THE CRIMSON CRUSADER
By January 14, 1917, von Richthofen had his 16th victory, making him Germany’s number-one flying ace. The German government gave the young pilot a medal and a squadron of his own. He also painted his plane red—both to intimidate enemies and to make it recognizable to German troops on the ground so they wouldn’t shoot at him. Within weeks, his friends and enemies were calling him the Red Baron.
Q. The Nile is the world’s longest river, but what’s #2? A: The Amazon.
THE RED BARON RULES THE SKIES
Von Richthofen’s squadron became the most feared group of air fighters in World War I. During “Bloody April” 1917, the British lost 912 airmen to the Red Baron’s pilots. Von Richthofen himself shot down 41 planes. The German military, afraid of losing its best pilot, ordered him to take a couple of months’ vacation. But shortly after his return to duty in September, he upped his victory count to 60. By April 1918, the German ace had increased his total to an incredible 80 victories. There seemed no way to stop the Red Baron.
REVENGE OF THE SOPWITH CAMEL
Like most German pilots, von Richthofen usually flew a triplane, which had three wings and was more maneuverable than other airplanes, but didn’t always fly steady. In 1916, though, the British air force had introduced a new, sturdier fighter plane, the Sopwith Camel. And it was against one of these that the Red Baron finally met his match.
First character to speak in Star Wars: A New Hope: C-3PO.
On April 21, 1918, Canadian pilot Wilfrid May was on patrol over France in a Sopwith Camel when he found himself under attack by the Red Baron. (Canada and Britain were allies.) May was not an experienced flyer, and he later said that it was because of his erratic, jerky turns that he survived the battle. Nonetheless, the young Canadian held his own.
May finally decided to head back to his own territory, but the German ace followed him. Another Canadian pilot named Arthur “Roy” Brown saw the dogfight and chased after von Richthofen’s plane, as friendly troops on the ground opened fire. But the Red Baron easily avoided Brown and continued after May, who cringed as machine-gun bullets whipped past his ears.
GOING DOWN
Then suddenly, the firing stopped. May circled back to see the Red Baron’s plane making a bouncy emergency landing below. When it came to a stop, the soldiers on the ground approached warily. The plane’s motor was still running, and the propeller still turning, but there was no movement in the cockpit. When one of them finally looked inside, he found the Red Baron barely alive. A single bullet had come up through the floor of the plane and lodged in the ace’s chest. One of the soldiers on the ground had fired a lucky shot.
The Red Baron died in his cockpit soon after. He was only 25, and legend has it that just before he died, he whispered, “Kaput”—finished.
Number of mammal species identified (so far) by scientists: 5,416.
HOW TO MAKE A VOODOO DOLL
People around the world actually practice voodoo, but what’s the story behind the superstition.
IS VOODOO REAL?
Voodoo is a religion that merges African pagan beliefs and Roman Catholicism. In the 1500s and 1600s, the French (who were mostly Catholic) brought slaves to Haiti from Africa, and those men and women carried their tribal rituals with them. As the two cultures merged, so did the religions. Today, voodoo is an official religion in Haiti and is also widely practiced in Louisiana, where many former Haitian slaves moved in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Many voodoo rituals are based on superstition. Followers believe in spirit possession, the power of dance to cure illness…and voodoo dolls. The dolls can be used for good or bad—their purpose is to affect the lives of the people they represent. And if you’ve ever wanted to make your own voodoo doll, here’s how.
WHAT YOU’LL NEED
Two sticks, moss, string, pieces of fabric (about 12 inches long), yarn that matches your fabric, a needle and thread, fabric glue, buttons, feathers, and scissors.
Fireworks that explode into perfect circles are called “chrysanthemums.”
GET STARTED
1.Make a cross with your sticks, and wrap the string around the joint so it’s tight. Tie a knot to secure it.
2.Wrap the Spanish moss around the sticks. Start at the joint and then move up and down to create the doll’s head and body. Be sure to wrap the moss tightly so that it doesn’t fall off; use string to secure it if you need to.
3.Cut the pieces of fabric into two-inch-wide strips and wrap those around the moss. Leave a little moss poking out of each end (for hair, hands, and feet). Glue the end of the last fabric strip to the doll’s body.
4.Get the buttons, feathers, needle, and thread. Sew two buttons for eyes and one for the nose. Glue feathers to your doll’s head to make hair.
5.Now it’s time to personalize your doll. Write the person’s initials on the back, and then you’re ready to “cast” spells that wish luck or misfortune to the person your doll represents.
If you happen to be in Norway and a fisherman walks by, spit after him It’s a way of wishing him good luck.
EWWW! BOOGERS!
Lots of people will probably tell you not to be snotty, but we say, “Go ahead!”
•About 70 percent of people say they pick their boogers. (And 3 percent of those admit that they eat what they pick.)
•Eating your boogers is really gross…but it’s not necessarily unhealthy. In fact, because the booger mucus exposes your body to new and useful bacteria, it can actually strengthen your immune system. But the dirty fingers you use to do the picking are full of bad bacteria that can make you sick.
•Eye boogers (those round balls of mucus that collect in the corners of your eyes and sometimes turn crusty) are made from the same stuff as the boogers in your nose.
•Pure boogers are clear.
•You get especially snotty in cold weather because when the temperature drops, your body produces more mucus to line your throat and nose. In the cold air, the mucus is usually thick. But when you go inside someplace warm, it thins and drips out.
•Animals make boogers, too. If horses get stuffy, they just take a deep breath and blow hard through their noses. Other animals, like bison, have tongues long enough to lick their noses clean.
WHO SAID THAT?
Want to learn to speak without moving your lips?
TALK LIKE A DUMMY
Ventriloquism got its start hundreds of years ago as a way (some people believed) to talk to the dead. Ventriloquists were considered to be prophets, and supposedly, spirits slipped into their stomachs and spoke from there. The word ventriloquism even comes from Latin words that mean “belly speaker.” Of course, the spirits weren’t really talking—it was the ventriloquist manipulating his voice to fool the audience.
Today, ventriloquists make it sound like their voices are coming from a puppet. Ventriloquism isn’t easy, but if you work at it, you can do it just as well as the professionals.
KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT!
Ventriloquists use two main tricks. The first is misdirection. When the ventriloquist’s puppet is “speaking,” the audience focuses on it. That distracts people from watching the ventriloquist, or noticing if he makes a mistake.
A ventriloquist’s second trick is to alter his speech to mask difficult sounds. Most letter sounds are easy. Hold your mouth slightly open and recite the alphabet. Most of the letters require no or minimal use of your lips. The ones that you do have to move your lips to pronounce are B, F, M, P, Q, V, and W. So what’s a budding ventriloquist to do? You can’t just avoid those letters altogether.
The whale shark is the world’s largest fish (up to 50 feet long).
FAKE OUT
Try these substitutions:
•For “B,” say “geh,” which comes from the back of your throat instead of your lips. For example, instead of “bottle,” you’d say “gottle.”
•For “F” and “V,” take a tip from Daffy Duck. Replace either sound with “th.” In other
words, things aren’t “very fantastic,” they’re “thery thantastic.”
•“M” is easy, just use an “N” sound. If your dummy calls you a “moron,” don’t be offended—he actually said “noron.”
•“P” can be tricky. “P” or “puh” is replaced by a “kuh” or “kluh” from the back of your throat. Example: “They pay you to write these jokes?” would become “They kay you to write these jokes?”
•A “Q” is really made up of two different sounds: the “cuh” and the “oo.” For ventriloquism, mash the two sounds together to make a lipless “koo” sound, as in “koo-iet” for “quiet.”
•The “wuh” of a “W” can be covered up with an “ooo” or “oh,” as in “oo-ut’s going on?”
Now all you need is kuh-ractice!
Six U.S. cities claim to be the world’s “popcorn capital.”
LET ME OUTTA HERE!
Papillon—which means “butterfly” in French—was the nickname of a man named Henri Charrière. It’s also the title of his book and of a movie based on his story of life in prison and daring escape. But how much of his tale is actually true?
HENRI’S STORY
In 1931, 25-year-old Frenchman Henri Charrière was convicted of murder and given a life sentence of hard labor. In those days, France sent its convicted criminals to French Guiana, a small territory that sits on the north coast of South America. Most of the cells in the prison were reserved for violent criminals, and Charrière certainly qualified. (Fellow prisoners called him “Papillon” or “Papi” because he had a tattoo of a butterfly on his chest.) He always swore that he wasn’t guilty, and vowed to escape the unjust punishment no matter the cost.
ON THE RUN
As soon as he arrived, Charrière started plotting his escape. The first time, he knocked out a guard in the prison’s hospital and made it all the way to Colombia. But he was caught and imprisoned there.
Small world: Actors Christina Ricci and Macaulay Culkin went to elementary school together.
Before he could be sent back to French Guiana, he used a hacksaw to cut through the bars of his cell. (He’d bought the saw secretly from some men who sneaked it into the Colombian prison.) That time, he managed to live on the run for a few months before he was recaptured. Then it was back to French Guiana and two years of solitary confinement as punishment.
DEVIL’S ISLAND
Eventually, Charrière ended up at the most isolated prison in French Guiana. Called Devil’s Island, this brutal prison was just offshore, and prisoners there were beaten and poorly fed. Deadly diseases like malaria were rampant, and the jungle around the prison was filled with fire ants and other dangerous creatures. From 1852 (when the prison opened) until 1946 (when it closed), about 80,000 prisoners died on Devil’s Island.
But still, Charrière tried to escape. He made a raft from coconut shells and, one night, jumped from a cliff into the ocean. Floating on his raft, he managed to get to land and, with the help of strangers, traveled all the way to Venezuela. The authorities there captured him, but refused to return him to Devil’s Island. According to them, it was too violent a place. So in 1945, after 14 years and a total of nine escapes, Charrière was a free man. He settled in Venezuela, got married, had children, opened a restaurant, and wrote his autobiography.
The East Indian wandering whistling duck whistles rather than quacks.
THE TRICKY PART
But was it really his biography? When Charrière’s book was published in 1969, it was an immediate success. People all over the world were fascinated by his tale. But decades later, in 2005, another prisoner from Devil’s Island claimed that he was the real Papillon.
Charles Brunier was 104 years old and living in a nursing home outside of Paris. He said he’d known Henri Charrière back in the 1930s and 1940s, when they were both imprisoned in French Guiana. Brunier claimed that he told Charrière stories of three of his own escapes, all of which appear in the book. Brunier even had his own butterfly tattoo—on his left arm.
History seems to back up Brunier’s story. Other prisoners remembered seeing him on Devil’s Island. Some also remembered Charrière. But they said he wasn’t an escape artist and had a reputation as a model prisoner. Others even said Charrière was never at Devil’s Island at all. The prison didn’t keep good records of who came and went, so we’ll probably never know for sure who the real Papillon was. Henri Charrière died in 1973.
Top-selling gift for Christmas, 1975: Atari’s Pong video game Top-selling gift for Christmas, 2005: Sony’s PlayStation 3.
SPOT OF MYSTERY
Can there really be a place where the laws of time and gravity don’t apply?
STRANGE HOUSE IN THE WOODS
In 1890, Gold Hill, Oregon, was a small, sleepy town with little gold left to mine. That year, after a heavy rainstorm, a former gold processing office (basically, a shack on a hill in the forest) slid off of its foundation and came to rest farther down the hillside. People went inside and found a place that didn’t seem to make any sense: rocks rolled uphill, and people were able to stand on the walls.
In 1930, that shack—now called the Oregon Vortex House of Mystery—opened as a tourist attraction where visitors could see the strangeness for themselves:
•Brooms stand on end.
•Children appear taller than adults.
•And few animals seemed willing to enter the area. But how…and why?
BRING IN THE SCIENTIST
John Lister was an engineer from England. He came to the Vortex in 1929 to study all the strange goings-on. He even discussed what he called “abnormalities” in the area’s magnetic field with Albert Einstein.
Lister seemed to think there was something extraordinary happening, but he never shared his findings with anyone. To this day, no one really knows what he came up with. Legend has it that, before he died in 1959, he burned all his notes, but supposedly, he’d written, “The world isn’t yet ready for what goes on here.”
SO WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON?
Over the years, people came up with many different theories:
1.When the house fell, it moved so fast that it ripped a hole in the earth and created a “gravitational anomaly,” where “high-velocity soft electrons” exit the earth. (Not likely, because there are no such things as “gravitational anomalies” or “high-velocity soft electrons.”)
2.There’s a giant underground magnet or other device that’s causing the strange activity. (Also unlikely.)
3.The weirdness could be caused by magnetic rocks in the area. (Possible, but there is no evidence of iron or other magnetic rocks in the ground near Gold Hill.)
4.High concentrations of volcanic rocks cause the strange events. (Not true—volcanic rocks can’t alter gravity.)
THE EXPLANATION?
The debate has raged for years. True believers always point to magnetic abnormalities, or even the supernatural. But most people think the tricks at the Vortex are just optical illusions. The House of Mystery is likely a tilted house at a strange incline on a hill. The floor, walls, and ceiling are built at sloping angles to trick people’s brains into thinking everything looks crooked and distorted.
Studies show: The three most dangerous foods to eat in a car are coffee, tacos, and chili.
There are similar “mystery spots” all over the United States. Almost all of them (like the Oregon Vortex) opened in the 1930s as cheap roadside attraction to thrill Depression-era travelers. Most of them have a similar hook: single-room shacks on a hillside that are “beyond the realm of science.” Check out one near you…if you dare:
•The Mystery Spot: Santa Cruz, California
•Confusion Hill: Piercy, California
•The Mystery Spot: St. Ignace, Michigan
•The Mystery Hill: Marblehead, Ohio
•The Mystery Shack: Maggie Valley, North Carolina
•Spook Hill: Lake Wales, Florida
•Cosmos of the Black Hills: Rapid City, South Dakota
•Grav
ity Hill: Bedford County, Pennsylvania
* * *
COWBOY PROVERB
Never dig for water under an outhouse.
First job: Patrick Dempsey of Grey’s Anatomy worked as a unicycle-riding clown.
REAL TREASURE HUNTING
Want to go looking for treasure? Well, ye pirate, here’s one of the Caribbean’s most notorious stashes. So attach your peg leg, raise your Jolly Roger, and cast off!
SEEKING: 55 chests of silver and gold
LAST SEEN ON…Norman Island in the British Virgin Islands, which some people say was the setting for Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Treasure Island.
THE LEGEND: In 1750, a ship called Nuestra Senora de Guádelope was bound for Spain and carrying a fortune in gold, silver, and spices. Somewhere in the Atlantic, either the crew mutinied or pirates took over—no one knows for sure—and half of the cargo was lost at sea. Englishman Owen Lloyd, a member of the Guádelope’s crew, stole the other half, loaded it onto his own ship, and sailed 1,000 miles to the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean Sea.
Lloyd and his cohorts stashed chests of gold and silver on the uninhabited Norman Island, named after a pirate who retired there with his spoils in the early 1700s. But Lloyd never got a chance to do that—he and his gang were captured before they could retrieve the goods.
Uncle John’s Facts to Annoy Your Teacher Bathroom Reader for Kids Only! Page 4
