•Pencil lead isn’t lead—it’s a mixture of graphite and clay.
•The New York Jets and the New York Giants both play their home games in New Jersey.
•French fries are not from France. Most likely invented in Belgium, they’re called “French” because of the style in which they’re sliced (into long, thin strips), known in French as julienned.
The turkey didn’t come from Turkey—it’s native to North America.
ANNOYING JOKES
Uncle John loves a good joke. He likes these, too.
Q. What does a dog do that a man steps in?
A: Pants
Q. What’s at the end of the world?
A. The letter D
Q. What did one mountain say to the other?
A. Do these trees make my butte look fat?
Q. Why was the broom late for work?
A. It over-swept.
Q. Where was the Declaration of Independence signed?
A: At the bottom
Q. Can you spell this sentence without any Rs? “Railroad tracks crisscross.”
A. Sure: T-H-I-S S-E-N-T-E-N-C-E
Q. What do you call a boomerang that never comes back?
A: A stick
Eggplants don’t contain eggs. So why are they called that? Early varieties were white or yellow and egg-shaped.
PRESIDENTIAL GOOFS
To get elected president, you have to be perfect, right? Not exactly.
NIXON INSULTS HIS WIFE
Richard Nixon ran for president in 1960 against Senator John F. Kennedy. During the debates of that campaign—the first ones ever televised—Kennedy came off as handsome and relaxed, but Nixon sweated profusely and looked nervous. Then, during their fourth debate, Nixon made a serious goof. While driving home a point, he declared: “America can’t stand pat!” (To “stand pat” means to resist change, and Nixon meant that he thought Kennedy was inflexible.) The trouble was, “Pat” was also the name of Nixon’s wife—and for a minute, many viewers wondered why he was insisting the country didn’t like her.
Realizing what he’d said, Nixon blushed. He didn’t win the election against Kennedy, but he was eventually elected president in 1968—with his wife Pat at his side.
GETTING HIS GOAT
Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd president of the United States (and grandson of William Henry Harrison, the ninth president), wasn’t known as a “people person.” He hated all the socializing that came with being president. In fact, he was so standoffish and cold that his staff called him the “Human Iceberg.” But Harrison had a fun side: He liked to skip work in the afternoon to play with his grandchildren, Mary and Ben, who also lived in the White House. He bought them a pet goat that they named His Whiskers.
But the goat was badly behaved, and one day, while pulling a cart with baby Ben inside it, the goat broke loose. Trailing the cart behind him, His Whiskers ran out the White House gate and into the street. President Harrison saw what happened and took off after them, waving his walking stick in the air. (Harrison eventually caught the goat and rescued Ben.)
Q: Little Briar-Rose is the original title of what fairy tale?
A: Sleeping Beauty.
AHEM, MR. PRESIDENT…
Presidents often entertain heads of state from other countries at state dinners, where good manners are very important. But things don’t always go as expected. When President Ronald Reagan hosted François Mitterand, the president of France, and his wife at a White House dinner in 1988, protocol dictated that President Reagan escort Mrs. Mitterand into the dining room.
They walked a few steps together, but then Mrs. Mitterand stopped suddenly. When the president urged her on, she whispered something to him, but he was baffled—he couldn’t understand French. Mrs. Mitterand was quietly trying to tell him that she couldn’t move because he was standing on the hem of her gown.
* * *
IT’S A BLOODY FACT!
•The pressure your heart creates when it pumps your blood is strong enough to squirt it 30 feet.
•Length of the total number of blood vessels in a human body: 60,000 miles…enough to go around the earth 2½ times.
•Lobsters have blue blood.
•The first recorded blood transfusion was performed in England in 1665. It was done between two dogs. The first transfusion on humans was in 1818 (also in England).
A cat has 500 skeletal muscles. (A human has 650.)
DELICIOUS OR DISGUSTING?
Next time you want to bring your teacher a gift, consider one of these foods.
STRANGE FRUIT
The durian from Southeast Asia is one of the largest fruits in the world—about the size of a football—and it’s covered in sharp thorns. It can be tricky to harvest: people simply wait for durians to fall off the trees (which grow to be 100 feet tall or more), or use a long pruning saw and gloves to pick them.
And this thorny fruit smells as nasty as it looks. The aroma has been compared to skunk spray, rotting flesh, stale vomit, and sewage. In fact, it smells so bad that many hotels in Southeast Asia won’t let tourists take durians into their rooms. They’re banned on taxis, buses, ferries, and airplanes, too. There are even “no durian” signs in Singapore’s subway stations.
But how does it taste? Surprisingly, most people say it’s delicious. If you can get past the stinky exterior, you’ll find several sections of cream-colored, custardlike pulp that can be eaten with a spoon. Durians also have large seeds that can be eaten raw, boiled, or roasted. People who love durians pay good money for them—as much as $15 per fruit.
Q. What’s a lemniscate? A. It’s another name for the infinity sign.
DIRTY, ROTTEN BEANS
Also known as petai beans, “stink beans” are about the size of almonds. They grow in long, thin pods and are used in Thai and Indian food…and are definitely an acquired taste. People who don’t like them claim that these crunchy beans smell like a mixture of farts, vomit, rotten garbage, and dirty toilets. But those who love them say that they taste delicious.
LOOK SHARP
If they got lost in the desert, cowboys in the Old West sometimes had to eat cactus plants. And today, people throughout the southwestern United States eat all kinds of cactus dishes—cactus jelly, roasted cactus, fried cactus, even raw cactus.
There are more than 200 species of cacti, and many of them have a sweet, gooey pulp. But beware—it takes special skills and tools to make them edible. Cactus harvesters have to roll the pieces around on the sand and then skin them with a sharp knife to get rid of all the needles and make sure no one gets stabbed.
The moon is a million times drier than Asia’s Gobi Desert.
ESCAPING THE ROCK
School is a little like prison—people tell you what to do, you’re confined to campus, and you spend most days wishing you could break free…sort of like these guys.
LIFE ON THE ISLAND
Alcatraz is a 12-acre sandstone island in San Francisco Bay. The city of San Francisco sits just a mile and a half away, but the icy ocean currents near the island are treacherous. In 1934, the U.S. government opened a high-security prison on Alcatraz and started shipping the country’s most dangerous criminals there—including famous ones like Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly.
Officials bragged that Alcatraz was escape-proof, and armed guards watched the inmates’ every move. The prisoners—locked in their cells for most of the day—weren’t allowed to talk, read newspapers, or listen to the radio. People nicknamed Alcatraz “the Rock,” and word leaked out that inmates often went crazy from the boredom and isolation.
Some of the prisoners, though, tried to escape. Most died in the attempt, either shot by guards or drowned in the ocean. But there was one famous escape attempt that may—or may not—have been successful.
The average meteor is about the size of a grain of sand.
A DIABOLICALLY CLEVER PLAN
In 1960, convicted bank robbers Frank Lee Morris and the Anglin brothers—Clarence and John—star
ted plotting a getaway. Each had a small vent in his cell, and the men used nail clippers and spoons stolen from the dining room to pry loose the grills that covered the vents. The goal was to widen the vents and dig a tunnel to the outside. Then they would squeeze through the vents, escape through the tunnel, and use a makeshift raft to sail across the bay to dry land.
Covering up their progress would be hard, but the trio came up with some ingenious ideas:
•They painted pieces of cardboard to look like the grills they’d pried off and then covered their holes with those. Where did they get the cardboard? They made it themselves, by soaking and mashing scraps of paper into a pulp and letting it dry under their mattresses.
•They mixed the excess cement with soap and glue, and then molded the concoction into fake “heads” that they tucked into their beds at night to act as decoys while they were digging. They painted the heads with supplies from an art class and stuck real hair on them that they’d smuggled out of the prison barbershop. The heads fooled the guards for six months while the three men worked.
Each night, they crawled through the vents and crept toward the prison’s roof. They worked to pry away the bolts and bend the bars that blocked access to the outside. They also built a raft out of stolen raincoats and stored it in a corridor below the roof.
Singer Sheryl Crow’s two top front teeth are fake.
SO LONG, SUCKERS!
It took two years, but finally, their work was complete. On June 11, 1962, Morris and the Anglins squeezed through the bars, dragged their raft across the roof, and shimmied 50 feet down a drainpipe to the ground. Then they climbed a 15-foot fence topped with barbed wire…and disappeared.
Most people think the trio died in the bay. The water that night was a chilly 50°F, cold enough to cause hypothermia in minutes, and men on a Canadian fishing boat said they saw a body floating facedown in the water soon after. None of the prisoners were heard from again, even though all three had been notorious criminals. FBI investigators didn’t think they would just stop committing crimes. So what happened after they got into the water, no one knows. No bodies were ever found. The only trace of them was a black plastic bag with pictures of the Anglin family that washed up near the island a few days later. The fate of the three men remains a mystery.
Say “chopsticks” in Japanese: Hashi.
WRONG FACTS
Remember: just because you learned it in school doesn’t make it true.
FACT? Your hair and fingernails keep growing after you die.
WRONG! Shortly after death, the human body begins to dry out, especially the skin. This causes it to shrivel and shrink away from the hair and nails, making them look like they’re still growing…which they’re not.
FACT? The Wright brothers flew the first aircraft.
WRONG! In 1904, Wilbur and Orville Wright flew the first aircraft that was capable of being controlled by a human pilot. Gliders and manned kites—which can technically be called “aircraft”—had been flown by dozens of other people over the previous two decades.
FACT? One dog year is equivalent to seven human years.
WRONG! This started as a way to compare a dog’s life span (about 14 years) with a human lifespan (about 80 years): 14 x 7 = 98. According to researchers today, there is no mathematical correlation between human and dog ages. Based on maturity level, a one-year-old dog is similar to a 15-year-old human; a four-year-old dog is like a 32-year-old human; and a 15-year-old dog is like a 76-year-old human.
A top ping-pong player can hit a ball as fast as 70 mph.
TOY STORIES
Before PlayStation and cell phones, kids had to make do with these toys. We bet you’ll recognize them.
RUBIK’S CUBE
If there was one toy that could make a kid in the 1980s happy, sad, and frustrated all in the space of a few minutes, it was the Rubik’s Cube. Invented by Hungarian sculptor Erno Rubik, the three-inch cube hooked almost anyone who picked it up. At first, people just wanted to realign the colored squares, but then came the competitions, as solvers raced to outdo each other. In 2008, Erik Akkersdijk from the Netherlands set a record for solving the cube: it took him 7.08 seconds. That same year, 96 people in California set a record for the most people solving the cube at once. There’s even a blindfolded competition, in which contestants get to study the cube before their eyes are covered: Ville Sepannen from Finland holds the current record for that: 42.01 seconds.
Ten animals that have been to outerspace: Dog, chimp, bullfrog, cat, tortoise bee, cricket, spider, fish, worm.
THE HULA HOOP
This toy has been around for centuries—even the ancient Greeks twirled hoops around their waists for fun. But in the late 1950s, the hula hoop was rediscovered by two Americans, Richard Knerr and Arthur “Spud” Melin, who marketed it to kids. Suddenly, hula hooping was a hit, and some people were very good at it: in 1976, eight-year-old Mary Jane Freeze won a hula hoop contest by “hooping” for 10 hours and 47 minutes.
MR. POTATO HEAD
In the 1940s, New York toy inventor George Lerner came up with a brilliant idea: he crafted small eyes, noses, mouths, and ears out of plastic and made dolls for his little sisters by sticking those features onto various vegetables. The potato seemed to work best.
Lerner’s sisters loved the potato dolls so much that, in 1949, he tried to sell the concept to several toy companies. They all turned him down—the Great Depression and World War II had ended just a few years before, and many people believed that using vegetables to make toys was wasteful.
Finally, in 1951, Lerner convinced a cereal manufacturer to use the plastic pieces as prizes in its cereal boxes. A year later, the toy company Hasbro decided to sell complete sets of facial features as a toy. It worked: Hasbro sold a million of the toys in the first year, and Mr. Potato Head became a favorite of American children. (The plastic potato body was first included in 1964.)
THE CASE OF THE GOOEY SPITBALL
Here’s another classroom mystery. See if you can figure it out. (The answer is on page 243.)
Mr. Patterson was at the blackboard, giving his fifth-grade class a lesson about punctuation. While he was writing on the chalkboard, a gooey spitball hit him in the back of the head.
“Whoa!” said Mr. Patterson, and he turned around to face the class.
He scanned the room and then figured that the culprit had to be sitting in the back row where he (or she) would have the least chance of being seen. Billy, Mark, Melissa, and Danny were sitting back there. And just as Mr. Patterson was about to question the four, Melissa wrote something on a piece of paper, folded it, and raised her hand.
“Yes, Melissa?” said Mr. Patterson. “May I go to the restroom?” she asked. “Uh, sure,” he said.
On her way out, Melissa slid the folded note onto Mr. Patterson’s desk. He quietly picked it up and turned to face the blackboard again. He unfolded the note and read it. It said: “?! I saw him throw it!”
George Lucas’s inspiration for Chewbacca in Star Wars: His dog, Indiana.
Mr. Patterson turned back to the class. “Okay,” he said. “I know who the culprit is.”
How did Mr. Patterson know who threw the spitball?
* * *
AMERICA’S STINGIEST WOMAN
Hetty Green, the heiress to a whaling-business fortune, was the richest woman in 19th-century America. During her life, she was worth about $100 million (around $17 billion today), but she spent very little. She lived in tiny rented rooms, never turned on the heat or used hot water, ate meat pies that cost about 15 cents each, and bought new clothes only when her old ones wore out.
In 1902, Green moved from her home in Vermont to Hoboken, New Jersey, so she could more closely manage her money, which was invested in New York’s stock markets. She went to see her stockbrokers every day and quizzed them about her earnings. Because she always wore black and lost her temper if she thought she wasn’t making enough money, her bankers gave her the nickname “the Witch of Wall Street.” Aft
er she died in 1916, her two children, Ned and Sylvia, inherited her fortune, but they didn’t inherit her stinginess. Ned loved science and spent most of his money financing various experiments. Sylvia died in 1951 and left $800 million to charity.
In 2004, so much gas built up inside a decomposing whale in Taiwan that it exploded.
RUFF POLITICS
Uncle John thinks that animals are our best friends. (Porter the Wonder Dog even has his own ring tone on Uncle John’s cell phone.) But this town seems to have gone a little too far.
GOING TO THE DOGS
Sunol is a tiny California suburb, about 40 miles southeast of San Francisco where nothing much ever happens. But in 1981, when faced with two (human) candidates that most residents didn’t like, townspeople put Sunol on the map when they elected a Labrador retriever named Bosco as their new mayor.
Bosco’s career in politics started one day when two friends were arguing about which one of them could get more votes if they ran for mayor. A third man offered the opinion that his dog, Bosco, could get more votes than either of them. Then, to prove his point, he nominated Bosco for the job.
THE CAMPAIGN TAIL
For several weeks, Bosco campaigned all over town. His stance: He didn’t “drink, smoke, or chase women” (he sometimes did chase cars), and he stood for “a bone in every dish, a cat in every tree, and many more fire hydrants.” On election day, he won…by a landslide.
Uncle John’s Facts to Annoy Your Teacher Bathroom Reader for Kids Only! Page 10
