Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (41 page)

Scientists are now in a mad rush to find a banana to replace the Cavendish, which replaced the Gros Michel. The most likely candidate: the Goldfinger, developed by Canadian and Honduran scientists and first sold in 1994. It’s caught on commercially in Australia, but it will be a hard sell in the U.S., where consumers are used to the sweet, creamy Cavendish. The Goldfinger is very different from the banana as we know it—it is long and yellow, but it’s also said to be tangy, acidic...and slightly crunchy.

North Dakotans have tried to drop “North” from their state’s name twice, in 1947 and 1989.

EARLY TO RISE

Because age is just a number
.

• At age 1:
Future jazz great Buddy Rich started drumming professionally as part of his parents’ vaudeville act.

• At age 3:
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart learned to play his first instrument, the harpsichord.

• At age 5:
Future rock star Tori Amos was accepted to the Peabody Academy of Music in Baltimore, its youngest student ever.

•
At age 6:
Shirley Temple became Hollywood’s top box-office star. (She remained at #1 until she was 9.)

• At age 8:
Tiger Woods won the Optimist International Junior World title, his first international golf tournament.

•
At age 10:
Future Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget published his first scientific article. It was based on observations he’d made of a sparrow.

•
At age 11:
Franz Liszt gave his first piano recital.

• At age 12:
A Ukrainian boy named Sergey Karjakin became the world’s youngest chess grandmaster.

•
At age 13:
Mario Andretti started racing cars.

•
At age 14:
“Buffalo” Bill Cody became a rider for the Pony Express.

•
At age 15:
Mia Hamm joined the women’s U.S. National Soccer team.

•
At age 15:
After hearing what she believed to be the voice of God telling her to lead France in war, Joan of Arc convinced the Dauphin of France to let her lead the armies against England in the 100 Years War.

•
At age 19:
Jane Austen wrote
Sense and Sensibility
.

•
At age 20:
Leif Ericson led a crew of 35 Vikings to what is now Newfoundland, where he established the first European colony in North America around the year 1000.

• At age 23:
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg became the youngest billionaire in history.

Connecticut and Rhode Island never ratified the 18th Amendment (Prohibition).

AUSSIE-OOPS

After we compiled this year’s crop of goofs and blunders, we noticed that a bunch of them come from Australia. Coincidence? Of course, but we still thought it would make for a fun couple of pages
.

H
OG HEAVEN
In January 2011, Australia’s
Morning Bulletin
reported a story of seemingly biblical proportions after cyclone Yasi caused severe flooding in the northeast part of the country: “There have been 30,000 pigs floating down the Dawson River since last week.” Over the next few days, at least three other newspapers printed the
Bulletin
’s report verbatim. Apparently no one at any of the press offices questioned that incredible figure. Readers, however, had a tough time believing it and challenged the papers. A little digging revealed the truth: When
Morning Bulletin
’s reporter originally interviewed pig farmer Sid Everingham about the flood, Everingham didn’t say “30,000 pigs”—he said “30 sows and pigs.” The newspapers all printed corrections.

A BALL GAME

Several hundred plastic balls were carefully loaded into an Alfa Romeo sports car at a Perth shopping mall in 2011 for a “Guess the Amount” contest to raise money for the charity Comic Relief. In accordance with safety protocols, the battery of the car was disconnected. What organizers didn’t realize was that without the battery, the car’s doors automatically unlocked. And no one knew they were unlocked until a three-year-old boy opened one of them... and hundreds of balls spilled out. While the crowd cheered, mall security scrambled to collect all the balls (some were taken by other little kids). Nearly an hour later, the remaining balls were back in the car, and the doors were locked. Said mall manager Siobhan McConnell, “This was a bit more comic relief than we had originally planned.”

World’s first public aquarium: the “Fish House,” which opened in the London Zoo in 1853.

WHAT A DOLL

During the 2011 Queensland floods, two 19-year-olds (a couple whose names were not released to the press) decided to have a little fun by floating down the raging Yarra River near Melbourne in a makeshift raft. But the raft couldn’t hold them both, and the girl got sucked away by the rapids. She managed to grab hold of a tree, and had to cling to it for over an hour before a rescue team was able to pluck her from the river. Authorities were both angered and amused when they discovered that the couple’s “raft” was actually a blow-up sex doll. “It is not a recognized flotation device,” a police spokesman told reporters.

LAMBOR-GONE-Y

Late one night in May 2011, a 30-year-old man let a 22-year-old friend (names not released) drive his brand-new Lamborghini Murcielago (retail price: $400,000). The owner wasn’t worried about the car because it was fully insured. From the sidewalk, the man watched his friend peel out. Traveling at nearly 50 miles per hour down a busy Sydney street, the young driver lost control of the powerful sports car, veered over the center line, and smashed head-on into a taxicab. The driver emerged from the wreck unscathed, but the 51-year-old cabbie suffered a broken leg (it took paramedics an hour to free her). As for the Lamborghini, it was totaled. And when the car’s owner later put in a claim to his insurance company, he was informed of a clause in his contract that he’d previously overlooked: The car was “not insured for drivers under age 25.” It was a total loss.

YOU NEVER SAUSAGE A NUMBER

Mathematically speaking, there is no such thing as more than 100 percent (unless you’re a sports coach or a motivational speaker). That’s why a Swedish consumer reported the sausage company Trangsvikens Chark to government officials. On the package of one of their products, the label said, “Meat content—104%.” “This sausage couldn’t possibly contain more than 100 percent meat,” the man complained, “as there are other ingredients stated on the label.” Marcus Farnstrom, the company’s CEO, explained that it takes 104 grams of meat in order to make 100 grams of sausage, hence the higher-than-possible percentage. However, Farnstrom also acknowledged that the packaging is confusing and promised to have it fixed.

Australia’s crested billbird has an odd defense mechanism: It can throw its voice like a ventriloquist.

BOOKWORMS

Pay no attention to the fact that there are other books out there besides
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader.

• Before they figured out they could use parchment, Europeans wrote on thin peels of bark. The word “book” is derived from
bog
, the Danish word for beech, the preferred writing bark in Denmark.

• Only writer to turn down the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: Sinclair Lewis, for
Arrowsmith
in 1926. He felt the Prize committee judged books arbitrarily, based on “American ideals,” not on literary merit.

• For her first
Harry Potter
book, J.K. Rowling received an advance of only £1,500 (about $2,400).

• The British town of Hay-on-Wye
loves
books. It has 39 used bookstores (but only 1,300 residents). Each May it hosts a 10-day literary festival that Bill Clinton once called “the Woodstock of the mind.”

• Most prolific author ever: Brazilian novelist José Carlos Ryoki de Alpoim Inoue. Between 1986 and 1996, he published 1,058 novels—about one every three days.

• The dust jacket dates back to the 1830s, but Lewis Carroll (
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
, 1865
)
came up with the idea to put the title on the spine of the jacket so you could tell what book it was when it was lined up on a shelf.

• First e-book reader on the market: the Sony Bookman, introduced in 1992. It played CDs. (It flopped.)

• Patron saint of librarians: St. Jerome. Patron saint of booksellers: St. John. Patron saint of bookbinders: St. Christopher.

• Herman Melville was a failure in his own time; his novel
Moby Dick
sold poorly upon its release in 1851 due to bad reviews. The reason: The last few pages were accidentally not printed, giving the impression of an unresolved ending.

• In terms of titles available, the world’s biggest bookstore is the World’s Biggest Bookstore, located in a converted bowling alley in Toronto.

Look, but don’t eat: Azaleas and rhododendrons contain a toxin that can be fatal to humans.

SELF-SURGERY

Stories about people who had to perform emergency surgery on themselves may seem gross...because they are. But here’s something that might make you want to read about them anyway: They all have happy endings
.

W
ho:
Jan de Doot of Amsterdam
Background:
In 1651 de Doot, a blacksmith, began having terrible pains in his groin. He could feel something hard—it was a bladder stone (related to kidney stones)—through his skin. According to Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, mayor of Amsterdam and one of the most renowned surgeons of the era, Doot didn’t trust doctors.

Do It Yourself!
With only his brother standing by in case something went wrong, Doot used a small, sharp knife to cut through his perineum (the floor of your crotch, basically), where he could feel the stone. Then, according to Tulp:

To get the stone out was more difficult, and he had to stick two fingers into the wound on either side to remove it with leveraged force, and it finally popped out of hiding with an explosive noise and tearing of the bladder.

The stone was the size of a chicken egg. When the operation was completed, Doot had his brother summon a doctor’s assistant to stitch up his wound.

Outcome:
Doot apparently survived, because sometime after the self-administered surgery he sat for a painting by Flemish artist Carel van Savoyen. In it, de Doot is depicted holding a knife in one hand, and in the other he’s holding up an egg-shaped object—the stone he cut from his own body.

Who:
Inés Ramírez of Rio Talea in southern Mexico

Background:
In April 2002, Ramírez, who was pregnant, went into labor. She had already had several children at home, but lost her last one in childbirth. And now, once again, something was not right. After 12 hours of increasingly painful labor, 50 miles from the nearest midwife, and with no phone—or electricity or running water—Ramírez decided to do something.

What is a
spectroheliokinematograph
? A special camera used to film the sun.

Do It Yourself!
Ramírez drank a few shots of liquor as an anesthetic, got a sharp knife, and made a cut low on her belly. She kept cutting—for an hour—and finally reached her womb, at which point she reached inside and pulled out a baby boy. Shortly before passing out, she sent one of her sons for help. Some hours later, a local health aide arrived and, after getting over his shock, stitched up Ms. Ramírez’s belly—using ordinary needle and thread—and then drove her to a hospital in the city of Oaxaca.
Outcome:
Both the mother and child survived. It is the only known case in history of a woman successfully performing a cesarean section on herself.

Who:
Dr. Leonid Ivanovich Rogozov of Leningrad, U.S.S.R.

Background:
Rogozov went to Antarctica with a Russian research team in 1960, the only doctor in the 13-person group. On April 29, 1961, he woke up with a fever and a pain in the right side of his abdomen. He took antibiotics, but got worse. By the next day, he was in extreme pain and knew that he was suffering from appendicitis. The closest help was another Soviet Antarctic station 1,000 miles away, but blizzard conditions would have made landing a plane there impossible. Appendicitis, untreated, is almost always fatal. There was only one option.

Do It Yourself!
Rogozov put on his doctor’s uniform, including surgical mask, got into a hospital bed, propped his head up with pillows, and, using novocaine as a local anesthetic, cut a five-inch incision into his abdomen. Then, going by feel, though sometimes looking in a mirror held by one of the researchers (he later said that just confused him because everything was backward), he cut deeper into his body, pausing every few minutes to vomit, collect himself, and continue cutting. After
four and a half hours
, he got the infected and swollen appendix out, sutured himself up—and passed out.