Read Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wise Up! Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wise Up! (18 page)
Sixty percent of all chicken soup sold in the United States is bought during cold and flu season.
A fever can cause brain damage if it goes above 107.6°F.
What do your tailbone and appendix have in common? Nobody knows what they’re for.
Penicillin causes about 300 deaths per year in the United States.
Most frequently broken bone: the clavicle (collarbone).
Streptomycin, an antibiotic, was discovered in fungus found in a chicken’s throat.
Fifty-five percent of Americans are registered organ donors.
Country with the most kidney donors per capita: Iran. (The United States is second.)
About one in five humans has no reaction to the toxic oil in poison oak or poison ivy.
Best-selling medicines worldwide: cholesterol reducers, antidepressants, and ulcer drugs.
Chance of getting a cold within a week after taking a two-hour flight: 20 percent.
Among amateur golfers, lower-back injuries are the most common ailment.
Old English word for “sneeze”:
fneosan
.
Sales of Rolaids, Alka-Seltzer, and Tums jump 20 percent in December.
According to medical texts from 1552 BC, the ancient Egyptian cure for indigestion was to crush a hog’s tooth, put it inside four sugar cakes, and eat one a day for four days.
Mount Everest’s name in Nepali (the main language of Nepal) is Sagarmatha, which means “Goddess of the Sky.”
Officially, the definition of a mountain is “a landmass that projects conspicuously above its surroundings and is higher than a hill.”
Utah is home to the United States’ only major east-west mountain range, the Uintas.
Until the 1830s, most Americans thought the Rocky Mountains were impassable.
Washington State’s North Cascades are often called “the American Alps.”
Most mountainous state in the United States: Nevada, with more than 300 ranges.
The Himalayas cover one-tenth of the land on earth.
The dinosaurs were already extinct by the time the Alps were formed.
World’s longest mountain range: the Andes, which stretch more than 4,000 miles through seven nations.
Number of corpses abandoned and still remaining on Mount Everest: about 120.
In Old English, snakes were called “nadders” until a misspelling turned them into “adders.”
Fifteen people have died during the annual “Running of the Bulls” in Pamplona, Spain.
During the Great Depression, armadillos were a popular food in the American Southwest. Many people nicknamed them “Hoover hogs.”
More than 40 horse “actors” appeared in
Seabiscuit
(2003), with 10 sharing the title role.
Vermont’s Panache restaurant offers musk ox, lion, and giraffe dishes on its menu.
The small intestine of an average ostrich is 46 feet long. (A human’s is between 19 and 26 feet.)
Goat meat contains about 40 percent less saturated fat than chicken.
Odds that a can of fish sold in the United States will be eaten by a cat, not a human: one in three.
What do you call a saddle on an elephant? A howdah.
Iowa is bigger than Portugal.
The entire area of Japan (population: 127 million) is slightly smaller than California (population: 34 million).
Iguassu Falls in Brazil and Argentina has about nine times the water volume of Niagara Falls.
Golf courses cover about as much of the United States as Delaware and Rhode Island combined.
Israel is about the size of Massachusetts, and has about the same population.
Minnesota has 90,000 miles of shoreline, more than California, Florida, and Hawaii combined.
Idaho’s Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve covers more than 1,100 square miles, about the size of Rhode Island.
The combined area of the entire United Kingdom is smaller than the state of Oregon.
The 21 smallest U.S. states combined are still smaller than Alaska.
Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport is larger than Manhattan Island.
The Amazon River basin could hold the country of France 13 times over.
San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park is 174 acres larger than New York’s Central Park.
Genghis Khan conquered more land than Alexander the Great, Napoléon Bonaparte, and Adolf Hitler.
There are more people of Irish descent in Boston and surrounding New England than there are in Ireland.
California’s Disneyland and Florida’s Disney World are both are located in Orange County.
Easternmost capital city in the United States: Augusta, Maine.
Chicago has America’s tallest building and the world’s only drive-through post office.
Smallest post office in the United States: Ochopee, Florida, a town in the western Everglades. The 8'4" by 7'3" building was originally a farmer’s shed.
Fastest-growing city since 1990: Gilbert, Arizona. Fastest-shrinking city since 1990: Detroit, Michigan.
The oldest capital city in the United States is Santa Fe, New Mexico, founded in 1608.
The official state fish of Nevada is the cutthroat trout.
Montpelier, Vermont, is the smallest state capital in the United States. Population: 8,035.
Only 2 percent of the immigrants who were processed through Ellis Island were not allowed to enter the United States.
Maine is the largest U.S. producer of blueberries, with 25 percent of the country’s production. And…
Nearly 90 percent of the nation’s lobster supply is caught off the coast of Maine.
The government owns 85 percent of all the land in Nevada.
High life: 74 percent of New York City residents live at least one flight of stairs aboveground.
October 4, 2004, was the first day since 1999 on which no one was shot in Chicago.
Before 1920, it was technically legal to send children through the mail.
Who looked after a knight’s estate while he was away fighting the Crusades? Usually his lawyer.
In ancient China, criminals who were caught robbing travelers had their noses cut off.
Between 800 and 1500, English law decreed that every male had to practice archery daily.
The notorious pirate Blackbeard took hostages, but there’s no proof that he ever killed one.
In 1908, New York City passed a law forbidding women from smoking in public.
In 19th-century Britain, you could be hanged for associating with Gypsies…or for stealing bread.
The Colt revolver—a six-shooter patented in 1836—is still used today by the Texas Rangers.
During Prohibition, there were more than 100,000 illegal drinking establishments in New York City.
Since the 1950s, it has been against the law for a flying saucer to touch down in any of France’s vineyards.
The USS
Phoenix
survived the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, was sold to Argentina, and sank in the 1980s during the Falklands War.
The primary presidential helicopter is a Sikorsky VH-3D called the Sea King.
Gordon Lightfoot’s song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” chronicles the sinking of the SS
Edmund Fitzgerald
, a freighter that went down in Lake Superior in 1975 without sending a single distress call.
Seaworthy replicas of the
Niña
,
Pinta
, and
Santa Maria
have been docked at Corpus Christi, Texas, since 1992.
William Howard Taft was the second president to own a car, but he was too fat to drive it.
First acting president to ride a train: Andrew Jackson (1833).
The tidewater coastline of Texas contains more than 600 historic shipwrecks.
Lyndon Johnson was the only U.S. president to be sworn in on an airplane.
President James Madison’s reasons for declaring the War of 1812: He wanted to stop the British navy from harassing U.S. ships and prevent the British government from forming alliances with American Indians.
In Galveston, Texas, you can see a yacht that once belonged to Benito Mussolini.
While president, Ulysses S. Grant was fined $20 for driving his carriage too fast.
Only fully intact British warship ever found in the Great Lakes: the HMS
Ontario
, which sank in Lake Ontario in 1780 during the American Revolution.
The average take from a bank robbery is less than $5,000.
Peter the Great of Russia taxed Russian men who wore beards.
The first insurance policy in the American colonies was written in 1721.
The NASDAQ was totally disabled in December 1987 when a squirrel chewed through a phone line.
During the Depression, 44 percent of all U.S. banks failed.
NASDAQ is short for the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations.
The first income tax was levied in China in AD 10, at a rate of 10 percent of the profits of skilled professionals.
When Al Capone was finally convicted, it was not for murder but for income-tax evasion.
In 1864, the top U.S. income tax rate was 3 percent.
The Jesse James gang’s final bank robbery netted them just $26.70.
In England in the 1700s, you could buy insurance against going to hell.
Some insurance companies offer hole-in-one insurance for golf tournaments that award a prize to any player who makes a hole in one.
The IRS processes more than 2 billion pieces of paper each year.
The most likely time for a bank robbery is on a Friday between 9:00 and 11:00 a.m. The least likely time is on a Wednesday between 3:00 and 6:00 p.m.
According to the FBI, 74 percent of the threats against federal workers are directed at IRS employees.
Theodore Roosevelt officially gave the White House its current name in 1901. Before that, it was called the President’s Palace, the President’s House, or the Executive Mansion.
In 1915, to celebrate the completion of the first transcontinental phone line (from New York to San Francisco), President Woodrow Wilson made a call from the Oval Office.
Bulletproof glass wasn’t installed at the White House until 1941. It went into three windows of the Oval Office.
The White House has 412 doors, 147 windows, 132 rooms, 35 bathrooms, 28 fireplaces, 8 staircases, 6 levels, and 3 elevators.
The White House is the only private residence of a head of state that the public can visit free of charge.
The six floors of the White House have a total area of about 55,000 square feet.
Every day, about 6,000 people visit the White House.
Solar panels were first installed in the White House during the Carter administration. Reagan took them down, but GW Bush reinstalled them in 2002.
Weigh yourself; multiply it by 0.0028. That’s how many grams of salt are in your body.
Every day, your eyes are closed for a total of 30 minutes…blinking.
The adult human body requires about 88 pounds of oxygen daily.
When people see someone they like, their eyebrows raise for about two-tenths of a second.
By age 60, you will have lost 50 percent of your taste buds and 40 percent of your sense of smell.
If unwound, your DNA would reach from Earth to the Sun and back…more than 400 times.
Women are 70 percent more likely than men to live past the age of 100.
When you walk down a steep hill, the pressure on your knees is equal to three times your body weight.
Take your height and divide by eight. That’s how “tall” your head is.
A human body includes about 50 trillion cells.
A single gram of human feces contains 100,000,000,000 microbes.
Human capillaries are about 0.0003 inch in diameter…thinner than a hair.
Your eyeballs are 3.5 percent salt.
Each person sheds about 100 billion flakes of skin every day.
The average speaker sprays 2.5 microscopic droplets of saliva for every word spoken.
A gamomaniac is someone obsessed with proposing marriage.
In South Korea, a can of Spam is considered a great wedding gift.
By law, Princess Diana had to call Prince Charles “sir” until they were formally engaged.
Catherine Parr was married twice before she wed Henry VIII. She wed a fourth time after he died.
Inspiration for the Rolling Stones song “Angie”: David Bowie’s first wife, Angela.
To choose a wife, Ivan the Terrible had 1,500 women sent to Moscow for him to choose from.
Queen Victoria’s wedding cake had a circumference of more than nine feet.
Diana was the first British subject to marry an heir to the throne since 1659.
Most remarried couple: Richard and Carol Roble from New York, with 56 ceremonies. (The first was in 1969.)
Berengaria of Navarre (Spain) became the British queen when she married Richard I in 1191, but she never actually set foot in England.
Most abundant element in the universe: hydrogen. (Helium is second.)
There’s no mercury on Mercury—most of the planet is solid iron.
Mineral seepage creates the colors at Michigan’s Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. Red and orange are copper, green and blue are iron, black is manganese, and white is lime.
Most tin cans are actually made of steel, with a thin layer of tin to prevent corrosion.
Iron weighs more after it rusts. Why? Iron oxide (what iron becomes when it rusts) is heavier than iron alone.
The name of the radioactive element in smoke detectors is americium.
Among the ingredients in stannous fluoride, the cavity fighter found in toothpaste: tin.
Most-used metals in the world (in order): iron, aluminum, copper.
The element astatine gets its name from the Greek word
astato
s, meaning “unstable.”