Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (64 page)

A page of canine quotes for dog lovers.

“Ever consider what they must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul—chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we’re the greatest hunters on Earth!”

—Anne Tyler

“Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.”

—Robert A. Heinlein

“They fight for honor at the first challenge, make love with no moral restraint, and they do not for all their marvelous instincts appear to know about death. Being such wonderfully uncomplicated beings, they need us to do their worrying.”

—George Bird Evans

“I’ve seen a look in dogs’ eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.”

—John Steinbeck

“To a man the greatest blessing is individual liberty; to a dog it is the last word in despair.”

—
William Lyon Phelps

“I don’t eat anything a dog won’t eat. Like sushi. Ever see a dog eat sushi? He just sniffs it and says, ‘I don’t think so.’ And this is an animal that licks between its legs and sniffs fire hydrants.”

—William Coronel

“If dogs could talk it would take a lot of the fun out of owning one.”

—Andy Rooney

“Dear Lord, help me to be the kind of person my dog thinks I am.”

—Anonymous

“Don’t make the mistake of treating your dogs like humans, or they’ll treat you like dogs.”

—Martha Scott

“Whoever said you can’t buy happiness forgot about puppies.”

—Gene Hill

On January 20, 1973, it was –16°F in Deadwood, SD, but 52°F in Lead…only 1½ mi. away.

Here are the origins of some common abbreviations.

£
or lb.

Meaning:
Pound

Origin:
The abbreviation originates with the Latin phrase
libra pondo,
which means “a unit of measurement by weight.” The Romans shortened the phrase to
pondo,
which ultimately became
pound
in English, but the abbreviation of the first word—
lb.,
for
libra
—endured. The symbol for British currency is a stylized L, or £, which comes from the same source. The value of the British pound was originally equal to one pound of silver.

V.I.P.

Meaning:
Very important person

Origin:
This frequently used contraction was created during World War II by a British officer in charge of organizing flights for important military leaders. In order to conceal the names from enemy spies, each of these were referred to as a “V.I.P.” in the flight plan.

Mrs.

Meaning:
A married woman

Origin:
Originally, Mrs. was a shortened version of
mistress,
a word that used to mean “wife” but has since acquired a very different meaning. Strictly speaking, because the word it once abbreviated has changed its meaning, Mrs. is no longer an abbreviation— unlike Mr., its male counterpart, which can be spelled out as
Mister.

K

Meaning:
A strikeout in baseball

Origin:
In the 1860s when a batter struck out, it was proper to say that he “struck.” It was during this era that a newspaperman named Henry Chadwick created symbols for use with his new invention—the box score. He gave each play a letter: S for sacrifice, E for error, and so on. Since S was already taken, he used the last letter of “struck” instead of the first to abbreviate it: K.

Hurricane Nixon? The Australians used to name hurricanes after unpopular politicians.

Rx

Meaning:
A drug prescription

Origin:
Actually, there is no
x
in
Rx.
In Medieval Latin, the first word in medicinal prescriptions directing one to take a specific quantity of a concoction was
recipe,
meaning “take” or “receive.” This was later symbolized as an R with a slash across its leg. The spelling
Rx
is an attempt to represent this symbol in English letters.

B.O.

Meaning:
Body odor

Origin:
In 1933 the Lifebuoy Health Soap Company ran a series of radio advertisements containing their new slogan: “Lifebuoy stops B--- O---.” A heavy two-note foghorn warning was synchronized with the “B.O.,” giving the phrase a negative spin it has retained ever since.

D-Day

Meaning:
June 6, 1944, the day Allied forces invaded France during WWII

Origin:
The
D
in D-day does not stand for “designated” or “defeat,” as many believe, but simply for “day.”
D-day
actually means “day day.” The redundancy comes from the common practice in army correspondence of referring to a top secret time as
H-hour
or
D-day.

XXX

Meaning:
Marking on bottles in cartoons to indicate that they contain alcohol

Origin:
According to one theory, during the 19th century, breweries in Britain marked their bottles X, XX, or XXX as a sign of alcohol content. The number of Xs corresponded to the potency of the drink.

“What a life. When I was a kid, I asked my dad if I could go ice skating. He told me to wait until it gets warmer.”

—Rodney Dangerfield

Cyclosporine,
which prevents organ transplant rejections, comes from a fungus grown in dirt.

It seems that anything goes on television these days. But this wasn’t always the case. We recently found this timeline in an old issue of
The Wall Street Journal.

With legislators railing about excessive sex and violence on network television, questions about what should be seen on shows and what should be cut continue to preoccupy producers and the public. But this much is certain: each season’s new series will contain scenes that were unthinkable and dialogue that was unmentionable in the early days of television.

To reach the 18 to 49-year-olds coveted by advertisers, networks in recent years “have had to open up to dealing with relatively controversial issues,” says Lynn Spigel, a professor at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television. Each network has a standards-and-practices department overseeing programming content and presentation, but “there’s no such thing as broadcast standards” today, says Steven Bochco, co-creator of NYPD
Blue
and
Hill Street Blues.
He adds: “It’s really what you can get away with. Then it becomes a new standard.”

It is illuminating to see how much primetime standards have loosened since the 1950s, when the word “damn” shocked viewers, and the 1960s, when network executives refused to air an episode of Dr.
Kildare
because it involved rape.

1939:
NBC begins the first regular network broadcasts.

1950:
Arthur Godfrey becomes one of the first people to swear on national TV when he utters the words “damn” and “hell” during a live CBS program.

1950:
The first bare breasts appear—unintentionally—when talk-show host Faye Emerson accidentally falls out of her plunging neckline. (The 1977 miniseries Roots is the first to intentionally show bare breasts.)

1951:
TV’s first pregnant character in primetime is a woman on
One Man’s Family,
a long-running radio program that made its way to TV in 1949.

1952:
Ozzie and Harriet Nelson are the first TV couple shown sleeping in the same bed. “There was no controversy—they were so darn wholesome,” says Alex McNeil, author of Total
Television.

1952:
Lucille Ball’s pregnancy is featured in seven episodes of I
Love Lucy
—without the word “pregnant” uttered once.

1961:
Actress Yvette Mimieux wears a scanty bikini and bares her navel in a Dr.
Kildare
episode. No other navels are shown for the next decade: I
Dream of Jeannie
is launched in 1965 and runs for five years without showing Barbara Eden’s, which is hidden under waist-high harem pants. Cher ends the taboo on the
Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour
in the 1970s.

1962:
In an episode of
The Defenders,
a doctor speaks out in favor of abortion, which at the time is illegal in all 50 states. Some stations refuse to air the episode, and the show’s regular sponsor pulls out. More than 10 years later,
Maude
experiences a similar backlash when its two-part abortion episode airs.

1968:
Star
Trek features the first interracial kiss. In an episode titled “Plato’s Stepchildren,” a man who has the power to control the actions of others forces Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura to kiss.

1970:
ABC’s
The Odd Couple
features the first lead characters who are divorced. Ironically,
The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
which premiered on CBS five days earlier, was originally to have been about a divorced woman. But CBS told the show’s creators that a divorcee was too controversial to be the main character of a weekly comedy, so Mary Richards was rewritten as a woman who had recently ended a long engagement.

1971:
During its first season,
All in the Family
brings one of the first homosexual characters to primetime. In the episode, “Judging Books by Covers,” Archie Bunker scorns his son-in-law’s effeminate friend, unaware that one of his own tough beer-drinking buddies is gay.

1973:
In another episode of
All in the Family,
titled “Gloria, the Victim,” Gloria is almost raped and suffers through the aftermath of reporting the crime.

Uncle John has a list of ten reasons why the
Bathroom Reader
should have lists in it. (The list is confidential.)

7 “Official” Attributes of the Pillsbury Doughboy:

1.
His skin must look like dough: “off-white, smooth, but not glossy”

2.
Slightly luminous, but no sheen

3.
No Knees, elbows, wrists, fingers, ears, or ankles

4.
Rear views do not include “buns”

5.
Walks with a “swagger”

6.
Stomach is proportional to the rest of his body.

7.
He is not portly.

4 Strange Tourist Attractions

1.
The Hall of Mosses (WA)

2.
Phillip Morris Cigarette Tours (VA)

3.
The Soup Tureen Museum (NJ)

4.
The Testicle Festival (MT)

7 Nicknames Given to President Grover Cleveland

1.
Big Beefhead

2.
The Buffalo Hangman

3.
The Dumb Prophet

4.
The Stuffed Prophet

5.
The Pretender