature.

About A.D. 1000, the Northern Hemisphere experienced a warming trend that resulted in less ice on the Arctic Sea. This allowed the Thule to expand to Alaska’s north coast, then east along Canada’s. And they did expand: within just 200 years the Thule inhabited a region that stretched from Alaska all the way across northern Canada, and even into Greenland. (The name “Thule” comes from an ancient site found in Thule, Greenland.) But they would grow to their largest numbers in northern Canada, where their descendants still live today. Their native Canadian neighbors, the Algonquin Indians, called them “Eskimos,” which linguists believe refers to snowshoes, but they called themselves “Inuit”—the People.

NEW NEIGHBORS

The Inuit thrived in the far north for the next several centuries. Evidence suggests that sometime in the 13th century they had their first contact with Europeans, encountering Viking settlements on Greenland. There may have even been some trade between the two groups, but the Vikings were gone from the island by the 1400s and the Inuit had it to themselves.

Pope John Paul II canonized 1,340 saints, more than any other pope.

In the 1500s and early 1600s, contact increased as Europeans pushed farther into North America. Most of the meetings were unfriendly, with several skirmishes and deaths on both sides. But in the later part of the century, the Hudson’s Bay Company of England set up a number of trading posts, and trade between the two groups began on a regular basis. Through the 1700s the Inuit regularly exchanged furs of animals such as seals, wolverines, and arctic foxes for manufactured European goods such as tools, hunting gear, and wool blankets.

If that trade seemed beneficial at first, over time it proved disastrous. Hunting with rifles and steel traps was a lot easier than using spears and bows and arrows, but it caused animal populations to plummet. The Inuit relied on those animals not only for trade but also for clothing and shelter. When the animals began to disappear, the Inuit became increasingly dependent on European goods, while at the same time having less to offer for them. They began a century-long slide into dependency, poverty, and despair.

THE NORTHWEST TERRITORIES

While they were losing their traditional way of life, the Inuit were also losing control of their land. By the mid-19th century, the Hudson’s Bay Company “owned” most of modern-day Canada, including virtually all Inuit lands. In 1870 the company’s land was sold to the newly formed Dominion of Canada and designated as the Northwest Territories (NWT). The Inuit lands, as well as those of many other native tribes, ended up as part of the territory.

The Inuit were just one small group in the vast territory and had almost no say in the government. Over the decades large chunks of the region gained independent governing powers as they became the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, as well as the Yukon Territory, but the rest remained under the control of a federally appointed commissioner. Even after power was transferred to an elected assembly in 1967, the Inuit were still outnumbered and outvoted by the whites and other natives who lived in the non-Inuit lands to the south and west. The Inuit did not trust that the government understood their problems or was responsive to their needs.

They wanted their land back.

State with the most Civil War battles: Virginia (519), followed by Tennessee (298).

TIME TO SPLIT

The concept of splitting the NWT into Inuit and non-Inuit areas first surfaced in the early 1960s. It didn’t make much headway until a landmark Canadian Supreme Court decision in 1973: The Nisga’a Indians of British Columbia argued that they had an “aboriginal claim” to Canadian territory since they had been there for so much longer than Europeans. The court agreed. And that was enough for the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada (ITC), an organization that represents the rights of Canadian Inuit, to begin a formal push for a separate Inuit territory within Canada.

In 1976 the Canadian government agreed to enter into negotiations with the ITC for the creation of a territory that would be known as Nunavut, which means “our land” in Inuktitut, the Inuit language. It turned out to be a long, slow process. It took until 1982 for a vote on the idea to go to the people. It passed. Then they had to work out the details. That took another ten years. In 1992 the final agreement was put to a vote…and passed. The following year the Canadian government ratified the agreement.

ALMOST HOME

The Canadian government agreed to a triangle-shaped Inuit territory in north-central and eastern Canada, more than 770,000 square miles in size—roughly the same size as western Europe. The Inuit would gain outright title to 135,000 square miles of the territory; the rest would remain the property of the federal government, but the Inuit would have the right to hunt and fish on the land. The federal government also retained control of the mineral rights to all but 14,000 square miles of the territory, but the Inuit would be guaranteed a royalty on any oil or minerals extracted from Nunavut. In addition, the Canadian government agreed to pay the Inuit more than $1 billion Canadian to settle any and all remaining territorial claims.

It still took another six years to set up the new government, but finally, on April 1, 1999, the Nunavut Territory came in to being and the Inuit, who had been there for 1,000 years, had their land back. Paul Okalik, a 34-year-old Inuit lawyer who had served as deputy negotiator on the land claim, was elected Nunavut’s first premier. Okalik was re-elected to a second term in 2004.

Money down the drain? A single space shuttle toilet costs $24 million.

NUNAVUT FACTS

• Nunavut may be as big as western Europe and the largest territory in Canada, but only 29,000 people live there in only 28 isolated and largely icebound communities.

• Eighty percent of the people in Nunavut are Inuit.

• Nunavut is nearly as big as Alaska and California combined.

• The northernmost town in the territory, Alert, is the northernmost inhabited town in the world. It is less than 600 miles from the North Pole.

• Nunavut is the largest area in the world to be governed by aboriginal people.

• Six thousand people live in the capital city, Iqaluit, which means “many fish,” on the eastern shore of Baffin Island. The only way to get there is by boat or airplane, and there are no street numbers or even any street names—except for one: the Road to Nowhere.