Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader (83 page)

BISSELL CARPET SWEEPERS

Melville and Anna Bissell owned a crockery shop in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the 1870s. One of Anna’s least favorite chores was sweeping the sawdust used as packing material off of the shop’s carpet at the end of the day. So in 1876, Melville went out and bought Anna a newly invented “carpet sweeper.” But while it worked pretty well on ordinary dirt, it was useless on the sappy, fibery sawdust that literally stuck to the carpet. Undaunted, Melville took apart the carpet sweeper and built an improved model for his wife.

Note:
Melville Bissell built the
sweeper
, but it was Anna who built the
company:
when Melville died from pneumonia in 1889, Anna took over the business, streamlining procedures and selling the sweeper in foreign markets for the first time—including to Queen Victoria of England, who authorized their use on the priceless rugs of Buckingham Palace. Anna Bissell is one of the earliest and most successful female CEOs in the history of American business.

Commonsense fact: Animals that lay eggs don’t have belly buttons.

A few choice thoughts from Roseanne.

“Men read maps better than women because only men can understand the concept of an inch equaling a hundred miles.”

“Women are cursed and men are the proof.”

“Women complain about premenstrual syndrome, but I think of it as the only time of the month I can be myself.”

“My husband said he needed more space, so I locked him outside.”

“You marry the man of your dreams, but fifteen years later you’re married to a reclining chair that burps.”

“When Sears comes out with a riding vacuum cleaner, then I’ll clean house.”

“As a housewife, I feel that if the kids are still alive when my husband gets home from work, then hey, I’ve done my job.”

“My children love me. I’m like the mother they never had.”

“I asked the clothing store clerk if she had anything to make me look thinner, and she said, ‘How about a week in Bangladesh?’”

“It’s okay to be fat. So you’re fat. Just be fat and shut up about it.”

“I think the sexiest thing a woman could do is be as fat as me—or fatter.”

“Husbands think we should know where everything is: like the uterus is a tracking device. He asks me, ‘Roseanne, do we have any Cheetos left?’ Like he can’t go over to that sofa cushion and lift it himself.”

“Excuse the mess but we live here.”

On tabloids:
“They say this comes with the territory but...it’s like a hand from hell that continually reaches up to grab my ankles.”

To the staff of her TV show:
“This is not a democracy, this is queendom.”

You’re born with 300 bones, but have only 206 as an adult. The others fuse together.

Jurassic Park
and
Star Wars—
two of the most popular and profitable films of all time—got a big boost from their unusual sound effects. Here are a few of the secrets behind them.

S
TAR WARS

Ben Burtt, a talented USC college student, recorded most of the sounds needed for the film. Some of his secrets:

• Chewbacca’s voice was created from a combination of walrus, badger, sea lion, three different bears, and bear cub recordings. After mixing the sounds together, Burtt changed the pitch and slowed them down to “match” a Wookie photo Lucas had sent him.

• The light sabers were a combination of humming film projectors and static from Burtt’s TV set.

• The Jawas spoke a mixture of sped-up Swahili and Zulu dialects.

• R2-D2’s “voice” was Burtt’s own voice combined with sounds of bending pipes and metal scraping around in dry ice.

JURASSIC PARK

• The
Tyrannosaurus rex’s
voice is an assortment of animal noises—elephants, tigers, dogs, penguins, and alligators, etc.—and the thudding sound of his feet are recordings of trees falling in a forest.

• The sound of a sick
Triceratops
was recorded at a farm for “retired” performing lions. Sound designers went to the farm looking for sounds for the t-rex, but they found that the “wheezy, pained breathing” of the old lions was perfect for the triceratops.

• The
Velociraptors
used 25 different animals sounds...but not all at once: a “very old” horse was used to provide the breathing sounds they make when stalking prey; dolphin sounds were used to make the “attack” screeches; and mating tortoises provided the hooting call that raptors make to each other.

• The sound designers wanted to use whale sounds for the
Brachiosaurus
(the veggie-munching, long-necked dinosaur)—but they couldn’t get the right recording...so they recorded a donkey braying, slowed it down, and played it backwards. The end result was practically indistinguishable from a whale.

Vampire bats use rivers to navigate. They smell the animal blood in the water and follow it.

Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was one of the most dramatic incidents in U.S. history—and the source of persistent questions. Did President Roosevelt know the attack was coming? If so, why didn’t he defend against it? Here’s some insight from
It’s a Conspiracy!

S
hortly after dawn on Sunday, December 7, 1941, Japanese warplanes launched an all-out attack on Pearl Harbor, the major U.S. military base in Hawaii. Within two hours, they had damaged or destroyed 18 warships and more than 200 aircraft, killing 2,403 American soldiers, sailors, and marines, and wounding 1,178. Americans were stunned and outraged.

The next day, FDR delivered a stirring speech to Congress in which he referred to the day of the attack as “a date which will live in infamy.” In response, Congress declared war, and the country closed ranks behind the president.

Despite America’s commitment to the war, however, questions arose about Pearl Harbor that were not easily dismissed: How were we caught so completely by surprise? Why were losses so high? Who was to blame? Did the president know an attack was coming? Did he purposely do nothing so America would be drawn into the war? Although there were seven full inquiries before the war ended, the questions persist to this day.

UNANSWERED QUESTION #1

Did the United States intercept Japanese messages long before the attack, but fail to warn the Hawaiian base?

Suspicious Facts

• By the summer of 1940, the United States had cracked Japan’s top-secret diplomatic code, nicknamed “Purple.” This enabled U.S. intelligence agencies to monitor messages to and from Tokyo.

• Although several U.S. command posts received machines for decoding “Purple,” Pearl Harbor was never given one.

• Messages intercepted in the autumn of 1941 suggested what the Japanese were planning:

Birth of the dimpled ball: Golfers noticed that old, dented balls flew farther than new ones.

On October 9, 1941, Tokyo told its consul in Honolulu to “divide the water around Pearl Harbor into five sub-areas and report on the types and numbers of American war craft.”

The Japanese foreign minister urged negotiators to resolve issues with the U.S. by November 29, after which “things are automatically going to happen.”

On December 1, after negotiations had failed, the navy intercepted a request that the Japanese ambassador in Berlin inform Hitler of an extreme danger of war...coming “quicker than anyone dreams.”

On the Other Hand

• Although the United States had cracked top-secret Japanese codes several years earlier, “the fact is that code-breaking intelligence did not prevent and could not have prevented Pearl Harbor, because Japan never sent any message to anybody saying anything like ‘We shall attack Pearl Harbor.’” writes military historian David Kahn in the autumn 1991 issue of
Military History Quarterly.

• “The [Japanese] Ambassador in Washington was never told of the plan,” Kahn says, “Nor were other Japanese diplomats or consular officials. The ships of the strike force were never radioed any message mentioning Pearl Harbor. It was therefore impossible for cryptoanalysts to have discovered the plan. Despite the American code breakers, Japan kept her secret.”

• Actually, Washington
had
issued a warning to commanders at Pearl Harbor a few weeks earlier. On November 27, 1941, General George Marshall sent the following message: “Hostile action possible at any moment. If hostilities cannot, repeat CANNOT, be avoided, the United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act. This policy should not, repeat NOT, be construed as restricting you to a course of action that might jeopardize your defense.”

• But the commanders at Pearl Harbor were apparently negligent. The base should have at least been on alert, but the antiaircraft guns were unmanned and most people on the base were asleep when the attack came.

Five percent of Americans think “espresso” is an overnight delivery service.

UNANSWERED QUESTION #2

Did a sailor pick up signals from the approaching Japanese fleet and pass the information on to the White House—which ignored it?

Suspicious Facts

• This theory is promoted in John Toland’s bestselling book,

Infamy.
He asserts that in early December, an electronics expert in the 12th Naval District in San Francisco (whom Toland refers to as “Seaman Z”) identified “queer signals” in the Pacific. Using cross-bearings, he identified them as originating from a “missing” Japanese carrier fleet which had not been heard from in months. He determined that the fleet was heading directly for Hawaii.

• Toland says that although Seaman Z and his superior officer allegedly reported their findings to the Office of Naval Intelligence, whose chief was a close friend of the president, Pearl Harbor never got the warning.

On the Other Hand

• Gordon Prange, author of
Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History
, refutes many of Toland’s assertions. Although he concedes that there may have been unusual Japanese signals that night, Prange says that they were almost certainly signals
to
the carriers from Tokyo—and thus would have been useless in locating the carriers.

• To prove his point, Prange quotes reports written by Mitsuo Fuchida, who led the air attack on Pearl Harbor: “The Force maintained the strictest silence throughout the cruise....[Admiral] Genda stressed that radio silence was so important that the pilots agreed not to go on the air even if their lives depended upon it.” The chief of staff for Fleet Admiral Nagumo adds, “All transmitters were sealed, and all hands were ordered to be kept away from any key of the machine.”

• Prange notes, “It would be interesting to know how the 12th Naval District in San Francisco could pick up information that the 14th Naval District, much nearer the action in Honolulu, missed.”

• Finally, Prange reports that years after the war, “Seaman Z” was identified as Robert D. Ogg, a retired California businessman. Ogg flatly denied that he had said the unusual signals were “the missing carrier force,” nor was he even sure that the transmissions were in Japanese—“I never questioned them at the time.”