Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (68 page)

Gruen does live on, however, in the term “Gruen transfer,” which mall designers use to refer to the moment of disorientation that shoppers who have come to the mall to buy a particular item can experience upon entering the building—the moment in which they are distracted into forgetting their errand and instead begin wandering the mall with glazed eyes and a slowed, almost shuffling gait, impulsively buying any merchandise that strikes their fancy.

It’s true—big things come in mall packages.
Part IV of the story on
page 458
.

Some San Francisco bakers still make sourdough bread from dough started in 1849.

COLLEGE RIVALS

Sis-boom-bah! Which is the most hated college football team ever? Whichever one happens to be
your
school’s rival. Here are a few of the most famous annual college battles
.

T
HE APPLE CUP: University of Washington vs. Washington State.
It’s named for the state’s huge apple crop. The winner is awarded an actual golden apple trophy.

THE FRIENDS OF COAL BOWL: West Virginia University vs. Marshall University.
Coal mining is a major industry in West Virginia, where both schools are located, and the game is sponsored by a coal industry trade association.

THE CIVIL WAR: University of Oregon vs. Oregon State.
These two teams have been playing each other since the 1880s. The trophy awarded to the winner is called the Platypus Trophy because the animal has characteristics of both school’s mascots: the Duck and the Beaver. The 1983 game was such a dismal affair that its still referred to as the “Toilet Bowl.” After eleven fumbles, four missed field goals, and five interceptions, in a game played in the pouring rain, the Ducks and Beavers, both mediocre teams, slogged to a 0–0 tie.

THE EGG BOWL: Ole Miss vs. Mississippi State.
A trophy has been awarded to the winner since 1927, and almost immediately it was nicknamed “the Golden Egg.” That’s because it’s polished brass (which looks like gold), and it’s shaped like an early-20th-century football (which looks like an egg).

THE RED RIVER SHOOTOUT: University of Oklahoma vs. University of Texas.
Part of the boundary between the states of Oklahoma and Texas is a naturally occurring one—the Red River. A similarly named rivalry: the “Battle of the Brazos” between two other Texas schools—Baylor University and Texas A&M, which are less than 90 miles apart, separated by the Brazos River.

THE IRON BOWL: University of Alabama vs. Auburn University.
Until 1989 the annual ’Bama/Auburn game was held in
Birmingham, Alabama, a neutral city with a big stadium. In the early 20th century, Birmingham was the nation’s second-biggest iron-producing city (behind Pittsburgh), so the game was nicknamed the “Iron Bowl.”

There are more than 85,000 possible drink combinations available at Starbucks.

THE HOLY WAR: University of Utah vs. Brigham Young University.
More than 50 percent of Utah citizens are Mormons, giving rise to the “holy” wordplay for the game between the state’s two biggest universities.

THE BLACK AND BLUE BOWL: Southern Mississippi vs. University of Memphis.
The name is taken from the color of each team’s uniforms—black for Southern Mississippi, and blue for Memphis. But it has a double meaning: The teams play so aggressively that the players are bruised “black and blue.”

THE BATTLE FOR THE VICTORY BELL: USC vs. UCLA.
These two schools are crosstown Los Angeles rivals, and the winner of their annual football game gets to keep the Victory Bell, an actual bell mounted on a metal cart, for a year. And they get to paint it their school color: blue for UCLA and cardinal red for USC. But wait! There are two more rivalries that have an annual Battle for the Victory Bell: University of North Carolina vs. Duke University, who have been battling for an old railroad bell since 1948, and Miami University vs. University of Cincinnati, who have been going at it for their own Victory Bell since 1888.

FIVE TOASTS

• May we all come to peaceful ends,
and leave our debts unto our friends
.

• Here’s to you, and here’s to me, may we never disagree.
But if we do, to Hell with you…and here’s to me!

• May we never flatter our superiors or insult our inferiors
.

• What shall we drink to? About three in the morning
.

• Here’s to a clear conscience—or a poor memory
.

If the name fits: One of the founders of CNN was named William Headline.

BEHIND THE
MAGIC 8-BALL

Can a plastic orb connect you to the spirit world and lift the future’s filmy veil?
OUTLOOK NOT SO GOOD.
Can it at least give good advice?
REPLY HAZY, TRY AGAIN.
Can a toy company make money selling it?
SIGNS POINT TO YES!

A
SEEKER BORN EVERY MINUTE
Wartime has long been a boom time for spiritualists, mostly because people long for
any
news about loved ones at the battlefront. In the 1940s, a woman named “Madame” Mary Carter was capitalizing on that opportunity, plying her trade as a professional clairvoyant in Cincinnati. Her best séance stunt was one she called the Psycho-Slate, consisting of a chalkboard inside a box, with a lid covering it. When a client asked a question, Carter would close the lid, and after a short interval of muffled chalkboard scratching, she would dramatically flip open the lid to reveal the spirit world’s answer, written with chalk in a ghostly scrawl. (How she did it remains a mystery.)

TELL A FORTUNE, MAKE A FORTUNE?

Mary Carter had a son named Albert who had little use for any spirits that couldn’t be drunk straight from a bottle. When sober, however, he fancied himself an inventor, and seeing the success of his mother’s Psycho-Slate, Albert Carter came up with his best idea ever: a portable fortune-telling device that any spiritual seeker could use at any time or place.

It took some time for Carter to work out the details. It had to look mysterious, it had to offer a variety of answers and, because he had no capital to work with, it had to be cheap to build. He went to work using what he knew best—murky liquids in cans and bottles—and developed what he called the Syco-Seer Miracle Home Fortune Teller—a seven-inch can-shaped device with a glass window on each end. The inside of the can was divided in two; each half contained a six-sided die floating in a dark, viscous liquid (according to some accounts, molasses from his mother’s
kitchen) and each of the die’s six sides was inscribed with a short answer. His reasoning for having two compartments isn’t clear, but perhaps it was for efficiency: You could get an answer from one end, then turn it over and get the next answer with little lag time. In 1944 Carter filed for a patent, made a prototype, and began showing it around Cincinnati’s toy and novelty shops.

When the 13th Dalai Lama died in 1933, he was buried sitting up in a bed of salt.

YOU WILL MEET A HELPFUL STRANGER

One of the storekeepers, Max Levinson, not only wanted to stock Syco-Seers, he was very interested in helping Carter produce and market them. Levinson brought in his brother-in-law, Abe Bookman, an engineer from the Ohio Mechanical Institute, who suggested improvements to Carter’s design—adding ridges inside the chamber to make the die spin and better randomize the answers. He also hired a designer to give the Syco-Seer’s outer label a mystical appeal.

In 1946 the three men formed a partnership, which—in a nod to his two creative partners’ first names—Levinson called the Alabe Crafts Corporation. Bookman arranged for a manufacturer and planned for the retail release of the Syco-Seer in 1947. At just about the same time, Albert Carter’s alcoholism and self-neglect had finally caught up with him and he died. “When he was sober, he was a genius,” Bookman recalled to a
Cincinnati Post
reporter a few years later. “He stayed in flophouses and he was always broke. But I bought every idea he ever had, and that gave him enough to keep going.”

I SEE A PATENT IN YOUR FUTURE

Carter’s patent came through the following year, and luckily for Bookman and Levinson, he had signed rights over to the partnership before he died. Given new creative freedom to experiment with the design, Bookman began making changes that Carter had resisted.

First, while the Syco-Seer was attracting curious browsers in stores, it wasn’t generating sales, and Bookman was convinced that it was priced too high. To bring down the price, Bookman reduced costs by cutting Carter’s double-chambered design in half, using only one chamber, one die, and one window. He also decided that Carter’s mother was a good judge of product names.
He borrowed her chalkboard gimmick’s name, calling his 3½-inch single-chambered device “Syco-Slate, the Pocket Fortune Teller.” Next, he decorated it with the 12 zodiac signs and an illustration of a gypsy fortune-teller.

First (and only) actor to have a film open at #1 in five different decades: Sylvester Stallone.

In stores, models dressed as gypsies demonstrated how to use the device. But demonstrations weren’t really needed. On the top of the cylinder were the instructions:

Place left hand on this end. Ask a “yes or no” question about the future, wait 10 seconds and turn SYCO-SLATE over. Answer will appear on “Spirit Slate” in the window.

ON THE BALL

Although the price of the new incarnation was lower, the Syco-Slate didn’t sell much better than the Syco-Seer had. Why? It looked like a can of peas. Bookman racked his brain—what did people expect when they had their fortunes read? Then it came to him: a crystal ball. Late in 1948, Bookman began encasing Syco-Slates in a translucent, iridescent ball. Then he changed the six-sided die to a 20-sided one, and even hired a University of Cincinnati psychology professor named Lucien Cohen to come up with answers for each of its 20 faces. Bookman was sure he had a winner this time.

He didn’t. The crystal ball flopped too.

CONCENTRATE AND ASK AGAIN

Bookman was out of ideas. He’d put a lot of money, time, and sweat into this thing. He was sure it was going to strike it big, yet nothing seemed to work. Then something strange happened, almost as if it had been preordained by the stars: Bookman got a message from beyond—just beyond Ohio’s western border. A representative of the Brunswick Billiards Company of Chicago called to say that Brunswick needed a unique promotional item—would it be possible to change the skin of Alabe’s crystal ball and make it look like a billiard ball?

It was a strange request, and it didn’t make sense. Who ever heard of an 8-ball that tells fortunes? But Bookman, looking for a way to make some money and reduce his surplus stock, agreed to do it.

Mr. Bigglesworth, the hairless cat in the
Austin Powers
movies, was played by Ted Nude-Gent.

OUTLOOK GOOD

Even Madame Mary Carter couldn’t have foreseen that a fortune-telling billiard ball would strike a chord with the public. Maybe it was because the absurd 8-ball design stripped away that phony gypsy fortune-teller aura, making the object clearly designed as a fun toy instead of an occult item. By 1950 most Americans were planted firmly in the material world. They might enjoy reading fortune cookies and newspaper horoscopes, but they weren’t trying to get genuine answers or relief from war anxieties. Most saw fortune-telling as something offbeat to laugh about with friends.

It turned out that a “Magic 8-Ball” fit right in. The Brunswick Billiards Company quickly distributed their supply, but people were contacting Alabe Crafts asking for more. Abe Bookman was smart enough to recognize that he had a good thing going. Albert Carter’s invention finally found its market.

RANDOM FACTS AND QUICK ANSWERS

• Half of the 20 answers on a Magic 8-Ball are positive. Five are noncommittal, and the remaining five are negative.

• What’s inside a Magic 8-Ball? First of all, there’s a cylinder that’s very much like Carter and Bookman’s original Syco-Seer / Syco-Slate design. It’s filled with a blue dye dissolved in alcohol. The 20-sided die has raised white letters and openings for the liquid to enter. This makes the die just barely buoyant, which accounts for the way it slowly floats to the top, making the answer gradually emerge from the gloomy dark liquid.

• There is one recent addition to the original Magic 8-Ball design. When Ideal Toys bought Alabe Crafts in 1971, their designers tackled a problem that had vexed users for decades: annoying bubbles appeared in the message window, making it hard to see the answers. In 1975 Ideal patented the solution—the “Bubble-Free Die Agitator,” consisting of an inverted funnel that routes air into an internal bubble trap. The BFDA has been part of the Magic 8-Ball ever since.