Fact: They don’t. Your tissue recedes from your hair and nails, making them appear longer.
Myth: You should never wake a sleepwalker.
Fact: There’s no reason not to wake a sleepwalker. This superstition comes from the old belief that a sleepwalker’s spirit leaves the body and might not make it back if the person is wakened.
Myth: In the Old West, pioneers circled their wagons to protect against Indian raids.
Fact: When they did circle the wagons, it was to keep livestock in.
Myth: A strong cup of coffee will help a drunk person get sober.
Fact: It’s the alcohol in a person’s bloodstream that makes them drunk, and no amount of coffee, no matter how strong, will change that.
Myth: SOS stands for “Save Our Ship.”
Fact: It doesn’t stand for anything. It was selected as a distress signal because it’s easy to transmit in Morse code: 3 dots, 3 dashes, 3 dots.
Myth: Fortune cookies were invented in China.
Fact: They were invented in the United States in 1918 by Charles Jung, a Chinese restaurant owner, to amuse customers while they waited for their food. Only later were they served after the meal.
Myth: According to the Bible, Adam and Eve ate the forbidden apple and were expelled from the Garden of Eden.
Fact: They ate the “fruit” of the Tree of Knowlege. Nowhere does the bible call the fruit an apple. The misconception may have come from the fact that, in Middle English, “apple” referred to many fruits.
Myth: Dogs sweat through their tongues.
Fact: Dogs cool off by breathing rapidly, not by sticking their tongues out. Their tongues don’t have sweat glands—and the only large sweat glands they have are in their feet.
Myth: For every cockroach you see in your house, there are 10 more you didn’t see.
Fact: According to studies conducted by the Insects Affecting Man and Animals Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the number is actually closer to 1,000 to 1.
Myth: The artist Vincent van Gogh cut off his entire ear.
Fact: The famous episode followed two months of hard work, hard drinking, and an argument with his best friend, Paul Gauguin. Van Gogh was despondent and cut off only a small part of his earlobe.
Myth: The largest pyramid in the world is in Egypt.
Fact: The Quetzalcoatl pyramid southeast of Mexico City is 177 feet tall, with a base covering 45 acres and a volume of 120 million cubic feet. Cheops, the largest in Egypt, though originally 481 feet tall, has a base covering only 13 acres and a volume of only 90 million cubic feet.
Myth: A limb “falls asleep” because its blood supply gets cut off.
Fact: This feeling of numbness—called neurapraxia—happens when a major nerve is pinched against a hard object or bone. This causes the harmless temporary sensation of numbness, but the blood continues to flow normally.
Sweet Tooth
Americans consume more than 20 pounds of candy per person per year.
The kid on the Cracker Jack box is named Robert.
The seven Gummi Bears are named Gruffi, Cubbi, Tummi, Zummi, Sunni, Gusto, and Grammi.
Bellysinkers, doorknobs, and burl cakes are nicknames for doughnuts.
The double Popsicle stick was introduced during the Depression. It was designed so two people could share it.
Animal Crackers come in 18 different “species.”
In 1995 Kellogg Company paid $2,400 to a man whose kitchen was damaged by a flaming Pop-Tart.
World’s best-selling cookie: Oreo.
Five Jell-O flavors that flopped: celery, coffee, cola, apple, and chocolate.
Twinkie inventor Jimmy Dewar ate 40,177 Twinkies in his lifetime.
Sixty-nine percent of cake eaters eat the cake first, then the frosting.
The average American consumes 1 ton of ice cream in his or her lifetime.
Cranberry Jell-O is the only flavor that contains real fruit flavoring.
About 8 percent of students at the Dunkin’ Donuts Training Center fail the six-week course.
Aspartame is 200 times sweeter than sugar. Saccharin is 500 times sweeter.
There are more places to buy candy in the United States than there are places to buy bread.
Your Average Kid
A child laughs about 400 times a day. Adults laugh about 15 times.
More children are accidentally poisoned by toxic houseplants than by household chemicals.
The average American child uses 730 crayons by the age of 10.
The price of a sleepover in the Bronx Zoo’s Congo Gorilla Forest exhibit for 15 kids: $4,500.
The average American child takes his first trip to the mall at two months old.
A child just starting school knows about 6,000 words.
A four-year-old child asks about 437 questions a day.
The average kid eats 15 pounds of cereal a year.
The average child will eat 1,500 peanut butter sandwiches by high school graduation.
On average, kids ages two to five put their hands in their mouths 10 times an hour.
An American kid catches six colds a year. The average American kid in daycare catches 10 colds every year.
Forty-six percent of American kids don’t get an allowance.
Sixty-five percent of kids have had at least one imaginary friend by age seven.
Kids’ favorite superheroes: Spider-Man, Superman, and Captain Underpants.
Twenty-one percent of U.S. children say that if they were president, they’d “eat ice cream for every meal.”
Something’s Fishy
Goldfish remember better in cold water than in warm water.
One mother shark can give birth to as many as 70 baby sharks per litter.
Pregnant goldfish are known as “twits.”
The great white shark is the only shark that can hold its head above water to observe activity on the surface.
Some Arctic and Antarctic fish have proteins in their blood that act as antifreeze.
Marine turtles rid their bodies of excess salt by weeping.
A shrimp’s heart is in its head.
Great white sharks can hear sounds from over a mile away.
A baby oyster is called a spat.
Sponges form 99 percent of all marine species.
Maximum life span of a goldfish in captivity: 25 years.
The glue that barnacles use to stick themselves to ship hulls is twice as strong as epoxy resin.
An adult electric eel generates enough electricity to power a medium-size house.
STRANGE TOURIST ATTRACTIONS
The Hall of Mosses (Washington)
Philip Morris Cigarette Tours (Virginia)
The Soup Tureen Museum (New Jersey)
The Testicle Festival (Montana)
Safari
Hippopotamus bites are almost always fatal. Reason: they’re very large bites.
The hippo weighs about 100 pounds at birth.
Elephants drink a minimum of 50 gallons of water a day.
Elephants spend 18 hours a day eating.
The ears of an African elephant can weigh up to 110 pounds each.
No matter what anyone tells you, elephants are not afraid of mice.
The elephant is the only animal with four knees.
An elephant grows six sets of teeth in its lifetime.
Lions and tigers can’t purr. Cougars can.
Force exerted by the jaw of an African lion: 937 pounds. By the human jaw: 175 pounds.
Lions are the only cats that live in packs.
Lions can mate more than 50 times a day.
Elephants can’t jump. Every other mammal can.
The cheetah is the only member of the cat family that cannot retract its claws.
A giraffe only sleeps about four hours a day.
Baby giraffes grow as much as one inch every two hours.
A giraffe’s tongue is 17 inches long.
Baby giraffes drop six feet to the ground when they’re
born.
The giraffe has the highest blood pressure of any animal.
Giraffes are highly susceptible to throat infections because of their long throats—and because they can’t cough.
Famous Folks
Benjamin Franklin once wrote an essay on the possibility of waterskiing.
What did Christopher Columbus look like? No one knows—his portrait was never painted.
P. T. Barnum staged the first international beauty contest.
Astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon with his left foot first.
Daniel Boone thought coonskin caps were uncivilized.
Though deaf and blind, Helen Keller learned English, French, and German.
Joan of Arc was 19 years old when she was burned at the stake.
Jimmy Hoffa’s middle name was Riddle.
Mussolini’s favorite cartoon character was Donald Duck.
Abraham Lincoln and William Shakespeare have no living descendants.
Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein married their first cousins.
Winston Churchill called his wife Kat. She called him Pug.
Albert Einstein couldn’t read until the age of nine.
Sigmund Freud smoked 20 cigars a day.
Napoléon Bonaparte was afraid of cats.
Cleopatra was married to Ptolemy XIII and Ptolemy XIV—both her brothers.
Cleopatra tested the potency of her poisons by feeding them to her slaves.
Mahatma Gandhi is buried in California.
Myth Conceptions
Myth: The driest spot on earth is in the Saharan desert.
Fact: The driest place on earth is in Chile. It’s so dry in Calama, Chile, that 400 years went by without rain; the only source of moisture was the fog in the air. (A torrential rainstorm broke the 400-year dry spell in 1972, but the record remains intact.)
Myth: Most of the world’s plant life is in the dense jungles of Africa and South America.
Fact: The vast majority—85 percent, in fact—of the world’s greenery is in the oceans.
Myth: All your fingernails grow at the same rate.
Fact: If you’re right-handed, nails on your right hand grow faster; if you’re left-handed, nails on your left will.
Myth: If you touch a baby bird, its mother will abandon it.
Fact: Whether or not a mother can detect the scent of a human depends on the animal’s sense of smell. Birds have a poor sense of smell and would never know from it whether a human had touched their nests.
Myth: Air fresheners remove offending odors from the air.
Fact: Not even close. Actually they either cover smells up with a stronger scent, or make your nose numb so you can’t smell the bad stuff. The only way you can get rid of odors is with expensive absorption agents like charcoal or silica gel.
Myth: Whales spout water.
Fact: Whales actually exhale air through their blowholes. This creates a mist or fog that looks like a waterspout.
The Sporting Life
The game of lacrosse is about 600 years old.
Most popular sport on earth: soccer. It is played by 100 million people in more than 50 countries.
In 2002 runner Tom Johnson ran an 80 kilometer race (about 50 miles) against a horse—and beat it by 10 seconds.
There are about 10 trillion ways to play the first 10 moves in a game of chess.
Sports celebrity to appear simultaneously on Time, Newsweek, and Sports Illustrated: the racehorse Secretariat, in 1973.
John McEnroe once tied his shoelaces seven times during a match at Wimbledon.
Oldest major U.S. sporting event: the Kentucky Derby, first held in 1875.
Fifteen runners started the first-ever Boston Marathon. Only 10 of them finished it.
In an average day Canada imports 822 hockey sticks from Russia.
A runner consumes about seven quarts of oxygen while running a 100-yard dash.
Horse jockeys are the only U.S. athletes legally allowed to bet on themselves.
Oldest American college sport still in existence: rowing.
In the United States, Frisbees outsell baseballs, basketballs, and footballs combined.
First announcer to say, “He shoots, he scores!” during a hockey game: Foster Hewitt, in 1933.
In pro Ping-Pong, if players use white balls, they can’t wear white shirts. They can’t see them.
Geography 101
Check a map: Reno, Nevada, is west of Los Angeles, California.
Westernmost state in the United States: Alaska. Easternmost: Alaska. (It crosses the international date line.)
Tallest mountain on Earth: Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, 31,800 feet from the ocean floor.
Highest town in the United States: Climax, Colorado, at 11,302 feet above sea level.
Moscow is closer to Washington, D.C., than Honolulu is.
Alaska alone has as much coastline as the rest of the United States.
Coney Island isn’t an island, but it used to be.
Three Mile Island is two and a half miles long.
Israel is one-fourth the size of Maine.
There were 30 more countries in the year 2005 than there were in 1990.
What’s special about Cadillac Mountain, Maine, in the winter? It’s the first place you can see the rising sun in the United States. In the warmer months, it’s Mars Hill in Maine.
There are eight time zones in North America.
World’s biggest desert: the Sahara, at 3.5 million square miles. The Gobi is number two at 500,000.
In an average minute, 20,900 gallons flow from the Amazon River into the sea.
Shortest river: the D River in Oregon. It’s 120 feet long.
Page of Sevens
7 Wonders of
the Ancient World
Great Pyramid of Cheops
at Giza, Hanging Gardens of
Babylon, Statue of Zeus
at Olympia, Temple of Artemis
at Ephesus, Mausoleum at
Halicarnassus, Colossus of
Rhodes, Pharos (Lighthouse)
of Alexandria
7 Liberal Arts
Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic,
Arithmetic, Geometry, Music,
Astronomy
7 Deadly Sins
Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth,
Avarice, Gluttony, Lust
7 Seas
Red, Adriatic, Black, Caspian,
Mediterranean, Persian Gulf,
Indian Ocean
7 Days of the Week
Sun’s day, Moon’s day, Tiw’s day,
Woden’s day, Thor’s day,
Frig’s day, Saturn’s day
7 Virtues
Faith, Hope, Charity, Fortitude,
Prudence, Justice, Temperance
7 Sages of Greece
Solon of Athens, Pittacus of
Mytilene, Bias of Priene,
Cleobulus of Lindus, Periande of
Corinth, Chilon of Sparta,
Thales of Miletus
7 Japanese Gods of Happiness
Laughing Buddha, Watchman,
God of longevity, God of scholarship,
God of nutrition, God of
fishing, Goddess of music
7 Hills of Rome
Palatine, Capitoline, Quirinal,
Viminal, Esquiline, Caelian,
Aventine
7 Metals of Alchemy
Gold, Silver, Lead, Quicksilver,
Copper, Iron, Tin
7 Muslim Heavens
Pure silver, Pure gold, Pearl,
White gold, Silver, Ruby and
garnet, Divine Light
7 Sisters (Pleaides)
Alcyone, Asterope, Celaeno,
Electra, Maia, Merope, Taygete
7 Ancient Rivers
Nile, Tigris, Oxua, Euphrates,
Indus, Yaksart, Arax
7 Taxonomic Classifications
Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order,
Family, Genus, Species
Custom Made
CLINKING GLASSES AFTER A TOAST
Nobles and knights were sometimes assassinated by enemies who’d poisoned their wine. So when they got together socially, each poured a little of his own wine into everyone else’s goblet, as a precaution. That way, if one man poisoned another, he poisoned everyone—including himself. Over the years the tradition of exchanging wine has been simplified into clinking glasses as a gesture of friendship.
BUTTONS ON COAT SLEEVES
Researchers credit this to Napoléon Bonaparte. Apparently, while inspecting some troops, he spotted a soldier wiping his nose on his jacket sleeve. Disgusted, Napoléon ordered new jackets for his army—this time with buttons on the sleeves, to prevent a recurrence.
WEARING BLACK FOR MOURNING
Until King Charles VIII of France died in the late 15th century, Europeans in mourning wore white (for hope or renewal). But when Anne of Brittany, Charles’s widow, went into mourning, she donned black. The result: a funeral fashion that continues today.
BUSINESS CARDS
Until the early part of the 20th century, “calling cards” were used by the upper class exclusively for social purposes. Presenting a calling card when you met or visited someone indicated that you didn’t have to work for a living. But as the middle classes got into the act, the calling card became another means of making a business contact.
STRIPED BARBER POLES
Barbers were once a lot more versatile than they are today. They not only cut hair, but performed surgery as well. When the barbers finished, the towels used to soak up excess blood were hung outside to dry on a pole. As the wind dried them, they wrapped around the pole, making a design, so to speak, of red and white stripes.
APRIL FOOLS’ DAY
Until 1564 it was a tradition to begin the New Year with a weeklong celebration, ending with a big party. But the calendar was different then; the new year began on March 25—which meant the annual party was held on April 1. In 1564 a new calendar was instituted, making January 1 the New Year. People who forgot and still showed up to celebrate on April 1 were called April fools.
Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Extraordinary Book of Facts: And Bizarre Information (Bathroom Readers) Page 7
