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

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  Old fogy: The computer mouse was introduced in 1968.

  But still, many rodeo competitions wouldn’t let Pickett enter because he was black. So the management at the 101 Ranch often billed him as an American Indian. (He did have some Cherokee ancestry.)

  LAST RIDE

  Pickett worked for the 101 Ranch for almost 30 years. He performed in Mexico, Canada, South America, England, and the United States. But in 1932, he died after an accident in which one of the horses at the ranch kicked him hard in the head.

  More than 50 years later, though, his legacy as the most famous black cowboy lives on: the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo, formed in 1984, is the only all–African American touring rodeo in the United States.

  * * *

  Cowboy proverb: Never kick a cow chip on a hot day.

  Smithsonian Institution founder James Smithson never set foot in the United States But after his death, his remains were entombed at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

  DIG LIKE AN EGYPTIAN

  What does Egypt make you think of? Pyramids, of course. There are lots of them…and people keep finding more.

  OFFICIAL TREASURE HUNTERS

  Egypt has such a strong connection to its ancient culture that the country employs a high-ranking government official to discover and preserve artifacts. That person is Zahi Hawass, chief of antiquities. His job: to take teams of archaeologists into the Egyptian desert to uncover ancient tombs and pyramids.

  In 2006, Hawass and his team of diggers started excavating in Saqqara, an area about 18 miles south of Cairo. Today, it’s a scientific site, but in ancient Egypt, Saqqara was a huge burial ground for pharaohs and other VIPs from the Egyptian capital city of Memphis.

  DIG ON!

  Hawass and his crew dug for two years with little success. They weren’t surprised; Saqqara had been an archaeological site for decades, and most scientists thought it had already been completely excavated. But finally, in November 2008, Hawass’s team found something. Sixty-five feet below the sand, they uncovered a 16-foot-tall section of a pyramid that was more than 4,000 years old and had once stood 45 feet high. The markings on the pyramid’s walls indicated that it was the resting place of Queen Sesheshet, the mother of Teti, founder of Egypt’s sixth dynasty.

  Grave robbers had stripped the pyramid of its jewels and other treasure long ago, probably just a few hundred years after it was built. But the scientists kept digging… and looking.

  Finally, in January 2009, they came across something incredible: Sesheshet’s mummy. Not the whole mummy, but parts of it—a skull and many bones. Both the pyramid and the mummy were great finds because very few of ancient Egypt’s pyramids were dedicated to women. They were mostly reserved for male royalty. According to Hawass, “You can discover a tomb or a statue, but to discover a pyramid, it makes you happy. And a pyramid of a queen—queens have magic.”

  The center on a football team was once called the “snapper-back.”

  HOLE IN ONE

  Psst! Nobody loves doughnuts more than Uncle John. Whenever anyone brings a box of them to the BRI, it mysteriously disappears.

  HISTORIC EATS

  Doughnuts have been around for centuries—scientists have even found fossilized fried dough in ancient American Indian ruins. The word first appeared in writing in 1803, when an English cookbook included a recipe for doughnuts. And in America, author Washington Irving published A Knickerbocker’s History of New York in 1809. The book told funny stories about the city’s Dutch settlers. In it, he wrote about “balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat, and called doughnuts.”

  DOUGH-NUT OR DOUGH-KNOT?

  Those early doughnuts were called olykoeks (“oily cakes” in Dutch), and they didn’t have holes in the middle. They usually had a nut at the center because the dough in the middle of the balls didn’t cook thoroughly, and the nuts made the gooey centers tastier.

  Some people believe that’s why the olykoek eventually got a name change: a dough-nut. But others think the name came from the fact that the pastries were sometimes braided or twisted into dough-knots.

  What’s a junkanoo? A street parade celebrated in the Bahamas.

  THE CAPTAIN’S SWEET MISSION

  In 1847, an American sea captain named Hanson Gregory invented the doughnut hole. His mother, Elizabeth, was well-known throughout New England for her olykoeks. (Legend has it that hers were especially delicious because she added nutmeg to the dough and used hazelnuts for the center.) But Captain Gregory didn’t like the pastries’ soggy middles. On one sea voyage, he started cutting them out with the round top of a pepper tin and throwing them away.

  When he got home and showed his mother the technique, she started cutting out the centers before frying the dough. And she discovered that if she did that, the pastry cooked all the way through.

  DOUGHNUTS GO TO WAR

  Over the next few decades, doughnuts with holes caught on all over the United States. During World War I, a group of women from the Salvation Army were in France, trying to help make the soldiers feel at home. In the summer of 1917, a unit near Montiers was soaked from 36 days of rain, and the women decided to make doughnuts to cheer everybody up. They rolled the dough with an old wine bottle, cut the doughnuts with the top of a baking soda tin, and deep-fried the dough in a soldier’s helmet, seven at a time. The men loved them.

  Time it takes the average adult to read 250 to 300 words: One minute.

  That first day, the women made only 100 doughnuts, but they were soon making and serving doughnuts 24 hours a day, frying them up in several helmets. And they made huge batches—their standard recipe called for eight eggs and 18 cups of flour, and the doughnuts were fried in five pounds of lard.

  HOMECOMING

  After the war, the troops came home and wanted more doughnuts. So a man named Adolph Levitt answered their doughnut obsession—he invented a machine for mass-producing them in 1920. It went on display at the 1934 World’s Fair in Chicago, where the doughnut was hailed there as a “hit food.” Next came the doughnut shops: Krispy Kreme started selling them in 1937, and Dunkin’ Donuts opened in 1950.

  Today, more than 10 billion are sold every year in the United States and Canada. But as people pay more attention to their diets, many have begun worrying that doughnuts are unhealthy. Those with a sweet tooth need not fear too much. An average doughnut has about 300 calories; an average bagel with cream cheese has 450. So as long as you don’t overdo it, go ahead!

  In China, it’s considered rude to suck on your chopsticks.

  KIDS RULE!

  Some people say that you won’t get anywhere in this world without years of hard work. But these kids prove that when you really love something, success can come early.

  STOKED!

  John John Florence rode on his first surfboard when he was six months old. Okay…his dad was with him, but by the time he was five, he was surfing alone at Hawaii’s Bonzai Pipeline, one of the most dangerous surfing spots in the world. In the winter, waves there can swell up to 30 feet high. In 2005, when he was just 13 years old, John John qualified for the Triple Crown of Surfing, a three-part competition that many people consider the sport’s most prestigious professional event. John John was the youngest person ever to compete in the contest, and even though he didn’t get past the first round, he did score higher than some pros twice his age.

  Surfing isn’t John John’s only hobby, though. He’s also a skilled skateboarder and snowboarder who has competed for the title of “Ultimate Boarder,” a surfing/skateboarding/snowboarding competition in Santa Barbara, California.

  GUITAR HERO

  Tallan Latz (known as T-Man) likes to ride his bike and play sports like other kids, but he’d rather be inside his Wisconsin home, wearing cool black shades and practicing his electric guitar. At nine years old, T-Man is the youngest professional blues guitarist in the world today, and his riffs are so good that he’s jammed with rock legend Jackson Browne and played at Chicago’s famous House of Blues. All t
hat didn’t come easy, though. He’s been playing the electric guitar since he was four and practices for two to three hours every day. But T-Man says it’s all worth it: “I just love to play the guitar. It’s my favorite feeling.”

  About 70 percent of Earth is covered with water but only 1 percent of the water is drinkable.

  A REAL MASTERPIECE

  When Akiane Kramarik turned 14 in 2008, she’d already been a professional painter for seven years. She made her first drawing—of an angel—when she was four and gave it to her mom as a present. When she was seven, she painted a self-portrait and sold it for $10,000!

  Akiane is homeschooled in Idaho so she can spend most of her days painting. But as much as she loves art, there’s even more she wants to accomplish. She especially wants to help people living in poverty in Lithuania, where her parents grew up. She says, “They need help with food and medicine, and a free hospital. I really want to build a free hospital for them.” Good luck, Akiane!

  * * *

  Misnamed: Greenland is mostly snow and ice. Iceland is mostly green.

  TOYS = MONEY IN THE BANK

  Don’t let your mom throw away your stuff—you never know what might become a “collectible.”

  ACTION FIGURE

  In 2002, an original 1963 G.I. Joe was sold to the Geppi Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. Price: $200,000.

  YO-YO

  In 1974, President Richard Nixon autographed a yo-yo for country music star Roy Acuff. After Acuff died in 1992, the yo-yo sold at an auction for $16,000.

  BARBIE DOLL

  In 2003, an original 1959 Barbie doll (still in the box) sold for $25,427.

  BASEBALL CARD

  The rarest card—only six perfect copies exist—is known as the 1909 Honus Wagner “T206.” Why is it so rare? Wagner, a Hall of Famer who played mostly for the Pittsburgh Pirates, was strongly opposed to cigarette smoking, and he had the card canceled because it was manufactured by a tobacco company. In 2007, one of the cards sold at an auction for $2.8 million.

  Panda car: British slang for a police car (because it’s black and white).

  COMIC BOOK

  The most ever paid for a comic book was for a 1938 Action Comics #1. The issue contained the first-ever appearance of Superman. Price: $317,200. (The owner, who’d had the comic since he was nine, bought it for 35 cents in the 1950s.)

  PEZ DISPENSER

  PEZ manufactured two dispensers shaped like astronauts to be sold at the 1982 World’s Fair. They later scrapped the idea. In 2006, one of the two prototypes sold on eBay for $32,000.

  CANDY

  A single brown M&M that had been on a 2004 space-flight sold for $1,500.

  * * *

  SLICE IT THICK

  In 1946, the New York Times heralded a “new style in peanut butter,” telling readers that “instead of scooping peanut butter out of a jar to spread on crackers and bread, [they] might soon be slicing it from a brick, much as we now do cheese.” Alas, the innovation, from scientists at Georgia State College, never caught on.

  Abraham Lincoln’s favorite book to carry around: Joe Miller’s Joke Book.

  DIRTY WORK

  These jobs are dirty, but somebody’s got to do them. And hey—who knows, maybe you’ll find your calling.

  DOG BREATH SNIFFERS

  Some people make a living by putting their noses in front of a dog’s mouth and smelling. Then they grade the smelliness of the dog’s breath on a scale of 0 to 10 and put it into categories like sweaty, salty, musty, fungal, or decaying. After the first round of sniffing, the dog gets a fresh-breath treat or some food, and the sniffer tries again. The dog sniffer’s job is to test how well the treats or different types of dog food change (and hopefully improve) the smell of the dog’s breath.

  Unlike most cats, the spotted ocelot loves to swim.

  PEOPLE SNIFFER

  If you have a good nose but don’t like the idea of smelling dog breath, you can always use your sniffing skills to smell human breath instead. Breath odor evaluators smell nasty morning breath, garlic breath, coffee breath, and other stenches and rate them on a scale from 1 to 9 (with 1 being the stinkiest). Then the evaluator smells and rates the breath again after the person has used products like mints, gum, or mouthwash, which is how the manufacturers test the effectiveness of their products.

  DEAD BODY PREPARERS

  A diener, from the German word for “servant,” prepares corpses for autopsies and for doctors who study the effects of deadly diseases on human bodies. Dieners cut up dead bodies and remove their organs so that the doctors can weigh and examine them. People in this line of work wear scrubs, an apron, gloves, surgical boots, hair-nets, goggles, and masks to protect them from the blood, guts, and smells of the dead bodies.

  PORTABLE TOILET CLEANERS

  Portable toilets aren’t much fun to use, but imagine if you had to clean them for a living. Most workers clean 10 to 60 of them a day. Of course, how many they can clean in a day depends on how dirty the toilet is. How do they do it? They pick up stray toilet paper and wash down the floor and walls using a high-pressure hose. Then they use a tank and vacuum wand to suck up all the waste. It’s a dirty job, but the pay isn’t bad: portable toilet cleaners can make up to $50,000 a year.

  Number of candy canes made in the United States every year: About 1.76 billion.

  POOPER SCOOPERS

  Want an outside job on an exotic island in the fresh air? Get a job collecting guano (or, bird poop) off the coast of Peru. Why would anyone do that? Companies use the guano to make fertilizer. Dung collectors wake up at 3:30, grab a shovel and pickax, and spend the next 12 hours hacking away at hardened seabird poop on rock-hard soil.

  After scraping up the dung, they collect it, sift and filter it through a piece of wire mesh, bag it, and pile the bags onto barges. The barges then carry the precious cargo to the mainland.

  It’s a dirty job. Most workers go barefoot, so their feet and legs are coated with a layer of poop by the end of the day. And some wear handkerchiefs to avoid breathing in dung dust.

  In a year, a work crew usually collects about 15,000 tons of precious bird poop, which brings in a lot of money. A ton of Peruvian guano can sell for up to $500.

  * * *

  WORLD’S SMALLEST WINGED INSECT

  The Tanzanian parasitic wasp is just 0.2 millimeter… about the same size as a housefly’s eye.

  “Gitch” is Canadian slang for underwear.

  HOBO SLANG

  In the early 20th century, homeless people—known then as hobos—traveled around the country by stowing away in trains. They also had their own colorful lingo.

  Wood butcher: a carpenter

  Black strap: coffee

  Hundred on a plate: a can of beans

  Saddle blankets: pancakes

  Tin roof: a free meal

  Wind pudding: air; having nothing to eat is “living on wind pudding”

  Baldy: an old man

  Comet: a new hobo

  Fingy: a hobo who is missing fingers

  Paul Bunyan: an entertaining liar

  Yegg: a criminal

  Coop: a jail

  Bone orchard: a graveyard

  Cozzy: a public restroom

  Crowbar hotel: a police station

  Doghouse: a caboose

  Flop: sleep

  Gooseberry: to steal clothes off a clothesline

  Padding the hoof: traveling by foot

  Bindle: a pack carried over the shoulder

  California blanket: a newspaper

  Grinders: teeth

  Polish the mug: wash your face

  Throw the guts: to talk too much

  Feel like roughing it? There’s a Sandpaper Museum in Two Harbors, Minnesota.

  HOW TO MAKE A BLOODY EYEBALL

  Halloween is supposed to be fun, and we bet it would be super fun to see real bloody eyeballs at your school’s next Halloween party. The teachers might object, though, so here’s a recipe for bloody eyeball ice cubes that’s sure
to make them say “Ewww!”

  WHAT YOU’LL NEED

  •15–20 radishes

  •15–20 green olives, stuffed with pimientos

  •Water

  •An empty ice tray

  •A vegetable peeler

  GETTING STARTED:

  •You’ll want to prepare your eyeballs at least one day before you need them, and be sure to get your parents’ permission before you do any cutting.

  An adult human eyeball is about two-thirds the size of a ping-pong ball.

  DIRECTIONS:

  •Peel the radishes, leaving behind thin streaks of the red skin to look like blood vessels.

  •Using the end of the vegetable peeler, cut a small hole in each radish—about the size of an olive.

  •Stuff one olive (pimiento side out) into each radish.

  •Put one radish in each section of the empty ice tray.

  •Fill the tray with water, freeze overnight, and voilà! Your bloody eyeballs are ready for school.

  * * *

  THREE THINGS PRESIDENTS CAN’T DO?

  •Swim naked. Wrong!—John Quincy Adams liked to go skinny-dipping in the Potomac River.

  •Dress casually. Wrong!—Thomas Jefferson often wore pajamas when greeting visitors.

  •Overeat. Wrong!—William Howard Taft was so fat (about 325 pounds) that he got stuck in the bathtub at the White House…more than once.