Free Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader by Bathroom Readers’ Institute Page A

plane’s wings off, the Navy would consider buying it.
    Reasonable or not, the test encouraged airplane manufacturers to build planes stronger than necessary, which made them heavy.
Egg whites will turn pink when left overnight in a copper bowl.
    That, in turn, made them slow and difficult to maneuver—bad qualities for aircraft whose speed and agility could mean the difference between victory and defeat.
    The worst example of this was the 2.5-ton Brewster Buffalo. It was so overbuilt in its structure that the manufacturer under built other parts of it—landing gear and machine guns, for example—just to save on weight.
    England’s Royal Air Force bought 150 Buffaloes, but then found them so worthless against the fast German fighters that it sent them to Britain’s Far East colonies, to go up against Japanese fighters (considered “antiquated junk”). Big mistake—Japan’s Mitsubishi Zeros proved to be faster, more maneuverable and better armed. They flew circles—literally—around the Buffaloes, whose four tiny machine guns were no match for the Zero’s two larger machine guns and 20-millimeter cannons.
    According to one expert, within a few months of the start of the war, “every Buffalo in the Far East had been lost, giving Brewster the distinction of having handed the Japanese complete air superiority over Southeast Asia on a silver platter.”
    Only a few American Buffaloes saw action and they didn’t see it for long—13 of the 19 sent into combat during the Battle of Midway in June 1942 were shot out of the sky in less than half an hour. “It is my belief,” wrote one Buffalo pilot who survived, “that any commander who orders pilots out for combat in a Brewster should consider the pilot as lost before leaving the ground.”
    CONVAIR XFY-1 POGO
    One of the problems with flying an airplane, especially in a war, is that there isn’t always a runway where you need one. The Convair Pogo, developed in the mid-1950s, was designed to be an airplane that didn’t need a runway. It looked just like an ordinary plane, except that it was tilted up vertically on its tail like a rocket. It had an engine and propeller so powerful that it could take off straight up in the air and land the same way, just like a helicopter…or a pogo stick.
    Taking off wasn’t too difficult, but landing vertically was another story: the pilot had to literally set the plane back down on the ground while looking over his shoulder, which was almost impossible.
    It was the same with a similar plane, the XFV-1, being developed at Lockheed. “We practiced landing looking over our shoulders,” remembers Lockheed designer Kelly Johnson, “but we couldn’t tell how fast we were coming down, or when we would hit. We wrote the Navy: ‘We think it is inadvisable to land the airplane.’ They came back with one paragraph that said, ‘We agree.’”
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    CONVAIR XF2Y-1 SEA DART
    The Sea Dart was built in the 1950s when it was easy to get money from the Pentagon and defense contractors were willing to try anything. So how about a supersonic jet fighter…on water skis?
    Only five prototypes were ever made, only three were ever flown, and only two made it back safely. Vibration caused by the retractable skis made the Sea Dart unstable, but what really killed it was common sense. With the Pentagon’s approval, Convair had pumped millions into the Sea Dart program without having any idea why such planes should be built in the first place. They never did come up with a reason, either.
    “The program was terminated,” Yenne writes, “without ever having demonstrated any operational rationale.”
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    THOUGHTS FOR THE THRONE
    If you could shrink the world down to 100 people—keeping the same ratios—there would be:
    • 51 female, 49 male
    • 57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 14 from the