Bathroom Readers' Institute's Blog, page 89

Food Origins

When Uncle John was a kid, the basic food groups were meat, bread, vegetables, and dairy products. Uncle John always wondered why they left out the other basic food groups: coffee, candy, cold soup, fish sticks, corn dogs, and salad dressing.

VICHYSSOISE

Don’t let the French name fool you—this leek-and-potato soup (pronounced vi-she-swaz) is as American as apple pie. Louis Diat, the head chef of New York’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, came up with this cold soup in 1917 while looking for something to serve to customers in the sweltering heat of New York summers.

FISH STICKS

Clarence Birdseye single-handedly invented the frozen-food industry in the late 1920s when he figured out how to freeze food without ruining its flavor, texture, or nutritional value (you have to freeze it quickly). His early machines worked best with food that was cut into slender pieces, and one of the first foods he came up with was a knockoff of a French delicacy called goujonettes de sole: sole fillets baked or fried in bread crumbs and a light batter. Birdseye switched to cheaper fish (cod), fried it in a heavier batter, and scored a hit: If you had a freezer in the 1930s, more likely than not it contained a box or two of fish sticks.

CAPPUCCINO

In Vienna, a Kapuziner is a cup of espresso with a few drops of cream stirred in. The drink gets its name from the Catholic order of Kapuzin friars, who wore a brown habit or robe that was about the same color as the drink. (In English, the friars are known as Capuchins.) In the late 1800s, Austrian soldiers stationed in northern Italy introduced Kapuziners there; the Italians renamed them cappuccinos. When high-pressure espresso machines were introduced in 1906, the Italians put their own stamp on the drink by making it with steamed, foamy milk, and plenty of it, instead of just a little bit of cream.

WISH-BONE SALAD DRESSING

When Phillip Sollomi returned from fighting in World War II in 1945, he opened a restaurant in Kansas City, Missouri. The house specialty was fried chicken, so he named the restaurant “The Wishbone.”

In 1948 he started serving his mother’s Sicilian salad dressing; it was so popular that customers asked for bottles to take home.

So he started bottling it…and soon demand was so strong that he had to make it in batches of 50 gallons at a time. In 1957 he sold the salad dressing business to the Lipton Tea Company, and today Wish-Bone is the bestselling Italian dressing in the United States.

CORN DOGS

Even if he wasn’t the very first person to dip a hot dog in corn meal batter and deep fry it, Neil Fletcher was the guy who popularized the dish when he began selling it at the Texas State Fair in 1942. Those early dogs were served on plates; it wasn’t until four years later that Ed Waldmire, a soldier stationed at the Amarillo Airfield, became the first person to put the corn dog on a “stick” (the first ones were actually metal cocktail forks, later replaced by wooden sticks).

LICORICE ALLSORTS

You might not recognize these candies by name, but you’d know them by sight—they’re the variety of licorice candies that are sold as a mixture of colors, shapes, and sizes. The candies were created by the Bassetts company of England in the late 1800s. The original plan was to sell each shape separately, but that plan was foiled in 1899 when a salesman named Charlie Thompson spilled a carefully arranged tray of the pieces during a sales call. The buyer actually preferred the candies all mixed up…and as it turned out, so did everyone else: The candies sold better as a mixture than they ever did individually.

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It’s a College Basketball Vacation!

So your team made it to the final round of the NCAA Division I basketball tournament…but lost in the final game. But then the NCAA ruled that those losses don’t count or are “vacated.” Good news? Not really. Those games are technically stricken from the NCAA record books because the teams were involved in major scandals.

The Villanova Wildcats made it to its first ever title game in 1971, played in front of a then-record 31,765 fans at the Houston Astrodome. But after losing to UCLA 68-62 (for that school’s fifth straight championship), Villanova was disqualified. College basketball is strictly amateur, and it was discovered that Villanova’s Howard Porter had signed with a sports agent before the tournament. Similarly, third-place finisher Western Kentucky was also disqualified because player Jim McDaniels had already signed a pro contract and even been paid.


The next time a tournament finish was vacated involved UCLA, who lost to Louisville by five points in the 1980 title game, just missing its 11th national championship. It would’ve been deleted anyway: After a team booster named Sam Gilbert came under federal investigation for laundering drug money, the Los Angeles Times discovered that he’d also paid a handful of recruits to play for UCLA.


The 1992 title game was a blowout: Duke over Michigan, 71 to 51. Michigan returned to the championship round in 1993, but again lost, this time to North Carolina, 77 to 71. Both of those losses were vacated when a six-year federal investigation revealed multiple recruiting and financial rules violations by the Michigan basketball program. Four Michigan players (including future NBA star Chris Webber) were found to have received loans totaling more than $600,000 from booster Ed Martin…who was using the loans to launder money from an illegal gambling ring.


The 2008 tournament made history in two ways. 1) It was the first time that the Final Four was made up entirely of the no. 1 seeds from all four regions. 2) Derrick Rose, star player for runner-up Memphis (who lost to Kansas, 75 to 68) was discovered post-tournament to have gotten into college due to some grade alteration by his high school, along with evidence that another student may have taken his SATs for him.

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Obscure-o-nyms

Caution: Reading the definitions of these obscure words may lead to sophomania.

Castrophenia:

The belief that one’s thoughts are being stolen by enemies.

Eugonic:

Rapid and luxuriant growth, such as bacteria bred in labs (and teenagers).

Rhytiscopia:

A neurotic preoccupation with wrinkles.

Nyctalopia:

An inability to see at night.

Gyrovagues:

Medieval Christian monks who wandered from monastery to monastery, or traveling salesmen and others who go door to door.

Tegestologist:

A collector of beer coasters.

Limophoitos:

Insanity caused by lack of food.

Ventoseness:

A tendency to fart.

Necromimesis:

A morbid state in which the sufferer believes himself to be dead.

Cumberworld:

One so idle as to be a burden on his friends.

Ozostomia:

Evil-smelling breath.

Maulifuff:

A woman who makes a fuss about everything but does little or nothing.

Frugivore:

An animal that eats fruit, such as the orangutan, whose diet is 65% fruit.

Collywobbles:

Intestinal cramps, such as colic, or a feeling of apprehension.

Quodlibetarian:

One who argues about anything.

Chiliarch:

In ancient Greece, the commander of 1,000 men (chilioi, a thousand; archos, leader).

Booboisie:

Coined in the 1920s by social critic H.L. Mencken to describe the gullible masses. A parody of the French word bourgeoisie.

Orchiectomy:

From the Greek word orkhis (testicles), the surgical removal of one, or both.

Flyspecked:

Marked with tiny stains from the excrement of flies.

Sophomania:

A delusional state in which the sufferer believes he or she is of exceptional intelligence.

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Historic April Fools

It’s not unusual to find odd-but-true stories in the news these days. But if the date of the article is April 1, you might want to think twice before assuming it’s true.

In 1959…

The Indiana Kokomo Tribune announced that due to budget cuts, the city police department would now be closing each night from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. Anyone who called the police after hours would have to leave a message on the answering machine, and in the morning a police officer would listen to the messages. “We will check the hospitals and the coroner, and if they don’t have any trouble, we will know that nothing happened,” the paper quoted a police department spokesperson as saying.

In 1980…

The BBC broadcast a report that London’s Big Ben was going to be remade into a digital clock and the clock hands would be offered for sale to the first listeners who called in. “Surprisingly, few people thought it was funny,” a BBC spokesman told reporters.

In 1981…

The Herald-News in Roscommon, Michigan, printed a warning that scientists were preparing to release 2,000 “freshwater sharks” into three area lakes as part of a government-funded study.


England’s Daily Mail newspaper published a story about a Japanese entrant in the London Marathon named Kimo Nakajimi who, thanks to an error in translation, thought he had to run for 26 days—not 26 miles. The paper reported that there had been several recent sightings of Nakajimi, but that all attempts to flag him down had failed.

In 1993…

A group calling itself “The Arm the Homeless Coalition” announced that volunteers dressed as Santa would be stationed outside local malls collecting donations to buy guns and ammo for the homeless citizens of Columbus, Ohio. “There are organizations that deal with food and jobs, but none that train homeless people to use firearms,” a spokesperson told reporters. A few days later three Ohio State University students admitted they’d made the whole thing up.


The German radio station Westdeutsche Rundfunk in Cologne broadcast a report that the city had issued a new regulation requiring joggers to run no faster than 6 mph; running faster than that “could disturb the squirrels who were in the middle of their mating season.”


San Diego’s KGB-FM radio station announced that the space shuttle Discovery was being diverted from Edwards Air Force Base to a local airport called Montgomery Field. More than 1,000 people descended on the tiny airstrip, snarling traffic for miles. “I had to shoo them away,” said airport manager Tom Raines. “A lot of them were really mad.”

In 1996…

At about the same time that Pepsi made a worldwide change from its traditional white soda cans to blue ones, England’s Virgin Cola announced an “innovation” of its own: its red cans would turn blue when the cans passed their sell-by date. “Virgin strongly advises its customers to avoid ALL blue cans of cola,” the company said in an April 1 newspaper ad. “They are clearly out of date.”


America Online published a report that NASA’s Galileo spacecraft had found life on Jupiter. The following day they admitted they made it up. “Yes, it is a hoax,” an AOL representative told reporters, “but it’s a good one, don’t you think?”

In 1998…

Burger King ran a full-page advertisement in USA Today announcing the new Left-Handed Whopper. “The new left-handed sandwich will have all condiments rotated 180°, thereby reducing the amount of lettuce and other toppings from spilling out the right side of the burger.”


In March 1998, the newsletter New Mexicans for Science and Reason published a story claiming that the Alabama state legislature had passed a bill changing the mathematical value of pi from 3.14159 to the “Biblical value” of 3.0. On April 1 a physicist named Mark Boslough came forward and admitted he wrote the article to parody legislative attacks on the teaching of the theory of evolution.

In 1999…

Just four months after most of western Europe adopted the euro as a standard currency, England’s BBC radio service announced that England was scrapping the national anthem, “God Save the Queen,” in favor of a European anthem that would be sung in German. “There’s too much nationalism,” a spokesperson for the EU supposedly told the BBC. “We need to look for unity.”

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Tallest, Shortest, Biggest, Smallest, Youngest, Oldest: NHL Trivia

It’s almost time for the Stanley Cup playoffs, so here are some facts about some notable standouts from NHL history. (Check out our previous pieces on the NFL , NBA , and baseball .)

Tallest

Longtime Boston Bruins defenseman Zdeno Chara has a lot of acocmplishments in his 20-year NHL career. He’s won the Stanley Cup, the Norris Trophy (for defensive player of the year), and played in the NHL All-Star Game. He’s also the tallest player in NHL history, at 6’9”. He’s so big that during power plays, he can simply stand in front of the net and prevent goals being scored.

Shortest

Roy Woters was a goaltender in the 1920s and 1930s. Reasonably nicknamed “Shrimp,” he was a mere 5’3” tall. But even though he couldn’t block the net with his size alone, he got the job done, because he’s in the Hall of Fame.

Biggest

It’s probably not very pleasant for opposing players to get checked against the boards by enforcer John Scott. Listed at 270 pounds, he’s the largest player the NHL has ever seen.

Smallest

Once again, it’s Shrimp Waters. His listed weight: 135 pounds.

Youngest

In Canada, kids start playing hockey early, so its routine that teenagers enter the NHL. (Even The Great One himself, Wayne Gretzky, entered the pro hockey just before his 18th birthday.) But the absolute youngest: 16-year-old Armand “Bep” Guidolin. He laced up his skates and took the ice for the Boston Bruins at the beginning of the 1942 season.

Oldest

As players start playing hockey young, pros often last well into their 40s. The oldest man to play regularly was Maurice Roberts, who retired in 1951 less than a month before his 46th birthday. Hockey legend Gordie Howie retired in 1971 at age 43, only to comeback at age 45 to play in the NHL competitor World Hockey Association. But then in 1969, as something of a publicity stunt, he played in one game for the Detroit Vipers of the IHL. Howe was 69 at the time.

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You’re My Inspiration

More examples of the unusual places pop-culture architects get their ideas.

The One Ring.

An ancient Roman gold ring was discovered on a farm in rural England in 1785. A stone tablet found at another site 140 years later curses a thief named Senicianus for stealing the ring from its owner, Silvianus. “Among those who bear the name of Senicianus,” reads the inscription, “to none grant health until he bring back the ring to the temple of Nodens.” One of the scholars who translated the tablet: Oxford professor J. R. R. Tolkien, who was a year away from beginning his seminal works revolving around a ring that curses its owner—The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Megan from Bridesmaids.

Melissa McCarthy partially modeled her raunchy character in the 2011 comedy on the Food Network’s Guy Fieri—star of Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives. According to McCarthy, she even wanted to wear the celebrity chef’s trademark spiky bleached hair and backward sunglasses, but producers told her, “You can’t actually be Guy Fieri!”

THE VERY HUNGRY CATERPILLAR .

In 1969, author Eric Carle was punching holes in some paper when he imagined a bookworm eating through a book. His publisher suggested a caterpillar instead. Good choice: The book has sold over 30 million copies.

“Dude Looks Like A Lady.”

The 1987 Aerosmith song was born when Steven Tyler and the band were taking a break from a recording session. They were partying in a New York nightclub and spotted a “lady” at the end of the bar with an enormous head of blonde hair. When the “lady” turned around, it was Vince Neil, the singer from Mötley Crüe. They went back to the studio and finished a song called “Cruisin’ with My Lady”…with new lyrics.

 The Volleyball.

The only “companion” of Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) during his four years spent on an island in 2000’s Cast Away had a real-life counterpart: While researching for the film, writer William Broyles, Jr., spent a few days on an isolated beach with no one to talk to…until a volleyball washed up on shore.

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Le Change en Francaise

Some dramatic changes to the French language were announced in 1990 and they’re scheduled to take effect this fall. Not happy about it: a lot of people who speak French.

The Academie Francaise is the governing body of the French language. In 1990, the agency voted to make some official changes to the language, but that any and all changes would be optional and acceptable side by side with the old ways. The Academie wanted to give French speakers plenty of time to adapt. Plenty of time. Those changes are going into effect in September 2016, with the changes reflected in new school textbooks across France. Reminded of this fact by the French education ministry, many French speakers are treating the changes like they are nothing short of catastrophic.

Among the changes: the elimination of the circumflex. It’s the ^, the accent or punctuation mark that looks like a little hat or a triangle. It appears above the “i” or “u” in thousands of French words, and it’s literally a trace of history. The ^ is used to note that a letter that was once in the word has been eliminated, but to remind the speaker of it so that they pronounce it properly. But now the ^, like the letters it replaced, is gone, too.

The other sea change: about 2,400 French words will have their spelling simplified. For example oignon (onion) is losing its “i” and becoming ognon. (Ironically, if this had been done in the past, a ^ would have replaced that “i”.)

The third major category of changes is the elimination of the hyphen. Mille-patte, le week-end and porte-monnaie will now be millepatte, le weekend, and portemonnaie, respectively. (Those words mean centipede, weekend, and purse.)

These changes are meant to make French easier to use, but many French speakers are not happy with the changes. National Assembly representative Eric Ciotti called the changes “a dumbing down of French,” while French chef Pascal Sanchez calls reforme orthographe (spelling reform) a “glorification of mediocrity.”

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Celebrity Rumors

Despite what you may have heard, Uncle John was not the original Ty-D-Bowl Man. (How do these rumors get started?)

Rumor:

1970s shock-rocker Alice Cooper was actually Ken Osmond, the teen actor who had played Eddie Haskell on Leave It to Beaver.

Truth:

Cooper’s real name is Vincent Furnier. The rumor spread because Cooper said in a magazine interview that as a child he was obnoxious “like Eddie Haskell.” He didn’t mean it literally.

 Rumor:

Gene Simmons of KISS has a signature stage move. He sticks out his giant tongue and wiggles it around. The reason it’s so long is that he had a cow’s tongue surgically grafted onto his own.

Truth:

It seems like something a member of KISS would do, but Simmons has a naturally freakishly long tongue. A “tongue graft” is not a medical procedure that existed in the ’70s…or today.

 Rumor:

Jessica Chastain is Ron Howard’s illegitimate daughter.

Truth:

When picking up awards for her role in Zero Dark Thirty, Chastain thanked her mother, Jerri Chastain, and her father, Michael Hastey. But Hastey isn’t her biological father—a man named Michael Monasterio is. Chastain had a falling out with him years ago, and they don’t speak. The idea of Chastain’s father not being her real father, coupled with the fact that she strongly resembles Howard’s daughter, Bryce Dallas Howard, helped the rumor spread.

Rumor:

Actress Jamie Lee Curtis was born “intersex”—she had both male and female sex organs, and she had surgery shortly after birth to remove all traces of malehood.

Truth:

The only “proof” for this far-fetched story is that Curtis’s parents—Hollywood icons Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh—gave her a gender-neutral name, supposedly until she could have the necessary surgeries. Leigh explained the name in her memoir, which could be the source of the rumor. She and Curtis wanted to name their baby before it arrived, and since they didn’t know the gender before birth, they picked a gender-neutral name.

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Fitness Fads

Every few years, a new exercise craze sweeps the country. Here’s how a few of them got up and moving.

Jazzercise

Jazz choreographer Judi Sheppard Missett came up with the dance-meets-aerobics fitness program—fun routines set to pop music—in 1969 and opened a studio in Los Angeles. By 1977 she no longer taught classes. Instead, she taught instructors who wanted to lead their own classes around the country. She also appeared on TV talk shows, leading hosts such as Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas in Jazzercise routines. By 1984, classes were available in 50 states, as were Jazzercise-branded leotards, workout videos, records—and even a syndicated newspaper column penned by Missett. Think Jazzercise ended in the ’80s? There are still 2,700 locations in the U.S., and it’s a billion-dollar corporation.

Tae Bo

As a teenager, Billy Blanks wanted to grow up to be a martial-arts champion like Bruce Lee. So he took karate and tae kwon do lessons. Based on those martial arts, in 1976, 22-year-old Blanks designed a workout for himself—high-impact aerobics set to fast music, with lots of punches and kicks. He called it “Tae Bo,” a combination of “tae kwon do” and “boxing.” He opened a studio in Boston in 1982, and it did so well, he opened one in Hollywood. In 1998, Blanks was approached to make a line of Tae Bo workout DVDs. Primarily through infomercials, more than $500 million worth of Tae Bo videos have sold worldwide.

Curves

Gary Heavin ran a chain of gyms in Texas in the 1970s, but they went bankrupt. A few years later he started over, but this time he decided to focus on an untapped market: women in their 40s and 50s. Older customers had frequently told him that they didn’t like gyms because they were intimidating, filled with ogling men, and younger women who were already fit. With his wife, Diane, Heavin opened the first Curves for Women in Harlingen, Texas, in 1992. Only women could join, and it offered only one fitness plan, created by Heavin: A customer rotates around exercise stations (treadmill, bike, stretches, weights), switching every 30 seconds. Three circuits equal a 30-minute workout. By 1998, there were 650 Curves locations; today, there are 10,000.

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6 Surprising Academy Award Winners

Doctor Who has on Oscar . Playwright George Bernard Shaw got one well after he died. Here are a few more unlikely Oscar recipients.

Kira Roessler

In the 1980s, Kira Roessler played bass in the influential punk rock band Black Flag, best known for the song “TV Party” as well as its lead singer, actor Henry Rollins. In the 1990s, she shifted careers and became a dialogue editor for movies. She won an Emmy for her sound work on HBO’s John Adams and last weekend, she was part of the Oscar-winning sound effects editing team for Mad Max: Fury Road.

Bobby Houston

Bobby Houston got his start as an actor in 1970s B-movies, including The Hills Have Eyes and The Great American Girl Robbery. Shortly thereafter he became an independent filmmaker. In 2005, he won an Oscar for Best Documentary Short for Mighty Times: The Children’s March.

Saul Bass

There is no Academy Award for Best Title Design (the Academy rejected the idea in 1999), but if there’d always been one, Saul Bass likely would’ve won it. He created the memorable, singular title sequences for movies such as Psycho, Vertigo, and West Side Story. (He also created dozens of movie posters.) In 1968 he won a Best Documentary Short Oscar for his film Why Man Creates. 

Fisher Stevens

Character actor Fisher Stevens is probably best known for his role as robot creator Ben Jabituya in the Short Circuit movies. In 2010 he won the Best Documentary Feature award for The Cove, a film that exposed abuse of dolphins off the coast of Japan.

Eminem

At the 2003 Academy Awards, the nominees for Best Original Song included legendary songwriters John Kander and Fred Ebb, Paul Simon, and U2. They were all beat by star rapper Eminem. His song “Lose Yourself” was featured in his loosely autobiographical movie 8 Mile. It’s the first time a rap song ever won the Best Song award.

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