Uncle John’s Facts to Annoy Your Teacher Bathroom Reader for Kids Only!
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BANNED BOOKS
Why would anybody discourage reading?
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
In 1931, the Chinese government banned this book because it gave animals human emotions and characteristics. “Animals,” one government official said, “should not use human language.”
Blubber, by Judy Blume
This children’s novel tells the story of a girl who participates in the constant torment of a classmate, only to learn a valuable lesson when she becomes the object of the teasing herself. In 1990, a parent in Louisville, Kentucky, asked that it be removed from her child’s elementary school because the characters “behaved unkindly” (which is the whole point of the book).
A Light in the Attic, by Shel Silverstein
Cunningham Elementary School in Beloit, Wisconsin, took this humorous poetry collection off its library shelves in 1985 because one poem jokingly encouraged kids to break dishes instead of washing them.
Little Red Riding Hood, by the Brothers Grimm
Was the Big Bad Wolf eating people too violent? Nope. Officials in two California school districts thought the story might encourage kids to drink because one of the illustrations shows a bottle of wine among the food Red brings to her grandmother.
Where’s Waldo?, by Martin Handford
The public libraries of Saginaw, Michigan, tried to ban the first Waldo book in 1989 because some of the pages supposedly contained “dirty things”—like the bare back of a sunbather in a beach scene.
Mickey Mouse comics
In 1938, just before World War II, Italy’s National Conference of Juvenile Literature banned all books featuring Mickey Mouse. Why? The organization thought the character encouraged kids to think for themselves and be individuals, concepts that clashed with the politics of Italy’s dictator at the time, Benito Mussolini.
The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank
Anne Frank’s diary is a sad account of her time living in an attic and hiding from the Nazis during World War II. In 1983, the Alabama Textbook Commission tried to remove the book from schools because the group thought it was “a real downer.”
J. K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was turned down by eight publishers.
BIZARRE ANIMAL ACTS
Some critters do people tricks better than people.
MONKEYING AROUND
Macaque monkeys often imitate human beings, but none do it better than Momoko, a monkey who lives in Nagasaki, Japan. She scuba dives, water-skis, windsurfs, and snow skis.
Her owner, Katsumi Nakashima, adopted Momoko from a shelter. He got her used to the water in his bathtub and then took her boating. At first, he towed the monkey slowly behind his boat on a four-foot-long surfboard with handlebars. But soon Momoko was shooting across the water on water skis at almost 20 mph.
The six-year-old monkey’s favorite sport, however, is scuba diving. Wearing a yellow wetsuit and a breathing mask made to fit her face, Momoko swims to the ocean floor on her own and sits on a rock watching the colorful fish swim by.
PIG OUT
There’s a saying: “Don’t try to teach a pig to sing,” meaning don’t attempt the impossible. But teach a pig to ride a skateboard, play songs, and golf? That’s not so hard…at least not for Bacon and Porkchop, two potbellied pigs from Colorado. The pair can do dozens of incredible tricks, like shooting a ball through a basketball hoop and raising a flag.
Time it took Dr. Seuss to write the text for The Lorax: 45 minutes.
It all started in the 1990s when Lynne Vincent convinced her husband John to bring home a little black piglet named Bacon from an animal shelter. Pigs have a good memory, which makes them fast learners. “I just started training him to be smarter than my friends’ dogs,” John recalled. It worked. After a few weeks of training, Bacon had learned all the typical commands: he could shake, turn in a circle, and fetch. From there, it wasn’t a big leap to 360-degree slam dunks and jumping 18-inch hurdles.
Bacon was later paired with another pig that Lynne and John adopted, a white piglet named Porkchop. The two became a stage team. They sing and act (and learned to do impersonations of James Bond, Stevie Wonder, and Elvis Presley). Porkchop even landed a role on an episode of the television show Diagnosis: Murder. And when the pair performed on The Tonight Show, Jay Leno observed, “Pigs like this only come around once in a lifetime.”
British astronomer William Whewell coined the term “scientist” in 1833.
TOENAILS
You’ve got 10 toenails—so how about 10 toenail facts?
1. MOON SPOTS
That white spot at the base of your toenails (and fingernails) shaped like a half-moon is called the “lunule,” a name that comes from the Latin word for “moon.”
2. WORLD’S LONGEST
In 1991, a woman from California named Louise Hollis set (and still holds) the record for the longest combined toenail length: her 10 nails were 7.25 feet long. How much time does she spend filing and painting them? Two days every week.
3. CLIP ME TENDER
The Loudermilk Boarding House Museum in Georgia contains about 30,000 Elvis Presley artifacts. Here you’ll find a wart, a vial of sweat, and a toenail…all said to have come from the King himself. (Some Elvis experts debate the authenticity of the toenail, though, so it’s just called the “Maybe Elvis Toenail.”)
There’s a Spaghetti Museum in Pontedassio, Italy.
4. OUCH!
About 5 percent of people complain of ingrown toenails, that painful condition where the toenail grows into the surrounding skin.
5. ANOTHER KIND OF TOENAIL
The Devil’s Toenail in Llano County, Texas, is a 350-foot-tall sandstone hill that looks like a giant toenail.
6. MOTHER KNOWS BEST
Gorilla mothers use their teeth to trim their babies’ toenails.
7. TOENAILS TELL THE TALE
The chemicals in your toenails can tell doctors lots of things: if you’re at risk for skin cancer or heart disease, what you eat and drink, whether you take prescription drugs, and even where you’ve lived.
8. A STAR IS BORN
Thomas John Ashton’s 1852 book A Treatise on Corns, Bunions, and Ingrowing of the Toenail: Their Cause and Treatment contains a section on toenails. It’s believed to have been the first time the subject of toenails showed up in a published book.
Let those piggies free! August 6 is Wiggle Your Toes Day.
9. FAST HANDS
Toenails grow four times more slowly than fingernails. (It takes about eight months to grow a new toenail.)
10. NECKNAILS
Marathon runner Jan Ryerse was always breaking off parts of his toenails when he ran races. (They collected in his shoes.) So he decided to craft a memento: a toenail necklace. Most of the toenails are his, but he also took donations from family, friends, and fans to fill it out.
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TAKE HEART
•People who’ve suffered a bad breakup or the death of a loved one are more likely to have a heart attack.
•Most people think their heart is located on the left side of their chest, but it’s not. Your heart is in the center, right between your lungs.
•Make a fist—your heart is about that size.
Actual book title: The Little Book of Horse Poop
GOSSIP!
Stuff you didn’t know about celebrities.
•Both of Jack Black’s parents were rocket scientists.
•When he was a young man, President Richard Nixon worked at an Arizona carnival. As a young man, President Gerald Ford was a model.
•Rihanna’s real name: Robyn Fenty.
•Ashton Kutcher, Jon Heder (Napoleon Dynamite), and Scarlett Johansson all have twin siblings.
•Cameron Diaz washes her face only with bottled Evian water.
•Kelly Clarkson initially wanted to be a marine biologist. Then she saw the shark movie Jaws, changed her mind, and decided to be a singer instead.
•Barack Obama met h
is wife Michelle when he took a job at a law firm in Chicago—she was his boss.
•When she was 11, singer Taylor Swift won a national poetry contest. Her entry: a three-page poem called “Monster in My Closet.”
•Right before he was supposed to record his first album in 2003, Kanye West was in a car accident, which required his jaw to be wired shut. He didn’t quit rapping, though. Instead, he sneaked out of the hospital and recorded his first single, “Through the Wire”—with his jaw still wired shut.
If Oprah Winfrey married writer Deepak Chopra, she’d be Oprah Chopra.
CIRCUS SUPERSTITIONS
When Uncle John was a teenager, he ran off to join the circus…as a toilet paper roll juggler, of course. So to honor his fellow performers (and lucky page #13), he put together this list.
•Don’t sleep inside the big top. It could collapse, and anyone inside might be killed.
•Never look back during a parade. Circus performers always keep their eyes forward to leave behind any misfortune or bad memories.
•Don’t whistle under the big top. Before high-tech headsets and computers, the backstage workers at a circus whistled to each other to give stage cues: when to drop a curtain, when to light the human cannon, etc. If the performers whistled, too, it could throw off the entire show. Today, no one whistles…just in case.
•Don’t count the audience. This old theater superstition applies to the circus as well and was designed to protect the performers. If the audience was too small, it might make them feel self-conscious; too large, and they might get stage fright.
•Never take a picture of an elephant’s trunk pointing down—it will make the circus’s luck run out.
In Nepal, never point your toes at anyone. It’s considered insulting.
THE FART MAN
Forget what your teachers may have told you—some jobs require skills you can’t learn in school.
THAR SHE BLOWS!
Joseph Pujol was born in France in 1857, and as a teenager, he discovered that he had a unique and special talent: he could fart at will. One day, while swimming in the ocean, Joseph took a deep breath before dunking his head underwater. When he breathed in, he felt a whoosh of cold water enter his body through his bottom. Soon, Joseph started doing the trick to entertain his friends: he’d suck in water through his behind and then shoot it out. Then, he discovered he could also do it with air.
After high school, Pujol joined the army and honed his farting skills by performing them for other soldiers. He learned to make different notes with his farts and even played tunes on a small flute called an ocarina.
A CHEEKY STAGE ACT
When he left the army, Pujol went to work as a baker (and earned a reputation for making fantastic muffins). But in 1887, he wanted a change in life, so he put together a farting act and landed a gig at the most famous theater in Paris: the Moulin Rouge.
On the night of his first stage appearance, the audience initially didn’t know what to think. He started off imitating cannon fire and thunder, blowing out candles, and tooting out songs on his ocarina. Finally, the audience started to laugh…and laugh. Some women even fainted from all the laughing because their corsets were so tight they couldn’t take deep enough breaths.
Elephant dung is almost odorless.
THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS
Pujol’s act quickly became popular, and within two years he was the highest-paid entertainer in France. He kept up his unusual job until he retired in 1914.
When Pujol died in 1945, the famous Sorbonne University in Paris asked his family to donate his body to science…so doctors at its medical school could study his insides and figure out how he was able to make such incredible farts. But his family turned them down and instead buried him at a cemetery in southern France.
Actual headline: TREES CAN BREAK WIND.
SPRTS STUPIDITY
Sports stars make great plays, but they can also make some really bad decisions. Like these guys.
•In 1912, a team of college all-stars—the Norfolk Blues—challenged the football team at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., to a game. The Blues thought they’d have no trouble clobbering their opponent because Gallaudet had a lower-ranked team. So they were shocked when the underdogs shut them out 20–0. How did they win? Gallaudet is a college for the deaf, and the Blues talked openly about what plays they were going to run, thinking they were safe because the Gallaudet players couldn’t hear them. The kicker? Gallaudet teaches all of its students to lip-read.
•The Dallas Cowboys were playing the Buffalo Bills in the Super Bowl in 1993 when Cowboys defenseman Leon Lett recovered a fumble and headed for his team’s end zone. But then he made a stupid mistake. A couple of yards before he crossed the goal line, he started celebrating his “certain” touchdown…and didn’t see the Bills’ Don Beebe coming up behind him. Beebe stripped the ball, and Lett didn’t score.
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“Always root for the winner. That way, you won’t be disappointed.”
—Tug McGraw, baseball player
Q: What 7-letter word contains 10 words without rearranging any letters?
A: Therein—the, there, he, in, rein, her, here, ere, herein, therein.
MUSEUMS THAT ARE FUN!
Everyone loves to get out of class once in a while…okay, all the time. Next time your teacher asks for ideas, suggest one of these museums.
THE COCKROACH HALL OF FAME
There aren’t many people who’d set up an entire museum dedicated to one of the ickiest insects ever to crawl the earth. But exterminator Michael Bohdan from Plano, Texas, did. He’s always been fascinated by bugs and, in the 1980s, entered a contest looking for the biggest cockroach in Texas. His two-inch-long roach (now mounted behind glass on his office wall) won first place and the $1,000 prize. And that got him thinking…what about a museum full of roaches?
So next door to his pest-control shop, Bohdan opened the Cockroach Hall of Fame. His main attraction: dead cockroaches dressed up in tiny outfits and placed in various scenes. There’s Marilyn Monroach, a musician roach playing the piano, two roaches sunbathing on a miniature beach, and more than 20 others. Plus, there’s a display of live Madagascar hissing cockroaches, and visitors can hold the bugs…if they have the courage.
DEAD SQUIRREL-VILLE
In 1995, Sam Sanfillippo was a mortician living in Madison, Wisconsin, when he took up taxidermy as a hobby. (A taxidermist stuffs the skins of dead animals so they can be put on display.) His subjects? Dead squirrels. Sanfillippo says he uses “ones that had been hit by cars or died of heart attacks or whatever.” He put them on display in the basement of the Cress Funeral Home, where he worked.
In the years since, Sanfillippo has put together a collection of stuffed, mounted squirrels in various poses. There’s a squirrel on a bucking bronco, five squirrels playing poker, a squirrel “family” riding a Ferris wheel, and dozens of others. And it wasn’t all just for fun. Sanfillippo says the stuffed squirrels made the people who came to funerals at his mortuary feel more relaxed: “They don’t know what to do—the old people—at funerals, you know.” So he’d send them into the basement to look at the squirrels, and they’d always come out laughing. Today, the collection is called the Dead Pals of Sam Sanfillippo, and anyone can visit them.
MORE WEIRD MUSEUMS
•Circus World Museum: Baraboo, Wisconsin
•The Museum of Bad Art: Deadham, Massachusetts
•Kansas Barbed Wire Museum: Lacrosse, Kansas
•International UFO Museum and Research Center: Roswell, New Mexico
A cat’s lower jaw cannot move sideways.
THE DIRT ON DIRT
It’s everywhere…underfoot, in your clothes, on your face. What’s the deal with dirt?
•Dirt is made mostly from rocks. Over thousands of years, wind and water erode the rocks into smaller and smaller pieces. Then other things—like animal droppings and dead plants—mix in with the rock dust to create soil.
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�About 50 to 250 earthworms make their homes in an average acre of lawn.
•The carpet in your house can hold twice its weight in dirt.
•About 80 percent of the dirt in a house comes inside on people: stuck to their shoes, clothes, skin, and hair.
•People in many cultures (Africa, Mongolia, even the United States) eat mud. They consider it healthy for pregnant women—a way for their bodies to get the minerals they need. One American mud-eater says, “The good stuff is real smooth…just like a piece of candy.”
•Some animals, like pigs and elephants, cover themselves in mud to protect and cool their skin.
Found in a fortune cookie: “He who throws dirt loses ground.”
DRIVE YOUR TEACHER NUTS
Making trouble in class is an old tradition—students have been doing it for hundreds of years. A few of those time-honored techniques (and some creatures to make your teacher shriek) are hidden in the schoolhouse-shaped puzzle to the right.
ARM FARTING
BUBBLE GUM
BUGS
COMIC BOOKS
FAKE EYEBALLS
FERRET
GARLIC
ITCHING POWDER
NEWT
PRANKS
PUPPY
SALAMANDER
SILLY NOTES
SNAKES SPIDERS
WHISPERING
WORMS
YO-YO
Say “I love you” in Swahili: Nakupenda.