Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (26 page)

Movie Fact:
Highest-grossing movie about Twins:
Twins
(1988).

The tuatara, a lizard native to New Zealand, has a third eye on the top of its head.

KINGS, SIZED

Here’s the long and short (and wide) of some of the world’s most powerful monarchs
.

N
OT SHORT ENOUGH
It’s no surprise that Charles VIII of France was short when he became king in 1483—he was only 13 years old. As the years passed, his head continued to grow but his body didn’t keep up, making him not only short, but also disproportionate. He did have one thing going for him: He was courteous. In fact, “Charles the Courteous” became his nickname long before 1498, the year he escorted his wife down a dark corridor toward a tennis match, bowed to allow her to pass beneath the door’s low lintel, and then stood up too fast, crashing his head into a wooden beam. He died of a skull fracture nine hours later.

THE KING’S MINIATURE PAINTER

At 5'4", Charles I was the shortest king in British history. That may be why he kept a 19-inch-tall dwarf at court—to have at least one man he could look down on. In 1649, after England’s Second Civil War, the British monarchy was abolished and Charles I was executed, leaving him a head shorter. (He regained his stature after Parliament permitted his head to be sewn back onto his body so that his family could pay their last respects.) The monarchy was restored in 1660, and at 6'2", Charles II towered over his late father. His future wife, Catherine of Braganza, however, was short. So short, in fact, that when they met, Charles said, “My God, they’ve sent me a bat!”

HIS ROYAL WEAKNESS

Five-foot-five-inch King Frederick William I of Prussia (1688–1740) surrounded himself with giants. His Potsdam Giant Guards—a special regiment of the Prussian Infantry—had a minimum height requirement of 6’2”. The Potsdam Giants never saw battle, though. Frederick just liked to watch them perform drills, led by their mascot, a bear. “The most beautiful girl or woman in the world would be a matter of indifference to me,” Frederick confided to the French ambassador, “but tall soldiers...they are my weakness.”

The current London Bridge (in London) is owned by a public charity, Bridge House Estates.

HEY, GOOD LOOKIN’

The Venetian Ambassador once called 6-foot-tall Henry VIII “the handsomest potentate he’d ever set eyes on.” That must have been before the British king got fat. Henry seldom ate fruit or vegetables. Instead, he indulged in eels, whales, porpoises, boars, snails, swans, and peacocks. Historians note that Henry had many symptoms of scurvy—a disease caused by a lack of vitamin C: swollen face, ulcerated legs, lethargy, bloating, and wild mood swings. He also ended up with a 52-inch waistline, weighed 300 pounds, and needed several servants to carry him about in a chair on poles.

SHRIMP À LA KING

Believing that the 900-year-old House of Savoy needed a boost, King Umberto I of Italy did some selective breeding. In 1896 he matched his 5'3" son, Prince Victor Emmanuel, to the tallest royal he could find: 6-foot-tall Elena of Montenegro. While he waited for his own son, Umberto II, to grow up, Victor Emmanuel did all he could to elevate his own stature. He had the legs of his throne cut short so his feet touched the floor and the back seat of his royal car raised so his subjects could see him through the window. The Italians adored
il piccolo
—”the little one”—but he appointed Benito Mussolini to Prime Minister, and Mussolini backed Germany in World War II, a disaster for Italy and its people. In 1946 the little king abdicated, hoping his 6-foot-tall son could hold the throne. He couldn’t. The Italian people voted to make Italy a republic and gave the last Savoy monarch the boot.

QUEEN-SIZED

Like most senior citizens, Queen Victoria suffered from shrinkage—she lost five inches, going from 5' in her youth to 4"7'' in her old age. And by the end of her life (age 82), England’s longest-reigning monarch was almost as wide as she was tall. A pair of her bloomers that sold at auction in 2009 had a 50-inch waist.

World’s first movie theater: Vitascope Hall, in New Orleans (1896). Price of admission: 10¢.

THE GOLDEN PAGE

These facts are worth their weight in Au
.

• Gold’s chemical symbol is Au. Why not G? Because the “au” is short for
aurum
, the mineral’s name in Latin.

• Gold reflects heat and radiation so well that NASA used it to coat the plastic visors of astronauts’ space-suit helmets to provide protection from the Sun’s powerful rays.

• Gold-to-Go ATMs dispense 24-karat gold coins and gold bars. The machines update their prices every 10 minutes (based on current gold prices) and are “largely” burglar-proof and tamper-resistant.

• The most gold ever stored in Fort Knox was in 1949. At the time, there were 701 million ounces there, or 69.9 percent of all the known gold in the world. How much is in there today? The government won’t say.

• For three years, a North Carolina family used a heavy rock found on their farm as a doorstop. In 1802 they sold it to a jeweler for $3.50. Bad move: It turned out to be a 17-pound gold nugget.

• Yellowknife, a city in Canada’s Northwest Territories, is famous for having streets “paved with gold.” (Waste from local gold mines was used to make some of them.)

• The infamous 1838 relocation of the Cherokee known as the “Trail of Tears” is directly linked to gold. The tribe controlled most of the land in the North Georgia. Almost immediately after gold was discovered there in 1828, the Georgia legislature began plans for their removal.

• On average, a ton of ore dug from a gold mine yields only a single ounce of gold.

• Elvis Presley had many custom Cadillacs, but designed only one himself: a gold custom Eldorado convertible with gold pearlescent paint (40 coats), a gold-plated steering wheel, a solid-gold hood ornament, and gold records mounted on the cloth top. The car wasn’t built until 1987—10 years after Elvis died. (There’s a Hot Wheels version.)

King George II of England had a pet armadillo. He called it “Indian Monster.”

MISERY INDEXES

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

T
HE 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 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 a Florida engineer named 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.

THE INES SCALE

Background:
INES stands for International Nuclear Event Scale, the scale used to measure disasters at nuclear power plants and other nuclear facilities. Drawing inspiration from similar scales used by the French and Japanese nuclear industries, the International Atomic Energy Agency created INES in 1990 to provide a single international standard of comparison that it hoped would be as useful as the Fahrenheit scale or the metric system.

In Oman, date palms are so valuable that the government keeps a list of who owns each tree.

How It Works:
Nuclear events are measured on a scale of 1 to 7: Levels 1 to 3 have consequences contained inside the affected facility and are called “incidents”; levels 4 to 7 have consequences outside the facility and are called “accidents”:

Level 1:
Anomaly

Level 2:
Incident

Level 3:
Serious Incident

Level 4:
Accident with Local Consequences

Level 5:
Accident with Wider Consequences

Level 6:
Serious Accident

Level 7:
Major Accident

Details:
Like the Richter scale, the INES scale is a
logarithmic
scale: Each increase in level (say, from Level 4 to Level 5) represents a tenfold increase in the severity of the disaster.

• The 1979 accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania was a Level 5 “Accident with Wider Consequences” because it involved a partial meltdown with severe damage to the reactor core, plus limited release of radioactive material into the environment.

• The 1986 accident at Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union ranks as the worst nuclear disaster in history and one of only two Level 7 “Major Accidents” to date (release of a “significant fraction” of the nuclear material in the reactor core, resulting in widespread health and environmental effects). The other Level 7 accident occurred after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

• It can take time to accurately assess the scale of a nuclear event, especially if more than one reactor is involved. In the months following the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami, officials were still assessing the damage to six nuclear reactors at the Fukushima nuclear power plants. Three reactors have been assessed as Level 5 incidents (severe damage to the reactor core, and
limited
release of radioactive material) and one was rated at level 3 (loss of cooling water to the reactor). The overall incident, however, was categorized as a Level 7 accident.

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.

You can’t hum if you’re holding your nose closed. Try it.

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...so far.

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 June 2011, it was six minutes to midnight.)