Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (6 page)

76 percent of American commuters drive to work alone.

In the UK, nearly 500,000 car accidents a year are caused by women applying makeup while driving.

According to a survey, over a lifetime, the average driver spends 2 hours, 14 minutes kissing in the car.

Where's the Rest of Me?

ST. NICHOLAS'S BONES:
The real Saint Nick (who lived in ancient Greece and had a penchant for secretly giving gifts) was buried in the town of Myra, now a part of Turkey. In 1087, authorities in Bari, a rival town in Italy, hired pirates to steal the saint's bones. The pirates managed to make off with about half of them, which are still stored in Bari. The rest of the bones were stolen by Venetian sailors ten years later during the First Crusade and deposited in a church there. In 2009 Turkey demanded the bones back from Italy; it's still waiting.

NAPOLEON'S PENIS:
Allegedly removed during the French leader's autopsy in 1821 and given to a priest, the dried organ, which looked a lot like a one-inch piece of beef jerky, ended up in the hands of a urologist in New Jersey, who paid $3,000 for it in 1977. The man stored it under his bed for 30 years, and his daughter inherited it after his death.

MUSSOLINI'S BRAIN:
Well, half of it anyway. After the fascist leader was executed and Italy was occupied at the end of World War II, the American government took away part of Mussolini's brain, allegedly to study it, but mostly as a victory trophy. The Americans returned the brain to Mussolini's widow in 1966.

THOMAS PAINE'S CORPSE:
In 1819, ten years after the
Common Sense
author died a penniless, friendless drunkard in Manhattan, an admirer named William Cobbett dug up the writer's bones and carried them to England for a fitting memorial. Unfortunately, Cobbett's attempts at raising money for Paine's burial stalled, and the remains remained in a trunk in Corbett's attic…or so everybody thought. However, after Cobbett died in 1835, a thorough accounting of his belongings revealed that Paine's bones were gone. They still haven't turned up.

Sticking Their Necks Out

Giraffes don't make a lot of noise, but they are able to make sounds like grunts, hisses, snorts, and even moos.

Baby giraffes grow about an inch every day during their first week of life. But only about one giraffe baby in four makes it to adulthood. Big cats and jackals hunt them, and their mothers aren't great at defense

Giraffe males can be as tall as 18 feet; females, 14 feet.

Like cows, giraffes are ruminants, which means they have four compartments in their stomachs and they regurgitate and chew their cud.

A giraffe tongue measures about 2 feet long and is blue-black in color. Scientists think that might be so their tongues don't get sunburned.

A giraffe's legs are taller than the average human adult.

Giraffes have seven vertebrae in their necks—the same as every mammal.

A giraffe newborn falls from a height of about 6½ feet. Luckily, it's already about 6 feet tall at birth, so the fall isn't really that bad.

Male giraffes are often at more risk from predators than females, even though they're larger, because they spend a lot of time alone and are easy to sneak up on.

The giraffe has only one known relative: the okapi, a mammal native to rain forests in central Africa. Okapis somewhat resemble giraffes, but have black and white striped legs and short necks.

*
  
*
  
*

Apples float in water, but pears don't.

Up & Autumn!

Autumn (aka, fall) is the only season that has two names.

The autumnal equinox (September 22 or 23, depending on the year) is one of the two days each year that the entire world gets a day split into exactly half sun and half dark. It even happens at the North and South Poles…sort of. At the poles, the sun skims the horizon, beginning six months of uninterrupted daylight or darkness.

In 1908 Archibald Joyce wrote his popular waltz “Songe d'Autome” (“Dream of Autumn”) in a slightly melancholic minor key. Maybe it was that calming, nostalgic sadness that inspired the
Titanic
's eight-member band to play it as the ship floundered.

Certain autumn things like football and the Thanksgiving harvest festival make sense. But why do new cars come out then? That was President Franklin Roosevelt's idea during the Great Depression. He asked carmakers to shift the new car season from January so that auto workers would be working instead of laid off during the holiday season.

*
  
*
  
*

TWO FIRSTS IN SPACE

First toys:
Eleven simple toys, like a top, a yo-yo, a flipping bear, and a jump rope, went up on April 12, 1985.

First human:
Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who orbited the Earth on April 12, 1961.

The Average Canadian…

… receives 200 e-mails a week.

…spends about $2.50 per week on condiments.

…spends about one week each year waiting in line—nearly half an hour a day.

…trusts firefighters more than pharmacists, doctors, or EMTs.

…would stay on the job, even if he or she got a windfall of money.

…checks food labels for fiber, vitamins, calories, and fat.

…man is 5'9" and weighs 182 pounds.

…works 36.6 hours per week and makes about $38,700 a year.

…household spends $2,200 a year on cell phone and Internet services.

…household has $40,000 more in net worth than the average U.S. household.

Neither Cocoa, Nor A Nut

Coconut milk can be used in place of blood plasma in emergencies.

The average mature coconut weighs about 2.5 pounds.

Nearly 150 people die every year from being hit on the head by falling coconuts.

A well-fertilized coconut palm can produce up to 75 fruits a year, but 30 is average.

Technically, coconut isn't just a fruit; it's a “fibrous drupe.” Drupes are fruits that contain pits, like peaches, mangoes, apricots, nectarines, and plums.

To produce fruit, coconut palms need a lot of sun, a lot of rain and humidity, and heat—no colder than 54°F, but ideally 68–90°F. Even one night below freezing can kill a tree.

The brown fiber on the outside of coconuts is called “coir.” It's strong and resistant to salt water. So it's used for ropes, fishing nets, upholstery and mattress filler, doormats, sacks, carpets, floor tiles, and brushes.

Tooth or Consequences

About 40 percent of American men do not brush their teeth every day.

If you're typical, you'll use about 68,000 gallons of water and spend five to seven weeks of your life brushing your teeth.

A person's teeth are home to nearly 11,000 million bacteria per quarter inch.

Dentists say that grazing is worse for your teeth than eating regular meals. Eating of any kind—whether a meal or a snack—activates the cavity-causing bacteria in your mouth for 20 minutes or more. So the fewer times you eat, the better off your teeth will be.

Archaeologists have found ancient mummies with metal braces on their teeth.

Odontophobia is the fear of dental treatment.

Every year, hundreds of people swallow their false teeth.

At one time, denture makers added uranium to false teeth to give them a “healthy” glow.

One in 10 men grind their teeth while sleeping.

The Catholic patron saint of dentists is Saint Apollonia—an angry mob knocked out all of her teeth when she wouldn't renounce her faith.

Russian czar Peter the Great loved playing dentist, especially extracting teeth.

Actor James Dean had two false front teeth. For fun, he liked to drop them into his glass while drinking.

One of Isaac Newton's teeth was auctioned in 1816 for $3,633 ($35,700 today).

*
  
*
  
*

The Catholic Saint Brigid of Ireland
was sainted in part because she performed the miracle of turning water into beer.

Our Daily Bread

The Chillicothe Baking Company (Missouri) was the first to sell bread packaged and sliced (1928).

During the Middle Ages, people often used stale bread as plates.

The yeasts that make bread rise are similar to the yeasts that grow between your toes.

Yeast grows fast. Under ideal conditions, 200 grams will grow into 150 tons in just five days, enough to make a million loaves of bread.

Some San Francisco bakers still make sourdough bread from dough started in 1849. But despite San Francisco's association with sourdough bread, Oakland, just across the San Francisco Bay, produces more sourdough bread than any other city in the world.

New Yorkers eat more Wonder Bread per capita than do residents of any other U.S. city.

The word
pumpernickel
means “devil's fart” in German. It got its name in the 15th century when the bread was especially coarse, foul-smelling, hard to eat, and typically produced a lot of flatulence in the people who ate it.

Farmers in Kansas harvest enough wheat each year to make 36 billion loaves of bread.

Gallup poll results: 49 percent of Americans don't know that white bread is made from wheat.

Bread changes color and flavor when toasted due to a complex chemical reaction called the “Maillard reaction,” after Louis-Camille Maillard, who first analyzed the effect in 1912.

*
  
*
  
*

GOT A DOLLAR?

Dollar bills typically wear out after about 18 months of circulation. Other denominations don't get as much day-to-day use, so they tend to last longer.

Hating Shakespeare

“With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. The intensity of my impatience with him occasionally reaches such a pitch, that it would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.”

—George Bernard Shaw

“Shakespeare never has six lines together without a fault. Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion.”

—Samuel Johnson

“I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.”

—Charles Darwin

“Shakespeare's name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down. He has no invention as to stories, none whatever. He took all his plots from old novels, and threw their stories into a dramatic shape, at as little expense of thought as you or I could turn his plays back again into prose tales.”

—Lord Byron

“What a crude, immoral, vulgar, and senseless work
Hamlet
is.”

—Leo Tolstoy

“Enormous dunghill.”

—Voltaire

Put a Sock in It

A company called Aetrex makes GPS-enabled shoes for tracking Alzheimer's patients. The shoes send a signal when the wearer roams out of a preset range.

According to a Chinese wedding custom, tossing one of the bride's red shoes from the roof ensures happiness.

For much of 2008, actress Natalie Portman had her own line of eco-friendly “vegan” shoes (not made of leather or animal glues). The economic downturn that year, however, drove the company that made them out of business.

George Washington's shoes were size 13.

In the shoe world, a clog is any shoe with a wooden sole. A klompen is a shoe that's carved entirely of wood.

The first zippers were put on shoes.

Foot-binding in China deliberately deformed women's feet from childhood, bending the toes under the soles, so they'd fit into tiny slippers.

In a pinch, you can shine your shoes with banana peels or vegetable shortening.

Until 1884, a shoe could be worn on either foot. The first store to sell boots matched into a left and right pair was Phil Gilbert's Shoe Parlor in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

GR8 PL8s

As early as 1884, license plates were used on horse-drawn carriages.

The mayor of Boston's official car had the same license plate number from 1914 to 1993: 576.

Early license plates were made of porcelain, leather, or cardboard.

In 1893, France became the first country to require license plates on cars.

New York was the first state to require license plates, in 1901.

19 states don't require front license plates, just back ones.

New Hampshire's license plate slogan is “Live Free or Die”…and they're stamped out by inmates at the state prison.