Uncle John’s Impossible Questions & Astounding Answers (2 page)

The “divine Sarah,” as Bernhardt was called, had an acting career that spanned from 1862 to 1922. Her worldwide celebrity and “silver voice” turned everything she touched into gold—including the creased, brimmed hat she wore in the 1882 French play
Fédora
. Through the 1920s, the fedora hat was a staple of women’s fashion; it became popular with men in the 1930s.

In 1981 Harrison Ford gave the fedora new life as the hat of choice for Nazi-fighting archaeologists.

Two brothers.
Two Nazis.
Two rival shoe companies.
Who were the brothers?
And what were their shoes?

Not long after World War I, two cobbler brothers, Adolf and Rudolf Dassler, started
Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik
(Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory) in the town of Herzogenaurach, Bavaria. In 1933 the brothers joined Hitler’s Nazi party. Of the two, Rudolph, who went by Rudi, was the more ardent Nazi, and a rift began to form between them. When World War II broke out, Rudi joined the military, while Adolf, who went by Adi, stayed behind to manufacture boots and weapons for the German army.

After the war, tensions between the brothers grew worse. Rudi was arrested by American occupation forces, and he believed that Adi had reported him as a member of the SS. Adi denied it, but after Rudi was released, he quit the company and opened his own shoe factory across town.

Adi Dassler combined his first and last names to name his shoe company “adidas” (all lowercase); Rudi did the same and named his company Ruda (later changed to Puma). The brothers never spoke again, and their bitter rivalry split the town into competing factions separated by the Aurach River. Said one local resident: “You’d always tend to look at the shoes a person is wearing before you strike up a conversation.”

Footnote:
Although the Dassler brothers were Nazis, they provided running shoes for African-American track star Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics. Owens won four gold medals that year…and put the Dasslers on the map as expert athletic shoemakers.

A California man named David Hampton was unimpressed with the Tamagotchi. “You can’t pet it,” he complained. So he invented his own version, which ended up getting banned from the National Security Agency’s headquarters. What did he invent?

What fictional version of a real toy—first released in 1938—suddenly became popular in 1983?

Hampton invented the Furby, an interactive toy robot that’s part owl, part penguin, and part cat. Released in 1998, Furbies became the biggest toy fad of the new millennium; millions were sold.

Hampton, a lifelong tinkerer, got the idea for an interactive toy at the 1997 International Toy Fair, where he played with a Tamagotchi, a digital pet from Japan that existed only on a small LCD screen. The Tamagotchi’s key feature: It would “die” if you didn’t feed it. But Hampton sensed that kids wanted more than a screen to play with, so he created the Furby. When you turned the toy on, it spoke only “Furbish,” a language invented by Hampton. But as you kept talking to it, it “learned” preprogrammed English words.

The Furby also recorded your voice and played it back at random…which is why it was banned by the National Security Agency. What’s the use of a bugproof room in a spy agency if there’s a Furby sitting there, recording everything you’re saying, ready to blab state secrets to the highest Russian bidder?

The Daisy company started selling Red Ryder BB guns in 1938, but never a “carbine-action, 200-shot Range Model air rifle with a compass in the stock and a thing which tells time!” Yet that’s how
A Christmas Story
author Jean Shepherd remembered the rifle he had when he was a kid, so Daisy built one especially for the 1983 movie adaptation.

What board game was designed to pass time during World War II air raids?

Colonel Mustard could answer this question, but he’s otherwise occupied in the ballroom with a lead pipe. The game, of course, is Clue.

During World War II, England was under constant threat of German attacks. Hiding in cellars for hours during air raids was both terrifying and boring. So, looking for a way to pass the time, Anthony Pratt, a Birmingham, England, law clerk, created a mystery game called Murder. He later patented the game, which proved to be such a big hit that Parker Brothers released it in the United States as Clue. Waddingtons, a gaming company from Leeds, England, released it in the U.K. as Cluedo (a play on “clue” and
ludo
, Latin for “I play”).

Pratt’s original design called for 10 suspects, one of whom would be designated at random as the murder victim. The published board game featured six suspects and a perpetual murder victim (Mr. Black in England, Mr. Boddy in the U.S.); the publishers eliminated Mr. Brown, Mr. Gold, Miss Grey, and Mrs. Silver, and changed Nurse White and Colonel Yellow to Miss White and Colonel Mustard. They also streamlined the number of weapons, eliminating the bomb, syringe, poison, fireplace poker, Pratt’s ax and—with a nod to the Irish—the
shillelagh
(a type of cudgel, or club). More than 100 million Clue games have sold.

At what magazine did Hugh Hefner work while he raised the money to start
Playboy
?

Which clothing line got its name from a McDonald’s billboard?

Children’s Activities
. Hefner served as the magazine’s circulation manager while he raised money to start his “sophisticated” men’s magazine that would feature journalism, fiction, and nude women. Working title:
Stag Party
. (Hefner changed the name because another magazine
—Stag
—had threatened to sue.) Along with the cash he earned at
Children’s Activities
, Hefner took out a loan to start
Playboy
(putting up his furniture as collateral) and borrowed the rest from his mom. In December 1953, working from his Chicago apartment, Hefner put all $8,000 into printing the first edition of
Playboy
. The first cover girl: Marilyn Monroe.

See if you can GUESS the answer. In 1977 four French brothers—Armand, Georges, Maurice, and Paul Marciano—moved to California to make their fortune in fashion. Their first label, Marilyn Designer Jeans, sold poorly despite the pop-culture reference, so the Marcianos started searching for a new name. While driving to work one day, Georges saw a McDonald’s billboard. Displayed on it was a picture of a hamburger along with seven words, the first in all capital letters: “GUESS what’s in the new Big Mac!” So they named their new line of jeans GUESS. (On a side note: Did McDonald’s really think it was a good idea to make customers GUESS what’s in their food?)

What does the gaming term “check” mean in Japanese? And what does it have to do with Chuck E. Cheese?