Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader (81 page)

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In another important scene, young Caine is taught to tread lightly—symbolically and literally—by walking across fragile rice paper without breaking it. “When you can walk the rice paper without disturbing it,” Master Kan explains, “then your steps will not be heard.” But the prop department couldn’t find any rice paper, so they used regular butcher paper instead, which is much stronger. Pera couldn’t rip it no matter how hard he tried, even when the crew glued sandpaper to the bottom of his feet. They finally shot the scene by having Pera walk over paper that was already torn, but didn’t show the paper until he’d already walked over it.

In Turkey, drunk drivers are dropped off 20 miles from home and made to walk back.

THE PRICE OF FAME

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Eleven-year-old Radames Pera, who played the young Caine, had his own problems. Child labor laws limited the number of hours he could be on the set each day, which meant that there was no time for makeup artists to apply a bald cap to his head—so they shaved him bald for much of the show’s three-year run. He was a big TV star, but the bullies at his school picked on him anyway, slapping his bald head and calling him “eightball.” Pera drew strength from the show’s scripts. “As I was dealing with my personal struggles,” he says, “young Caine was dealing with his. Asian philosophy helped us both.”

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Like George Reeves (TV’s Superman) before him, David Carradine had to worry about overly enthusiastic fans who really did believe he was an indestructible warrior monk. “People were throwing themselves at his car in the street,” Harvey Frand says. It eventually got so bad that Carradine spent most of his free time on the set hiding in his dressing room.

SO LONG, GRASSHOPPER

Kung Fu
might have continued for season after season save for one thing: David Carradine. Apparently worried that he would be typecast in the part, he was determined from the beginning not to play Caine for longer than three years. Just as he’d promised, he left the show. The last original episode aired on April 19, 1975.

Three attempts to revisit
Kung Fu
were made; two succeeded.
Kung Fu: The Movie
was a 1986 made-for-TV movie that starred Carradine as Caine and Bruce Lee’s son Brandon as his son, Chung Wang. That did well enough to inspire a 1987 pilot for a show set in the 1980s. Brandon Lee signed on to play Caine’s great-grandson... but Carradine thought the script was stupid—he called it “
Kung Fu
car crashes”—and passed. The pilot aired in February 1986 but died without Carradine’s support. He did, however, agree to star in
Kung Fu: The Legend Continues
, which ran from 1993 to 1997. In this series, set in the 1990s, Carradine plays the original Caine’s grandson (also a kung fu master named Kwai Chang Caine), and Chris Potter plays Caine’s son, Peter, a big-city police officer.

What do people have in common with wild geese? We both get the flu.

LASTING INFLUENCE

The original
Kung Fu
left an indelible mark on film and television. One huge fan was Quentin Tarantino, who lists the show as one of his earliest inspirations. He even wrote the part of Bill in his revenge flick
Kill Bill
with Carradine in mind (who got the role after Warren Beatty dropped out). Carradine’s Bill is sort of “an evil Kwai Chang Caine, offering deep-sounding Chinese parables with psychopathic twists, in between the soothing tunes of Caine’s trademark wooden flute,” writes Chris Pepus, one of the many critics who praised the film.

And
Kill Bill
is just the latest role in a long career for David Carradine, who’s appeared in more than 100 film and television projects. Yet nearly every biography about Carradine echoes these same words: “...best known for his role as Caine on the 1970s series
Kung Fu
.”

THE GREAT WIDE NORTH

It’s a good thing Canada has free health care. Here are some less-than-healthy (but still delicious) Canadian food favorites.

Poutine:
French fries and a heap of cheese (or cheese curds) immersed in brown gravy.

Trempette:
Bread soaked in maple syrup and topped with heavy cream.

Tire sur la neige:
Heated maple syrup that congeals into taffy when served on top of fresh snow.

Kraft Dinner sandwich:
Macaroni and cheese on white bread, topped with ketchup.

You have a 1-in-77 chance of dying by accident and a 1-in-211 chance of being murdered.

Here’s our feature based on Andy Warthog’s prophetic remark that “in the future, every animal will be famous for 15 minutes.”

T
HE HEADLINE:
O Brother, Boar Art Thou?

THE STARS:
Three male boars named Kalle, Oskar, and Willy; their mates Luise, Berta, and Sophie; and their 50 offspring

WHAT HAPPENED:
In September 2003, a group called the German Hunting Protection League launched a Web site with 24-hour Web cams that let viewers watch the animals on a wildlife preserve in the Eifel Plateau in western Germany. The site didn’t attract a whole lot of attention...until March 2004, when the league turned its cameras on the six adult boars and their babies. They happened to do this at about the same time that the German version of the reality TV show
Big Brother
launched the latest installment of the series.

Did Germans suddenly become more interested in nature? Or was it that after watching humans living together in a house crammed with cameras, boars seem a lot more fascinating? Whatever the reason, “Pig Brother,” as the pig section of the site came to be known, was an instant hit. It attracted more than 1.5 million visitors in its first two weeks alone. Adding to the popularity: “We have microphones in the enclosure,” says Anke Nuh, a spokesperson. “The mating calls are very impressive.”

THE HEADLINE:
Cuddly Canine Captivates Calendar Consumers

THE STAR:
A tiny, fluffy, mixed-breed stray puppy

WHAT HAPPENED:
One evening in 1996, a photojournalist named Lara Jo Regan got lost in Bakersfield, California, while on assignment for
Newsweek
magazine. She was driving around in circles when a tiny, dirty ball of fluff with big eyes and an oversized tongue suddenly appeared in her headlights. “I got out of my car and he just hobbled into my arms,” she says. The abandoned puppy was “about the size of a Cornish game hen.”

Regan took the tiny dog home and named him Mr. Winkle.

How about you? Pigeons can’t walk without bobbing their heads.

After nursing him back to health, she started taking pictures of the dog and quickly realized that he has a unique gift—he likes to pose. “He’s like a pipe cleaner,” Regan says. When she had enough pictures, she created a Web site and posted them. The site got so many hits that she decided to make a Mr. Winkle calendar...and the calendar sold so well that Regan landed a book deal with Random House.

AFTERMATH:
So far Mr. Winkle has been the subject of five calendars and three books, and his fame continues to grow. He receives an average of 100 e-mails a day, many of them from fans who have seen him on
Today, The Rosie O’Donnell Show, Sex and the City
, and other TV shows. “I feel like I’m the keeper of a magical elf,” Regan told the
San Francisco Chronicle
. “I’ll take him to a party, and what was a staid affair is suddenly full of happiness and whimsy. It’s almost as if he knows it’s his mission to enchant people.” (If Mr. Winkle’s fame continues to grow, we’ll have to rename this article “Famous for 25 minutes.”)

THE HEADLINE:
Panicked Pair of Porkers Pinched by Pig Police

THE STARS:
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Pig, two Tamworth pigs in central England

WHAT HAPPENED:
In January 1998, a farmer named Arnaldo DiJulio brought his pigs to the local slaughterhouse to be butchered. The pigs must have known what was up because they escaped from the truck while they were being unloaded. Then, before anyone could catch them, they squeezed under a fence, ran across a field, and swam across the Avon River to safety.

Farmer DiJulio wanted the pigs returned to the slaughterhouse, but when Britain’s tabloid newspapers picked up the story, animal lovers nationwide called for the renegade pigs—whom the press dubbed Butch and Sundance—to be spared. Were they? The hunt was on and soon more than 100 reporters from all over the world had descended upon the tiny town of Malmesbury to cover it. Butch (who turned out to be female) was the first caught—she was captured by animal lovers and whisked off to a shelter. Sundance was caught the next day. By then DiJulio had agreed to spare both pigs...by selling them to the highest bidder. The pigs were worth only $65 each when they escaped, but by the time the bidding was over, London’s
Daily Mail
paid a rumored $24,500 for the pair.

Bye, bye, love: The brain chemicals that create romantic bliss fade in about 18 months.

AFTERMATH:
Butch and Sundance are living out the rest of their days in an animal sanctuary in southeast England. In April 2004, they were the subject of a BBC-TV movie,
The Legend of the Tamworth Two
, billed as “the pigs that saved their own bacon.”

THE HEADLINE:
Pet’s Piano Playing No Trivial Pursuit

THE STAR:
Dinky Di, an Australian dingo

WHAT HAPPENED:
Dingoes run wild in Australia and are considered pests because they prey on livestock. But when trappers caught some of the wild dogs near Jim Cotterill’s roadhouse in the Northern Territory, Cotterill decided to take in one of the puppies and raise it as a pet.

One night, as Cotterill’s daughter was practicing the piano in the bar, the puppy began to display an unusual talent. He started howling along to the music, and soon he was jumping on the keyboard as well. “When customers came in,” Cotterill says, “someone would make a noise on the piano and he would literally sing to that piano playing.”

AFTERMATH:
Dinky Di became the most popular attraction at the roadhouse, bringing in tourists from all over the country. In 2003 someone entered him in a nationwide contest held by Trivial Pursuit to become the subject of a question for the 20th anniversary edition of the game—and Dinky Di won. “We wanted to find Australia’s most trivial person,” says game spokesperson Amanda Blackhall. “We just didn’t think it would end up being an animal.”

BATHROOM NEWS

The year 2000 was a toilet paper milestone—it marked the 15th anniversary of those jumbo roll toilet paper dispensers (JRTs) found in airports, restaurants, hospitals, and office buildings. Industry experts estimate that since 1985, JRTs have dispensed more than 293 billion feet of toilet paper, equal to the distance of 125 round-trips from the Earth to the moon. Weight: More than 494 million pounds—as much as 41,167 male African elephants. In honor of the occasion, Kimberly-Clark, the product’s manufacturer, gave away 1,000 tape dispensers designed to look like jumbo roll toilet paper dispensers.

The ancient Greeks believed telling a lie caused a toothache.

Here’s the final installment of our story on the world’s largest unintentional glider. (Part II starts on
page 319
.)

M
EANWHILE, BACK IN COACH

So how were the passengers holding up while all this was going on? Surprisingly well. One of the nice things about this new Boeing 767 was that its engines were so quiet and the cabin so well insulated for sound that few passengers were even aware at first that both engines had stopped.