JON CARROLL
Tuesday, December 26, 1995
©2000 San Francisco Chronicle
AND IF YOU do not have yesterday's newspaper in front of you, quick, run to the recycling bin or local trash heap so that the following will be comprehensible:
1. The Tube Alloys were the British equivalent of the Manhattan Project, a group of scientists working toward the development of an atomic bomb. The two groups soon joined forces.
2. The three motion pictures that have won Academy Awards in all five major categories are ``It Happened One Night'' (1934), ``One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'' (1975) and ``The Silence of the Lambs'' (1991), and if that progression doesn't say something about something, I don't know what does, if you catch my meaning.
3. ``Mother liquor'' is a slang term for molasses.
4. Will Rogers, W. C. Fields, Albert Einstein and Wallace Stevens were all born in 1879.
5. ``Ghetto'' is a Venetian word for ``foundry,'' which is what that part of the city had been before the Jews were forced to live there and only there -- in 1515.
6. ``Hamlet'' takes place in Denmark; ``Twelfth Night'' takes place in ``a city in Illyria, and the sea-coast near it''; ``The Taming of the Shrew'' takes place in Padua; ``All's Well That Ends Well'' takes place in Roussillon, Paris, Florence and Marseilles.
7. Babe Ruth stole 123 bases in his career, 21 more than Gehrig, 93 more than DiMaggio and 99 more than Ted Williams. 8. ``The Manchurian Candidate,'' ``The Gulag Archipelago,'' ``The Eustace Diamonds,'' the Deptford Trilogy, ``Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung.'' ``Deptford'' isn't strictly speaking a title, but it was necessary to get Robertson Davies (RIP) in here somehow.
9. King Arthur slain, A.D. 539; Leif Eriksson reaches America, circa 1000; farthest westward extremity of Genghis Khan's empire, 1224; Robin Hood dies, 1247; Marco Polo dictates his memoirs, 1286; Chaucer publishes ``Canterbury Tales,'' 1477; Leonardo da Vinci paints the Mona Lisa, 1503; rifle is invented, 1520.
10. JOHN UPDIKE
wrote, ``We are cruel enough without meaning to be'' in ``Rabbit Is Rich''; Eldridge Cleaver said, ``You're either part of the solution or part of the problem'' in a speech in San Francisco; W. P. Kinsella wrote, ``If you build it, he will come'' in ``Shoeless Joe.''11. That's the Monty Python parrot sketch, you silly nit.
12. Robert Lee Frost, the great Yankee poet, was named for the great Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
13. WIDMERPOOL IS
sort of the villain-presumptive in the grand 12-volume work ``A Dance to the Music of Time'' by Anthony Powell.14. That plane along the 20th parallel north from the equator across Africa passes over Mauritania, Mali, Algeria, Niger, Chad and the Sudan. It's really only a tiny sliver of Algeria; still, fair is fair.
15. That same plane, now flying along the 20th parallel south, passes over Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Madagascar.
16. Sockdolager, Upset, Hance, Spectre and 110 Mile are all names of rapids along the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon.
17. REOs are classic automobiles; when Ransom Eli Olds left the Olds Motor Co. (makers of, yes, the Oldsmobile), he was prohibited from using his last name. So he used his initials instead.
18. Although it is certain that the corn chip was created long before the snack cake, the Frito qua Frito was not introduced until 1932, by one Elmer Doolin, who also invented a machine for making them rapidly. The Twinkie was invented a year earlier, by James Dewar, looking for a way to fill his company's shortcake pans when strawberries were not in season.
19. Bullwinkle the Moose was named after Clarence Bulwinkel, a used-car dealer in Berkeley. And that's all I know.
©2000 San Francisco Chronicle Page B16