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    Uncle John's Facts to Go Fads & Flops
    Uncle John's Facts to Go Fads & Flops
    Uncle John's Facts to Go Fads & Flops
    Ebook91 pages1 hour

    Uncle John's Facts to Go Fads & Flops

    By Bathroom Readers' Institute

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    About this ebook

    It’s pet rocks and faux pas in Fads & Flops!

    Uncle John takes the nation by storm in this hip new e-book of Bathroom Reader classics and some brand-new articles! Fads & Flops is overflowing with stories of unlikely successes and colossal failures. So whether you were weaned on bell bottoms, parachute pants, baggy pants, or skinny jeans, you’ll find the one thing that never goes out of style: great bathroom reading! Read about…

     

    • The world’s stupidest business decisions
    • Playing real-life Pac-Man on the streets of New York City
    • From flop to fad: The Rocky Horror Picture Show
    • The ups and downs of the trampoline
    • Le Car and other le-mons
    • Turtles, Transformers, and Power Rangers
    • Shaky Etch-A-Sketch moments
    • What the backward messages in rock songs really mean
    • Dot Bombs

    And much, much more!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPortable Press
    Release dateMar 15, 2014
    ISBN9781626862326
    Uncle John's Facts to Go Fads & Flops
    Author

    Bathroom Readers' Institute

    The Bathroom Readers' Institute is a tight-knit group of loyal and skilled writers, researchers, and editors who have been working as a team for years. The BRI understands the habits of a very special market—Throne Sitters—and devotes itself to providing amazing facts and conversation pieces.

    Read more from Bathroom Readers' Institute

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    Book preview

    Uncle John's Facts to Go Fads & Flops - Bathroom Readers' Institute

    21ST-CENTURY FADS

    Uncle John told us he just doesn’t get all these

    new fads, so we told him to go pet his pet rock.

    BAGEL HEADS

    This beauty treatment fad got its start in Tokyo dance clubs in 2009. Using disposable syringes, teenagers inject saline solution (a common hydrating fluid) into their foreheads. A few moments later, the saline disfigures the forehead, creating a large, bulbous growth with an indentation in the middle. In other words, it looks like a giant bagel (or possibly a tumor) growing out of the forehead. Food coloring is sometimes added to the saline to turn the bagel green or blue. Thankfully, it’s not permanent—the bulge deflates in about a day.

    IKEA DINNER PARTIES

    IKEA sells modern-looking furniture that’s very popular with the young and hip. So popular, in fact, that some can’t wait to get home to enjoy IKEA merchandise. In Sacramento in 2008, a small group of young people began holding dinner parties inside an IKEA store, and the fad has since caught on at locations around the U.S. After dining on lingonberry jam and meatballs in the store’s Swedish-themed cafeteria, partiers retire to the living-room furniture displays to play board games. IKEA managers don’t seem to mind—the partygoers are paying customers, after all, and the publicity doesn’t hurt.

    FINGER MUSTACHE TATTOOS

    In a trend that’s taken off around Brooklyn, New York, college-age men and women get a permanent tattoo of a tiny handlebar mustache on one side of their index finger. Why? When they hold it up to their face, above the lip, it looks like they have a tiny, silly mustache. (Superbad star Jonah Hill showed his off on Saturday Night Live.) The one drawback to a finger mustache tattoo (other than actually having a finger mustache tattoo) is that the joke doesn’t work if you’re wearing gloves. Problem solved: You can now buy gloves preprinted with a mustache.

    In 2005, North Korea launched an ad campaign telling men to cut their hair. The campaign’s slogan: Trim Our Hair According to Socialist Lifestyle.

    MR. TROLOLO

    Here’s the story of a viral video three decades in the making.

    FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

    Eduard Khil (pronounced Hill) was a pop singer from St. Petersburg, Russia. Famous there since the 1960s, he was virtually unheard of in the United States until 2009. That’s when a YouTube user posted a video from a 1976 Russian TV show in which Khil lip-syncs to his 1966 hit song I Am Glad Because I Am Finally Returning Back Home.

    The video is strangely compelling: Wearing a brown polyester suit with a yellow tie, Khil slowly strolls onto an orange-and-yellow soundstage, bouncing in time to the cheesy bossa nova music. He seems almost robotic as he smiles the entire time and waves to nobody in particular. But what makes the song truly unique are the nonsense lyrics Khil sings in his operatic baritone. Sample: Yayaya-ya-yaya-ya yaya-ya / Oo oo oo oo / ahh EEEE! / Trololololo!

    Khil’s lyricist actually did pen some words to the song; it was about a cowboy from Kentucky longing for his woman (who is at home knitting him some stockings). However, Soviet sensors banned the lyrics for being offensive, so Khil decided to record the song with the nonsense words instead.

    IT’S A FAD!

    Not long after the song was posted online, Khil became known on the Web as Mr. Trololo, and his video and its dozens of parodies have amassed (as of 2014) 17 million hits. Even a 2009 clip of Khil watching YouTube parodies of himself (and commenting on them in Russian) got half a million views.

    American fans started a Facebook page urging him to come out of retirement and tour again, but he politely declined, saying he had no plans to perform live. However, Khil did post a video response thanking everyone for the renewed interest in a 40-year-old song. He also requested that all the people of the world contribute actual lyrics to the song, and we will all sing together. Overjoyed by his newfound stardom, Khil told his fans, Thank you for getting this supply of cheerfulness and optimism while listening to this melody.

    PASSING OF A LEGEND

    Sadly, Khil was only able to enjoy his renewed fame for a short time; he suffered a stroke in 2012 and died at the age of 77. While his passing simply made the rounds on entertainment sites in the U.S., in Russia it was a national day of mourning. Even President Vladimir Putin sent the family his condolences: Eduard Khil was unique in his extraordinary charm and lyricism, constant in his professionalism, vocal culture, and creative taste. (Uncle John’s challenge: Watch Mr. Trololo online and then try not to sing the melody out loud.)

    Why doesn’t the Mona Lisa have eyebrows? Because when Leonardo da Vinci painted her in 1504, shaved eyebrows were a fad in Italy.

    LE FLOP

    Renault’s Le Car was sporty, economical, and cute. And, according to Tom and Ray Magliozzi, hosts of NPR’s Car Talk, it was also so badly engineered that it would put you in mortal danger if you ran into anything larger than a croissant. Here’s le story.

    LE COMPANY

    By 1976, French automaker Renault had been trying to break into the North American market for nearly two decades. The company had been producing cars since 1897—almost from the birth of the automobile—and knew a thing or two about selling them to fuel-conscious Europeans. But the U.S. was a different market, saturated with gas-guzzling models. Then the energy

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