I SPY…AT THE MOVIES

More fun in-jokes and cameos from the silver screen.

CHARLIE’S ANGELS (2000)
I Spy…E.T.’s living room
Where to Find It: Wearing nothing but a plastic blow-up swimming-pool toy, Dylan (Drew Barrymore) bursts into a house where two boys are playing a video game. It’s the same house in Tujunga, California, that was used for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the film that launched Barrymore’s career in 1982. (To hammer the point home, the kids are eating Reese’s Pieces and there’s an E.T. poster on the wall.)

That’s just one tiny excerpt from the brand new Uncle John’s 24-KARAT GOLD Bathroom Reader.

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A few origin stories for some miserable things we’ve all heard of:

MISERY INDEXES

Here’s a look at some famous and not-so-famous indexes
that are used to measure the bad things in life.

THE SAFFIR-SIMPSON HURRICANE SCALE
Background: Robert Simpson was the head of the National Hurricane Center in August 1969 when Hurricane Camille—one of the most powerful hurricanes ever to hit the United States—bore down on the Gulf Coast states. New forecasting tools had enabled the Center to predict Camille’s intensity, and Simpson raised such an alarm that more than 81,000 people evacuated the affected areas. Result: Fewer than 300 people were killed when it hit. Nonetheless, Simpson felt that a more effective way of communicating the size and likely impact of a hurricane was needed. So he contacted Florida engineer Herbert Saffir, who had recently devised a five-category windstorm scale for the United Nations to predict how much damage would be caused to structures hit by winds of various strengths. Simpson and Saffir worked to incorporate potential damage from storm surges and flooding intro hurricane predictions; their Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale made its debut in 1971.
How It Works: Hurricanes are classified into five categories according to wind speed: Category 1 (74–95 mph), Category 2 (96–110 mph), Category 3 (111–130 mph), Category 4 (131–155 mph), and Category 5 (156 mph and greater).
Details: The scale has proven ineffective at predicting flooding and the height of storm surges. Both vary too much according to local factors such as the shape of the coastline and slope of the continental shelf where the hurricane makes landfall. In 2010 these elements were removed; now it’s solely a wind scale.

DEFCON
Background: If you’re a fan of science fiction or war movies, you may already know that DEFCON is short for “Defense Readiness Condition” and is measured on a scale from 1 to 5. The system was created in the late 1950s to give all U.S. military operations worldwide a simple measure of the nation’s current state of alert.
How It Works: DEFCON 5 is the lowest level of readiness in peacetime. As perceived threats increase, the military’s readiness can be raised in stages all the way to DEFCON 1, when war is imminent. (Precise details of how the military increases its readiness when the DEFCON level is raised are kept secret.)
Details: Are you old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962? Throughout much of the Cold War the military was kept at DEFCON 4, but during the Cuban Missile Crisis the alert level was raised to DEFCON 3, and the U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Air Command was ordered to DEFCON 2. That’s the only time since the creation of the system that any part of the military has been placed at DEFCON 2. During the 9/11 attacks the alert level never rose above DEFCON 3. DEFCON 1 has never been used.

THE DOOMSDAY CLOCK
Background: By the summer of 1947, just two years after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the directors of the University of Chicago’s Bulletin of Atomic Scientists had grown so concerned about the possibility of another nuclear war that they created a symbolic clock face called the “Doomsday Clock” to convey their estimation of how close the world was to “midnight”—nuclear Armageddon—at any point in time. The clock has appeared on the cover of the Bulletin ever since.
How It Works: When the clock was created in June 1947, it was set at seven minutes to midnight. Between 1947 and 2011, the minute hand was moved 19 times, closer to midnight when the Bulletin’s board of directors thought the danger of nuclear war was increasing; farther from midnight when the danger was receding.
Details: When the U.S. and the Soviet Union both tested hydrogen bombs in 1953, the clock was reset from three minutes to just two minutes before midnight, the closest to the zero hour that it has ever been set. The farthest it has ever been from midnight was in 1991, when the end of the Cold War and the signing of the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty prompted the editors to move it from 10 minutes to 17 minutes ’til midnight in a single stroke. In 2007 the clock was updated to include non-nuclear dangers such as biological weapons and climate change. (So what time is it now? As of December 2011, it’s six minutes to midnight.)

That’s another in our series of article excerpts from the brand new Uncle John’s 24-KARAT GOLD Bathroom Reader. Read about more misery indexes, and hundreds of other stories – at 30% off the usual price as part of our annual HOLIDAY SALE.

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And other weird ways to go…

THEY WENT THATAWAY

Some famous people aren’t just remarkable for how they lived,
but also for how they died. Take these folks, for example

JOHN A. ROEBLING (1806–69)
Claim to Fame: The engineer who designed the Brooklyn Bridge
Cause of Death: Killed by the Brooklyn Bridge
Details: On June 28, 1869 Roebling was standing on a dock surveying the location of the tower on the Brooklyn side. When an approaching ferry pressed up against the dock, Roebling got his right foot caught between the boat and the dock and his toes were badly crushed. They were amputated later that same day. Roebling refused further medical treatment, perhaps contributing to his developingtetanus, a disease caused when a wound is infected by a strain of bacteria commonly found in dirt. In the days before tetanus shots, the disease could be fatal, and in Roebling’s case it was. After a week of suffering terrible seizures he died on July 22.
Note: Roebling’s son Washington, who took over supervision of the project after his father’s death, was also nearly killed by the Brooklyn Bridge. Long hours spent in caissons, the pressurized underwater chambers used to construct the bridge’s foundation, left him severely disabled by decompression sickness, more commonly known as “the bends.” For the remaining decade that it took to finish the bridge, he supervised the project from his house via intermediaries, rarely returned to the job site, and did not attend the bridge’s opening in 1883.

KING ALEXANDER OF GREECE (1893–1920)
Claim to Fame: Alexander reigned from 1917 to 1920. He was a first cousin of Prince Philip of England
Cause of Death: Killed by his pet monkeys
Details: On October 2, 1920, the king was walking his dog through the Royal Garden in Athens—now called the National Garden—when one the monkeys that lived there attacked the dog. (Some sources claim it was the dog that attacked the mon- key.) When Alexander tried to separate them with a stick, a second monkey came to the defense of the first, and the King was badly bitten by both. He died from his wounds three weeks later.
Note: Alexander became king during World War I after his father, King Constantine I, was forced off the throne because of his pro-German sympathies. After Alexander’s death Constantine returned to the throne, making Alexander a rare example of a king who succeeded his father and was succeeded by him, as well. Constantine abdicated a second time in 1922, this time for good.

JASPER NEWTON “JACK” DANIEL (1846–1911)
Claim to Fame: The distiller who created Jack Daniel’s Whiskey
Cause of Death: A bad memory, exacerbated by a short temper
Details: Daniel had a terrible time remembering the combination to his office safe (no word on whether whiskey was a factor), and it was usually his nephew’s job to open it One morning, however, Daniel came in to work early and his nephew wasn’t there. Daniel tried to open the safe himself and got so frustrated in the attempt that he kicked the safe, striking it so hard that he broke his toe. The toe became infected, and he developed septicemia, or blood poisoning, which killed him on October 10, 1911. Daniel’s last words (according to the distillery): “One last drink, please.”

That’s another in our series of article excerpts from the brand new Uncle John’s 24-KARAT GOLD Bathroom Reader. Read about more weird deaths, and hundreds of other stories – at 30% off the usual price as part of our annual HOLIDAY SALE.

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This is always one of our favorite regular pages in the UJBR.

FLUBBED HEADLINES
Whether silly, naughty, obvious, or just plain bizarre, they’re all real:

Chick Accuses Some of Her Male Colleagues of Sexism

Westinghouse Gives Robot Rights to Firm

How to Combat That Feeling of Helplessness With Illegal Drugs

World’s Largest Stove Destroyed by Fire

Young Marines Make Tasty Christmas Treats

Students cook & serve grandparents

Hispanics ace Spanish tests

Academics to dissect Bob Dylan at NY conference

Experts: Fewer blows to head could reduce brain damage

Tiger Woods plays with own balls, Nike says

Mayor Parris to homeless: Go home

That’s another in our excerpt series from the brand spanking new Uncle John’s 24-KARAT GOLD Bathroom Reader! You can read more actual headlines, as well as hundreds of other stories – at 30% off the usual price as part of our annual HOLIDAY SALE! And that’s 30% of ALL our books.

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OBSCURE FADS OF THE ’60S

Sure, you’ve heard of lava lamps, Nehru jackets, yo-yos, pop art,
op art, paper dresses, and bell-bottoms. But here are a few
crazes of the 1960s that may have escaped you.

PIANO WRECKING (1963)
As part of his nightclub act in the 1930s, Jimmy Durante would play a few songs on a piano…then slowly rip it apart with his bare bands and throw the chunks out into the audience. It was a bizarre bit of performance art, and the audience loved it. More than three decades after Durante did it, wrecking pianos became a fad in the engineering department at Derby College of Technology in England. Six-man teams used tools such as axes, sledgehammers, and crowbars to break a piano into pieces so tiny that they could be passed through a 20-cm hole (that’s a little less than eight inches), competing to see who could do it fastest. The fad spread to Cal Tech in Pasadena, California, where the Piano Reduction Study Group deconstructed a piano in just 10 minutes, 44 seconds. Engineering students at Wayne State University in Detroit beat that record with a time of 4 minutes, 51 seconds. But why wreck a piano into tiny bits? Like earlier weird college fads like phone-booth stuffing or goldfish swallowing, it was probably to blow off steam incurred from the rigors of academia. Or, as Robert Diller of Cal Tech told Time in 1963, “It has psychological implications which are pretty clear to us. It’s a satire on the obso- lescence of today’s society.” The fad died out by the mid-’60s, replaced with a far more pressing college pastime: protesting the Vietnam War.

That’s another excerpt in our series of bits and pieces from the brand spanking new Uncle John’s 24-KARAT GOLD Bathroom Reader! You can about read more obscure 1960s fads, as well as hundreds of other stories – at 30% off the usual price as part of our annual HOLIDAY SALE! And that’s 30% of ALL our books.

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THE CURSE OF THE DEMON CORE

The real-life story of a small ball of plutonium, the people
it killed, and the researchers who blew it up.

THE BOMB
On the evening of Tuesday, August 21, 1945, American physicist Harry Daghlian was working at the U.S. government’s ultra-secret Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. He was performing a very delicate experiment: Daghlian was placing brick-shaped pieces of metal around a chunk of plutonium, the highly unstable fuel used in most nuclear bombs. And he was making it more unstable with every brick he placed around it. [...]

Daghlian was working with a gray, softball-sized sphere of Pu-239. It was basically the core, or pit, of a nuclear bomb—the part that does the exploding. He was performing experiments with the core to determine whether it was the proper size and density to sustain a chain reaction—so it could be used in an actual bomb.

CORE VALUES
Daghlian began surrounding the core with bricks of tungsten carbide, a very dense metal that reflects neutron radiation. The more enclosed in metal the core became, the more neutrons were reflected back into the core, rather than simply flying off. That meant that the rate of neutron bashing and atom splitting in the core increased as Daghlian added more and more bricks. (A geiger counter indicated whether the experiment was working, by clicking faster and faster.) [...]

Using the bricks, Daghlian built walls, about ten inches on a side and ten inches high, around the plutonium. He then took a brick and slowly positioned it—he was simply holding it in his hand—over the opening at the top of the structure, right over the core. The geiger counter clicked wildly. Enough neutrons were now being reflected back into the core that it was headed toward a supercritical state.

Daghlian went to jerk the brick away…and dropped it.

UH-OH
The brick landed right on top of the ball of plutonium. The plutonium was now effectively surrounded by neutron reflecting material, and it went supercritical immediately. There was a blue flash…

That’s another in our excerpt series from the brand spanking new Uncle John’s 24-KARAT GOLD Bathroom Reader! You can read the rest of harrowing tale of the “The Curse of the Demon Core,” as well as hundreds of other stories – at 30% off the usual price as part of our annual HOLIDAY SALE! And that’s 30% of ALL our books. Get one for all the aspiring physicists in the family!

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