Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (28 page)

First woman elected to U.S. political office: Susanna Salter, mayor of Argonia, Kansas (1887).

A WORLD APART

After a tense standoff lasting a few more days, the crew of the
Primrose
were evacuated by helicopter to safety. They were lucky to get away: It was their misfortune to have run aground just offshore of one of the strangest islands on Earth, and probably the very last of its kind. Anthropologists believe that the men who appeared on the beach that morning in 1981 are members of a hunter-gatherer tribe that has lived on the island for 65,000 years. That’s 35,000 years before the last ice age, 55,000 years before the giant wooly mammoths disappeared from North America, and 62,000 years before the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids at Giza. These people are believed to be the direct descendants of the first humans out of Africa.

The outside world has known about the North Sentinel Islanders for centuries, but the islanders have been almost completely cut off from the rest of the world
all
that time, and they fiercely maintain their isolation to this day. No one knows what language they speak or what they call themselves—they have never allowed anyone to get close enough to find out. The outside world calls them the “Sentineli” or the “Sentinelese,” after the island. It’s estimated that the 28-square-mile island (slightly larger than Manhattan) is capable of supporting as many as 400 hunter-gatherers, but no one knows how many people live there.

HOME ALONE

North Sentinel Island is amazingly well suited to both support and isolate a tribe like the Sentinelese. It’s too small to interest settlers or colonial powers, especially when there are bigger, better islands within a few hours’ sailing time. And unlike many of those islands, North Sentinel has no natural harbors, so there’s no good place for a ship to take shelter from a storm. Furthermore, the island is surrounded by a ring of submerged coral reefs that prevent large ships from approaching. This was especially true during the age of sail, when ships had no way of quickly maneuvering out of harm’s way once they realized that the reefs were there. Narrow openings in the reefs allow small boats to slip through and land on the beach, but these are passable only in good weather and calm seas, which occur as infrequently as two months out of the year. For the remaining 10 months, the island cannot be safely approached from the sea.

Tonka uses 5.1 million lbs. of sheet metal every year to manufacture its toy trucks.

SELF-SUFFICIENCY

At the same time that they keep strangers out, the coral reefs help keep the Sentinelese in, because the reefs created several shallow lagoons that are teeming with sea life. The food provided by these lagoons is so plentiful that the Sentinelese have never needed to fish in the deep sea waters beyond the coral reefs. They propel their dugout canoes through the shallow lagoons by poling along the bottom, but they cannot navigate in water deeper than the length of their poles. They’ve never invented oars, without which they cannot leave the island.

The Andaman Islands, North Sentinel Island included, sit at the crossroads of ancient trade routes between Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Ironically, this may have further encouraged the isolationist tendencies of the Sentinelese, because their dark skin and African appearance would have made them the targets of any slave traders who might have tried to land on the island over the centuries. Periodic contact with such outsiders would have only intensified the tribe’s hostility toward the outside world and their desire to be left alone.

WHO ARE YOU WEARING?

One more thing that has protected the Sentinelese from outsiders: the age-old belief that all Andaman Island tribes were cannibals. There is no evidence that any of them were, except that some tribes wore the bones of their ancestors as jewelry (including the skulls), which they wore strapped to their backs. It would have been easy to mistake such people for cannibals. Who’d stick around long enough to find out that they weren’t?

By the time the Greek astronomer Ptolemy wrote of an “Island of Cannibals” somewhere in the Bay of Bengal in the 2nd century A.D., sailors were already giving the Andamans a wide berth. Marco Polo didn’t help matters in the 1290s when he described the Andamanese as “a brutish and savage race...[who] kill and eat every foreigner whom they can lay their hands upon.” Claims like these certainly did help to keep strangers away. And considering how fiercely the Sentinelese and other Andaman tribes defended their islands, it’s probably a lucky thing that they did.

Turn to
page 357
for Part II of the story
.

The world’s largest elk herd (over 200,000) is in Colorado’s White River National Forest.

WEIRD ANIMAL NEWS

Strange tales of creatures great and small
.

T
HAT’S SO RAVEN
Wall Street brokers spend years learning the intricacies of the financial markets so they can pick stocks that make money for their investors. A monkey named Raven picks
her
stocks by throwing darts at a list of companies. In 2000 she was ranked the 22nd-best fund manager in the United States—her MonkeyDex fund outperformed more than 6,000 licensed (and experienced) brokers. When asked to divulge the secret to winning at high-finance stock speculating, her handlers said, “It’s all in the wrist action.”

BOVINE INTERVENTION

How long could you elude the British Army? In 1999 a herd of nine Limousin cattle escaped from a Staffordshire, England, farm and made a new home in nearby Hopwas Woods. For the next three months they managed to elude 50 hunters, 100 soldiers, and a helicopter equipped with thermal imaging equipment. Staffordshire Police installed “Go Slow” signs on local roadways to prevent people from scaring the cows, which can be dangerous when frightened. Four cows were eventually shot and killed, but public outcry convinced authorities to spare the other five...once they were caught.

EIGHT ARMS TO PRANK YOU

One morning in 2009, an employee of the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium arrived at work to discover three inches of standing water throughout the building, and still flowing out of a 200-gallon saltwater tank. The culprit: a curious octopus. The water-control valve was located on the inside of the octopus’s giant tank. Aquarium official Tara Treiber believes that the octopus was merely exploring and “found something loose and pulled on it,” sending water everywhere, damaging the aquarium’s recently installed carpets, but not killing any of the sea creatures.

Oldest operating tavern in the US: the White Horse Tavern in Newport, RI, opened in 1673.

A BAD CASE OF HIVES

The bees are coming! In 1999 a swarm of 10,000 bees suddenly descended on the Manhattan Beach Pier in California. None of the 150 people at the pier were injured, but all were evacuated while officials cleared the area. The insects are part of an increasing expansion of Africanized “killer” bees that have been moving north from South America since the 1950s. The Africanized Honey Bee problem has gotten so bad in Manhattan Beach that the area is now considered to be “colonized.” The Manhattan Beach City website has a page about how to deal with AHBs, and the city of 35,000 has four bee removal services—about four times as many as any other town with such a small population.

TRUNKARDS

The habitats of wild elephants in India continue to be threatened by human encroachment. In 1999, 15 of the giant animals used their trunks to break into thatched huts in the northeastern village of Prajapatibosti. They then proceeded to drink the rice beer they found inside...and there was enough to get all 15 elephants drunk. The inebriated pachyderms then trampled rice paddies and more huts, killing a family of four.

IT’S BETTER THAN WHAT THEY USUALLY THROW

Researchers at the Furuvik Zoo in Gavle, Sweden, first realized there was a problem with their chimpanzee, Santino, when visitors complained that the animal was throwing rocks at them. The scientists looked at video footage and discovered that Santino had planned the attacks. Zookeepers found hidden stashes of rocks and concrete chunks all around his enclosure. When visitors came close, Santino unloaded. (The zoo keeps a close eye on him now.)

WE ARE NOT AMUSED

England’s Queen Victoria loved Lewis Carroll’s book
Alice in Wonderland
so much that she requested a copy of his next book. Carroll, a math professor at Oxford, was happy to oblige, so he sent the Queen his next book:
Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry—Systematically Arranged with Formal Definitions, Postulates, and Axioms
.

Crowded skies: There are over 2,000 species of butterfly in the rain forests of South America.

GRANDMA CELIA,
CARD SHARK

Uncle John’s grandma makes money playing cards, but she loves doing tricks more than anything. These classics are among her favorites. See if you can guess how they work without peeking at the answers on
page 536
.

I
NSTA-MATIC
“I have a photographic memory,” Grandma Celia told me as she opened a new deck of cards. “When I shuffle these, I can’t help but memorize the order of all the cards in the deck.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

“No? Then watch this,” she replied. She shuffled the deck face down, staring intently at the cards. Then she split the deck into three piles in front of her from left to right and said, “The first card is the Seven of Clubs.” She picked the top card off of the first pile and looked at it, but did not show it to me. “Got it!” she said. Then she said, “The second card is the Jack of Hearts,” and picked the top card off the second pile and looked at it, again not showing it to me. “Right again!” she said. “The card on top of the third pile is the Three of Spades.” She picked the top card off of the third pile, looked at it without showing it to me and said, “What’d I tell you? Three in a row!” Then she laid the three cards face up on the table, calling them out as she did: “Seven of Clubs, Jack of Hearts, and the Three of Spades.” How’d she do that?

SEEING IS BELIEVING

“Ever since I had that laser surgery on my eyes, I’ve actually been able to see
through
the playing cards,” Grandma Celia said. “I thought about suing the doctor, but I make so much money playing poker I decided to let it go. Now the doctor’s suing me for a percentage of my winnings.”

“Yeah, right!” I said.

English-speaking kids read more novels and fewer comics than kids of other language groups.

“My boy, you need to be more trusting of your elders,” she said. She took out a piece of paper, wrote something on it, and then put it in her wallet (“For safekeeping,” she explained) and put the wallet in her purse. Then she gave me the deck and told me to shuffle it and start dealing the cards face down onto the table, without looking at them and without showing them to her. She said she’d tell me to stop when she was ready. “Don’t worry about being tidy,” she said, “a messy pile is fine.” Celia looked carefully at the back of each card as I dealt them onto the table. After I’d dealt a bunch she said “Stop!” and took her wallet out of her purse and laid the wallet on top of the pile. “Open the wallet, take out the note, and read what it says,” she said. I did as she asked. The note read, “You stopped at the Ten of Diamonds.” Then Celia said, “See for yourself.” I lifted the wallet off the pile and turned the top card over: It was the Ten of Diamonds. How’d she do that?

FLIP-FLOP

“I try never to mix my hobbies, but sometimes I can’t help it,” Grandma Celia told me. “My circus training occasionally intrudes into my card playing, and the cards somersault by themselves.”

“Maybe that’s just your head spinning, Grandma,” I said.

“Smart aleck!” Celia snarled as she fanned out a deck of cards in her hands and presented them to me face down.

“Pick a card,” she said. I did, and as I read my card Celia closed the fan and squared up the deck. When I was done, she held out the squared deck and said, “Put the card back in the deck, but don’t let me see it.” I slid the card into the deck as she held it. Next Celia put the deck behind her back for just a second, then she put the deck on the table face down. “What was your card?” she asked. “The Queen of Clubs,” I said. With a swipe of her hand Celia fanned the cards out across the table. All the cards were face down except one: the Queen of Clubs. How’d she do that?

A STAND-UP GUY

“One last trick,” Celia said. “The Joker is hardly ever used in card games because he’s too levelheaded—so levelheaded, in fact, that he can balance a paper cup on his head.”