Read Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wise Up! Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wise Up! (35 page)
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote
The Communist Manifesto
while in England.
John Hancock, first signer of the Declaration of Independence, was Boston’s wealthiest merchant.
The “White Rose” was the name of an anti-Nazi resistance movement in World War II Germany.
Ho Chi Minh based the beginning of Vietnam’s declaration of independence on that of the United States.
Science-fiction author Isaac Asimov was a claustrophile—he liked small, enclosed spaces.
First person to call Mark Twain the “father of American literature”: William Faulkner.
In 1961, when Harper Lee won the Pulitzer Prize for
To Kill a Mockingbird
, she broke out in hives.
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was once the editor of a magazine called
Babies, Just Babies
.
Time
magazine was originally going to be named
Facts
.
First comic strip artist to win the Pulitzer Prize: Garry Trudeau, for
Doonesbury
, in 1975.
In 1989, baseball pitcher Tom Seaver wrote a crime novel called
Beanball: Murder at the World Series
.
Printing pioneer Johannes Gutenberg was actually a goldsmith by trade.
Karl Marx once worked for the
New York Daily Tribune
.
In 1954, Charles Lindbergh won a Pulitzer for
The Spirit of St. Louis,
his autobiography.
Ulysses S. Grant finished his memoirs on July 19, 1885, and died on July 23; the book sold 300,000 copies.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote her first poem when she was eight years old. She wrote her first epic poem (complete with rhyming couplets) when she was 12.
Winston Churchill worked as a war correspondent in Cuba, India, and South Africa.
Benito Mussolini was a newspaper editor before he came to power.
Adversaries during the Texas Revolution (1835–36), Stephen F. Austin and Mexican general Santa Anna once belonged to the same freemasonry lodge in Mexico City.
Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy” is on their
Physical Graffiti
album…not
Houses of the Holy
.
Meat Loaf is a vegetarian.
The Lemon Pipers hated their 1968 song “Green Tambourine,” but it was their only #1 hit.
The Bank of England was founded by a Scotsman, and the Bank of Scotland by an Englishman.
Chinese herbalists used to prescribe marijuana as a cure for forgetfulness.
Dolly Parton once lost a Dolly Parton look-alike contest.
Sigmund Freud’s endorsement of cocaine as a pain reliever resulted in a wave of cocaine addiction in Europe.
The name of the Soviet propaganda newspaper
Pravda
means “Truth” in English.
The
New Yorker
magazine has more subscribers in California than in New York.
One inspiration for Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
: vampire bats from Central and South America. They drink a few tablespoons of blood daily.
In the horror film
Trick or Treat
, Ozzy Osbourne plays a televangelist who denounces heavy metal.
In 2004, John Kerry’s hometown newspaper, the
Lowell Sun
, endorsed George W. Bush for president…and George W. Bush’s hometown newspaper, the
Lone Star Iconoclast
, endorsed John Kerry.
During the Middle Ages, murdering a traveling musician was not considered to be a serious crime.
The earliest known sheet music for guitars was written by French troubadours around 1100.
First “rock star”: Franz Liszt, in the 1840s. Women used to fight over the Hungarian composer’s handkerchiefs. They wanted them as souvenirs.
Some Chinese classical music is more than 3,000 years old.
The world’s oldest known song, written on a clay tablet, is about 3,400 years old.
In carvings dating to 800, the Norse hero Gunther plays a lute with his toes.
A 3,300-year-old stone carving shows a Hittite poet playing an instrument that looks like a guitar.
First European instrument in China: a harpsichord presented by Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci in 1601.
Klezmer, the name for traditional Jewish music, is from Hebrew words meaning “vessel of music.”
In 1931, in Hungary, archaeologists found the remains of a water-driven organ dating to 228.
Until the 1500s, musicians often used bows to play guitars.
Experts say pounding grain was probably the first kind of intentional rhythm created by humans.
The Celts and Romans introduced the bagpipe to Scotland.
Chinese mythology says the founder of music was a scholar named Ling Lun, whose bamboo flutes mimicked birds.
More than 1,000 species of plants live in Death Valley, California.
The scientific name for the tomato:
Lycopersicon lycopersicum
, which means “wolf peach.”
Peanuts and peas are members of the same botanical family.
Only one in 10,000 clovers has four leaves.
A saguaro cactus can take up to 75 years to grow a side arm.
Shaggy manes, inky caps, sulfur tufts, and pig’s ears are all types of mushrooms.
Invasive exotic plant species infest about 2.6 million acres in U.S. national parks.
The reddish color sometimes seen on snow at California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park is a living organism called snow algae.
The world’s largest cactus plantation is in Edwards, Mississippi.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the apples grown in the United States were used not for eating but to make hard (alcoholic) cider.
An adult turkey has about 3,500 feathers.
The walls of the American goldfinch’s nest are so thick that the nest will hold water. As a result, goldfinch nestlings sometimes drown during rainstorms.
King penguin chicks may go five months between meals.
An eagle’s bones weigh half as much as its feathers.
The orange-and-black Sri Lanka junglefowl, a kind of pheasant, looks like and is a relative of the chicken.
Mallard ducks have 360-degree vision.
Chickens can’t swallow while they are upside down. Gravity is what makes their food pass through their throats.
Puffins can swim faster than they can fly.
Pigeons and doves are in the same biological family, and both are related to the extinct dodo bird.
Gentoo penguins have pink droppings.
Some Middle Eastern farmers breed bald chickens. Why? They do better in the heat.
The Gila woodpecker and gilded flicker are two birds that nest in saguaro cacti.
More than 40 National Park Service sites are designated as “Globally Important Bird Areas.”
Rockhopper penguins can travel as far as five feet in a single hop.
About 50 pairs of bald eagles nest in Florida’s Everglades National Park.
A hawk can spot a mouse from a mile away.
Hollywood fashion tip: wearing yellow makes you look bigger on camera; green, smaller.
A Colombian company makes a T-shirt it claims is “stab-proof.” Price: $500.
Until the early 20th century, many boys wore dresses up to the age of five.
The green jackets awarded to the Masters golf tournament champions are made of 55 percent wool and 45 percent polyester.
The social status of an ancient Roman was indicated by the stripes on his toga.
Sunglasses became popular in the 1920s when movie stars wore them to shield their eyes from bright camera lights.
The Chinese have been painting their fingernails for more than 5,000 years.
During the 1770s, most people in Europe owned only one or two changes of clothing.
Average number of bathing suits sold in America every second: four.
Technical term for the season: autumn, which comes from the French word
automne
. People started calling autumn “fall” during the 16th century.
John Keats wrote the poem “To Autumn” in 1819.
Retailers in the United States sell about $2 billion worth of candy at Halloween.
Leaves change color in the fall because, as the days get shorter and there’s less sunlight, trees stop producing chlorophyll, the chemical that gives them their green color. The bright oranges, yellows, and other colors of fall leaves have been part of the plants all along, but they’ve been covered up by all the chlorophyll. When the trees stop making that green chemical, the other colors come to the forefront.
Best conditions for fall leaves: a dry late summer, sunny fall days, and autumn nights with temperatures of about 40°F.
* * *
“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”
—George Eliot
When Julius Caesar said, “
Veni, vidi, vici
” (“I came, I saw, I conquered”), he was referring to Turkey.
The Cuna, Guaymí, and Chocó Indians of Panama wore gold breastplates, prompting the Spanish myth about El Dorado, the “lost city of gold.”
Abel Tasman discovered Tasmania, New Zealand, and Fiji, but didn’t notice Australia until a later voyage.
In 1498, Christopher Columbus declared that the earth was pear-shaped, not round.
Technically, it was lookout Rodrigo de Triana who first sighted America, not Columbus.
Dublin, Ireland, was founded by the Vikings.
Nobody knows exactly where Columbus landed when he “discovered” America—probably somewhere in the Bahamas.
The term “Silk Road” is a translation from the German
Seidenstrasse
, which was first used by German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1877.
Polynesian explorers used stars, wind, wave patterns, and seagulls to navigate their way across the Pacific Ocean.
In 49 BC, Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon—territorial armies were forbidden from crossing the river in northern Italy because it was seen as a declaration of war on Rome. Caesar’s decision made history, but today, no one’s sure where the actual crossing took place.
In Switzerland, it’s illegal to flush a toilet or urinate standing up after 10:00 p.m.
In the town of Summerside on Canada’s Prince Edward Island, it’s illegal to borrow or lend water.
In Cuba, you can be jailed for three days if your house burns down.
It’s against the law in Madagascar for pregnant women to eat eels or wear hats.
In Paraguay, dueling is perfectly legal…if both parties are registered blood donors.
Speeding-ticket fines in Finland are based on the driver’s income.
Canadian law prohibits anyone from boarding a plane while it’s in flight.
Law requires that farmers in England provide their pigs with toys.
Roger Tullgren, a man from Sweden, gets disability benefits for his “heavy metal music addiction.”
In Glasgow, Scotland, it’s a crime for a man to hug a store mannequin.
The first gold nugget found in the United States weighed 17 pounds and was discovered in North Carolina in 1799.
About one of out every billion rocks in the earth’s crust is gold.
You have a better chance of finding gold than of winning the lottery.
When gold was discovered in California in 1848, the area was still officially Mexican territory.
World’s largest consumer of gold: India—936 tons a year, enough to make a gold ring for every Indian citizen.
Every year in the United States, 17 tons of gold are used to make wedding rings.
There’s about $137 billion worth of gold at Fort Knox, and about $147 billion in New York’s Federal Reserve Bank.
A bar of gold the size of a matchbox can be flattened into a sheet the size of a tennis court.
A typical gold bar weighs about 25 pounds.
Common prices for everyday goods in 1849 California gold-mining towns: $30–40 for a pound of flour and up to $100 for a glass of water.
The average human body contains about 0.2 milligram of gold.
About 90 percent of the gold used throughout history was mined after 1848, when gold was discovered in California.
World’s largest gold nugget: a 60-pounder found in Australia.
The Aztec word for gold is
teocuitlatl
…“excrement of the gods.”
More than 350 sets of brothers have played baseball at the major-league level, but only nine sets of twins have.
William the Conqueror was illegitimate—his father had an affair with a tanner’s daughter.
Only father and son to hit back-to-back home runs in major-league baseball: Ken Griffey Sr. and Ken Griffey Jr.
The woman who modeled for Grant Wood’s
American Gothic
painting was Wood’s sister.
The last king of the ancient Egyptian empire was Ptolemy XV, son of Cleopatra.
Anne Frank’s
The Diary of a Young Girl
was published by her father after her death.
Robert F. Kennedy’s 11th child, Rory Elizabeth, was born six months after his death.
Abandoned at birth as stillborn, Pablo Picasso was revived by his uncle.
The Wright brothers were practically inseparable, and neither ever married.
Polish king Augustus the Strong fathered more than 300 children, but had only one legitimate son.
After he murdered his son, Ivan the Terrible had himself rechristened as a monk to atone for his crime.
Michelangelo’s father didn’t want him to become an artist.
To ensure an heir, England’s King Henry VIII had six wives. But none of his children had children.
At her witchcraft trial, Joan of Arc was also charged with disobeying her parents.