Bathroom Readers' Institute's Blog, page 155

5 Quick Facts About 5 Christmas Movies

You watch them every year…but do you know everything there is to know

about these classic holiday films?

Elf. Buddy the Elf says that elves “try to stick to the four main food groups: candy, candy canes, candy corns, and syrup.” While portraying Buddy, Ferrell ate so much sugar—particularly in the scenes where Buddy eats huge plates of spaghetti covered in chocolate syrup and candy chunks—that he routinely suffered migraines throughout the filming of the movie.

Bad Santa. Christmas movies are usually very clean, family-friendly, and rated G or PG. Not Bad Santa. This R-rated dark comedy is easily the most profane Christmas movie of all time. The f-word and its variants are used 170 times; the s-word, 74 times.

A Christmas Story. Did you know that there’s a sequel to this movie? The original is based on real childhood stories by humorist Jean Shepherd. The 1994 movie It Runs in the Family is also based on Shepherd stories, and features the same characters from A Christmas Story. Filmed 11 years after the first film, It Runs in the Family necessarily has a different cast—Charles Grodin replaced Darren McGavin, Mary Steenburgen replaced Melinda Dillon, and as Ralphie, Peter Billingsley was out and Kieran Culkin was in. Also missing from It Runs in the Family: Christmas. It takes place in the summer.

It’s a Wonderful Life. Prior to this movie, fake movie snow was made from simply painting cornflakes white. But they made so much noise as they fell (or were stepped on) that any dialogue had to be recorded later, and dubbed in. Director Frank Capra wanted to record the movie’s emotional dialogue live, so he the effects department at RKO Pictures created a few kind of movie snow, made from soap, water, and foamite, a chemical used to put out fires. The combination was then sent through a wind machine. Result: realistic looking—and quiet—phony snow. RKO’s effects department was awarded an honorary Oscar for the achievement in 1947. Ironically, It’s a Wonderful Life flopped in its initial theatrical run in late 1946 because of real snow. Much of the country was hit by nasty snowstorms its opening weekend, and movie attendance plummeted.

Christmas Vacation. In the scene where the Griswold family decorates their Christmas tree, It’s a Wonderful Life plays on TV. It was directed by Frank Capra; Capra’s grandson, Frank Capra III, was an assistant director on Christmas Vacation. And toward the end of the movie, when police bust into the house to rescue Clark Griswold’s kidnapped boss, “Here Comes Santa Claus” by Gene Autry plays. Autry is a third cousin of Randy Quaid, who plays Eddie in all the Vacation films, including this one.

5 Quick Facts About Hit Pop Songs Not Performed in English

A few weeks ago, we wrote about the Singing Nun , who had an unlikely #1 hit in the U.S. in 1963 with “Dominique,” a song sung in French. Here are some more non-English tunes that topped the American pop chart.

• A rock version of the folk song “La Bamba” is Ritchie Valens’ best-known and signature song, but upon its release in 1959, it was only a minor hit. As the B-side of the #2-hit ballad “Donna,” “La Bamba” hit #23. But when a movie about Ritchie Valens life and untimely death (he died in the same plane crash that killed Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper) called La Bamba was released in 1987, a cover version by the band Los Lobos hit #1. It’s the first and only time a song sung entirely in Spanish has topped the charts.

• Only four non-English songs have ever become #1 hits in the United States. In addition to the previously mentioned “La Bamba” and “Dominique,” the other two are “Volare” by Domenico Modugno, an Italian-language hit in 1958, and “Sukiyaki,” by Japanese singer Kyu Sakamoto in 1963.

• Two songs partially sung in English have reached #1. Falco’s 1986 hit “Rock Me Amadeus” has German and English portions. Los Del Rio’s “Macarena” (1996) has English and Spanish sections.

• The first song performed in Korean to be a hit in the U.S.: “Gangnam Style.” The song by South Korean rapper Psy, fueled by a silly viral video, made it to #2 in 2012.

• “99 Luftballons” was a Cold War protest song released in 1983 by Nena, a New Wave band from Germany. It’s about a nuclear war breaking out, after floating balloons are misinterpreted as enemy aircraft. The song’s fears resonated, because even though it was performed in German, it was a huge hit in several non-German-speaking countries, including Sweden (#1), Switzerland (#1), Australia (#1), Spain (#10), and the U.S. (#2). Nena re-recorded the song in English as “99 Red Balloons” for the English-speaking market, but American record-buyers preferred the German version.

• Beatles bonus. The Beatles honed their skills playing nightclubs in Hamburg, Germany. Once Beatlemania struck in 1964, a German division of their record label, EMI, convinced the band to re-record a few of their biggest hits in German. Result: a double-sided single featuring “Komm, gib mir deine Hand” and “Sie liebt dich”—German versions of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You,” respectively. The singles didn’t make it to the American pop charts…but they did make the top 10 in Germany.

10 Quick Facts About the Harlem Globetrotters

Stuff you didn’t know about the world’s most famous basketball team.

• In late 1926, Abe Saperstein took over as coach of a touring African-American team in Chicago called the Savoy Big Five (they played their games at the Savoy Ballroom). Saperstein renamed them the Harlem Globetrotters because all the players were African-American (Harlem being a predominantly African-American neighborhood).

• The original lineup for the team’s first game in January 1927: “Toots” Wright, “Fat” Long, “Kid” Oliver, “Runt” Pullins, and Andy Washington.

• The team played hundreds of games a year and got so good that they played in a national championship in 1939 against another independent team, the New York Renaissance. The Globetrotters lost, but that same year they discovered that the crowd liked it when they did ball tricks and comic routines. Saperstein told them to do as much of that as possible…provided they’d already established a comfortable lead.

• Over the years, a few famous athletes have played for the Globetrotters. Wilt Chamberlain played for one year, between college and joining the NBA. Future Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Gibson played in the 1950s, before his baseball career. And NBA great Magic Johnson played in a single game.

• Eight famous people have been named honorary Globetrotters: Bob Hope, Nelson Mandela, Henry Kissinger, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Jesse Jackson, Whoopi Goldberg, Pope John Paul II, and the only actual basketball player on the list, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

• Shortest Globetrotter ever: 5’2” Jonte “Too Tall” Hall. Tallest Globetrotter ever: 7’8” Paul “Tiny” Sturgess.

• The Globetrotters travel with a second team, who almost inevitably loses. This has been a part of the Globetrotters experience since 1952, when Saperstein asked Philadelphia Sphas owner Red Klotz to take his Eastern Basketball League team on the road. They were renamed the Washington Generals and served as a “straight man” to the Globetrotters antics, directed to attempt to play a serious game of basketball. Sometimes the Generals changed their name and uniforms to become the “Boston Shamrocks,” “Baltimore Rockets,” “Atlantic City Seagulls,” and “New Jersey Reds,” but it was always the same team. In 1995, the Generals name was retired. The patsy team is now called the New York Nationals.

• But the games are real. The Generals (or whatever they were calling themselves at the time) have beat the Globetrotters six times. In 1971, the Globetrotters lost track of a huge lead and started doing their usual tricks. The Generals ran up the score, and won the game on a buzzer-beater shot. Klotz said the crowd looked “like we’d just killed Santa Claus.”

• Nine women have played for the Globetrotters. The first, in 1985, was Lynette Woodard, who’d just won a gold medal in the Olympics playing for the U.S. women’s basketball team.

• The team didn’t actually play a game in Harlem until 1968.

Launching Our New and Improved Store

The holidays are right around the corner and we have a very special gift for everyone this year: A BRAND NEW STORE! We think it’s a big upgrade on looks and a lot easier to use. Best of all, we can now offer Canadian shipping and most of our e-books! Now you can do all your Bathroom Reader shopping in one place.

If you have shopped with us before, your username and password will remain the same, and you will still have access to all your prior order history. For all our new shoppers, please head over and create an account.

As always, if you experience any issues, please contact the Customer Service Department and we will make sure that you are taken care of.

Don’t forget: Our annual holiday sale is in full swing with 30% off the entire store and free shipping on $35+ orders of physical books. The shipping deadline to ensure delivery before Christmas is December 9 (US deadline. We cannot guarantee Canadian shipping in time for Christmas).

4 Kinds of TV Shows That Have Disappeared From Television

Tastes in TV change, so TV changes with them. Here are some shows that were once part of the broadcasting landscape…that have since gone off the air.

VARIETY SHOWS

These glitzy, glamorous, song and dance spectaculars were dominant TV format in the 1960s and ‘70s. Featuring big production numbers, colorful costumes, comic sketches, and banter between the hosts, extravaganzas Sonny and Cher, Donny and Marie, and The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour dominated ratings. By 1980 they were simply passé, as the garish ‘70s gave way to the sleek ‘80s. In 1987, ABC attempted to revive the variety show with what seemed like a sure thing. The network signed singer/actress Dolly Parton to a two-year, $44 million contract to star in Dolly. It flopped, and the network bought out Parton’s contract and cancelled the show in less than a year.

MOVIE OF THE WEEK

In 1961, NBC bought the rights to 30 major Hollywood movies and aired them in a two-hour block called Saturday Night at the Movies. It was a hit, because in the pre-home video days, if you didn’t see a movie in the theater, you never saw it. (Among the films broadcast: How to Marry a Millionaire and The Seven Year Itch.) A “movie of the week” became a TV staple for 40 years, with both big-screen films or ones made just for television. There was one on almost every night of the week. In 2000, there was one on every night of the week except Friday. The last time a weekly movie was part of a regular network schedule: 2005-06, with the CBS Sunday Night Movie. With home video, cable, premium cable, Netflix, and other options, movies on TV are no longer a novelty. Plus, movies were a fast and cheap way for a network to fill up a couple hours of airtime. By the mid-2000s, there was an even cheaper option: reality shows.

THE WHEEL

The 1971-78 series Columbo is one of the most popular detective shows of all time, but only 45 episodes of it were made. Reason: It was part of The NBC Mystery Movie, a “wheel” series that rotated through different shows each week. One week Columbo would air, then McCloud got a turn, and then it was McMillan and Wife. Other wheel series in the ‘70s: The Name of the Game (set around a newspaper, but each week’s main character would rotate) and The Bold Ones (with separate series like The New Doctors, The Lawyers, and The Senator.) In 1989, ABC revived the wheel format with The ABC Mystery Movie. That series rotated through B.L. Stryker (with Burt Reynolds), Gideon Oliver (about a crime-solving anthropology professor), and revivals of Kojak and Columbo. It was cancelled within a year—by then, audiences came to expect the same show at the same time every week.

SOAP OPERAS

Daytime soap operas aren’t quite dead yet, but they’re on their way. Before cable TV provided dozens of options, and when millions more women didn’t work outside the home, soap operas were a big part of popular culture. Some of the biggest TV moments have happened in soaps, such as the famous “Wedding of Luke and Laura” on General Hospital in 1981. The daytime schedules on all Big 3 TV networks were littered with soaps. There were 19 on the air in 1970, and around a dozen each season into the 1990s. Currently only four remain: The Young and the Restless, The Bold and the Beautiful, General Hospital, and Days of Our Lives. The Young and the Restless is the most-watched, bringing in 3.6 million viewers. To put that into perspective, in 1981, General Hospital attracted 13.8 million people.

How to Turn Down the Volume on the Entire World

Quieter living through chemistry.

There’s nothing worse than trying to concentrate on a very important project (like, say, a blog post) while struggling to tune out loud neighbors. If you live or work in an area with heavy traffic or other types of noise pollution, you’ve likely found yourself wishing you could grab a remote control and turn down the volume on the world outside your window.

Unfortunately, modern science has yet to provide us with such technology, but industrial designer Rudolf Stefanich has concocted the next best thing. The Sono looks like a futuristic smoke detector, but it can actually reduce the irritation caused by a noisy environment. It counteracts ambient noise by vibrating the glass in windows. This essentially turns them into large noise-cancelling speakers. Stefanich’s prototype was proven to reduce sounds in the 30-80 dB range. That might not silence a dog barking next door but it could reduce more distant noises, like a garbage truck clattering down the street.

Stefanich hopes to one day construct a much more sophisticated version, in which users could pick and choose which noises they want to hear and which ones they want to block. For example, the Sono could let in the pleasant chirps of a songbird, but turn down the annoying wails of a car alarm.

Stefanich built the prototype while studying at the University of Vienna. It earned the designer a nomination for the James Dyson Award, a prestigious recognition that could have granted him the additional funding he needs for further development. Alas, the Sono lost to the Titan Arm, a robotic appendage created by a group of engineering students at the University of Pennsylvania. We’ll have to make do with noise-cancelling headphones and white noise machines for a while longer.

Want more weird inventions? Check out Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Weird Inventions.

It’s Fact-or-Fake Friday!

It’s Friday, and that means it’s time for your weekly fake-out. Here’s how it works: Two of the three following stories are true. One of them we made up. Can you guess which one is the fake? Pick your answer at the end of the article and see if you’re right.

A.

A group of five drunk teenagers in the French city of Bordeaux were leaving a bar in the wee hours when they decided, as young men are wont to do, to break into a nearby circus so they could play with the animals. They convinced Serge the llama to join them for some partying on the town. They took Serge with them through the streets of Bordeaux, posting pictures of the literal party animal online. The group even brought the llama on a tram with them, and it was only when the conductor contacted authorities that the llama’s adventures were cut short.

B.

The cheese-loving city of Milwaukee is about to get even cheesier. This year, the city is going to begin testing a new treatment to fight icy roadways: cheese brine. The brine, a salty byproduct of the cheese-making process, will be used as a primer for rock salt applications and reduce the overall amount of salt needed. The end result could be saving the city money as well as reducing environmental damage, as road salt can both erode soil and pollute drinking water. The main down side of the cheese brine: the pungent cheesy smell.

C.

Due to widespread public protest, a Mexican toy company has discontinued production on a board game it began selling in 2012. Cartel Vaya Vaya was described by one report as “a cross between Monopoly and Grand Theft Auto, but more violent.” Play revolves around amassing a large army of soldados to help move “product” into the U.S., and also featured dice-roll battles with body counts.  A group of more than a dozen Catholic dioceses in Mexico, with the majority located in border cities, organized protests against the game, which a spokesperson said, “glorifies drug culture, making child’s play out of blood and tears.”

Want more fakes? Check out Uncle John’s Fake Facts. (Really!)

Tallest, Shortest, Biggest, Smallest, Youngest, Oldest: NFL Edition

More sports statistical anomalies , this time for football.

Tallest: Being taller than 7’0” is routine in the NBA. In the NFL, there’s only been one man. Seven-foot-tall defensive tackle Richard Sligh was drafted by the Oakland Raiders in 1967. He wasn’t put to much use, playing in just eight games and sitting on the bench during Super Bowl II.

Shortest: In the early days of the NFL—when it was essentially a regional, semiprofessional league, a 5’0”-tall guy named Jack Shapiro played in just one game in 1929, as a back, for the now defunct Staten Island Stapletons.

Biggest: Professional football is a big man’s game—for example, most linesmen necessarily weigh more than 300 pounds. The biggest is Michael Jasper. This offensive linesman and nose tackle for the New York Giants was drafted in 2011, when his weight was 448 pounds. But his size sure doesn’t make him any less agile. He can reportedly vertically jump 32 inches, can do a nine-foot long jump, and can dunk a basketball. Jasper has since dropped to 375 pounds. The only other NFL to top 400 pounds is 6’10” rookie Terrell Brown, who weighed in at 403 pounds at training camp.

Smallest: If linesmen are tall and hefty, wide receivers are short and slim. The smallest man to ever play in the NFL was wide receiver Gerald McNeil, who weighed 142 pounds and stood 5’7” tall. He played for five seasons in the 1980s, and was voted to the Pro Bowl in 1987.

Oldest: Legendary quarterback and hall of famer George Blanda played in the NFL from 1948 until 1976, when he was 48. He played for 26 seasons, a record. And until 2000, he held the record of most points scored in a career, with 2,002. (He’s now sixth on the all-time list.)

Youngest: At age 12, Amobi Okoye emigrated from Nigeria to Alabama, and tested into the ninth grade. He graduated from high school at 16 and turned down Harvard to attend the University of Louisville so he could play football. He left college after three years and joined the NFL, but that’s because he’d already finished college. Playing college football at 16 made him the youngest player in NCAA history. Playing in the NFL at 19 made him the youngest player in NFL history, too.

Weird Thanksgiving Stories

It’s almost Thanksgiving—have you bought your robot turkey yet?

• In 2003, wildlife conservation officers in Michigan faced a spate of illegal turkey poachers. They didn’t call the Detroit police, one-time employer of Robocop—they brought in Robo Turkey. Several models of the $1,000 animatronic bird were placed in fields and woodlots around the state’s northern counties to protect wild turkeys. Robo Turkey looks like the real thing…from a distance. Officers can operate the bird via remote control to make him move around and shake his tail feathers, in order to attract illegal hungers. Robo Turkey has caught hundreds of poachers in the past decade.

• Are you dreading the thought of having to choke down some dry and uninspired Stove Top stuffing this Thanksgiving? You have options. In 2010, the food blog Endless Simmer assembled a list of the craziest stuffing ideas its writers could find. Among the suggestions: meatloaf stuffing, fried stuffing croquettes, stuffing pizza, and, weirdest of all, stuffing made from White Castle sliders.

• By now you’ve probably heard all about turducken—it’s a meat feast made from sticking a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey and roasting the whole thing. And while American Thanksgiving isn’t widely celebrated in the Middle East, chefs there have concoted a similar, even more bizarre dish: “camel turducken,” or “stuffed camel.” There are variations, but it typically begins with eggs stuffed inside of a fish, stuffed inside of a chicken, stuffed inside of a sheep, stuffed inside of a full-grown camel. It takes about 24 hours to cook a stuffed camel. The dish once made the pages of Guinness World Records for “Largest Single Food Item on Any Menu.”

 

4 Quick Stories About Time Travel

In honor of the 50th anniversary of “Doctor Who,” here are some stories about some people who claimed to have unlocked the secret of time travel…or maybe not.

• In 2000, a mysterious man named “John Titor” started posting messages on Internet paranormal discussion forums claiming to be a time traveler from the year 2036. He’d been sent back in time by the U.S. government, he said, to fix software bugs that were making computers in the future malfunction. Titor not only showed off pictures of his time machine (a modified 1967 Camaro), but detailed the scary world events between the years 2000 and 2036. For example, from 2004 to 2008, the second American Civil War was waged; that the 2004 Olympics were the last ones ever held; and that in 2015, Russia started World War III by dropping nuclear bombs on China, the U.S., and most of Europe. Three billion people died and all major world governments crumbled. In March 2001, Titor claimed his IT duties were complete and he “returned” to 2036…which means he never posted on Internet forums again. Obviously, you can figure out that Titor’s details of the future history weren’t quite accurate, making this a hoax. But who was behind it? Nobody knows.

• Jacques Vallee is a French scientist who promotes a theory he calls Interdimensional Hypothesis. In short, Vallee says that UFOs—flying saucers and other alien spacecraft that humans have reported seeing—aren’t aliens from a distant planet…they’re time travelers. Vallee was even a UFO consultant on Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, although he couldn’t convince Spielberg to make the movie about time-traveling creatures instead of aliens.

• If anybody were smart enough to figure out time travel, it would have to be Stephen Hawking. In 2012, the famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking tried to settle the “is time travel possible?” debate forever. The answer is “no.” Announcing that he had “experimental evidence that time travel is not possible,” he told reporters that he had held a party for time travelers—on June 28, 2009. Theorizing very simply that if time travelers from the future did, in fact exist, they would have known about Hawking’s time traveler party, and traveled back in time to attend and prove that time travel is possible. He even sent out the invitations after the party was supposed to be held, just to test their time travel capabilities. Still…nobody showed up.

• In 2013, a scientist named Ali Razequi claimed to have built a working time machine, well, really a fortune-telling machine. Razequi, who works for Iran’s Center for Strategic Inventions, says his devices uses a complex series of algorithims to predict the next five to eight years of anyone’s life. The story was first reported by Fars, Iran’s state-run news service, but not even the Iranian government thinks Razequi’s desktop-computer sized device is legitimate. Razequi, however, claims that the Iranian government is keeping his invention because they fear “the Chinese will steal the idea and produce it in millions overnight.”

Want a few “Doctor Who” facts? Read our Doctor Who post.