Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (72 page)

Forgotten fad: Ancient Greek women wore cicadas on golden threads in their hair.

“Some of the environmental lobbyists are the salt of the earth,” Borlaug said, “but many of them are elitists. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.” He admitted that he would rather his work benefited small farmers, but added, “Wheat isn’t political. It doesn’t know that it’s supposed to be producing more for poor farmers than for rich farmers.” Supporters argue that Borlaug’s high-yield method has actually been a boon for the environment, saving hundreds of millions of acres of wild land from being turned into farms. The controversy continues, but none of it has stopped Borlaug from his mission.

KEEP ON PLANTING

In 1984, with the help of Japanese philanthropist Ryoichi Sasakawa, Borlaug set up the Sasakawa Africa Association (SAA), training more than a million farmers throughout Africa. Result: using Borlaug seed and methods, cereal grain yields have increased from two-to four-fold.

As of 2005—at the age of 91—Norman Borlaug is still at it. He continues to work with Mexico’s International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, still heads the SAA, runs research programs, teaches young scientists, gives lectures, and, of course, still works in the field. Over his 50-plus-year career he has been credited with saving as many as a billion people from starvation, and has received numerous international awards. In May 2004, he was presented with another: at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Borlaug’s college town of Minneapolis, he was shown their new “Window of Peace.” The
Minneapolis Star Tribune
described the event: “He gazed upward to see the sun shining through a 30-foot-tall stained glass window. There—along with depictions of Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, and other modern-day peacemakers—was a life-size likeness of Borlaug, holding a fistful of wheat.”

In 1876 every building in Jaipur, India, was painted pink for a visit by the Prince of Wales.

IT’S A CONSPIRACY!

If you know anybody who believes any of these theories, please send them our way. (We’re trying to sell an invisible bridge.)

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ONSPIRACY THEORY:
John F. Kennedy wasn’t assassinated—he’s still alive.
DETAILS:
In early 1963, President Kennedy became convinced his enemies (the Mafia, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, and elements within the CIA) were out to kill him. So he enlisted a group of friends and government agents to fake his death and then hide him overseas, should an attempt on his life be made. On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was shot in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald, a pawn in a murder plot hatched by Castro, the CIA, the Mafia, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, and Robert Kennedy (who had presidential aspirations and wanted his brother out of the picture). Contrary to news reports, Oswald’s bullets didn’t actually kill Kennedy—they left him in a coma. The president was secretly flown to a hospital in Poland. When he finally emerged from the coma in the late 1960s, he was crippled, frail, and mildly brain-damaged. Ever since, Kennedy has lived on the Greek island Skorpios in a hospital owned by Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis (who also aided in the cover-up by pretending to be Jackie Kennedy’s second husband). Proof? In 1971 the European tabloid
Midnight
ran a photo supposedly picturing Kennedy, Jackie, and Kennedy’s two nurses going for a walk on Skorpios.

TRUTH:
Midnight
faked the photos and the story. American author Truman Capote gave the tale a wider audience when he presented it as his own idea in a 1971 newspaper article. (In Capote’s version, Kennedy never emerged from his coma and lived in Switzerland, not Greece.) Capote later retracted the story, admitting that he had intended it as a silly piece of fiction. Nevertheless, the theory persists to this day.

CONSPIRACY THEORY:
Cabbage Patch Kids weren’t innocent dolls—they were actually made to prepare Americans for what post-apocalyptic humans will look like.

DETAILS:
In the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan feared that a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was inevitable. Survivors, if any, would likely be horribly physically deformed; the offspring of nuclear victims would be even more gruesome. So Reagan assigned government scientists to determine what post-apocalyptic humans would look like and to come up with a way to accustom Americans to their appearance. The scientists exposed human test subjects to high levels of radiation, then took samples of their altered DNA, and bred babies. Result: infants with tiny, beady eyes, chubby limbs with undifferentiated fingers and toes, and mashed-in faces. The government then hired Coleco Toys to make dolls based on the infants. Coleco gave the dolls an innocuous name, explained their odd appearance with a fairy tale about the children growing in the ground, and released them to toy stores. The toys were a huge success. Mission accomplished.

TRUTH:
Cabbage Patch Kids first appeared in the 1901 novel
Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch
, about a woman widowed with five children in Cabbage Patch, Louisiana. Georgia doll maker Xavier Roberts began handmaking dolls based on the characters in the novel in 1978—three years before Reagan took office. Coleco bought the rights to mass-produce the dolls in 1983. Richard Joltes, a college student who worked in a West Virginia Sears store in the early 1980s, claims to be the source of the “mutant” theory. Joltes says he hated the dolls, and whenever he sold one he’d tell the customer, “I heard these things were designed to get people used to what mutants might look like after a nuclear war.” Soon, other cashiers started doing it, too. Then Joltes told the tale in political science classes during discussions about President Reagan’s far-reaching nuclear policy. The legend spread…and mutated.

Bug Bomb: When threatened, a bombardier beetle can release a blast of 212°F air from its rear.

CONSPIRACY THEORY:
The Earth is hollow and its core houses a secret, powerful civilization.

DETAILS:
Immortal reptilian evil beings live at the center of the Earth and all the world’s governments answer to them. The evil denizens of the hollow Earth routinely escape to the surface of the Earth, kidnap humans, and torture them for pleasure. In fact, they are responsible for all the chaos and tragedy on the surface. The Nazis were their surface liaisons and traveled to and from the hollow earth via a portal in the South Pole. How is such a vast conspiracy kept under wraps? As previously stated,
all
of the world’s governments are under the control of the hollow-Earthers.

Q: Which country has the most colleges and universities? A: Mexico, with 10,341
.

TRUTH:
In 1869 a self-proclaimed “alchemist” named Cyrus Teed founded a cult based on his theories of a hollow-Earth society. (Some sources claim Adolf Hitler was a follower of Teed.) But the main source of the idea was likely the 1940s science-fiction magazine
Amazing Stories
. It ran stories by Richard Shaver about a superior evil prehistoric race that lived in caves inside the Earth and liked to torture humanity. Shaver’s proof: he said he often heard “sinister voices,” seemingly coming from nowhere, and he figured there was no explanation other than evil beings who lived inside the Earth. Thousands of
Amazing Stories
readers wrote in and said that they, too, had heard the same unsettling voices.

Scientifically, a hollow Earth is impossible. Newton’s law of gravity states that if a sphere, such as the Earth, were hollow, its interior would have zero gravity, meaning that if people were in there they’d float around weightlessly. An interior sun (another aspect of the hollow Earth scenario) is equally improbable. One of the reasons life flourishes on Earth is because of its distance from the Sun—just close enough to stay warm and for plants to use its energy to make food via photosynthesis, the basis of the food chain. If there was a sun in the middle of the Earth, not only would it be too hot to sustain life within the hollow core, it would be too hot to sustain life on the Earth’s surface.

A FEW MORE BIZARRE CONSPIRACY THEORIES

• The United States couldn’t find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq because they were invisible. In the 1980s, the United States funded Iraq’s war against Iran and gave them advanced military techno-logy, including the ability to make objects invisible. Iraqi leader Sadaam Hussein didn’t have to give up his stockpile of WMD—he merely made it invisible.

• Conspiracy theorists claim that the Canadian coffee chain Tim Horton’s laces its coffee and doughnuts with nicotine and MSG. They say customers aren’t loyal—just addicted.

• The same conspiracy theory floated around in the late 1980s, claiming that McDonald’s hamburgers were chemically addictive, then again in the 2000s, saying that kids loved Pokémon trading cards because they were addicted to a secret nicotine coating on the cards.

Miss Popularity: Queen Elizabeth II appears on the coinage of at least 35 countries.

ACCORDING TO THE LATEST RESEARCH

So how does a person get a job conducting one of these weird research studies? (If Uncle John ever finds out, he may take a little break from the book business.)

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ROSSWORDS AND SEX GROW BRAIN CELLS
Study:
Conducted by Dr. Perry Bartlett of the University of Queensland’s Brain Institute, in Australia
Findings:
In April 2004, Dr. Bartlett announced that mental and physical exercise may delay the onset of brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s by creating and nurturing new brain cells to replace ones that have been lost. Brain cell creation and growth appear to be stimulated by a chemical called prolactin—and prolactin levels rise during mental and physical exertion. (They’re also high when you’re pregnant.) “Perhaps one should run a long distance or do crosswords,” Dr. Bartlett suggests. “Prolactin levels also go up during sex,” he says, “so one could think of a number of more interesting activities than jogging in order to regulate the production of nerve cells.”

PARENTS FAVOR CUTE KIDS OVER UGLY ONES

Study:
Researchers at the University of Alberta in Canada went to 14 different supermarkets and observed the interactions between 400 different parents and their children. They also ranked the “physical attractiveness” of each child on a scale of 1 to 10.

Findings:
When Mom did the shopping, 13.3% of the children judged “most attractive” were secured with the seat belt in the shopping cart seat; only 1.2% of the “ugliest” children were. With Dad the disparity was even greater: 12.5% of the “most attractive” children were belted in;
none
of the ugliest children were.

• Ugly children were allowed to wander away from their parents more often than attractive kids, and were allowed to wander farther away than attractive children were.

• Good-looking boys were kept closer to their parents than pretty girls were, although the researchers concede that this may be because girls are perceived to be more mature and responsible than boys of the same age.

Highest batting average in a MLB season: .440, by Hugh Duffy (Boston Beaneaters, 1894).

• What does all of this mean? Scientists aren’t sure. Some speculate that evolution may play a role: parents may unconsciously perceive attractive children as being genetically more valuable. But Emory University psychologist Dr. Frans de Waal disagrees. “If the number of offspring are the same for ugly people and handsome people, there’s absolutely no evolutionary reason for parents to invest less in ugly kids,” he says.

DUMB BLONDE JOKES SLOW BLONDES DOWN

Study:
German researchers at Bremen’s International University asked 80 women with different hair colors to take intelligence tests, then monitored them carefully as they took the tests. Half of the women were told “dumb blonde” jokes before they took the test. (Jokes like: “Why do blondes open containers of yogurt while they’re still in the supermarket? Because the lid says, ‘Open here.’”)

Findings:
No word on how well the blondes or anyone else did on the intelligence tests—that wasn’t the point, and the university didn’t release the results. But it did keep track of how
quickly
the women completed the tests: The blondes who were told dumb blonde jokes took longer to complete their tests than the blondes who weren’t told jokes. Did the dumb blonde jokes make blondes dumber? No, the researchers say: the jokes made them more
self-conscious
, which caused them to work more slowly and cautiously so that they wouldn’t make mistakes. “The study shows that even unfounded prejudices generally dismissed as untrue can affect an individual’s confidence in their own ability,” says Jens Foerster, one of the social psychologists who administered the study.

GERMANS PREFER MONEY TO SEX Study:

In December 2004, the German edition of
Playboy
magazine commissioned a poll of 1,000 Germans. The pollsters asked participants if they were given a choice between more free time, more money, and more sex, which one they would choose.

Findings:
62% of Germans said cash, 26% said more free time, and only 6% said more sex. (That might explain why Germany has a declining birth rate.)

Twinkies were originally filled with banana cream.