Read Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wise Up! Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wise Up! (23 page)
When John Tyler was told that he’d been elected president, he was on his knees playing marbles.
Calvin Coolidge liked to have his head rubbed while he ate breakfast in bed.
Abraham Lincoln enjoyed Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven.”
James A. Garfield was a fan of Jane Austen.
Benjamin Harrison liked to play billiards and go duck hunting.
For fun, Calvin Coolidge rode a mechanical horse that he kept in the White House.
An avid collector, Franklin D. Roosevelt had a stamp collection that grew to 25,000 stamps by the 1930s and was worth millions.
Calvin Coolidge played the harmonica.
Speed-reader Jimmy Carter was once clocked reading 2,000 words a minute.
James A. Garfield juggled Indian clubs, which look like bowling pins, to build his muscles.
Thomas Jefferson, James A. Garfield, and Rutherford B. Hayes all liked to play chess.
Thomas Jefferson collected maps, minerals, fossils, bones, and Native American artifacts.
John F. Kennedy collected scrimshaw—carved or engraved ivory.
Harry S. Truman walked two miles every morning at a brisk clip of 128 steps per minute.
Jimmy Carter is an avid fan of Putt-Putt golf.
Franklin D. Roosevelt watched only short films with happy endings.
In 1966, British fans booed Bob Dylan when he used an electric guitar for the first time onstage.
Winston Churchill called Mahatma Gandhi “a seditious lawyer…posing as a half-dressed fakir.”
Japanese pro golfer Masashi Ozaki was uninvited from the 1988 Masters when rumors of his mob connections surfaced.
Tchaikovsky called Brahms’s piano concertos “dried stuff.”
In 1967, Jimi Hendrix opened for the Monkees…and was booed.
After pitcher Buck O’Brien gave up five runs in the first inning of a 1912 World Series game, his Red Sox teammates beat him up.
German psychologist Karen Horney challenged Sigmund Freud’s theories and suggested that men suffered from “womb envy.”
The term “fan” was first used to insult baseball “fanatics” in the late 1800s.
Siffleuse…a female wrestler
Cheek…the side of a hammer
Flink…a group of 12 or more cows
Pintle…the pin that holds a hinge together
Archetier…a person who makes bows for violins and other instruments
Yeevil…a fork used for pitching manure
Zugzwang…making a bad move in chess
Plectrum…a tool used to pluck or strum a stringed instrument, like a guitar pick
Skirl…a group of pipers (A group of harpists is called a melody.)
Peloton…the main cluster of riders in a bicycle race
Digitabulists…a person who collects thimbles
Alipile…a person who removes armpit hair professionally
Hawaii’s unofficial anthem, “Aloha ‘Oe” (“Farewell to Thee”) was written in 1877 by Lili‘uokalani, the islands’ last queen.
Spain’s national anthem has no official lyrics.
The 1862 Civil War song “Battle Cry of Freedom” was so popular in the northern United States that 14 printing presses couldn’t meet the demand for sheet music.
The theme song for
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
: “The Liberty Bell” by John Philip Sousa.
“Taps,” written by Union general Daniel Butterfield, was also used by the Confederate army.
Michael Jackson’s estate owns the rights to South Carolina’s state anthem, “South Carolina on My Mind.”
Teacher Katharine Bates wrote “America the Beautiful” in 1893 after viewing Colorado’s Pike’s Peak.
The Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” opens with a few bars of the French national anthem.
The Dutch national anthem, “Het Wilhelmus,” is the world’s oldest. It was first performed in 1574.
Woody Guthrie wrote the folk anthem “This Land Is Your Land” as a protest of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.”
World’s newest national anthem: Nepal’s “Sayaun Thunga Phool Ka” (“Hundreds of Flowers”), adopted in 2007.
The music for California’s state anthem (“I Love You, California”) was composed by a man named Abraham F. Frankenstein.
With 8,833 wins, Bill Shoemaker is the most successful jockey of all time.
King Frederick II of Prussia (1712–86) wrote 120 flute concertos, more than any other composer.
Author Isaac Asimov (1920–92) wrote or edited more than 500 books in his lifetime.
Total number of concerts played by the Grateful Dead: 2,317.
Susan Butcher won the world’s longest dogsled race, the Iditarod, four times.
Russian songwriter Irving Berlin wrote more than 1,000 tunes.
Vin Scully has been the “Voice of the Dodgers” since 1950—the longest tenure of any sportscaster with one team.
It took Leo Tolstoy nearly 10 years to write
War and Peace
, and it was originally published in six volumes.
Antonio Vivaldi composed 488 concertos, more than any other composer.
Marlon Brando was paid $3.7 million for two weeks of work for his cameo role in
Superman
.
First movie to earn $100 million:
Jaws
(1975). First movie to earn $200 million:
Jaws
.
Highest-grossing golf movies:
Tin Cup
($53.9 million) and
Caddyshack
($39.8 million).
Biggest Hollywood bomb ever:
The Adventures of Pluto Nash
(2002). It lost more than $95 million.
Clint Eastwood’s salary for the 1964 spaghetti Western
A Fistful of Dollars
: $15,000.
Julia Roberts earned $50,000 for
Mystic Pizza
in 1988, $300,000 for
Pretty Woman
in 1990, and $20 million for
Erin Brockovich
in 2000.
Dustin Hoffman’s salary for
The Graduate
(1967): $17,000.
Kevin Smith’s comedy
Clerks
(1994) was made on a budget of $26,800.
Highest-grossing Western:
Dances with Wolves
, which made $394.2 million worldwide.
At $3.9 million,
Ben-Hur
(1925) was the most expensive silent film ever made.
Pulp Fiction
cost $8 million to make, of which $5 million was for actors’ salaries.
The Miami Police Department’s annual budget equals 83 percent of what it cost to make the movie
Miami Vice
in 2006.
For her role in
Cleopatra
, Elizabeth Taylor was the first female actor to get a $1 million film contract.
It cost $3 million to build the
Titanic
…and $100 million to make the movie.
The temperature has never reached 100°F in either Alaska or Hawaii.
Cherrapunji, India, is the wettest inhabited place on earth, with 428 inches of rain per year.
Highest temperature ever recorded at the South Pole: 8°F.
Chicago’s average winter temperature is colder than that of Reykjavik, Iceland.
Tornadoes strike most often between 4:00 and 6:00 p.m., March through July.
In 1921, a hurricane deposited 23 inches of rain on Texas in one day.
A lightning bolt strikes so fast that it could circle the globe eight times in a second.
The warmest city in the United States, on average, is Key West, Florida. Coldest: International Falls, Minnesota.
Dust from the Sahara desert has been carried by the wind as far as Chicago.
Wettest city in the United States: Hilo, Hawaii. Driest: Yuma, Arizona.
Driest inhabited place on earth: Aswan, Egypt, receives only 0.02 inch of rain per year.
Snowiest city in the United States: Blue Canyon, California, with 204 inches (17 feet) per year.
Winds that blow toward the equator curve west.
Florida has more tornadoes per square mile than any other state.
There are no words in the English language that rhyme with “orange,” “silver,” “month,” and “purple.”
The letter combination “ough” can be pronounced eight different ways.
The Swedish group ABBA learned to sing their English songs phonetically.
ABBA also had the highest-charting single in which both the song and band’s name were palindromes: “SOS.”
The only three English words that end in “ceed”: succeed, proceed, and exceed.
Stevie Wonder released a 1968 album under the name Eivets Rednow.
What does KGB stand for?
Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti
(or Committee for State Security, in English.)
The Japanese word
koroski
means “death induced by overwork.”
Saippuakivikauppias
…Finnish for “lye merchant.”
Only word in the English language that begins and ends with “und”: underground.
What is
Nessiteras rhombopteryx
? The scientific name for the Loch Ness Monster…and an anagram for “monster hoax by Sir Peters.”
The “Ye” in “Ye Olde Taverne” is pronounced “the,” not “yee.”
The Simpsons
cartoonist Matt Groening’s name rhymes with “raining.”
In
The Matrix
, Neo is often referred to as “the One.” (One is an anagram of Neo.)
Most college grads live in urban areas—about twice as many as elsewhere.
Harvard University started out as New College in 1636 with nine students and one instructor.
Over a lifetime, a college graduate earns an average of $1 million more than a high school grad.
In 2008, about 18 million students were enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities.
Oldest continuously operating high school in America: Boston Latin, established in 1635.
In 1963, Rice University in Houston became the first U.S. university to establish a department of space science.
Yale University granted the first medical diploma in the United States in 1729.
Oberlin College in Ohio was one of the first U.S. colleges to admit African Americans and women.
Usually, a “college” provides only undergraduate programs, whereas a “university” offers both undergraduate and graduate courses of study.
During the 1960s, Stephen King wrote a column called “King’s Garbage Truck” for a University of Maine magazine.
Mary Lyon founded the first women’s college in America, Mount Holyoke Seminary in Massachusetts, in 1837.
Yale University is home to the oldest college newspaper in the United States, the
Yale Daily News.
Adjusted for inflation, it now costs twice as much to attend a four-year college than it did 25 years ago.
Every year, U.S. doctors leave surgical tools inside about 1,500 patients.
What do revolutionary Che Guevara and clairvoyant Nostradamus have in common? Both had careers as doctors.
Jane Delano, a relative of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, founded the American Red Cross Nursing Service.
Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to graduate from a U.S. medical school and the first female doctor in the United States.
Busiest time of year for plastic surgeons: Christmas.
Only 11 percent of American doctors play golf.
Walt Whitman served for three years in the Civil War…as a nurse.
In 1988, Beach Boy Brian Wilson and his psychiatrist, Dr. Eugene Landy, recorded a rap song called “Smart Girls.”
The number-one reason Americans give for visiting the doctor is “upper respiratory tract infection.”
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung introduced the concepts of extroverted and introverted personalities.
There are more psychiatrists than mail carriers in the United States.
Child-care guru Dr. Benjamin Spock won the 1924 Olympic gold medal in rowing.
Hippocrates, the “father of medicine,” prescribed pigeon poop as a cure for baldness.
Sigmund Freud pioneered the use of cocaine as an anesthetic.
THE GILDED AGE.
The “Golden Age of Piracy” was an outbreak of piracy in nearly all the world’s oceans that lasted from about 1650 until 1725. Most modern ideas of pirates come from this period, and history’s most notorious pirate leaders—like Blackbeard, Henry Morgan, and William Kidd— all sailed during this time.
NOT A BAD JOB.
During the 17th and 18th centuries, pirates made more money and had better working conditions than men onboard merchant and navy ships. Pirates voted before mounting an attack, and all booty was distributed among the crew, with the captain getting a larger portion and the rest shared evenly.
UNCONVENTIONAL PIRATES.
Youngest known pirate: John King was nine years old when he was killed on the
Whydah
, which sank in a 1717 storm off the coast of Massachusetts. And Grace O’Malley, a 16th-century Irish female pirate, commanded three ships and employed about 200 men.
PIRATE JUSTICE.
A pirate who broke his oath to his crew (by hoarding more than his share of the loot, for example) would be marooned on an island with a container of water and a loaded gun.
DON’T MESS WITH CAESAR.
Around 75 BC, before he became emperor of Rome, Julius Caesar was a popular soldier and speaker who was captured by pirates. Initially, they wanted to ransom him for 20 gold pieces, but Caesar said he was worth more and convinced them to ask for 50 instead. After the Roman government paid the ransom, Caesar put together a search party, found the pirates, and had them all killed.
Iceland is home to 120 glaciers…and more than 100 volcanoes.
Only two U.S. towns have an extinct volcano within their city limits: Portland and Bend, Oregon.
During most of earth’s geologic history, the North and South poles had no ice.