Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Extraordinary Book of Facts: And Bizarre Information (Bathroom Readers)
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Bees are born fully grown.
Termites eat wood twice as fast when listening to heavy metal music.
Water freezes before a cockroach’s blood will.
Pound for pound, spiders, flies, and grasshoppers all contain more protein than beef.
World’s fastest flying insect: the deer botfly, capable of flying 36 miles per hour.
A hive of honeybees eats up to 30 pounds of honey over the winter.
The mayfly’s eggs take three years to hatch. Life span: about six hours.
Houseflies prefer to breed in the middle of a room.
CHIQUITA BANANA
To let the public know that bananas should be allowed to ripen at room temperature, not in the refrigerator, in 1944 United Fruit commissioned a song and a character: Chiquita Banana. The song was so popular that it was once played on the radio 376 times in one day.
Salt of the Earth
We each have about eight ounces of salt inside us. It’s vital for regulating muscle contraction, heartbeat, nerve impulse transmission, protein digestion, and the exchange of water between cells, so as to bring food in and waste out. Deprived of salt, the body goes into convulsion, paralysis, and death.
It’s healthy to eat about 1/3 ounce of salt a day, but if you eat more than four ounces at once, you’ll die.
We can never run out of salt. There’s enough in the oceans to cover the world 14 inches deep.
Salt is hygroscopic, which means it absorbs water. That’s why you can’t drink seawater; it will dehydrate you.
Only 5 percent of the salt we mine goes into food. The rest goes into making chemicals.
When salt is made by vigorous boiling, it forms cubic crystals, but when it’s naturally dried, it makes pyramid-shaped crystals. The pyramid-shaped crystals are particularly sought after for kosher use and in fine cooking.
It takes four gallons of seawater to make a pound of salt.
Salt is often found with oil and is often used by oil companies as an indicator of where to drill.
For centuries salt was served in a bowl, not a shaker. It couldn’t be shaken, since it absorbs water and sticks together. The Morton Salt Co. changed that in 1910 by covering every grain with chemicals that keep water out—thus its famous slogan, “When it rains, it pours.”
The water in our bodies (we’re 70 percent water) has the same saltiness as the seas.
Familiar Phrases
CAUGHT RED-HANDED
Meaning: Caught in the act
Origin: For hundreds of years, stealing and butchering another person’s livestock was a common crime. But it was hard to prove unless the thief was caught with a dead animal . . . and blood on his hands.
GIVE SOMEONE “THE BIRD”
Meaning: Make a nasty gesture at someone (usually with the middle finger uplifted)
Origin: There are many versions. The “cleanest”: Originally “the bird” referred to the hissing sound that audiences made when they didn’t like a performance. Hissing is the sound that a goose makes when it’s threatened or angry.
MAKE MONEY HAND OVER FIST
Meaning: Rapid success in a business venture
Origin: Sailors through the ages have used the same hand-over-hand motion when climbing up ropes, hauling in nets, and hoisting sails. The best seamen were those who could do this action the fastest. In the 19th century, Americans adapted the expression “hand over fist”—describing one hand clenching a rope and the other deftly moving above it—to suggest quickness and success.
CLEAN AS A WHISTLE
Meaning: Exceptionally clean or smooth
Origin: This phrase appeared at the beginning of the 19th century, describing the whistling noise made as a sword tears through the air to decapitate a victim cleanly, in a single stroke.
TO BREAK THE ICE
Meaning: To start a conversation
Origin: “Severe winter weather is a major nuisance to operators of boats. Until the development of power equipment, it was frequently necessary to chop ice at the river’s edge with hand tools in order to make channels for plying about the river. The boatman had to break the ice before he could actually get down to business.” (Cassell Everyday Phrases, by Neil Ewart)
PULL YOUR OWN WEIGHT
Meaning: To do one’s share or to take responsibility for oneself
Origin: “The term comes from rowing, where a crew member must pull on an oar hard enough to propel his or her own weight. In use literally since the mid-19th century, it began to be used figuratively in the 1890s.” (Southpaws & Sunday Punches, by Christine Ammer)
26 THINGS ELVIS DEMANDED TO BE KEPT AT GRACELAND AT ALL TIMES:
Fresh ground beef
Hamburger buns
Case of Pepsi
Case of orange soda
Brownies
Milk
Half-and-half
6 cans of biscuits
Chocolate ice cream
Hot dogs
Sauerkraut
Potatoes
Onions
Bacon
Fresh fruit
Peanut butter
Banana pudding
Meat loaf
Cigarettes
Dristan
Super Anahist
Contac
Sucrets
3 packs each of Spearmint, Juicy Fruit, and Doublemint gum
The Bible
Dogs are mentioned 14 times in the Bible. Cats aren’t mentioned even once.
Longest name in the Bible: Mahershalalhashbaz (Isaiah 8:1).
The Bible has been translated into Klingon.
The Bible is the most shoplifted book in the United States.
The word sermon does not appear in the Bible.
Sixty percent of atheists and agnostics say they own at least one Bible.
First hotel to stock Gideon Bibles: the Superior Hotel in Iron Mountain, Montana, in 1908.
The word girl appears in the Bible once.
Most mentioned woman in the Bible: Sarah, 56 times.
Only two books in the Bible are named for women: Ruth and Esther.
Over 6 billion copies of the Bible have been sold.
According to the Bible, there were two windows on Noah’s Ark.
LIFE’S LITTLE IRONIES
English novelist Arnold Bennett died in Paris in 1931. Cause of death? “Drinking a glass of typhoid-infected water to demonstrate that Parisian water was perfectly safe to drink.”
Founding Fathers
JOYCE C. HALL
Hall started out selling picture postcards from a shoe box, but soon realized that greeting cards with envelopes would be more profitable. He started a new company, Hallmark Cards, a play on his name and the word for quality, and in 1916 produced his first card. But the innovation that made Hallmark so successful had little to do with the cards themselves—it was their display cases. Previously cards were purchased by asking a clerk to choose an appropriate one. Hall introduced display cases featuring rows of cards that the customer could browse through. When he died in 1982, the company he founded in a shoe box was worth $1.5 billion.
DAVID PACKARD
David Packard was an engineer with the General Electric Company. In 1938 he moved to California, where he renewed a friendship with William Hewlett. The two went into the electronics business, making oscillators that were smaller, cheaper, and better than anything else on the market. Working from a small garage in Palo Alto, the Hewlett-Packard company earned $1,000 that first year. Today the garage is a state landmark: “The Birthplace of Silicon Valley.” Packard died in 1996 leaving an estate worth billions.
CHARLES FLEISCHMANN
An Austrian native who first visited the United States during the Civil War, he found our bread almost as appalling as our political situation. At the time, bread was mostly homebaked, using yeast made from potato peelings, and its taste was unpredictable. The next time he came to America, Fleischmann brought along samples of the yeast used to make Viennese bread. In 1868 he began to se
ll his yeast in compressed cakes of uniform size that removed the guesswork from baking. In 1937 yeast sales reached $20 million a year. After Prohibition ended, Charles and his brother Maximillian found another use for their yeast—to make Fleischmann’s distilled gin.
PAUL ORFALEA
After graduating from the University of Southern California, Orfalea opened a small copy shop next to a taco stand in Santa Barbara, starting with a single copy machine. Business was brisk. He soon expanded the store, then branched out to the rest of California, and then all over the country. And all the stores bore his name, the nickname he got in college because of his curly red hair—Kinko’s.
GODFREY KEEBLER
Opened a bakery in Philadelphia in 1853. His family expanded it. Today Keebler is the second-largest producer of cookies and crackers in the United States.
WILLIAM SCHOLL
As an apprentice to the local shoemaker, Billy Scholl’s work led him to two conclusions: feet were abused, and nobody cared. So, in a burst of idealism, Scholl appointed himself the future foot doctor to the world. Strangely enough, it actually happened. By the time he became a doctor at 22, Scholl had invented and patented his first arch support; in fact, he held more than 300 patents for foot treatments and machines for making foot comfort aids. And his customers seemed to appreciate it—a widow once wrote him that she buried her husband with his Foot-Eazers so he would be as comfortable as he was in life. Until he died, in his 80s, Dr. Scholl devoted himself to saving the world’s feet, adhering always to his credo: “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise.”
SIR JOSEPH LISTER
Even before the mouthwash that bears his name was invented, Lister fought germs: he campaigned against filthy hospitals and against doctors who performed surgery in their street clothes. When St. Louis chemist Joseph Lawrence invented the famous mouthwash, he named it Listerine both to honor and to take advantage of Lister’s well-known obsession with cleanliness.
The Time It Takes
Twenty-nine days, 12 hours, 44 minutes, and three seconds from a new moon to a new moon
Thirty-five days for a mouse to reach sexual maturity
Thirty-eight days for a slow boat to get to China (from New York)
Twelve weeks for a U.S. Marine to go through boot camp
Eighty-nine days, one hour for winter to come and go
Ninety-one days, 7 hours, 26 minutes, and 24 seconds for Earth to fall into the sun if it loses its orbit
Two hundred fifty-eight days for the gestation period of a yak
One year for Los Angeles to move two inches closer to San Francisco (due to the shifting of tectonic plates)
Two years for cheddar cheese to reach its peak flavor
Four years, eight months to receive your FBI file after making the appropriate request
There are six years in a snail’s life span.
Twenty-five years equals the time the average American spends asleep in a lifetime
Sixty-nine years for the Soviet Union to rise and fall
One hundred years for tidal friction to slow Earth’s rotation by 14 seconds
Eighteen hundred years to complete the Great Wall of China
Five hundred thousand years for plutonium-239 to become harmless
One billion years for the sun to release as much energy as a supernova releases in 24 hours
Patently Absurd
INVENTION: Musical Baby Diaper Alarm
USE: Three women from France marketed this alarm to mothers in 1985. It’s a padded electronic napkin that goes inside a baby’s diaper. When it gets wet, it plays “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
INVENTION: Thinking Cap
USE: Improves artistic ability by mimicking the effects of autism. The cap uses magnetic pulses to inhibit the front-temporal, or “left brain,” functions. This, say the two Australian scientists behind the project, creates better access to extraordinary savant abilities. They reported improved drawing skills in five of 17 volunteers in a 2002 experiment.
INVENTION: Breath Alert
USE: This pocket-sized electronic device detects and measures bad breath. You simply breathe into the sensor for three seconds, then the LCD readout indicates—on a scale of one to four—how safe (or offensive) your breath is.
INVENTION: Vibrating Toilet Seat
USE: Thomas Bayard invented the seat in 1966. He believed that “buttocks stimulation” helps prevent constipation.
INVENTION: Lavakan
USE: It’s a washing machine for cats and dogs. This industrial-strength machine soaps, rinses, and dries your pet in less than 30 minutes. One of the inventors, Andres Díaz, claims that the $20,000 machines can actually reduce pet stress. “One of the dogs actually fell asleep during the wash,” he said. Cats weren’t quite as happy about being Lavakanned. “But it’s better than having a cat attach itself to your face, which is what can happen when you try to wash one by hand.”
INVENTION: See-Through Refrigerator
USE: The door is a one-way mirror so when a light is switched on inside the fridge, you can see what’s inside without opening the door. You save energy . . . and pounds. Inventor Bruce Lambert says, “The mirror encourages dieting, because people can see their reflections as they approach the door.”
INVENTION: Rape-L
USE: Haley manufactures skunk scent vials that wearers can clip to their undergarments to fend off sexual assaults. When attacked, the wearer simply pinches the vial and douses themselves with the scent, which is harvested from real skunks at a skunk ranch in upstate New York. The kit also contains a second vial filled with ordinary tap water “for practice,” inventor John Haley explains. Suggested retail price: $19.95.
INVENTION: Beethoven Condoms
USE: The condom will play a bit of Beethoven if it breaks during use. According to news reports, “the condom is coated with a substance that changes electrical conductivity upon rupture, setting off a microchip that produces sound.” Inventor Lino Missio, a 26-year-old Italian physics student, has also proposed an alternative to music: a verbal warning to the participants to stop what they’re doing immediately.
DID YOU KNOW?
Hurricanes are classed by wind speed:
Category 1 74–95 mph
Category 2 96–110 mph
Category 3 111–130 mph
Category 4 131–155 mph
Category 5 156 mph and up
That Was Then
In 1912 the archbishop of Paris declared dancing the tango a sin.
In the 13th century, Europeans baptized children with beer.
King Henry VI banned kissing in England in 1439 because he thought it spread disease.
Tablecloths originally served as big napkins. People wiped their hands and faces on them.
Ancient Roman theaters had “vomitoriums,” passageways that allowed people to file in and out quickly. (They weren’t for vomiting.)
Parrot tongue and ostrich brains were considered delicacies in the Roman Empire.
Colonial governor John Winthrop introduced the table fork to America in 1620.
When medieval Europeans burned witches, the witches’ families had to pay for the firewood.
Knights in armor used to lift their visors when riding past the king—the original military salute.
In the Middle Ages chicken soup was considered an aphrodisiac.
In the 13th century, suits of armor weighed as much as 90 pounds.
The Pilgrims refused to eat lobsters because they thought they were really big insects.
The wok began as a Bronze-Age Mongolian helmet that doubled as a cooking pan.
World’s oldest profession according to anthropologists: witch doctor.
Page of Sixes
6 Nobel Prize Categories
Peace, Chemistry, Physics,
Physiology & Medicine,
Literature, Economics
6 Wives of Henry VIII
Catherine of Aragon, Ann
Boleyn, Jane Seymour,
Anne of
Cleves, Catherine Howard,
Catherine Parr
6 Parts of the
Circulatory System
Heart, Arteries, Arterioles,
Capillaries, Venules, Veins
6 Enemies of Mankind
(Hinduism)
Lust, Angst, Envy, Avarice,
Spiritual ignorance, Pride
6 Layers of the Earth
Crust, Upper mantle, Lower
mantle, Outer core, Transition
region, Inner core
6 Grades of Meat
Prime, Choice, Good,
Standard, Commercial, Utility
6 Foreign Places Named
for U.S. Presidents
Cape Washington, Antarctica;
Monrovia, Liberia; Lincoln
Island, South China Sea;
Cleveland, Brazil; Mount
Eisenhower, Alberta, Canada;
Avenue de President
Kennedy, Paris
6 Rodeo Contests
Saddle bronco riding, Bareback
riding, Calf roping, Bull riding,
Steer wrestling, Team roping
6 Ice Hockey Positions
Right wing, Left wing,
Right defense, Left defense,
Center, Goalie
6 Branches of the
U.S. Armed Forces
Army, Navy, Air Force,
Marines, National Guard,
Coast Guard
Sinister 6 (Spider-Man’s
Archenemies)
Kraven the Hunter, Dr.
Octopus, Mysterio, Vulture,
Electro, Sandman
6 Elements (Buddhism)
Earth, Water, Fire, Wind,
Space, Consciousness
Myth Conceptions
Myth: Your hair and nails continue to grow after you die.