Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (11 page)

As some people age, their eye color gets lighter.

Human eyes produce about a teaspoon of tears every hour.

Coffee Talk

35 percent of coffee drinkers drink it black.

GI slang for coffee with cream and sugar: blonde and sweet.

After petroleum, coffee is the second most traded product in the world.

Norwegians drink the most coffee per person in the world.

Starbucks spends more on employee health insurance than it does on coffee beans.

By brewing your own coffee instead of buying a $3 latte each day for 30 years, you'd save $55,341.

Freeze-dried coffee was created for the military.

Long before screenwriters in cafés became a cliché, Francis Ford Coppola wrote large portions of
The Godfather
in Caffe Trieste, San Francisco's first coffee shop.

According to one study, the most dangerous food item to consume while driving is hot coffee.

The New York Stock Exchange started out as a coffeehouse.

Lloyd's of London, famous for insuring Betty Grable's legs and Bruce Springsteen's voice, didn't start as an insurance company. Edward Lloyd began the business in the 17th century as a coffeehouse near the docks in London, and insurance brokers and other gamblers made it their headquarters.

The writer Voltaire drank between 50 and 70 cups of coffee every day.

In 1657 a doctor wrote that coffee was good for “miscarriage, hypochondria, dropsy, gout, and scurvy. Makes skin exceedingly clear and white…it quickens the spirits, and make the heart lightsome.”

Coffee sometimes works wonders if your plants are turning yellow. Its acidity helps them to absorb iron.

Decaf coffee was invented accidentally after a storm at sea soaked a shipment of coffee beans in saltwater.

The Supply Room

Yukio Horie invented felt-tip pens in 1962, trying to replace ink brushes for Japanese writing.

Norwegians claim that their own Johan Vaaler invented the paper clip in 1901. We hate to rain on their lutefisk, but two years earlier, an American inventor named William Middlebrook had already patented a machine to make wire paper clips.

Walt Disney World buys 3.8 million pens each year.

A paper clip is about the size of a newborn kangaroo.

Bic estimates that it has sold more than 50 pens every second since 1950.

About 100 people choke to death on ballpoint pens every year.

On October 7, 1806, Ralph Wedgwood patented an “apparatus for producing duplicates of writings” (carbon paper).

The bottom part of a stapler, where the ends of the staple get pressed under, is called the “anvil.”

Finnish scissors-maker Fiskars has been in business since 1649—but they've been making scissors only since the 1880s. According to the company, its first products were “nails, thread, knives, hoes, iron wheels, and other things.”

Clock Wise

Who should we curse on Monday morning? Levi Hutchins of Concord, New Hampshire. In 1787, he invented the alarm clock.

Every day, the atomic clocks on GPS satellites gain 38 microseconds on their earthbound counterparts. This is a confirmation of Einstein's theory of relativity, which predicted that time will run faster when you're located away from gravity or while moving at a high speed.

Paul Revere made clocks, and Henry Ford repaired them.

In 2007 President Hugo Chávez ordered Venezuela's clocks permanently set back 30 minutes. The upside: Venezuelans got more light in the day. The downside: The move put the country halfway between two time zones and its clocks out of sync with those everywhere else on earth.

The earliest known clock, similar to a sundial, dates from about 3500 BC.

A cuckoo clock is nearly an exact reproduction of the sound of the male European cuckoo.

Clocks run ever so slightly faster on mountaintops than they do at sea level.

77s

The first Talking Heads album, released in 1977, was called simply
77
.

Football jersey #77 has been retired by both the University of Illinois and the Chicago Bears. In both cases, the number was worn by halfback and Hall of Famer Red Grange.

The nuclear aircraft carrier
CVN 77
is also known as the USS
George H.W. Bush
.

Interstate 77 runs from Ohio to South Carolina.

The United States Code, Chapter 77, makes it a federal crime to engage in “peonage, slavery and trafficking in persons.”

77 square inches is the combined area of two seven-inch pizzas.

The Group of 77 is part of the United Nations. The original members numbered 77, but today the group includes representatives from more than 130 developing countries who meet to discuss ways of improving their economies.

77 percent is the amount of light blocked by a typical lamp shade.

World “Capitals”

Cow Chip Throwing Capital of the World: Beaver, Oklahoma

In preparation for their annual competition in April, the folks of Beaver collect, flatten, and dry cow poop into Frisbee-sized throwing chips. No points for style or choreography; only distance.

Artichoke Capital of the World: Castroville, California

The town comes by its giant fiberglass artichokes honestly: California grows more artichokes than any other state in the union, and Castroville's one of the most prolific.

Barbed Wire Capital of the World: La Crosse, Kansas

La Crosse is home to the Barbed Wire Museum—it's either the world's largest, or one of the top three, depending on how you count. Regardless, its collection contains 2,000 different samples of barbed wire, as well as fence posts, books, and educational films.

Bourbon Capital of the World
^®
: Bardstown, Kentucky

The residents of Bardstown are so protective of their title that they even registered the phrase. Making the stuff since 1776, the area produces 69 percent of the world's bourbon.

Halloween Capital of the World™: Anoka, Minnesota

The trademarked title comes from the town's claim that it threw the first town-wide Halloween celebration. In 1920, tired of finding their “cows roaming Main Street, windows soaped, and outhouses tipped over,” Anoka residents created an annual party with costume parades, pillow fights, fireworks, snake dances, and “celebrity appearances.”

Fruitcake Capital of the World: Claxton, Georgia

Two bakeries pump more than four million pounds of fruitcake out of Claxton every year. The cake batters and fruits are tumbled 375 pounds at a time in what looks a lot like a cement mixer. Fruitcakes last six months at room temperature, twice as long refrigerated.

Loon Capital of the World: Mercer, Wisconsin

You know we're talking about the bird, right? The people of Mercer are no more crazy than the rest of us. Well, maybe a
little
crazier, as evidenced by the fact that they proclaimed themselves the World's Loon Capital.

Moonshine Capital of the World: Franklin County, Virginia

Technically, this title has since been retired, but in the 1920s, about 99% of the working residents of Franklin County were involved in a massive bootleg liquor trade. The county museum still honors the nickname with historic stills and other exhibits.

Horseradish Capital of the World: Collinsville, Indiana

Claiming to produce 85 percent of the world's horseradish, Collinsville is a treasure trove of condiment riches. Once the home of the G. S. Suppiger Catsup bottling plant, a 170-foot replica ketchup bottle also serves as the town water tower.

Factory Tour Capital of the World: York, Pennsylvania

Many towns have factory tours, but York has 25 in all—from Harley-Davidson to Bluett Bros. Violins, Snyder's of Hanover Pretzels, the York County Solid Waste Authority, and Hershey's Chocolate World, which contains a 10-minute faux factory-tour ride through a replica chocolate factory. (No chocolate bars are actually made there.)

Fire Hydrant Capital of the World: Albertville, Alabama

Home of a major fire hydrant company, Albertville took on the title proudly and features a nickel-plated hydrant downtown.

Snowshoe Baseball Capital of the World: Lake Tomahawk, Wisconsin

There's nothing like long winters to give you some crazy ideas. Take Snowshoe Baseball, invented by Lake Tomahawk's town chairman Ray Sloan in 1961 as a way of entertaining summer tourists. “Snowshoe baseball” is exactly what the name implies—baseball made comical by playing it in snowshoes in a field covered in sawdust.

Hubcap Capital of the World: Pearsonville, California

Tiny town, one obsessed collector, thousands of hubcaps on display.

An Absorbing Subject

Sponges depend on water flowing through their bodies to provide oxygen and food and to wash away waste.

Most sponges eat bacteria and small food particles. A few are carnivores, eating small crustaceans.

Although apparently fixed to one place, adult sponges can creep very slowly along the ocean floor. How slowly? The fast ones travel one inch in six days.

Fragments of a sponge can grow into a full sponge, like cuttings from a plant.

Thousands of sponge species live in saltwater, but only a few live in freshwater.

Some sponges live 200 years, maybe longer…maybe
much
longer, like thousands of years.

Some dolphins off western Australia use sponges to pad their snouts while digging around for food on the sandy ocean floor.

A sponge on a stick was what ancient Romans used for toilet paper.

Don't confuse loofah “sponges” with marine sponges. Loofahs are the dried shells of a gourd. Natural kitchen sponges, on the other hand, are essentially animal skeletons.

A living sponge doesn't have blood, a heart, veins, or arteries. It also doesn't have a digestive system, a brain, or any sort of nervous system.

Sponges reproduce a lot like plants: each is both male and female, releasing sperm into the water in the hope that some of them wash into the eggs of other sponges. Fertilized eggs turn into larvae that can swim, looking for a good place to put down roots.

Sponges can regulate the flow of water through their bodies, and can even shut it down completely if the water contains too much sand or silt.

MAD
Magazine

IT'S A
MAD, MAD
WORLD

From 1952 until 1955,
MAD
was a full-color comic book called
Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad
. But in 1954, an inflammatory book titled
Seduction of the Innocent
, written by anti-comics crusader Dr. Fredric Wertham, hit stores, and public hysteria that comic books might be causing juvenile delinquency rose to a fevered pitch.

The result was a congressional investigation and a “voluntary” set of guidelines that the industry adopted to avoid more onerous government regulations. The Comics Code Authority (CCA) contained prohibitions that would've made
Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad
impossible to continue as a comic book. The CCA prohibited not just sex, drugs, crime, depravity, lust, monsters, and vampires, but also anything that might promote “disrespect for established authority,” something that
Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad
did regularly.

There was a loophole, however: the CCA covered only “comic books.” So
Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad
decided on a makeover and
MAD
“magazine” was born.

MAD
FACTS

•
  
In 1961
MAD
made copyright history when music publishers—representing all-star songwriters like Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and Irving Berlin—sued the magazine. The issue? A songbook of parodies that included words with the instruction that they could be “sung to the tune of” a specific song. The musicians' claim that only the original authors could legally parody their own songs was dismissed by judges all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

•
  
The magazine's peak circulation was 2,132,644. This occurred in 1974, despite intense competition from a (slightly) more grownup satirical magazine, the
National Lampoon
.

•
  
The magazine's mascot—the round-headed boy with an idiotic grin—went unnamed until a staff member noticed the name of Alfred Newman in the credits of a movie. That Newman was
a well-regarded film composer (and, incidentally, the uncle of composer Randy Newman). Hoping to forestall a lawsuit, the staff changed the spelling of Alfred's last name and added E as a middle initial.

•
  
485 MADison Avenue was
MAD
's headquarters for decades. But in the magazine's heyday, one envelope that contained a picture of Alfred E. Neuman was successfully delivered to the right address.