Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (67 page)

a)
In the skin

b)
Near the skin

c)
In the starch

9.
Where does Mocha-Java coffee originally come from?

a)
The Yemen port of Mocha.
(Java
means “coffee” in Yemeni.)

b)
The Indonesian island of Java, where cacao beans are also grown.

c)
The Yemen port of Mocha
and
the Indonesian port of Java.

10.
In addition to adding flavor, how does a marinade change meat?

a)
The cooked meat will be juicier.

b)
The cooked meat will be drier.

c)
The cooked meat will be better preserved. On average, it will remain fresh in the refrigerator three times as long as unmarinated cooked meat.

Answers on
page 509
.

Even more proof that whether you’re dressed or naked, you can still be dumber than sin.

N
UDE…
The Florida Board of Medicine has indefinitely suspended the medical license of physician William Charles Leach after he examined at least three patients in the nude or nearly nude. “He took off his lab coat and his shirt and pants,” one patient writes. “He then stood naked in front of me and asked me to comment on his appearance.” The suspension has forced Dr. Leach to put on hold his plans for establishing the first nude medical clinic in the state of Florida.

PRUDE…
Finnish cellular phone maker Nokia and the Dutch phone company KPN Telecom are protesting a decision by Tring, an Amsterdam cell phone retailer, to give away a sex toy with each cell phone purchase. “We’ve asked that it be stopped,” says a KPN spokeswoman. “It’s not our style at all.”

NUDE…
Arne and Oeystein Tokvam, two elderly brothers living in Oslo, Norway, got the show of a lifetime when a blonde-haired woman they didn’t know talked her way into their home and began stripping off her clothing. The woman, who was in her 30s, was soon joined by an older woman who also stripped naked and began dancing around the brothers’ home. “The older one was the wildest of the two,” Arne, 73, told a local newspaper. “We saw everything.”

After about 15 minutes, the mystery women put their clothes on and left; that was when Oeystein, 80, discovered that the brothers’ safe was missing, and along with it $6,600 in cash and two government checks for $1,700. “Never mind,” says Arne. “It’s been a long time since we had that much fun.”

PRUDE…
Senegalese police detained two journalists for questioning after they published a photomontage that showed the head of Prime Minister Mame Madior Boye, Senegal’s first female prime minister, pasted onto the body of a nude model. “We did not aim to hurt the prime minister,” a spokesperson for
Tract
newspaper said following the arrests. “It was just meant as a joke.”

It takes 4 hours to weave a hula skirt from 60
ti
plants. The skirt will only last about 5 days.

In this article from
National Post Business
magazine, writer Ian Cruickshank slices open a golf ball and takes a look at what makes it fly.

According to one popular theory, golf began about 1,000 years ago when Scottish shepherds inverted their crooks to knock rocks into rabbit holes. By the early 1600s, the balls had evolved into a combination of feathers and leather. A hatful of chicken feathers was boiled and then stuffed into a wet, three-piece leather covering. The feathers expanded, the leather contracted, and the resulting solid orb was then painted white.

The next ball revolution took place in 1845 with the development of the gutta-percha ball, made from sap imported from Malaysia. Later experimentation showed that the “gutty” flew farther and straighter when it was dented—hence the beginning of golf ball dimples. In the early 1900s, Cleveland businessman Coburn Haskell invented the modern ball, with a rubber core that was wound with elastics and then finished with a plastic cover.

Golfers are very loyal to their brand of balls, with nearly 70% of them returning to their favorite ball season after season. The main reason: golfers tend to worship the pros. They like to tee up the same type of ball used by players such as Tiger Woods or Mark O’Meara, who get paid millions of dollars to use a particular brand. All of the major manufacturers make a variety of brands, usually four to eight models, with some specializing in distance, some in spin and control, and others in a combination of distance, control and accuracy. If a ball is a commercial hit, the profit margin is substantial. Marketing costs, however, can be steep: a new ball introduction can cost up to $ 15 million in marketing costs.

Dimples reduce drag at a ball’s launch, and an indented ball will fly more than twice as far as a smooth ball. Although they all look very similar, different types of golf balls are full of subtle differences.
For example, the number, size and shape of the dimple patterns vary. They are arranged in patterns according to whether you are looking for distance or control. Bigger dimples mean less room for drag, which allows the ball to fly higher and spin more. The number of dimples ranges from about 350 to 400 per ball.

Tongue-tied: Crocodiles can’t move their tongues.

The basic golf ball follows the two-piece construction, which is generally a solid rubber core wrapped in a hard plastic cover. Balls with liquid cores (usually saline-based solutions) or cores that are wound in elastic are generally softer. Most good players are more concerned with control than distance, and these softer balls allow them to put more spin on the ball. Some of the newer balls have tungsten in the rubber core, which, according to manufacturers, makes the ball both hard for distance and soft for spin. Another trend in golf balls is a rubber core surrounded by a soft covering, which is then wrapped by a hard core, all of which is supposed to make the ball spin more. There is also new technology going into covers: titanium, which increases rigidity, making the ball snap back into its original form faster after contact with the club head.

Golf balls must conform to standards set by the United States Golf Association and the Canadian Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews. The maximum weight for a ball is 1.62 ounces. They must measure at least 1.68 inches in circumference but there is no limit to size. Each year, the USGA tests over 20,000 golf balls to ensure they conform to velocity and spin requirements. Reason: They don’t want a manufacturer to juice up a ball with a smaller dimple pattern or a different core, which could allow the ball to fly much farther and render current golf courses obsolete.

The long-ball champ is Jason Zuback, an Alberta pharmacist, who recently won his fourth consecutive World Long Drive Championship (a combination of distance and accuracy) with a 376-yard blast—although his personal best is a Herculean 511-yarder.

“What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.”

—Thomas Hewitt Key

A golf club remains in contact with the ball for half a thousandth of a second.

Photography was a 19th-century technological wonder, and the early years of its development were incredibly productive. It turned another corner in 1878, with the introduction of the dry plate.

In the fifteen years since the invention of the daguerreotype in 1837, photography had made amazing progress. The collodion process and its descendants—ambrotypes, tintypes, and cartes-de-visite—were huge improvements, but they were still “wet-plate” processes.

Photographers had to apply fresh collodion to their glass photographic plates right before they took a picture, and then develop the plates immediately afterward, before the chemicals dried. That meant lugging all their chemicals and equipment, including a portable darkroom, wherever they went to take a picture. Every photo shoot was an expensive camping trip…which made photography off-limits to everyone except professionals and a handful of dedicated amateurs.

Someone either had to find a substitute for collodion or find a way to stop it from drying out so quickly, perhaps by mixing in substances that were slower to dry. They tried everything they could think of—honey, glycerine, raspberry syrup, beer—but nothing worked.

Ironically, the person who finally stumbled onto the answer, English physician Richard Leach Maddox, wasn’t even trying to solve the problem. Maddox didn’t mind the inconvenience of the wetplate process—he just hated the way it smelled. His photography studio was set up in a glasshouse, and when it heated up, the smell of the ether in the collodion was overpowering. He became determined to find a process that did not require ether.

In 1871 Maddox found one that showed a lot of promise: a silver-gelatin emulsion. He believed this was the key to a non-smelling “dry-plate process,” but the demands of his medical practice prevented him from spending the time needed to refine it. So, in a letter to the
British Journal of Photography
, Maddox invited others to pick up where he had left off.

He never got lost: T. D. Rockwell had his name and address tattooed on his body in 27 different languages, including Morse code, shorthand, and semaphore.

Seven years later another Englishman, Charles Harper Bennett, refined the process and proved Maddox right. He discovered that he could “ripen” the gelatin emulsion by heating it to 90°F and holding it at that temperature for several days. Then, after washing the plate to remove excess chemical salts, Bennett discovered that he could create a “dry plate” that was 60
times
more sensitive to light than one made with the collodion or any other photographic process.

For decades, photographers had yearned to capture all that the human eye could see. Now, in a single stroke, Bennett had invented plates that worked
faster
than the human eye, allowing people to see things that it had never been possible to see before: horses in mid-gallop, birds flapping their wings in flight, children jumping rope, water droplets falling in mid-air. Before gelatin plates, all of these images had appeared as blurs—now they were crystal clear.

The invention of gelatin plates prompted new camera designs: bulky wooden tripod-mounted cameras were replaced by smaller units that photographers could easily hold in their hands. The new cameras were also more sophisticated: In the past people took pictures by removing the lens cap and replacing it a few seconds later, but gelatin plates were too sensitive for that. Precise exposure speeds, accurate to within a fraction of a second, were necessary. So camera makers added shutter systems that allowed for short and accurate exposure times. By 1900 it was possible to take exposures as short as 1/5000 of a second.

Just as important as the speed of the new gelatin plates was the fact that they remained photosensitive for months on end, which meant that they could be prepared well in advance of being used. Photographers no longer had to prepare plates themselves; they could buy them from the hundreds of small companies that sprang up to sell ready-made plates. They still had to develop the plates themselves, but at least now they could do it at their leisure.

Gelatin plates also helped bring standardization to the photography industry. In the past, each photographic plate was prepared from scratch moments before being put into use, so photosensitivity varied from plate to plate and from photographer to photographer. Not anymore: Now plates could be made under more controlled conditions, making their performance more predictable and reliable.

This mass production made it possible for two British scientists, Vero Charles Driffield and Ferdinand Hurter, to begin some of the first serious scientific studies of the chemistry and physics of photography. Through their research they calculated the optimum exposure time for photographic plates depending on lighting, temperature, and other factors, and they perfected the developing process to the point that people could develop exposures in absolute darkness, just by timing how long the exposures soaked in developing chemicals. As Driffield and Hurder unlocked photography’s secrets, they helped to make it more accessible to ordinary people.