Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Extraordinary Book of Facts: And Bizarre Information (4 page)

How did hammocks get their name? They were first made from the fibers of the hamack tree.

Theater spotlights used to burn lime for light. Thus the term
limelight
.

The lollipop was named after Lolly Pop, one of the most famous racehorses of the early 1900s.

The slang term for an emergency room patient who isn’t sick enough to justify being there:
Gomer
(Get out of my emergency room).

Princeton professor John W. Tukey coined the term
software
in 1958.

When you do something “on the q.t.,” you are using an abbreviation of the word
quiet
.

Police are sometimes called the fuzz because London police once wore fuzzy helmets.

Why did Thomas Henry Huxley invent the word
agnostic
in 1869? He got tired of being called an atheist.

Sir Isaac Newton invented the swinging door . . . for the convenience of his cats.

Most dogs run an average of 19 mph.

Ancient Egyptians could be put to death for mistreating a cat.

Does your dog seem wary of going out in the rain? It’s not because it’s afraid to get wet. Rain amplifies sound and hurts dogs’ ears.

Toy-breed dogs live an average of seven years longer than large breeds.

In ancient Rome it wasn’t “officially” dark until you could no longer tell the difference between a dog and a wolf howling in the distance.

Average cat bill at the veterinarian: $80 per year for life.

Most popular dog names in Russia: Ugoljok (Blackie) and Veterok (Breezy).

In Japan you can rent a dog as a companion for $20 an hour.

In 1997 a member of Australia’s parliament proposed that all cats be eradicated from the country by 2002.

A Persian cat named Precious survived for 18 days without food. She was found when rescue crews heard her cries—across the street from the site of the World Trade Center.

The heaviest (and longest) dog ever recorded was an Old English Mastiff named Zorba: 343 pounds (and 8 feet 3 inches from nose to tail).

On August 30, 1995, Sean Shannon of Canada recited Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy in 23.8 seconds—an average of 655 words a minute.

On August 17, 1991, 512 dancers of the Royal Scottish Dance Society (Toronto branch) set the record for the largest genuine Scottish country dance (a reel).

In 1988 Palm Dairies of Edmonton created the world’s largest ice cream sundae—24,900 kg. (54,895 lbs.).

In 1993 the Kitchener-Waterloo Hospital Auxiliary filled a bowl with 2,390 kg (5,269 lbs.) of strawberries.

Four hundred mothers in Vancouver broke the record for mass breast feeding in 2002.

In February 2000, 1,588 couples at the Sarnia Sports Centre broke the record for most kissing in one place at one time.

Dave Pearson holds the record for clearing all 15 balls from a standard pool table in 26.5 seconds at Pepper’s Bar in Windsor, Ontario, in 1997.

In 1998, 1,000 University of Guelph students formed the longest human conveyor belt, laying down in a row and rolling a surfboard over their bodies. In 1999 they set the record for simultaneous soap-bubble blowing.

green-eyed monster

into thin air

kill with kindness

milk of human kindness

neither rhyme nor reason

one fell swoop

primrose path

star-cross’d lovers

sweets for the sweet

tower of strength

Who still believes in Santa? Studies say more four-year-olds do than any other age group.

Only 10 percent of U.S. households put cookies out for Santa on Christmas Eve.

U.S. kids leave an estimated 812 million cookies out for Santa on Christmas Eve.

Odds that a battery was bought during the Christmas season: 40 percent.

More than 25 million kids visit Santa in malls nationwide each year.

Worldwide, Christmas has been celebrated on 135 different days of the year.

Americans send about 2 billion Christmas cards every year.

Ninety-eight percent of Christmas trees are grown on tree farms.

Every year, 1.76 billion candy canes are made.

The tradition of sending Christmas cards originated in England in 1843.

CB radio users don’t like to get Christmas cards—that’s a code name for speeding tickets.

About 83 percent of U.S. families put up a Christmas tree. Fifty-eight percent of the trees are artificial.

Fake Christmas trees have outsold real ones every year since 1991.

The average shopping-center Santa weighs 218 pounds and has a 43-inch waist.

The holiday song played most often in malls in 2004 was “Jingle Bells.”

Top five holiday pies in the United States: pumpkin, apple, cherry, lemon meringue, and pecan.

Assuming Rudolph’s in front, there are 40,320 ways to arrange the eight other reindeer.

Superglue is so strong that a single square-inch bond can lift a ton of weight.

Superglue doesn’t stick to the bottle because it needs moisture to set, and there is no moisture in the bottle.

Cyanoacrylate products are a $325-million-a-year industry. Approximately 90 percent of U.S. homes have at least one tube.

During the Vietnam War tubes of superglue were put in U.S. soldiers’ first-aid kits to help seal wounds. Special kinds of superglue are now used in hospitals worldwide, reducing the need for sutures, stitches, and staples. (It doesn’t work on deep wounds or on wounds where the skin does a lot of stretching, such as over joints.)

Superglue is now used in forensic detection. When investigators open a foil packet of ethyl-gel cyanoacrylate, the fumes settle on skin oils left behind in human fingerprints, turning the invisible smears into visible marks.

A little dab’ll do ya. Superglue bonds best when it’s used at the rate of one drop per square inch. More than that requires a much longer bonding period, which may result in a weaker bond.

If you’re gluing two flat surfaces together, rough them up with sandpaper first. That’ll give the glue more surface area to bond to. But make sure you blow off any dusty residue first.

Glued your fingers together? Use nail polish remover. Don’t have any? Try warm, soapy water and a little patience. Your sweat and natural skin oils will soon loosen the bond.

Marcel Marceau’s greatest-hits album consisted of 40 minutes of silence, followed by applause.

More than 2.2 million Americans play the accordion.

There are more bagpipe bands in the United States than there are in Scotland.

When he needed inspiration, Ludwig van Beethoven poured water on himself.

Mozart wrote a piano piece that required the player to use both hands and his nose.

J. S. Bach played the cathedral organ. So did 100 of his descendants.

Sixty-one percent of Americans like to hear music when put on hold. Twenty-two percent prefer silence.

The “five golden rings” in “The Twelve Days of Christmas” weren’t originally rings. They were ring-necked pheasants.

The original jukeboxes came with earphones—only one person could listen at a time.

Artists who have recorded the most songs: the Mills Brothers (about 2,250).

The musical
Cats
ran on Broadway for 18 years.

Traditionally it isn’t a “big band” unless it has 10 different instrumentalists.

There are 158 verses in the Greek national anthem.

Singer Wayne Newton is a descendant of Pocahontas.

No one knows exactly where Mozart is buried in Vienna.

111,111,111 × 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321

If you tried to count off a billion seconds, it would take you 31.7 years.

One speck of dust contains a quadrillion atoms.

Take a century and divide it into 50 million. You get about a minute.

Experts say time is getting shorter: 280 million years ago a year lasted 390 days.

The average drinking glass holds 50 teaspoons of water.

There are 31,557,600 seconds in a year.

It takes seven shuffles to thoroughly mix a 52-card deck.

The official definition of a “jiffy” is 1/100 of a second.

The Gregorian calendar is accurate to within half a day per 1,000 years.

Number of toothpicks you can make from one cord of wood: 75 million.

The word
million
was invented sometime around the year A.D. 1300

The Chinese were the first to use a decimal system, in the 6th century B.C.

There are 3 x 10 to the 33rd power (3,000 quintillion) individual living things on earth. (Of these, 75 percent are bacteria.)

The odds of someone winning a lottery twice in four months is about one in 17 trillion. But Evelyn Marie Adams won the New Jersey lottery in both 1985 and 1986.

Known as the Animal, Ed Krachie is America’s wiener-eating champion. His best: 22.5 wieners (including buns) in 12 minutes.

Wieners are an economical buy. With virtually no weight loss during preparation, a pound of wieners yields a pound of edible food.

In 1970, at Camp David, the presidential retreat, wieners were served to Great Britain’s Prince Charles and Princess Anne.

More hot dogs—2 million a year—are sold at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport than at any other single location in the world.

NASA included the hot dog as a regular menu item on its Apollo moon flights,
Skylab
missions, and the space shuttle.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture “officially recognizes” the following as legitimate names for the hot dog: 1) wiener, 2) frankfurter, 3) frank, 4) furter, 5) hot dog.

The favorite meal of acclaimed actress Marlene Dietrich was hot dogs and champagne.

Lucky dog: In May 2000 Larry Ross stopped for a hot dog at Mr. K’s Party Shoppe in Utica, Michigan. He had a $100 bill and bought lotto tickets with the change. One ticket was a $181.5 million winner.

“Some people don’t salivate when they walk by a hot dog stand and smell that great symbol of American cuisine, bursting with grease and salt. But they are a very, very small group.”

—New York Times

ACE BANDAGES

When World War I broke out in 1914, the Becton Dickinson Company had to stop importing German elastic bandages and start making them in the United States. They held a contest to give the new product a name. The winners: a group of doctors who called it ACE, for All Cotton Elastic.

DIAL SOAP

The name refers to a clock or watch dial. The reason: it was the first deodorant soap, and Lever Brothers wanted to suggest that it would prevent body odor “all around the clock.”

WD-40

In the 1950s the Rocket Chemical Company was working on a product for the aerospace industry that would reduce rust and corrosion by removing moisture from metals. It took them 40 tries to come up with a workable Water Displacement formula.

SARA LEE

Charles Lubin and his brother-in-law owned three bakeries in the Chicago area. But Lubin dreamed of bigger things. He wanted a product that would be distributed nationally. In 1949 he created a cheesecake that he could sell through supermarkets, and named it after his daughter, Sara Lee Lubin. Within five years the company had developed a way to quick-freeze Sara Lee cakes and was selling them all over the United States.