Uncle John’s Did You Know?

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  • The average American kid scarfs down 46 slices of pizza per year.

  • Here’s a scary thought: The average American will develop a phobia by the age of 13.

  KIDS AT WORK

  Before the 1920s—in the days before child-labor laws and compulsory education—most children worked. How would you like to have had one of these jobs?

  • You’ve seen Mary Poppins, so you know what a chimney sweep does—clean chimneys. But many chimney sweeps were small children, six to eight years old, who had to crawl up chimneys and loosen the soot with a broom.

  • Gillie boys helped fishermen by baiting hooks, pulling nets, and preparing food.

  • A loblolly boy was an assistant to a ship’s doctor. One of his responsibilities was to feed the patients, and what he fed them was a thick oatmeal or porridge called loblolly.

  • Office boys worked—you guessed it—in offices. What did they do? Sharpened pencils, swept floors, stuffed envelopes, and ran errands.

  • Being a powder monkey might sound like fun, but it was a dangerous job. The powder in question: gunpowder. Kids carried it to the cannons during battles.

  • Children often worked as vendors, selling things on city streets. Besides newspaper boys, there were “hot corn girls,” who sold corn on the cob for a penny.

  EVERYBODY’S

  BODY

  • Your nose gets runny when you cry because the tears from your eyes drain into your sinuses…and dribble out of your nose. (Eww!)

  • Even if you ate while standing on your head, the food would still end up in your stomach.

  • Travelers beware: Flying frequently across several time zones can shrink your brain.

  • It seems there’s a name for everything: The food that’s digested in your stomach is called chyme.

  • The body of an adult human is covered with about five million hairs—the same number of hairs as an adult gorilla.

  • Your empty stomach has a capacity of less than two ounces. But when you start to fill it, your tummy can expand to hold a quart (about four juice boxes).

  • Onion or garlic breath comes from the lungs, not the mouth: The odor-causing components get into your blood, and when the blood reaches your lungs you breathe out smelly gas. (Eww!)

  • Breathing normally, you suck air into your nose at 4 mph. A sneeze shoots out of your nose at 100 mph.

  • If you’re right-handed, you sweat more under your left arm. If you’re left-handed, you sweat more under your right arm.

  • Sleeping on your right side helps gas escape more easily from your stomach. So, here’s the good news: you can burp while you snore.

  • Your stomach lining contains millions of tiny glands that produce hydrochloric acid. This acid is so strong that it can dissolve metal.

  • There are 639 named muscles in the human body.

  • The average fart contains several different gases, including nitrogen (59%) and methane (7%).

  • If you pluck a hair from your head (or someone else’s head), it will take 56 days—almost two months—for it to reappear.

  • Move your hand. You just used 35 muscles.

  • Bile produced by the liver is what makes your poop a brownish-green color. (Eww!)

  • About 50% of the bacteria in your mouth live on the surface of your tongue.

  • 90% of people have “innie” belly buttons, which means only 10% have “outies.”

  HORSING

  AROUND

  • Argentinian cowboys, called gauchos, have over 200 words to describe the color of horses.

  • The oldest known horse lived to 62 years old.

  • The average horse secretes (yuck!) nine gallons of saliva a day.

  • Hair from a horse’s mane or tail is used in making paintbrushes and violin bows.

  • Car models named for horses: Colt, Bronco, Mustang, Pinto.

  • A horse has 205 bones.

  • The first cloned horse was born in Italy in 2003; the mare that gave birth to her was her identical twin.

  • The word “equestrian” comes from equus, Latin for “horse.”

  • Who’s the only athlete to appear simultaneously on the cover of Time, Newsweek, and Sports Illustrated? The racehorse Secretariat. In 1973 he won the Triple Crown of horseracing: the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont Stakes.

  • The cowboy slang word for horse—cayuse—comes from the name of a Native American tribe.

  EXTREME

  WORLD

  • The largest living thing in the world is an underground fungus in Oregon. It covers about 2,000 acres.

  • The oldest organism on Earth: a colony of bacteria that had been entombed in sea salt in New Mexico for 250 million years. Scientists discovered it in 2000.

  • By using a nearby fossil of an identical plant, scientists estimated the age of a King’s Holly plant found in the rain forests of Tasmania at over 43,000 years old.

  • The oldest living animal: a Madagascar radiated tortoise presented to the royal family of Tonga by British captain James Cook in the 1770s. It lived to an estimated age of 188.

  • The hottest place on Earth: the El Azizia desert in North Africa. On September 13, 1922, the temperature was officially measured at 136°F, but scientists believe it may have actually reached 150° in some areas.

  • Manta rays can grow up to 19 feet long and weigh as much as 2,300 pounds.

  • Extreme height: Astronauts grow as much as three inches taller in space. Engineers have to factor it in when designing space capsules and uniforms.

  • In parts of the Atacama Desert in Chile, it has never rained. Ever.

  EDUCATION

  • Boulder, Colorado, is the most educated city in America—more than half of the adult residents have college degrees.

  • The oldest school in the United States is New York’s Collegiate School, founded in 1628.

  • The first library was established by the Greeks in 530 B.C.

  • Hawaii’s Lahainaluna High School was the first school established west of the Rocky Mountains. It was founded in Lahaina, Maui, in 1831, when Lahaina was a busy whaling port.

  • Maria Montessori opened the first Montessori school in Rome, Italy, for the children of poor families.

  • Utah’s Brigham Young University offers more than 100 ballroom dancing classes a year.

  • In the 10th century, the Grand Vizier of Persia, Abdul Kassam Ismael, carried his complete library with him wherever he traveled. It required more than 400 camels to carry all 117,000 volumes.

  • In 2004, Kimani Maruge of Kenya finally got his chance to go to elementary school…at 85 years old.

  FOREIGN TONGUE

  TWISTERS

  Dutch: Vissers die vissen naar vissen en vissers die vissen die vangen vaak bot. De vissen waar de vissende vissers naar vissen, vinden vissers die vissen vervelend en rot!

  English translation: “Fishermen that go fishing for fish and fishermen who fish often catch flounders. The fish that the fishing fishermen fish for, find fishermen that go fishing annoying and beastly!”

  French: Le poivre fait fièvre à la pauvre pieuvre.

  English translation: “The pepper gives the poor octopus fever.”

  Hawaiian: Hele wawai o ka malamalama, ka malamalama, o ka malamalama, hele wawai o ka malamalama, ka malamalama o ke Akua.

  English translation: “I am walking in the light, in the light, in the light, I am walking in the light, in the light of God.”

  Latin: Te tero Roma manu nuda date tela latete.

  English translation: “I’ll crush you, Rome, with my bare hands.”

  Italian: Trentatré Trentini entrarono a Trento, tutti e trentatré, trotterellando.

  English translation: “Thirty-three Trentonians came into Trento, all thirty-three trotting.”

  Japanese: Kaeru pyoko-pyoko mi pyoko-pyoko awasete pyoko-pyoko mu pyoko-pyoko.

  English translation: “Take two sets of three frog croaks. Add them together and they
make six frog croaks.”

  Zulu: Amaxoxo ayaxokozela exoxa ngoxamu exhibeni.

  English translation: “The frogs are talking loudly about the monitor lizard.”

  HEY, DADDY-O!

  Some animals have pretty cool dads.

  • A father sea catfish keeps the eggs of his young in his mouth until they’re ready to hatch. He won’t eat a thing until the babies are born, which can take weeks.

  • After a mother wolf gives birth to pups, the father guards the den. As the pups grow, he plays with them and teaches them how to live in the wild.

  • Rheas are large South American birds similar to ostriches. From eggs to chicks, the father rhea feeds, defends, and protects his young until they can survive on their own.

  • The male Darwin frog hatches the female’s eggs in his mouth. He eats and continues his normal frog life until the tadpoles become tiny frogs and jump out.

  • The male red fox will bury food near the den to train his pups to sniff and forage, and he’ll play ambush games with them to teach them self-defense.

  • When a Siamese fighting fish mom lays her eggs, the dad catches them in his mouth and drops them into a nest he’s prepared. He stands (or swims) guard over the nest, too.

  • A cockroach dad eats bird droppings to obtain precious nitrogen that he carries back to feed his young.

  MYTHICAL

  CREATURES

  • According to legend, the Abominable Snowman has four toes on each foot.

  • In almost every seafaring culture there have been reports of mermaid sightings. Even Christopher Columbus said he’d seen one.

  • Don’t blink! According to legend, if you’ve captured a leprechaun you cannot take your eyes off him…or he’ll vanish.

  • There’s a round-the-clock webcam now trained on the lake where the Loch Ness Monster supposedly lives. (No one’s seen the creature yet.)

  • Chinese dragons—especially yellow ones—are considered to represent good fortune.

  • A dragon is often portrayed as guarding an object or an area. Makes sense: The word “dragon” comes from the Greek draconta, which means “to watch.”

  • Greek mythology has a lot of monsters: griffins (part eagle, part lion), the Hydra (a nine-headed serpent), Cerberus (the three-headed hound who guards the entrance to Hades), the one-eyed Cyclops, and the three Gorgons (female monsters who had sharp fangs and hair of living, venomous snakes), to name a few.

  ON THE MAP

  Every state has something to brag about (including the fact that you live there).

  • Arkansas has the only active diamond mine in the United States.

  • The only royal palace in the United States, Iolani Palace, is in Hawaii. Its last occupant, Queen Liliuokalani, was forced to surrender Hawaii to the American government in 1893.

  • The washing machine was invented in Newton, Iowa, in 1884…which is why Newton is the washing machine capital of the world.

  • The world’s largest ball of twine is 40 feet around and weighs more than 17,000 pounds. It stands inside its own shrine in Cawker City, Kansas.

  • New Mexico has an official state question: “Red or green?” The answer refers to types of chili peppers.

  • Maine is the only state whose name is one syllable.

  • Shoes were first sold as left-and-right pairs in 1884 at Phil Gilbert’s Shoe Parlor in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Before that, everybody just bought two shoes that were exactly the same.

  • Ahlgrim’s Funeral Home in Palatine, Illinois, has a miniature golf course in the basement. You need to call for a reservation to play.

  ECOLOGY

  • The word “ecology” means “study of the house,” from the Greek eco for house or dwelling place.

  • How would they do it? A group of NASA engineers and American astronomers believe that moving Earth into a new orbit would solve the problem of global warming—or at least add another 6 billion years to its life.

  • Rain forests cover only 7% of the Earth’s surface, but they contain more than half the plant and animal species on the planet.

  • In 2006 Alaska’s Iditarod dogsled race had to be moved 30 miles north—the usual location wasn’t cold enough (because of global warming).

  • There are still undiscovered species in the rain forests, but experts fear that they might become extinct before they’re found and recorded.

  • Almost 70% of the Earth is water, but only 1% is usable: 97% is in the ocean and 2% is frozen.

  • In a typical day, humans destroy 115 square miles of tropical rain forest, create 72 square miles of desert, eliminate between 40 and 100 species, erode 71 tons of topsoil, and increase their population by 263,000.

  • 40% of the pure water in your house gets flushed down the toilet.

  FOOTBALL

  TEAM NAMES

  Name games that inspired the teams.

  • Arizona Cardinals: The original 1901 team wore hand-me-down jerseys from the University of Chicago. They were red, like a cardinal.

  • Baltimore Ravens: Named after a poem by Baltimore’s native son, Edgar Allan Poe: “The Raven.”

  • Chicago Bears: When the Decatur Staleys moved to Chicago in 1921, they had to share Wrigley Field with a Major League Baseball team—the Cubs. With that in mind, the team changed its name to the Bears.

  • Green Bay Packers: It was the first football team to receive sponsorship. In 1919, the Indian Packing Company gave the team $500 for uniforms and equipment.

  • Philadelphia Eagles: When the team joined the National Football League in 1933, the country was recovering from the Great Depression. The Blue Eagle symbol used in President Franklin Roosevelt’s National Recovery program inspired the Eagles’ name and logo.

  • Kansas City Chiefs: After being lured out of Texas by Kansas City mayor H. Roe “Chief” Bartle, the Dallas Texans changed their name to the Chiefs.

  WATCH THE

  BIRDIES

  • It’s common for a mockingbird to know 25 to 30 songs. Although most songbirds learn their songs before they’re one year old, a mockingbird keeps learning new tunes its whole life.

  • Real airheads: If you’ve ever wondered if woodpeckers get headaches from all that hammering, the answer is no. Pockets of air in their heads act as cushions for their brains.

  • Albatrosses can travel thousands of miles each flight, landing only every few years to breed. Luckily for them, they’re able to sleep while they fly.

  • The hummingbird is the only bird that can hover and fly in any direction: up, down, forward, or backward.

  • In some cultures, cuckoos are considered omens of a happy marriage.

  • Lovebirds are small parrots that mate for life—that’s why it’s so important that they’re kept in pairs in captivity.

  • Ever wonder how many feathers there are in a peacock’s beautiful tail display? Around 200.

  • Flying in a V formation helps birds conserve energy: It reduces wind resistance, and when the lead bird gets tired, another bird takes over.

  SCRABBLE

  This word-based board game is one of the most popular of all time. Ever played it?

  • Scrabble is sold in 121 countries around the world and has been translated into 29 different languages.

  • If you played the word QUARTZY as your first word in a game, it could be worth 126 points.

  • Top Scrabble players know as many as 14,000 words—about seven times as many words in the average vocabulary—but they don’t necessarily know the meanings.

  • There are 109 permissible two-letter words in American Scrabble, from AA (a kind of lava) to ZO (a kind of cattle).

  • The highest recorded score in a game of Scrabble was 1,049, by Phil Appleby in 1989.

  • The highest score in a single turn was 392; the word was CAZIQUES (native chiefs of the West Indies).

  • There are 15 O’s in an Italian Scrabble set, but no J’s, K’s, W’s, X’s, or Y’s.

  • In the English
version of Scrabble, the letter Q is worth 10 points. In Portuguese, it’s worth 6.

  • In the Finnish version of Scrabble, the letter D is worth 7 points, but it gets only 2 points in English.

  THE SEVEN

  NATURAL

  WONDERS OF

  THE WORLD

  • The Grand Canyon was created by millions of years of wind and water erosion from the Colorado River. The rocks of the canyon walls range in age from 250 million years old at the top to more than 2 billion years old at the bottom.

  • Paricutín volcano erupted out of a Mexican cornfield on February 20, 1943. Located just outside the city of Michoacán, about 200 miles west of Mexico City, Paricutín grew to 10,400 feet in just nine years, making it the fastest-growing volcano in recorded history. Its lava destroyed two villages and hundreds of homes, but caused no fatalities.

  • The harbor of Rio de Janeiro, in what is now Brazil, was first seen by Portuguese explorers on January 1, 1502. The Portuguese thought they had reached the mouth of an immense river and named their find River of January—Rio de Janeiro. The spectacular harbor’s landmarks include Sugarloaf Mountain and Corcovado Peak.

  • The northern lights, also called the aurora borealis, occur when solar particles from the sun collide with gases in the Earth’s atmosphere. The energy created by the collision is emitted as photons (light particles). The many collisions produce an aurora—lights that seem to dance across the sky.

  • Victoria Falls, the world’s largest waterfall, lies on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe in Africa, where the Zambezi River suddenly plummets 420 feet over a cliff. The first white man to see it, in 1855, was a Scottish missionary named David Livingstone. Although he named it after the Queen of England, native Africans continue to call it Mosi-oa-Tunya, which means The Smoke That Thunders, because the water makes thunderous clouds of spray as it falls.