Uncle John’s Facts to Annoy Your Teacher Bathroom Reader for Kids Only!

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  Bosco remained the town’s mayor for 13 years. It was mostly an honorary title—Sunol had a town council that conducted its business. But the dog did have some “official” duties, including leading the annual Halloween parade. He also rested on a blanket outside a local pub. When a patron had too much to drink, Bosco went for a walk with him until he’d cleared his head.

  In 1998, Burger King announced it had created a Left-Handed Whopper It was all a hoax, but thousands of people came in to order one anyway.

  But the dog’s political career wasn’t without controversy. In 1989, a newspaper in communist China ran a story attacking the United States and saying that Bosco was an example of how free elections were a failure. The people of Sunol disagreed, of course. They called Bosco “a symbol of democracy and freedom” and said that he represented “individualism and community pride.” He even made an appearance at a pro-democracy rally in San Francisco.

  LIGHTS OUT

  Bosco died in 1994, but Sunol residents didn’t want to just let him fade from memory. So they had a bronze statue built in his honor. Today, Mayor Bosco sits forever on his haunches, a kerchief around his neck, keeping watch over the town square.

  THIS STORY REALLY STINKS!

  Ever run to the bathroom only to find your older sister in there doing her hair—for hours? That’s annoying, but imagine if you had to use an outhouse.

  WHEN YOU GOTTA GO

  Before the days of indoor plumbing, most houses and schools had outhouses—small sheds where people went to the bathroom. An average outhouse was about four feet wide by seven feet tall, and contained a wooden bench with two holes (a large one for adults and a small one for kids) built over a deep pit. Most were simple wooden structures that weren’t fixed to the ground. That’s because when the outhouse pit filled up, people just covered it with dirt, dug a new pit a few yards away, and moved the structure.

  OVER THE MOON

  Most outhouses didn’t have windows, so people usually carved special holes on the door to let in a little light and air. The shape most associated with an outhouse door is a crescent moon, though no one seems sure why that is. One common explanation says that, in the old days, when most people couldn’t read, they needed a way to distinguish the women’s outhouse from the men’s, if there were two. Men’s outhouses usually had a star on them, and women’s usually had a crescent moon. And because women tended to take better care of their outhouses, more of those survived.

  Unlucky in China: The number 4. (The number 8 is lucky.)

  LOOK OUT BELOW!

  Wealthy people sometimes built two-story outhouses for their two-story houses. A bridge led from the house’s second floor to the top floor of the outhouse, which had a separate chute down to the pit so people below didn’t get an unwelcome…er, shower.

  WIPEOUT

  Most outhouses didn’t come with toilet paper; it was too expensive. Instead, people used old newspapers, catalogs, or magazines to clean up. Some even resorted to corn husks or leaves.

  Year the first X-Men comic book was released: 1963.

  CAN YOU DIG IT?

  Here’s a great job: “Outhouse diggers” are archaeologists who excavate old outhouse pits. The waste turned into dirt long ago, and the diggers are mostly on the lookout for “treasures” that were tossed down the outhouse hole a hundred years ago or more. What do they find? Usually doll parts, inkwells, marbles, doorknobs, bottles, sword parts, dishes, bone-handled toothbrushes, and false teeth. (Outhouse digger rule: don’t bite your fingernails while on the job.)

  A WASTEFUL CAREER

  In the 1800s, cities hired “nightsoil collectors” to go around to a neighborhood’s outhouses at night and collect the waste. You’d think people only did this job long ago, but Brisbane, Australia, had nightsoil collectors on staff until the 1970s.

  OUTHOUSE SPEEDWAY

  Want to root for outhouses? Take a trip to Trenary, Michigan, which hosts a race called the Outhouse Classic every February. Organizers call it “a real gas,” and competitors try to outdo each other by racing their elaborately decorated outhouses down the street. Some of our favorite former entrants: the Flower Power Car Outhouse (decorated to look like a Volkswagen Beetle) and the Vati-Can, which was pushed down the street by a group of nuns.

  A piece of unsliced bacon is called a “flitch.”

  ABRACADABRA! (IT’S SCIENCE)

  How do we know these magic tricks will amaze and delight your friends? Because we can read their minds!

  EYE CONTROL YOU

  The trick: Tell someone to look straight ahead for a minute and then to look upward with his eyes (without raising his head). Then tell him to close his eyes while still looking up. Now, command him to open his eyelids. Other than some weak eyelid fluttering, your friend won’t be able to do it.

  How it works: It’s simple—if your eyeballs are looking up, your eyelids are physically unable to open.

  THAR SHE BLOWS!

  The trick: Light a candle (with your parents’ help) and set it about eight inches behind a full two-liter bottle of water. Crouch down at table level, and blow really hard against the bottle. Even though the bottle blocks the candle, the flame will still be extinguished.

  How it works: It’s not magic. The air currents generated by your breath are strong enough to travel around the bottle and put out the candle—it only looks like you blew directly through the bottle.

  Kids as young as seven can join the Society of American Magicians.

  APPLES AND ORANGES

  The trick: Hand your friend an orange and an apple. Tell him to hold one in each hand. Then turn your back. Tell your friend to raise either the apple or the orange into the air and hold that arm straight above his head for about 15 seconds. Then tell him to put his arm down. Now, turn around…and tell him which arm he held up—the apple arm or the orange arm.

  How it works: Look for the hand that’s lighter in color. Blood will flow out of your friend’s hand when it’s raised, making it paler than the other hand.

  DRY WATER

  The trick: This one is pretty cool. First, show your friend a bowl of water. Have him dip his hand in it to see that it is, indeed, a normal bowl of water. Now, dip your hand in the water. Remove it…your hand is completely dry!

  Real name: Illusionist David Copperfield was born David Korkin in 1956.

  How it works: Before the trick, rub your hands with talcum powder, which repels water.

  STOP TIME

  The trick: Find an old wind-up wristwatch and show your audience that it’s a working, ticking watch. Then place it on a table and use your magical powers to make it stop ticking.

  How it works: Use a table with a tablecloth. Hide a magnet under the tablecloth. When you put the watch on top of the magnet, it will stop the watch. (Warning: Be sure your watch is an old, cheap one—when you remove the magnet, it will start ticking again, but sometimes the trick affects the watch’s ability to tell accurate time.)

  * * *

  WHAT’S THAT SMELL?

  The 16th-century painter Michelangelo had a reputation for being more than an amazing artist—his body odor was so bad, it drove people away. Most Europeans in Michaelangelo’s day didn’t take baths regularly because they believed that being too clean caused diseases. But the painter seemed smellier than most—while he was working on the Sistine Chapel in Rome, many of his assistants quit because he smelled so bad.

  Maximum length of most dreams: 25 minutes.

  BIG BITES

  These treats might make you wish you had a bigger mouth.

  FUDGE PHENOM

  The world’s largest slab of fudge was a swirled vanilla-and-chocolate concoction that weighed more than two tons—as much as a pickup truck! Canada’s Northwest Fudge Factory made the mega slab in 2007. It was 166 feet long, 6 feet wide, and 3 inches thick. And it took 86 hours and 13 employees to make it.

  LOLLY-PALOOZA

  In 2002, Jolly Rancher made the world’s largest lollipop, a giant version of its regu
lar-sized cherry lolly. The humongous pop weighed more than 4,000 pounds and was about 19 inches thick. The sucker broke the previous record for the largest lollipop by about 1,000 pounds.

  COOKIE MONSTER

  Take 30,000 eggs, 12,200 pounds of flour, 6,500 pounds of butter, 6,000 pounds of chocolate chunks, and what do you get? The largest chocolate-chip cookie in the world. The Immaculate Baking Company in Hendersonville, North Carolina, created the cookie, which weighed over 40,000 pounds—more than four large elephants.

  People were once so afraid of being buried alive that “safety coffins” were invented A rope inside the coffin reached to the surface and was attached to a bell.

  MEGA-BURGER

  Mallie’s Sports Grill and Bar in Southgate, Michigan, boasts the world’s largest bacon cheeseburger: 134 pounds, and sitting on a 50-pound bun. According to the restaurant, it takes 12 hours and three men to put the burger together, and it costs $350. (You may want to get a friend to help you eat it.)

  CUPCAKE COLOSSUS

  Food Network chef Duff Goldman baked a giant cupcake for the show Ace of Cakes. The cupcake weighed 61.4 pounds and was more than a foot tall…about 150 times the size of a regular cupcake.

  BIZARRE NEWS

  Even normal people do strange things.

  EXCUSE ME…OFFICER?

  In January 2009, a 14-year-old boy put on a homemade uniform, walked into a Chicago police station, and successfully impersonated a police officer for five hours before anyone caught on. He was so convincing that he was assigned a partner and sent on patrol. It wasn’t until after his “shift” ended that the ruse was discovered: one of the officers noticed that the boy’s uniform was missing official patches. It turns out the kid wasn’t trying to cause trouble—he was just fascinated by police work. And as for why the police didn’t notice he was only 14, one of them said he “looked a lot older.”

  JUST LET IT GO

  A 10-year-old boy named Soski from Glendale, California, got angry while on a walk with his parents. So in a fit of rage, he tossed his teddy bear over a fence—and down a steep canyon. Soski regretted tossing the teddy almost immediately, and his mom agreed to climb down the canyon and get it. Halfway down, she slipped and couldn’t climb back up. So his dad went after her—and also slipped. They both ended up trapped 80 feet down, and firefighters had to pull them up with ropes. (And Soski never did get his teddy bear back.)

  The words czar, tsar, kaiser, and July are all derived from the name Julius Caesar.

  ALL ABOARD THE JUNK RAFT!

  These guys took their environmental activism pretty far…all the way to Hawaii.

  GARBAGE PATCH GUYS

  More than 14 billion pounds of trash end up in the world’s oceans every year, and a lot of it concentrates in the North Pacific, in an area twice the size of Great Britain called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

  The Garbage Patch swirls along with the ocean’s current, which continuously moves clockwise and catches all kinds of debris (mostly plastic bags, bottles, and wrappers). And once all that trash gets caught in the current, it just stays there, polluting the ocean. So in 2008, two environmentalists named Marcus Eriksen and Joel Paschal built a raft out of trash and sailed it over the Garbage Patch, from California to Hawaii. Why? To try to make people more aware of ocean pollution.

  IF YOU BUILD IT…

  Eriksen and Paschal’s 30-foot “Junk Raft” was made of 15,000 empty plastic bottles. They wrapped the bottles in six large fishing nets to hold them together so the raft would float, used an old airplane cockpit as their cabin, and set up sails to power the raft.

  A kangaroo can go for months without drinking water.

  AN INCREDIBLE JOURNEY

  On June 1, 2008, the men left Long Beach, California, and planned to take about six weeks to make the 2,600-mile journey. But right away, there were problems. They hadn’t glued the tops onto the plastic bottles, and as the raft sailed, the caps started coming off and filling the bottles with water. So the raft started to sink before Eriksen and Paschal even lost sight of the California coastline. Fortunately, Marcus’s fianceé lived nearby. She flew in a “rescue mission” via helicopter and dropped off a glue gun. The guys kept going, but spent the next month gluing the tops onto all the bottles.

  Another problem: A few weeks into the trip, they realized they weren’t traveling as fast as they’d planned. In fact, they were going only about half as fast. They’d brought enough food for six weeks, but would probably need twice that to complete the trip. So they started eating only half of their food rations each day and caught fish to supplement their diets. But because they were traveling through the Garbage Patch, the fish they caught were often polluted and unappetizing. More than once, they caught a fish, filleted it…and found plastic pieces in its stomach.

  MIRACULOUS MEETING

  Just when Eriksen and Paschal started to really panic about their food supply, they got some welcome news. They’d been keeping in touch with the mainland via a computer and satellite phone. The men learned that another small craft was making its way to Hawaii, and it was pretty close to their position.

  So far, scientists have identified about 1,562,663 different life forms on earth.

  That craft turned out to belong to Englishwoman Roz Savage ‚who was crossing the Pacific Ocean in a rowboat. She wanted to become the first woman to row across the Pacific and, like Eriksen and Paschal, was also trying to highlight the problem of ocean pollution. But she’d run into trouble: Her desalinators had broken and she was nearly out of fresh water. She had food, though. So the two boats met up in the middle of the ocean about 600 miles from Hawaii to swap sea stories, have dinner, and trade supplies. Savage gave the men some food, and they gave her one of their desalinators.

  ISLAND ARRIVAL

  Finally, on August 27, after 88 days at sea, the Junk Raft and its sailors arrived in Honolulu, Hawaii. The first thing Eriksen said when he stepped onto the dock was, “We made it! Where’s the food?”

  The raft went on display at the Waikiki Aquarium in Honolulu, and the two men planned to make a documentary about the experience. And for their first dinner on dry land? Pizza—quite an improvement over polluted fish, said Eriksen and Paschal.

  Fang (“a sweet-smelling fragrance” in Chinese) is a popular name for female cats there.

  FART, FART, WHISTLE

  Your body can be used to do some incredible things…like make annoying noises in class.

  INCREDIBLE JOURNEY

  Some kids just seem to have a natural ability to make sounds with their hands, armpits, and mouths. Uncle John was never one of those kids. He tried and tried, but just couldn’t do it. So when he became a young man, he traveled to a remote island in the South Pacific and spent 10 years studying under the world’s great hand-fart masters. Here’s what he learned.

  HAND FARTS. Hold out your left hand palm up, with fingers stretched out. Next, place your right hand on top of the left hand crosswise so that the thumb of your right hand touches your left hand where it meets the wrist. Now, squeeze the fingers around the edge of each hand where they touch. Keep your palms cupped together. Next, open the bottom of your hands a little bit to allow air in. Then, squeeze your hands together back into the starting position. The air will get pushed out, making a noise that sounds like a fart. If you don’t get it the first time, that’s okay. It’ll work eventually.

  Four former Eagle Scouts have gone on to win the Nobel Prize.

  ARMPIT FARTS. Raise up your left arm. Cup your right hand against your left armpit. Lower your left arm quickly, squeezing your right hand against your body. Just like the hand fart, suddenly pushing out the air from a tight space will create a farting noise.

  FINGER WHISTLE. Make an “okay” sign with your thumb and index finger. Leave a gap where your two fingers touch—tiny, no more than of an inch. Place the fingers barely into your mouth, resting on your bottom lip. Close your lips tightly around the fingers, just enough so that air can flow between the gap in yo
ur fingers. Press your tongue against your lower jaw, right behind your bottom teeth. Lightly blow air across the top of your tongue through the finger gap. Adjust your finger, lips, tongue, and how hard you blow to sound a whistle. If you don’t get it right away, don’t worry—it takes a lot of practice. But take this knowledge with you and let everybody hear just how talented (and annoying) you are.

  * * *

  EAT CAKE!

  German chocolate cake didn’t originate in Germany. It’s named after Sam German, an American who invented one of the dessert’s original ingredients—the Baker’s German’s Sweet Chocolate bar—in 1857.

  If you lived in Europe before the 1400s, you would never have heard of potatoes or tomatoes.

  BEYOND THE WALL

  The Berlin Wall was demolished 20 years ago, and few people talk about it today. Why are we talking about it? Because it makes a great escape story.

  EAST VS. WEST

  Germany’s capital is one city today, but in 1948, the country was divided in two: East and West Berlin. That’s because the powerful Soviet Union (the United States’ ally during World War II, but main enemy after) didn’t want to let go of East Berlin, the part of the city it governed when the war ended.

  The Soviets were so strict that lots of people living under their rule wanted to leave East Berlin. Many wanted to be reunited with family and friends on the western side. Plus, jobs were hard to come by, food was often scarce, and citizens could be jailed or killed for criticizing the Soviet or East German governments.