Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (35 page)

DREAMER:
Paul McCartney

DREAM:
A lilting melody

RESULT:
“Yesterday”

While filming the movie
Help!
, Paul McCartney woke up with a tune in his head and rushed to the piano to play it, singing “scrambled eggs” and other random words in the place of lyrics. He recalled, “I liked the melody a lot, but because I'd dreamed it, I couldn't believe I'd written it.” Thinking maybe he had just remembered an old song, he played it for other people, asking if they'd ever heard it before. They hadn't. But they would, repeatedly, for decades. It became the 1965 Beatles hit “Yesterday,” one of the most popular tunes ever recorded.

DREAMER:
William Watt

DREAM:
Being pelted in a hailstorm of perfectly round lead balls

RESULT:
Perfectly round musket shot and cannonballs

Eighteenth-century Bristol, England, was known for its industry, especially smelting lead from local mines. Lead balls for muskets
and cannons were big business, but were difficult to make round and smooth enough that they wouldn't jam weapons. A plumber by trade, William Watt's dream inspired him to climb to the top of a church steeple and dribble a stream of melted lead into a bucket of cold water far below. Sure enough, like any liquid, the lead formed itself into perfect balls and stayed that way until it solidified in the cool air and cold water. Watt had remarkably figured this out long before high-speed photography proved that raindrops were round and not, as widely believed, teardrop-shaped.

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RIDE 'EM, COWBOY

      
•
    
The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo is the world's largest rodeo. It runs for most of March each year, attracting 2 million spectators.

      
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Rodeo
is a Spanish word that means “round up.”

      
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The first formal rodeo took place in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1872. However, Prescott, Arizona, hosted the first professional rodeo in 1888 with cash prizes and admission charged for spectators.

      
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Women have competed in rodeos since 1901, but team roping is the only event where men and women compete together.

      
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Bucking broncos are no longer wild horses being tamed—they're usually bred and trained to buck.

      
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Rodeo cowboys have their own group—the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association. But before 1975, it was called the Cowboy Turtle Association because, although the group was slow to organize, the men weren't afraid to “stick their necks out.” The group began after a labor dispute with a Boston rodeo promoter.

      
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The Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame is in the Fort Worth Stockyards west of Dallas. It used to be an actual stockyard, but now is a tourist attraction.

A Lake List

Only one Great Lake has a bottom that's above sea level: Lake Erie.

Isa Lake in Yellowstone Park straddles the Continental Divide and has two creeks leading out of it. One heads east, with its water ultimately reaching the Atlantic Ocean, and the other flows west to the Pacific.

Utah's Great Salt Lake is five times saltier than the ocean. If you evaporated an eight-ounce glass of its water, about an inch of salt would be left on the bottom.

But the saltiest lake in the world is Don Juan Pond in Antarctica. It's so salty that it never freezes, even in winter temperatures below -50°F.

Only one freshwater lake in the world has sharks: Lake Nicaragua.

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CLEMSON BLUE CHEESE

Blue cheese requires a long time to age, and its finicky blue mold doesn't survive in warm weather. So it wasn't until 1941 that researchers at Clemson University in South Carolina successfully made blue cheese in the American South for the first time. Using the state's unfinished Stumphouse Mountain Tunnel, which had been idle for about 80 years, researchers drilled into solid blue granite, which maintained a constant temperature of 50°F and humidity of 85 percent. Clemson University has been making blue cheese for sale since the 1950s, but it doesn't use the tunnel anymore.

Court of Last Resort

Most Americans can't name a single Supreme Court justice.

Childhood nickname of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg: Kiki.

In the late 19th century, the dairy industry pushed through laws forcing margarine manufacturers to color their product an unappetizing pink. The Supreme Court struck down the laws in the 1880s, and margarine has been yellow ever since.

William Howard Taft (president from 1909 to 1913) also became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1921 and served until his death in 1930, the only person to hold both positions.

In 1895, when Congress tried to pass an income tax on high earners, the Supreme Court ruled that such a tax was unconstitutional. In response, Congress wrote an income tax into the Constitution in 1913 with the 16th Amendment.

Shortest U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice: Melville W. Fuller (1888–1910). He was about 5'3".

The oldest Supreme Court justice to date was Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was 90 when he retired in 1932.

George Washington appointed the most Supreme Court justices (11), with FDR a close second (9).

Jimmy Carter was the only president who served a full term without appointing a justice.

Roger B. Taney (who served from 1836 to 1864) was the first Supreme Court justice to wear pants under his judicial robes. Before that, justices sported knee breeches.

The first, and last, U.S. Supreme Court justice to wear an English-style powdered wig was William Cushing in 1790. Although still commonly worn in his native Massachusetts, the wig immediately attracted teasing from the other justices and scorn from Thomas Jefferson, who said, “For heaven's sake, discard the monstrous wig which makes the English judges took like rats peeping through bunches of oakum.”

Poetry to My Ears

Tryphiodorus was an ancient Greek poet who enjoyed a good
lipogram
—a body of work deliberately written with one letter of the alphabet omitted. Tryphiodorus wrote a poem called
Odyssey
without the letter A. His next poem contained no Bs, and so on.

As far as anyone knows, Anne Bradstreet of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was the first poet to be published in colonial America.

Marguerite Johnson adopted the stage name of Maya Angelou when she became a cabaret dancer at the Purple Onion, a nightclub in San Francisco. Later, when she began writing novels and poetry, she decided to use her stage name as her pen name.

By the time poet John Milton published
Paradise Lost
, he was 45 years old and completely blind.

Don't confuse William S. Burroughs, the Beat poet, with William S. Burroughs, the man who invented the adding machine. The latter was the former's grandfather.

The Mild Bunch

Walmart sells more bananas than any other item.

The high level of potassium in bananas makes them slightly radioactive.

There are no banana trees. The banana plant is classified as an herb because everything aboveground dies as soon as the bananas mature.

“Banana” comes from the Arab word
banan
, which means “finger.”

Bananas came from Malaysia, where they've been bred and cultivated for 10,000 years. Wild bananas have large seeds, very little flesh, and are pollinated by bats.

Bananas are the most profitable crop in the world, and the industry employs 400 million people worldwide (most make below-poverty wages).

About 50% of people who are allergic to latex are also allergic to bananas.

Surprisingly, Iceland, located just below the Arctic Circle, is Europe's biggest banana grower. The tropical fruit grows in huge greenhouses heated by geothermal water.

From 1959 to 1994, Osoyoos, BC, located between two banana-shaped lakes, was home to Canada's only banana plantation—just 200 plants located inside a hothouse.

Paper made from banana-plant fiber is stronger than regular paper.

For a museum about the fruit, head to the Musée de la Banane (“Museum of the Banana”) on the Caribbean island of Martinique. It's located on a working banana plantation.

According to
Guinness World Records
, the largest bunch of bananas grown naturally came from Spain in 2001: 473 bananas in the bunch.

Bananas grow pointing up, not hanging down.

The Fruit of the Vine

A lover of wine is called an
oenophile
.

One of America's first great wine regions was centered around Cincinnati, Ohio. In the 1850s, the area was known as “the Rhineland of America,” making Ohio America's main wine producer at the time. All that ended with Prohibition, and Ohio winemaking never fully recovered.

Today, California produces the most wine in the United States, about 90%. New York and Washington State are second, with about 8% combined.

In the 7
^th
century BC, the Greeks planted the first wine grapes in France in what's now the region around Marseille.

The average French person drinks about 10 times more wine per year than the average American.

Marijuana mixed with a strong wine was the first recorded anesthetic, used by Chinese physician Hua Tuo in the second century AD.

Every book of the standard Bible mentions wine except Jonah. The book of Isaiah even has advice on how to plant a good vineyard.

Ernest and Julio Gallo learned how to make wine from a pamphlet they picked up at the Modesto public library.

Some wine historians believe that wine dates back more than 8,000 years, making it the oldest alcoholic beverage.

That large indentation on the bottom of wine bottles is called the “punt.” There are dozens of theories as to why it was put there centuries ago, but now it's just tradition.

All About Beetles

The insect order that outnumbers all the others? Coleoptera—the beetles.

The 350,000 varieties of beetles make up about one-fourth of all known species. Since 1758, species have been identified at an average of four a day.

Tiger beetles run at 5 mph—proportionately, that's equal to a human running at 480 mph.

Bess beetles can make 14 distinct sounds.

One dropping of elephant dung can feed and house up to 7,000 beetles.

Cochineal, a once-popular red dye, was made from crushing scale beetles that live exclusively on the prickly pear cactus.

A male dung beetle creates a ball of poop, pushes it away from the main pile, buries it, and gets a female to nest in it. That dung ball will later provide food for the happy couple's larva.

To make shellac, you have to crush a lot of beetles—about 150,000 per pound.

Potato beetle larvae protect themselves from being eaten by covering their bodies in poisoned poop. Many plants in the potato family—deadly nightshade, for example—have toxic compounds in their leaves. The larvae are able to eat the leaves without harm, but a lot of the poison gets excreted in their dung. They then stay safe from predators by piling that dung on their backs.

Early farmers believed that ladybugs were helpful pest-eaters sent from heaven. The English called them “Our Lady's beetles”; Germans called them
Marienkafer
(“Mary's beetles”); and the French called them
les vaches de la Vierge
(“cows of the Virgin”).

Australian ranchers had to import millions of African dung beetles to eat cow droppings because the continent's native beetles preferred marsupial dung.

Weird Beard

Pogonology
is the study of beards.
Pogonophobia
, the fear of beards.

Despite legend, shaving hair will not make it thicker or darker.

Russian czar Peter the Great wanted to modernize his country and thought unkempt beards looked “medieval.” So he discouraged long beards by taxing them.

Beards grow faster in the summer.

Female goats have beards.

Barbe à papa
is what the French call cotton candy. It translates to “daddy's beard.”

The band ZZ Top is famous for its beards. The only clean-shaven member is the drummer. His name? Frank Beard.

If an Amish man has a beard, it means he's married.

Treebeard, slow-talking leader of the treelike Ents found in two of the Lord of the Rings books, was based on J. R. R. Tolkien's good friend and fellow author, C. S. Lewis.

80 percent of American presidents with facial hair have been Republicans.

Knock on Wood