Read Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wise Up! Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wise Up! (31 page)
Honeybees have hair on their eyes.
Mosquitoes can hold twice their weight in blood.
A housefly carries as many as 6 million bacteria on its body.
Bee stings are acidic; wasp stings are alkaline.
Mosquitoes aren’t attracted to blood. It’s the carbon dioxide you breathe out and the lactic acid secreted by glands in your skin that they smell.
Most cicadas have red eyes.
The eggs of some species of mosquitoes can survive in a dried-up state for five years.
An airborne housefly only travels at about 4.3 mph.
A large swarm of desert locusts can consume 20,000 tons of vegetation in one day.
First newspaper advertisement: published in the
Boston News-Letter
in 1704, it was looking for a buyer for a Long Island estate.
First commercial jingle: “Have You Tried Wheaties?” for General Mills (1926). It was a last-ditch effort to save the brand, but radio listeners loved the song and singers (the Wheaties Quartet) so much that General Mills decided to keep making the cereal.
In the 1920s and 30s, Burma Shave put up hundreds of humorous billboards along American roads to promote its new brushless shaving cream. Each joke usually consisted of five or six signs that drivers read in succession. One example: Ben met Anna / Made a hit / Neglected beard / Ben-Anna split / Burma Shave.
In the early 1970s, the Coca-Cola jingle “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” was a #7 hit in the United States and rose to #1 on the charts in Great Britain.
One of the most influential political ads in history (the “Daisy Ad”) featured a little girl plucking flower petals and then a countdown to nuclear war. It aired only once—on Labor Day 1964—but is said to have ensured Lyndon Johnson a victory in that year’s presidential election over Barry Goldwater, who had said he’d be willing to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam.
Fidel Castro’s daughter Alina defected to the United States in 1993.
Country singers Loretta Lynn and Crystal Gayle are sisters.
Joseph Williams, son of film composer John Williams, was a member of the 1980s band Toto.
Timothy Leary was the godfather of actress Winona Ryder.
Marlon Brando’s son Miko was once Michael Jackson’s bodyguard.
Of Johann Sebastian Bach’s 20 children, 10 died in childhood. Four became composers and musicians.
Wilbur and Orville Wright had two other brothers: Lorin and Reuchlin.
Elton John is Sean Lennon’s godfather.
Blues-playing brothers Edgar and Johnny Winter are both albinos.
Four of Mary Todd Lincoln’s brothers fought for the Confederacy.
Painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s son, Jean, was a renowned filmmaker.
Baseball pitcher Barry Zito’s uncle is actor Patrick Duffy, who starred in
Dallas
.
Famous Siamese twins Chang and Eng Bunker married two sisters and had 21 children between them.
Kirsten Dunst’s production company is called Wooden Spoon Productions…because her grandmother always carried one to keep the grandkids in line.
Harpo Marx once tried to adopt Shirley Temple.
1816 is often called the “Year Without Summer” because of an abnormally long cold spell in Europe, Canada, and the northeastern United States. That summer, frost killed so many crops that prices for staples like oats and grain rose more than 700 percent, and a June snowstorm dropped a foot of snow on Quebec City, Canada.
Summer school holidays in Australia begin a few weeks before Christmas.
If you stand in front of the Sphinx in Egypt and look west on the summer solstice, the sun will set directly between the two Great Pyramids.
There are more than 10,000 competitors and 300 events in the Summer Olympics.
William Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
takes place on the summer solstice.
Americans take more than 600 million trips between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Of those, 97 percent are within the United States.
During the 19th century, schoolchildren in the United States didn’t have a summer break like they do now. Kids at rural schools attended spring and winter terms so they could help out with summer and fall harvests. Urban children typically went to school for 48 weeks a year, with one week off every three months. But in the late 1800s, reformers came up with summer break as a way to put all kids on the same schedule and as a compromise to solve two problems: 1) They felt rural schools were subpar and needed more oversight and structure, and 2) Some researchers worried that too much schooling in childhood without a sufficient break led to insanity later in life.
Eighty percent of millionaires drive used cars.
About 40 percent of American adults say they “change into something more comfortable” to watch TV.
Seventy percent of Americans have brown hair.
One in 20 people is born with an extra rib.
Americans spend more than 2 billion hours a year mowing their lawns.
Only 55 percent of Americans know that the sun is a star.
Chances you’ll die in an accident: one in 77. Chances you’ll be murdered: one in 211.
Toast lands butter-side down 62 percent of the time.
* * *
DID YOU KNOW?
Bulrushes are papyrus plants…the same stuff the ancient Egyptians used to make paper.
There are approximately 3,500 astronomers in the United States…and more than 15,000 astrologers.
Roughly 15 percent of the population of New Orleans practices voodoo.
Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, is known as the “Troll Capital of the World.” (There are troll sculptures all over town.)
Between 1520 and 1630, about 30,000 people were reported to French authorities for being werewolves.
Belleville is the “Unidentified Flying Object Capital” of Wisconsin.
Before the advent of Christianity, “witches” in Europe were considered to be spiritual advisers and healers.
The Salem witch trials resulted in the executions of 14 women and six men.
The earliest known images of witches flying on broomsticks date to about 1440, in France.
England’s Stonehenge is 1,500 years older than Rome’s Colosseum.
There were 736 documented UFO sightings in Canada in 2006.
Earliest documented sighting of the Loch Ness Monster: AD 565.
On an average day, at least one UFO abduction is reported in California.
Two things that might make you become a vampire, according to myth: to be born with red hair or to be promiscuous.
While Warren G. Harding was running for president, his wife, Flossie, visited a clairvoyant. She predicted that he was “a shoo-in” but that he would die in office. (He did.)
In 1925,
Billboard
magazine stated that the new medium of radio could be good for record sales if songs were not “killed by being radio’d to death.”
First platinum single (with 2 million copies sold): “Disco Lady,” by Johnnie Taylor (1976).
Bill Haley’s “Crazy Man, Crazy” was the first rock ’n’ roll single to make the
Billboard
Top 20.
First live musical performance to use an electric light show: a recitation of Alexander Scriabin’s
The Poem of Ecstasy
(1908).
First documented use of an electric guitar in a performance: Gage Brewer in Wichita, Kansas, in 1932.
First record to sell a million copies: “Whispering,” by jazz artist Paul Whiteman (1920).
First gold rap album (with 500,000 sold):
Run-D.M.C.
, by Run-D.M.C. (1984).
The first record to feature a Moog synthesizer was
Cosmic Sounds by the Zodiac
, released by Elektra Records in 1967.
First rap LP with an “Explicit Lyrics” warning label: 2 Live Crew’s
As Nasty as They Wanna Be
(1989).
First song to feature electric guitar distortion: “Don’t Worry,” by Marty Robbins (1961). It was an accident—the amplifier malfunctioned.
Electric Lady Studios was the first recording studio owned by a major artist—Jimi Hendrix.
The first Fender electric guitar was the 1950 Esquire. Only about 60 were released under that name.
Ulysses S. Grant suffered from intense migraines that were sometimes mistaken for bouts of drunkenness.
Few photos of Crazy Horse exist because he did not allow his picture to be taken.
After
Dark Side of the Moon
, Pink Floyd planned to do an album that used household objects as instruments. They never released the record, but did record some sounds and used them in their 1975 album
Wish You Were Here
.
Albert Einstein never learned how to drive.
Basketball star Wilt Chamberlain had a superstition about always wearing a rubber band around his wrist.
Reverend Jesse Jackson’s PUSH organization launched a campaign against disco music in the 1970s.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was secretly a chain smoker.
Luciano Pavarotti kept a bent nail in his pocket for luck when he was onstage.
Regardless of subject, Roman statesman Cato was said to end all of his speeches with “Carthage must be destroyed.”
Albert Einstein slept 10 hours a night.
Favorite game of champion swimmer Michael Phelps: Tiger Woods’s PGA Tour golf game on Nintendo Wii.
Patsy Cline didn’t like “Walkin’ After Midnight,” saying it was “just a lil’ old pop song.” (It went to #2 on the country music charts.)
A Swiss doctor once claimed to have invented a camera that could identify aliens posing as humans.
Monkeys have tails; apes do not.
Humans and elephants are the only species that recognize and react emotionally to the bones of their own kind.
Caterpillars have more muscles (4,000) than humans (about 640).
There are twice as many kangaroos as people in Australia.
The blond Mangalitza pig has thick fleece like a sheep’s.
A dolphin’s closest relative on land: the hippopotamus.
From a University of Michigan study: a dog’s memory span is five minutes; a cat’s is 16 hours.
What do turkeys and turtles have in common? Both have light and dark meat.
Cows have 35,000 taste buds. Pigs have 19,000. Humans have 10,000.
The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) was founded in London in 1844.
Donald Duck’s “official” address: 1313 Webfoot Walk, Duckburg, Calisota.
The Vienna Philharmonic, founded in 1842, has had only “guest” conductors since 1860.
Tin Pan Alley was a real place: West 28th Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue in New York, where songwriters and music publishers worked.
The Dallas-based “alternative groove funk band” Frognot got their name from a Texas town.
One of Disneyland’s original attractions: the “Bathroom of Tomorrow.”
The flashing light on top of L.A.’s Capitol Records Tower spells out “Hollywood” in Morse code.
Each copy of the band Black Oak Arkansas’ first album (1971) came with a deed to one square inch of land in Arkansas.
There are 142 staircases at Hogwarts of
Harry Potter
fame.
In 1835, Madame Tussaud established her first wax museum on London’s Baker Street.
In the 1960s
Batman
TV series, the distance from the Bat Cave to Gotham City was 14 miles.
Nashville nicknames: Music City, USA; Cashville; Nashvegas; and Titan Town.
The Port of Houston ships and receives more foreign freight than any other U.S. port.
First Top-40 radio station: WTIX in New Orleans.
During World War I, Charles de Gaulle was wounded several times and was a prisoner of war for three years.
Mickey Marcus is the only soldier buried at West Point who died fighting under a foreign flag. He was a military advisor to Israel in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
Adam Swarner of New York was the first Union soldier to die at the prison camp in Andersonville, Georgia.
Before the Civil War began, General Robert E. Lee was offered command of both the Union and Confederate armies.
Baron von Steuben, a Prussian, drilled George Washington’s troops at Valley Forge.
Lew Wallace, best-selling author of
Ben-Hur
, was also a Civil War general and U.S. senator.
The architect of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, was a graduate of Harvard.
Wal-Mart’s founder, Sam Walton, was an army spy during World War II.
While crossing the Gobi desert, Genghis Khan’s troops survived by drinking their horses’ blood.
After the American Revolution, John Paul Jones served in the Russian navy.
Between the Red River Rebellion (1869–70) and the North-West Rebellion (1885), the two insurrections he led against Canada’s government, Louis Riel (who founded the province of Manitoba) was a teacher in Montana.
To prevent warfare among families, sultans in the Ottoman Empire had the right to kill their brothers.
First man-made object to reach the Moon:
Luna 2
, an unmanned Soviet spacecraft, in 1959.
Earth is 0.02°F hotter during a full moon.
According to astronauts’ notes, moon dust smells like exploded firecrackers.
The Royal and Ancient Golf Club’s rules committee chastised Alan Shepard for not “replacing his divot” on the Moon.
The last astronaut to walk on the Moon was Eugene Cernan, in 1972.
In 1609, Galileo was the first to discover that the surface of the Moon was pitted, not smooth.
Every song title on the soundtrack to
An American Werewolf in London
has the word “moon” in it.