Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Extraordinary Book of Facts: And Bizarre Information (28 page)

The
wind
was way too strong to
wind
the sail.

After a
number
of injections, my jaw finally got
number
.

You
sow
! You’ll reap what you
sow
!

Every four seconds, somebody in the world opens a can of Spam.

Put 23 people in a room and there’s a 50 percent chance two will share a birthday.

Thursday is the least busy day for barbershops.

Friday the 13th comes at least once every year, but never more than three times a year.

There are 20 days in the Aztec week.

About 90 percent of time capsules are never recovered.

Every thousand years, spring gets two-thirds of a day shorter.

A moment lasts 90 seconds.

If you’re too young to be a baby boomer and too old to be a Generation Xer, you’re a Cusper.

It would take two and a half minutes to fall from the top of Mt. Everest.

It’s estimated that you’ll spend a year of your life looking for misplaced objects.

If it happened before A.D. 476, it’s ancient. After A.D. 476, it’s medieval.

The Incas measured time by how long it took a potato to cook.

U.S. invaded Grenada

Reagan proposed the Star Wars program

Truck bomb in Lebanon killed 241 U.S. Marines

Thriller
became bestselling album of all time

M*A*S*H
ended after 251 episodes

Terms of Endearment
won 5 Oscars

SAVAGES

Myth:
Scalping was a brutal tactic invented by the Indians to terrorize the settlers.

Truth:
Scalping was actually an old European tradition dating back hundreds of years. Dutch and English colonists were paid a “scalp bounty” by their leaders as a means of keeping the Indians scared and out of the way. Finally the Indians caught on and adopted the practice themselves. The settlers apparently forgot its origins and another falsehood about Native American cruelty was born.

THANKSGIVING

Myth:
The Pilgrims ate a Thanksgiving feast of turkey and pumpkin pie after their first year in the New World, and we’ve been doing it ever since.

Truth:
Thanksgiving didn’t become a national holiday until Abraham Lincoln declared it in 1863, and the Pilgrims ate neither the bird we call turkey, nor pumpkin pie.

MANHATTAN ISLAND

Myth:
In 1626 Peter Minuit bought Manhattan Island from the Canarsee tribe for $24 worth of beads and other trinkets.

Truth:
Minuit did give 60 guilders (roughly $24) worth of beads, knives, axes, clothes, and rum to Chief Seyseys of the Canarsee tribe “to let us live amongst them” on Manhattan Island. But the Canarsee actually got the best of the deal because they didn’t own the island in the first place. They lived on the other side of the East River in Brooklyn, and only visited the southern tip of Manhattan to fish and hunt. The Weckquaesgeeks tribe, which lived on the upper three fourths of the island, had a much stronger claim to it and were furious when they learned they’d been left out of the deal. They fought with the Dutch settlers for years until the Dutch finally paid them, too.

BUNKER HILL

Myth:
The Battle of Bunker Hill, where the Americans first faced the redcoats, was the colonists’ initial triumph in the Revolutionary War.

Truth:
Not only did the British wallop the Americans in the encounter, the whole thing wasn’t even fought on Bunker Hill. The American troops had actually been ordered to defend Bunker Hill, but there was an enormous foul-up and somehow they wound up trying to protect nearby Breed’s Hill, which was more vulnerable to attack. They paid for it. When the fighting was over, the Americans had been chased away by the British troops. Casualties were heavy for both sides: about 450 Americans were killed, and a staggering 1,000 (out of 2,100) redcoats died.

THE PILGRIMS

Myth:
The Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.

Truth:
This tale originated in 1741, more than 100 years after the Pilgrims arrived. It has been attributed to a then-95-year-old man named Thomas Fraunce, who claimed his father had told him the story when he was a boy. However, his father didn’t land with the Pilgrims—he reached America three years after they did. The Pilgrims first landed in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

YANKEE DOODLE

Myth:
“Yankee Doodle” was originally a patriotic song.

Truth:
It was composed in England as an anti-American tune. The phrase “stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni” referred to a foppish English group called the Macaroni Club, whose members wore ludicrous “continental” fashions they mistakenly believed to be elegant. The British laughed at “Yankee Doodle dandies,” bumpkins who didn’t know how silly they really were.

SO HIGH, SOLO

Myth:
Charles Lindbergh was the first person to fly nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean.

Truth:
He was the 67th person to fly nonstop across the Atlantic. The first nonstop flight was made by William Alcock and Arthur Brown in 1919, eight years before Lindbergh’s flight. Lindbergh was famous because he did it alone.

The automobile was invented in 1886. The used car lot (of 17 cars) was “invented” in 1897.

In 1924 a new Ford cost $265.

The first Rolls-Royce sold for $600, in 1906. Today they sell for more than $200,000.

Whale oil was used in automobile transmission fluids as late as 1973.

The average car has 15,000 parts.

No matter how cold it gets, gasoline won’t freeze. When the temperature gets below –180°F, it just turns gummy.

Toughest car ever: a 1957 Mercedes-Benz 180D racked up 1,184,880 miles in 21 years.

When used to make ethyl alcohol, an acre of potatoes will produce enough fuel to fill 25 cars.

It takes six months to build a Rolls-Royce and 13 hours to build a Toyota.

Goodyear once made a tire entirely out of corn.

The average 1995 luxury car had more than one mile of wiring.

The tubeless auto tire was invented by a man named Frank Herzegh. He made one dollar for it.

The first reported car theft in America took place in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1905.

It takes about two and a half gallons of oil to make a car tire.

The right rear tire on your car will wear out before the other three will.

No butts about it: Nissan has invented an artificial butt to test car seats.

More Americans have died in automobile accidents than have died in all U.S. wars.

The first American magazine (1741) was called
The American Magazine
.

Time
magazine’s Man of the Year for 1988: “Endangered Earth.”

Who
has
appeared on the most covers of
People
magazine? Princess Diana—54 times.

Sixty-eight percent of gossip columnists say the best place to interview a celebrity is in their kitchen. Thirteen percent say their bedroom. Four percent say the yard.

Queen Elizabeth II was
Time
magazine’s “Man of the Year” for 1952.

A typical
Playboy
centerfold weighs 15 percent less than a typical woman of the same age and height.

Mia Farrow appeared on the first cover of
People
magazine.

Fifty percent of all magazines printed in the United States are never sold.

First subject ever photographed by
National Geographic:
the city of Lhasa, Tibet, in 1905.

Time
magazine’s Person of the Century was Albert Einstein.

Mad
was a comic book before it was converted into a magazine in 1956.

Playboy
founder Hugh Hefner owns the crypt next to Marilyn Monroe at the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery. Monroe was his first centerfold.

First person to appear on the cover of
Rolling Stone
magazine: John Lennon.

A variety of mimosa is called the sensitive plant because it wilts when touched.

The flowers of Africa’s baobab tree open only in the moonlight. They are pollinated by bats.

A species of fern has the most chromosomes of all living things: 630 pairs.

The Venus flytrap only grows wild in one place: a 100-mile stretch of Carolina swampland.

Oldest vegetable known to humans: the pea.

Artichokes are flowers.

Peaches used to be known as Persian apples.

Peanuts are one of the ingredients used to make dynamite.

The stuff that gives freshly mowed grass its smell: hexanol.

An average apple contains about six teaspoons of sugar.

Mushrooms share a common ancestry with insects, not plants.

In search of a “World’s Largest” title, Bassett Furniture built a 20-foot 3-inch Mission chair. They sent it on tour to Bassett stores across the United States, calling it the World’s Largest Chair, until Anniston, Alabama, publicly refuted their claim. Now they call it the World’s Largest Chair on Tour.

A furniture company in Wingdale, New York, used more than a ton and a half of wood to build its 25-foot-tall Fireside Chair.

A custom furniture maker in Lipan, Texas, erected a 26-foot rocking chair in 2001.

Anniston, Alabama, has a 33-foot office chair in the vacant lot next to Miller Office Supply. A spiral staircase leads to the seat of the chair, which was constructed from 10 tons of steel.

The winner in the battle of the giant chairs is Promosedia in the province of Udine, Italy. Equivalent in size to a 7-story building, this chair was constructed in 1995 to advertise the chair-building region, known as the Chair Triangle. The 65-foot chair is indisputably the largest in the world. (So far.)

In medieval Europe, wedding ceremonies often took place in baths. Participants stood in a large tub as food was passed around on small boats.

Some 19th-century chamber pots were decorated with portraits of popular enemies on the inside. One popular target: Napoléon.

Forty-six percent of women “wish they could do something about their thighs.”

Two out of three times, it’s the woman who starts a flirtation.

Fifteen percent of American women say they send flowers to themselves on Valentine’s Day.

Fifty-seven percent of women would rather go on a shopping spree than have sex.