Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (31 page)

Doctors don’t know what causes canker sores.

What Happened:
Johnson wasn’t arrested, but his Olympic credentials were cancelled and he was thrown out of the Olympic Village. (When he tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs again in 1993, he was banned from competition for life.)

SEVEN DEADLY SPONGEBOBS

According to the show’s creator, Stephen Hillenburg, each of the seven main characters on the children’s cartoon show
SpongeBob SquarePants
is a personification of one of the seven deadly sins.

•
Sloth: Patrick Starfish.
He’s so lazy that in one episode he gets an award for “doing nothing the longest.”

•
Wrath: Squidward.
SpongeBob’s neighbor and co-worker, who hates SpongeBob, is always angry and dissatisfied with life.

•
Greed: Mr. Krabs.
SpongeBob’s boss at the Krusty Krab restaurant is obsessed with money and is always devising ways to get more.

•
Gluttony: Gary.
SpongeBob’s pet snail is shown doing little more than eating, or begging for food. At one point, he runs away when SpongeBob forgets to feed him his breakfast just once.

•
Pride: Sandy the Squirrel.
She constantly talks about how strong she is, and how proud she is to have been born in Texas.

•
Envy: Plankton.
As the villain, he runs a failed restaurant and is forever trying to steal the secret recipe of the Krusty Krab’s Krabby Patty.

•
Lust: SpongeBob.
He’s excitable, passionate, and demonstrates what Hillenburg calls “excessive love of others.”

All Africanized “killer” bees in North America are descended from 26 original queens.

AAMAZING AARDVARKS

You’ve got to love the aardvark. It’s the first animal in
Webster’s Dictionary,
beating “aardwolf” by a nose. And what a nose it is
.

• Aardvarks are burrowing mammals native to sub-Saharan Africa. The name means “earth hog” in Afrikaans, but they’re unrelated to pigs.

• Adult aardvarks are about two feet high at the shoulder and six feet in length (including a two-foot-long tail). They can weigh up to 180 pounds, with long, tubular snouts, and long, rabbitlike ears.

• Aardvarks are very good swimmers.

• Their arched backs and powerful tails give them a kangaroo-like appearance. They sometimes even stand up and balance on their tails like kangaroos, but they’re unrelated to kangaroos.

• Aardvarks feed almost exclusively on termites and ants, but they’re unrelated to anteaters—they’re actually more closely related to elephants.

• Aardvarks hunt at night, clawing termite and ant mounds open, then catching the panicked insects with their foot-long, sticky tongues.

•
Cucumis humifructus
is a type of wild cucumber and is the only fruit eaten by aardvarks. In South Africa they’re called “aardvark pumpkins.”

• Aardvarks have powerful legs with large, spoon-shaped claws. One aardvark can out-dig several men with shovels.

• Aardvarks dig several shallow burrows throughout their home range. Once a year females dig breeding burrows that reach 40 feet in length, with several entrances.

• Several African mammal species, including porcupines and hyenas, rely on old aardvark burrows for shelter.

• Adults have no front teeth, only molars at the rear of their jaws. The molars have no roots, and grow continuously throughout their lives. Aardvark teeth are considered lucky to some African tribes.

• Some tribes hunt aardvarks for their meat.

• An unusual aardvark habit: They bury their feces like cats.

Biggest NFL player: Aaron Gibson (6'6", 410 lbs). Smallest player: Reggie Smith (5'4", 160 lbs).

DUSTBIN OF (CARTOON) HISTORY

There are so many cartoon characters from TV, movies, comic books, and comic strips that they can’t all stay popular forever. Here are some favorites you may not have thought about in a while
.

C
HILLY WILLY
was a cute little penguin with big cheeks and huge eyes who starred in 50 theatrical cartoons for the Walter Lantz Studio from 1953 to 1972. Real life penguins live at the South Pole, but Willy lives in Fairbanks, Alaska. Real-life penguins are also adapted to the cold, but the plot of Chilly Willy cartoons usually revolved around Willy trying to get warm. (Some of the cartoons: “I’m Cold,” “Operation Cold Feet,” and “Hot and Cold Penguin.”) Lantz Studios closed in 1972, effectively ending the runs of most of its characters, including Woody Woodpecker, Andy Panda, and Chilly Willy. The cartoons were licensed out for TV syndication, but most local stations only wanted Woody Woodpecker. Result: Willy was unknown to an entire generation of cartoon-watching kids. Nevertheless, new Chilly Willy cartoons were a part of a Woody Woodpecker revival show that aired Saturday mornings on Fox from 1999 to 2002.

FIEVEL MOUSEKEWITZ
debuted in the 1986 hit animated movie
An American Tail
. Walt Disney Studios held a virtual monopoly on mainstream animated films…until mega-producer/director Steven Spielberg teamed with Universal Pictures to make this one. The plot was decidedly non-Disney, too: Fievel’s family are Russian-Jewish mice who flee their homeland (cats destroy their village) and come to America. Fievel, an adorable toddler mouse in an oversize blue hat, gets lost and has many adventures before the happy ending. It looked like Universal’s mouse might topple the House of Mouse
—An American Tail
grossed $47 million, more than Disney’s
The Great Mouse Detective
and a re-release of
Lady and the Tramp
. Universal immediately commissioned a sequel (
Fievel Goes West
), but it didn’t come out until 1991. By then, Fievel was no longer a hot commodity—the sequel earned less than half as much as its predecessor, which ended the franchise.

In 2008 Barack Obama had 459,000 friends on MySpace. Miley Cyrus: 552,000.

TOP CAT
was the second prime-time animated series, after
The Flintstones
. Both were produced by Hanna-Barbera and both aired on ABC. Top Cat was a con man who led a scheming gang of alley cats. And just as Fred Flintstone was based on Ralph Kramden in
The Honeymooners,
Top Cat was based on Sgt. Bilko, the shady army man on
The Phil Silvers Show
. Original episodes of
Top Cat
ran from 1961–62. After that, reruns were shown sporadically in syndication and on cable TV. In the late 1980s, several Hanna-Barbera cartoons were revived, including a
Flintstones
reboot called
Flintstone Kids
and new episodes of
The Jetsons
. A TV-movie called
Top Cat and the Beverly Hills Cats
was produced in 1987 to give Top Cat the same treatment, but it received low ratings and sold poorly on home video, scrapping any plans for a Top Cat revival.

WOODSY OWL
was the mascot of the U.S. Forest Service. One of the few famous public service mascots (like Smokey Bear), Woodsy appeared in TV commercials from 1970 until around 1990, urging kids to “give a hoot, don’t pollute.” While that campaign was about litter prevention, Woodsy was “rebooted” in 2006 after leaving the airwaves for more than a decade, but with a broader pro-environment approach. His new slogan is “Lend a hand, care for the land.”

BUSTER BROWN
was one of the earliest American cartoon characters, and one that survived for decades in several media. In 1902 Richard Felton Outcault created a comic strip about Buster (he took the name from vaudeville child star Buster Keaton), a wiseacre prankster in a page-boy haircut, his sister Mary Jane, and a pit bull named Tige. The characters moved to short films in the 1920s, a radio show that debuted in 1943, and to TV in 1951. Buster and Mary Jane were hugely popular, but today they’re only remembered for the shoes that bear their names. The Brown Shoe Company licensed the use of the Buster Brown characters in 1904 and has offered lines of “Buster Brown” children’s shoes ever since. “Mary Janes”—now a generic term for patent leather, rounded-toe shoes with straps for girls and women—get their name from the Mary Jane of
Buster Brown
.

Vinegar works as an air freshener—just place a small bowlful in a room to deodorize it.

THE MASTER HOAXER

Here at the BRI, we have a lot of respect for people who pull off elaborate hoaxes. Here’s one of the best ever
.

B
ACKGROUND
After graduating from Ohio State University in 1952, Alan Abel moved to New York City, hoping to become a stand-up comedian. When that didn’t work out, he took a job answering the customer hotline at the American Automobile Association. It was a pretty boring job, so to entertain himself, he’d give callers unnecessarily complicated driving instructions. Not only did that alleviate the boredom, it was fun, which made him realize that he’d found his niche in comedy: pulling pranks. Over the next five decades, Abel pranked the American media repeatedly with a series of bizarre hoaxes just believable enough to get press coverage…and get the press angry.

HOAX:
The Society for Indecency to Naked Animals

STORY:
While driving through Texas in 1959, Abel saw a cow and a bull mating in the middle of a road, which held up traffic for 20 minutes. During the interlude, Abel noticed two elderly women acting horrified and covering their faces in disgust. He thought it was absurd that anyone could consider the idea of mating animals offensive, so he took the idea a step further into absurdity and wrote a tongue-in-cheek article for the
Saturday Evening Post
calling for the need to
clothe
all animals. The
Post
thought he was serious (or seriously nuts) and rejected the article. But the seed for Abel’s first prank had been planted. In May 1959, he formed a phony organization called the “Society for Indecency to Naked Animals” (the badly worded title was intentional). He issued press releases and held press conferences for SINA, claiming he represented a large group of people who aimed to clothe the “scandalously naked animals all over the world.” SINA’s slogan was “A nude horse is a rude horse,” and its logo was a horse wearing red swim trunks.

Abel recruited a young actor (and future
Saturday Night Live
star) named Buck Henry to play SINA spokesman “G. Clifford Prout” in radio and TV interviews, and even got him booked on
The Today Show
. While the prank was an attempt to expose the failings of a media more interested in sensationalism than substance, many people were actually fooled, including a California woman who tried to donate $40,000 to the “cause.” (Abel returned the money, explaining to her that he “couldn’t accept money from strangers.”) Amazingly, the organization wasn’t exposed as a prank until three years later, when, after Walter Cronkite interviewed “Prout” for the
CBS Evening News,
a few network employees recognized Henry from his fledgling performing career.

There are 1,500 shades of animation paint in the film Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs
.

HOAX:
Deep Throat, Revealed

STORY:
As the Watergate scandal was unfolding in 1973,
Washington Post
journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein announced that they had been getting information from a secret source, nicknamed “Deep Throat” (after the popular porno film). Speculation ran wild as to who Deep Throat really was, so when Alan Abel invited reporters to a New York City press conference to meet the legendary informant, 150 journalists showed up. What they got was a masked actor who bickered with his wife, fainted, and was quickly taken to a waiting ambulance…still incognito. Although that should have made it clear that it was a hoax, a literary agent offered Abel $100,000 to write a Deep Throat biography.

HOAX:
Alan Abel is Dead

STORY:
In 1979 Abel set out with a lofty goal: to force the
New York Times,
the most respected newspaper in the United States, to retract an obituary…which it had never done before. First, he had phone service installed in the trailer home of a friend in Utah and registered it to the “Wellington Funeral Home.” Then he paid for a wake at All Soul’s Church in Manhattan. And finally, an hour before press time on a Sunday afternoon, when he knew there wouldn’t be enough time for staff to properly fact-check the story, he had his wife call the
Times
. Legendary prankster Alan Abel, she reported, had died of a heart attack while skiing in Park City, Utah. The reporter made some calls to both the “Wellington Funeral Home” and All Soul’s Church to confirm the story, and the next day, the Times published an obituary detailing Abel’s many high-profile pranks. Shortly after the paper hit stands, Abel issued a press release denying his death. The following day, the
New York Times
had to issue a retraction.