Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (29 page)

Coincidence? Conspiracy? To this day, there is not a single shred of tangible, incontrovertible evidence that the Yeti exist. But many people believe it’s just a matter of time.

Why do people believe wild, unsubstantiated stories? According to some psychologists, “rumors make things easier than they are.” And besides, they’re fun. Here are a few you might have heard.

R
UMOR:
If you mail your old sneakers to Nike, they’ll send you a new pair free.

HOW IT SPREAD:
Over the Internet, in 1998. An announcement sent via e-mail claimed Nike had started the promotion “to help make playgrounds for the underprivileged from old tennis shoes.” It said: “Pass this e-mail to everyone you know so that everybody can help out.” It also listed a mailing address for what it called the “Nike Recycling Center.”

THE TRUTH:
It was a fake. The address belonged to a Nike warehouse. Nike now receives an average of 100-150 pairs of old shoes a day at the warehouse, and public-minded corporations like Time-Warner began collecting old shoes for Nike until they learned it was a hoax.

RUMOR:
Don’t throw rice at weddings. Birds eat it, it expands in the stomachs, and they explode.

HOW IT SPREAD:
Via the Ann Landers advice column. In 1996 Landers fell for the rumor and published a warning in her column. “Please throw rice petals instead,” she implored her readers. “Rice is not good for the birds.”

THE TRUTH:
The USA Rice Federation, which admittedly has a vested interest in keeping the rice flying, sent an angry letter to Landers. “This silly myth pops up periodically, and it is absolutely unfounded,” spokeswoman Mary Jo Cheesman insists.

RUMOR:
The pre-printed label on your federal tax forms contains a secret code that tells the IRS auditors whether or not to audit you. If you throw the label away, you won’t be audited.

HOW IT SPREAD:
From one worried (and hopeful) taxpayer to another, especially in the weeks leading up to April 15.

THE TRUTH:
The label is actually there to reduce processing costs, lower the risk for error, and speed the delivery of tax refunds. “It does contain coding information,” says Mary Turville, an accountant with the National Society of Accountants, “but it has to do with mail routes and the form package you used in the past. There is no way to trace your tax return from the label.”

RUMOR:
When the TV show
Green Acres
went off the air in 1971, the cast and crew killed Arnold the Pig and ate him at the farewell barbecue.

HOW IT SPREAD:
In 1995
Starweek
magazine published a letter from a
Green Acres
fan who wrote to complain about the alleged incident. “Arnold was a valuable member of the cast,” the letter writer said. “Just because he was a pig was no reason to eat him. I had fond memories of
Green Acres
, but not now. I hope the cannibals burn in hell! Forever!” From there, the story took on a life of its own.

THE TRUTH:
At least twelve different pigs played Arnold, and according to trainer Frank Inn, they all lived to old age and died of natural causes. Similar rumors circulated about the pigs that starred in the 1995 film
Babe.

RUMOR:
There’s a seeing-eye dog in Germany named Lucky. He has led four of his owners to their deaths so far, but the agency that places him is making plans to give him to a
fifth
owner...without revealing Lucky’s checkered past. “It would make Lucky nervous,” trainer Ernst Gerber supposedly explained.

HOW IT SPREAD:
The story is attributed to a newspaper called the
Europa Times.
It appeared in 1993. Since then it has spread via the Internet and word of mouth. “I admit it’s not an impressive record,” Gerber supposedly told the newspaper, explaining:

Lucky led his first owner in front of a bus, and the second off the end of a pier. He actually pushed his third owner off a railway platform...and he walked his fourth owner into heavy traffic, before abandoning him and running away to safety. But, apart from epileptic fits, he has a lovely temperament. And guide dogs are difficult to train these days....

THE TRUTH:
It’s a complete fabrication.

Who’s the most famous made-for-TV cartoon character ever? It
could
be Scooby.

H
OUSE OF MYSTERY

In 1969, Fred Silverman, daytime programming director at CBS, asked Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, TV’s most prolific animators, to develop an animated series called
House of Mystery.
It was supposed to be a supernatural/whodunit series based loosely on a combination of a 1940s radio show called
I Love a Mystery
(considered by critics to be the best radio serial ever) and the 1959–1963 sitcom
Dobie Gillis
, which centered around a group of teenagers.

Hanna-Barbera quickly created the characters. The show, was called
Mysteries Five
, then renamed
Who’s S-s-s-s-cared?
It was to revolve around four teenagers and their dog (who at that time only had a small part). Silverman took the idea to New York and presented it to the top CBS brass. To his surprise, they rejected it. The reason: it was too frightening for little children. That posed a big problem to Silverman: he had already reserved his best Saturday morning slot for the show. He was determined to change their minds.

THE CHAIRMAN COMES THROUGH

Silverman spent most of his flight back to L.A. trying to figure out how on earth he would be able to sell the show. Finally, to relax, he put on his headphones. The first thing he heard was Frank Sinatra singing “Strangers in the Night”...which ends with the nonsense lyrics, “Scooby-Dooby-Doo.” Silverman suddenly had an inspiration—
that
could be the dog’s name. And if he made the dog the star of the show with the other characters supporting him, it would be funny rather than scary.

The CBS executives bought it, and Scooby Doo was born.

WHO’S WHO?

The final cast of characters for the show included:

•
Scooby-Doo
, a Great Dane. Don Messick, who voiced everyone from Bamm-Bamm to Papa Smurf in Hanna-Barbera cartoons, had to invent a new type of speech for Scooby. “I had to come up with what I call ‘growl talk,’” he said. “The words were there. Joe [Barbera] liked things starting with R’s, for the dogs especially. He got that from watching Soupy Sales in the early days.” (Go ahead, say “Rooby-Rooby Roo”—you know you want to.)

•
Norville “Shaggy” Rogers
, Scoob’s best friend, was based on Bob Denver’s characterization of Maynard G. Krebs in
Dobie Gillis.
He was voiced by Top 40 deejay Casey Kasem. (Famous quote: “Zoiks!”)

•
Velma Dinkley
(voice: Nicole Jaffe), the brains of the outfit, was blind as a bat without her glasses. Seemed to know every language on earth. (Famous quote, whenever she figured out a clue: “Jinkees!”)

•
Daphne Blake
(voice: Heather North), the wealthy redheaded beauty who seemed to have no purpose on the show at all. Occasionally, she’d accidentally stumble on a clue. (Famous quote: “Oops!”)

•
Freddie Jones
(voice: Frank Welker), the good-looking leader of the gang, who always made Shaggy do the dangerous stuff. (Famous quote: “We’ll split up. Velma, you go with Scooby and Shaggy, and I’ll go with Daphne.”) Hm-m-m—maybe Daphne
did
have a purpose.

THE NUMBERS

The show was an instant success. It took over Saturday morning in the 1970s and eventually set a still-unbroken record as the longest-running continuously-produced children’s animated show. Eighteen years passed before television was without some new incarnation of
Scooby-Doo.
In all, there were eleven different series with the name “Scooby Doo” in them. The most recent series (1990) was A
Pup Named Scooby-Doo.
Ten other dogs appeared in the series, all related to Scooby. The most famous, but least liked, was Scooby’s nephew, Scrappy-Doo. According to a recent poll on the Internet, Scrappy was the most annoying cartoon character of all time.

Time-killer:
Check out the Internet to find numerous recipes for Scooby snacks.

Look carefully at the point of a ballpoint pen. There’s a tiny little ball there, of course, which transports the ink from the ink reservoir onto the paper. It looks simple. But actually developing a workable ballpoint pen wasn’t easy. Here’s the story of how it became a “Bic” part of our lives, from Jack Mingo.

B
ACKGROUND

On October 30, 1888, John J. Loud of Massachusetts patented a “rolling-pointed fountain marker.” It used a tiny, rotating ball bearing that was constantly bathed on one side in ink. That was the original ballpoint pen. Over the next thirty years, 350 similar ballpoint patents were issued by the U.S. Patent Office—but none of the products ever appeared on the market.

The main problem was getting the ink right. If it was too thin, the pens blotched on paper and leaked in pockets. If it was too thick, the pens clogged. Under controlled circumstances, it was sometimes possible to mix up a batch of ink that did what it was supposed to do... until the temperature changed. For decades, the state-of-the-art ballpoint would (usually) work fine at 70° F, but would clog at temperatures below 64° and leak and smear at temperatures above 77°.

OUR HEROES

That’s how it was until the Biro brothers came along. In 1935, Ladislas Biro was editing a small newspaper in Hungary. He constantly found himself cursing his fountain pen; the ink soaked into newsprint like a sponge and the pen’s tip shredded it. Eventually, he recruited his brother Georg, a chemist, to help him design a new pen. After trying dozens of new designs and ink formulations, the brothers—unaware that it had already been done at least 351 times before—“invented” the ballpoint pen.

A few months later, while they were vacationing at a Mediterranean resort, the brothers began chatting with an older gentleman about their new invention. They showed him a working model, and he was impressed. It turned out that the gentleman was Augustine Justo, the
president of Argentina. He suggested that the Biros open a pen factory in his country. They declined...but when World War II began a few years later, they left Hungary and headed to South America. The Biros arrived in Buenos Aires with $10 between them.

Surprisingly, Justo remembered them and helped them find investors. In 1943, they set up a manufacturing plant. The results were spectacular—a spectacular failure, that is. They’d made the mistake everyone else had made—depending on gravity to move the ink onto the ball. That meant the pens had to be held straight up and down at all times. Even then, the ink flow was irregular and globby.

A PEN SAVED IS A PEN EARNED

Ladislas and Georg returned to the lab and came up with a new design. The ink was now siphoned toward the point no matter what position the pen was in. The Biros proudly introduced their new improved model in Argentina—but the pens still didn’t sell. They ran out of money and stopped production.

That’s when the U.S. Air Force came to the rescue. American flyers, sent to Argentina during the war, discovered that Biro ballpoints worked upside down and at high altitudes. So the wartime U.S. State Department asked American manufacturers to make a similar pen. The Eberhard Faber Company paid $500,000 for the American rights in 1944, yielding the Biro brothers their first profitable year ever.

RIPOFF CITY

About this time, a Chicagoan named Milton Reynolds saw a Biro pen in Argentina. When he returned to the U.S., he discovered that similar pens had been patented years earlier. Since the patents had expired, he figured he could get away with copying the Biro design. He began stamping out pens and selling them for $12.50 each through Gimbels department store in New York City. They were such a novelty that Gimbel’s entire stock—a total of 10,000 pens—sold out the first day. Other manufacturers jumped on the bandwagon.

The Reynolds Pen Company hired swimming star Esther Williams to show that the pen would write underwater. Other manufacturers showed their pens writing upside down or through stacks of a dozen pieces of carbon paper. But despite the hoopla, ballpoint pens still weren’t dependable. They plugged up or leaked, ruining many documents
and good shirts. People bought one, tried it, and—frustrated—vowed never to buy another ballpoint as long as they lived. Sales plummeted.