Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wise Up!
Page 14
Vermont’s Panache restaurant offers musk ox, lion, and giraffe dishes on its menu.
The small intestine of an average ostrich is 46 feet long. (A human’s is between 19 and 26 feet.)
Goat meat contains about 40 percent less saturated fat than chicken.
Odds that a can of fish sold in the United States will be eaten by a cat, not a human: one in three.
What do you call a saddle on an elephant? A howdah.
Comparisons
Iowa is bigger than Portugal.
The entire area of Japan (population: 127 million) is slightly smaller than California (population: 34 million).
Iguassu Falls in Brazil and Argentina has about nine times the water volume of Niagara Falls.
Golf courses cover about as much of the United States as Delaware and Rhode Island combined.
Israel is about the size of Massachusetts, and has about the same population.
Minnesota has 90,000 miles of shoreline, more than California, Florida, and Hawaii combined.
Idaho’s Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve covers more than 1,100 square miles, about the size of Rhode Island.
The combined area of the entire United Kingdom is smaller than the state of Oregon.
The 21 smallest U.S. states combined are still smaller than Alaska.
Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport is larger than Manhattan Island.
The Amazon River basin could hold the country of France 13 times over.
San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park is 174 acres larger than New York’s Central Park.
Genghis Khan conquered more land than Alexander the Great, Napoléon Bonaparte, and Adolf Hitler.
There are more people of Irish descent in Boston and surrounding New England than there are in Ireland.
The Nation’s Locations
California’s Disneyland and Florida’s Disney World are both are located in Orange County.
Easternmost capital city in the United States: Augusta, Maine.
Chicago has America’s tallest building and the world’s only drive-through post office.
Smallest post office in the United States: Ochopee, Florida, a town in the western Everglades. The 8'4" by 7'3" building was originally a farmer’s shed.
Fastest-growing city since 1990: Gilbert, Arizona. Fastest-shrinking city since 1990: Detroit, Michigan.
The oldest capital city in the United States is Santa Fe, New Mexico, founded in 1608.
The official state fish of Nevada is the cutthroat trout.
Montpelier, Vermont, is the smallest state capital in the United States. Population: 8,035.
Only 2 percent of the immigrants who were processed through Ellis Island were not allowed to enter the United States.
Maine is the largest U.S. producer of blueberries, with 25 percent of the country’s production. And…
Nearly 90 percent of the nation’s lobster supply is caught off the coast of Maine.
The government owns 85 percent of all the land in Nevada.
High life: 74 percent of New York City residents live at least one flight of stairs aboveground.
October 4, 2004, was the first day since 1999 on which no one was shot in Chicago.
In the Olden Days
Before 1920, it was technically legal to send children through the mail.
Who looked after a knight’s estate while he was away fighting the Crusades? Usually his lawyer.
In ancient China, criminals who were caught robbing travelers had their noses cut off.
Between 800 and 1500, English law decreed that every male had to practice archery daily.
The notorious pirate Blackbeard took hostages, but there’s no proof that he ever killed one.
In 1908, New York City passed a law forbidding women from smoking in public.
In 19th-century Britain, you could be hanged for associating with Gypsies…or for stealing bread.
The Colt revolver—a six-shooter patented in 1836—is still used today by the Texas Rangers.
During Prohibition, there were more than 100,000 illegal drinking establishments in New York City.
Since the 1950s, it has been against the law for a flying saucer to touch down in any of France’s vineyards.
Historical Transportation
The USS Phoenix survived the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, was sold to Argentina, and sank in the 1980s during the Falklands War.
The primary presidential helicopter is a Sikorsky VH-3D called the Sea King.
Gordon Lightfoot’s song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” chronicles the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, a freighter that went down in Lake Superior in 1975 without sending a single distress call.
Seaworthy replicas of the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria have been docked at Corpus Christi, Texas, since 1992.
William Howard Taft was the second president to own a car, but he was too fat to drive it.
First acting president to ride a train: Andrew Jackson (1833).
The tidewater coastline of Texas contains more than 600 historic shipwrecks.
Lyndon Johnson was the only U.S. president to be sworn in on an airplane.
President James Madison’s reasons for declaring the War of 1812: He wanted to stop the British navy from harassing U.S. ships and prevent the British government from forming alliances with American Indians.
In Galveston, Texas, you can see a yacht that once belonged to Benito Mussolini.
While president, Ulysses S. Grant was fined $20 for driving his carriage too fast.
Only fully intact British warship ever found in the Great Lakes: the HMS Ontario, which sank in Lake Ontario in 1780 during the American Revolution.
Money, Money, Money
The average take from a bank robbery is less than $5,000.
Peter the Great of Russia taxed Russian men who wore beards.
The first insurance policy in the American colonies was written in 1721.
The NASDAQ was totally disabled in December 1987 when a squirrel chewed through a phone line.
During the Depression, 44 percent of all U.S. banks failed.
NASDAQ is short for the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations.
The first income tax was levied in China in AD 10, at a rate of 10 percent of the profits of skilled professionals.
When Al Capone was finally convicted, it was not for murder but for income-tax evasion.
In 1864, the top U.S. income tax rate was 3 percent.
The Jesse James gang’s final bank robbery netted them just $26.70.
In England in the 1700s, you could buy insurance against going to hell.
Some insurance companies offer hole-in-one insurance for golf tournaments that award a prize to any player who makes a hole in one.
The IRS processes more than 2 billion pieces of paper each year.
The most likely time for a bank robbery is on a Friday between 9:00 and 11:00 a.m. The least likely time is on a Wednesday between 3:00 and 6:00 p.m.
According to the FBI, 74 percent of the threats against federal workers are directed at IRS employees.
The White House
Theodore Roosevelt officially gave the White House its current name in 1901. Before that, it was called the President’s Palace, the President’s House, or the Executive Mansion.
In 1915, to celebrate the completion of the first transcontinental phone line (from New York to San Francisco), President Woodrow Wilson made a call from the Oval Office.
Bulletproof glass wasn’t installed at the White House until 1941. It went into three windows of the Oval Office.
The White House has 412 doors, 147 windows, 132 rooms, 35 bathrooms, 28 fireplaces, 8 staircases, 6 levels, and 3 elevators.
The White House is the only private residence of a head of state that the public can visit free of charge.
The six floors of the White House have a total area of about 55,000 square feet.
Every day, about 6,000 people visit the White Hous
e.
Solar panels were first installed in the White House during the Carter administration. Reagan took them down, but GW Bush reinstalled them in 2002.
Body Numbers
Weigh yourself; multiply it by 0.0028. That’s how many grams of salt are in your body.
Every day, your eyes are closed for a total of 30 minutes…blinking.
The adult human body requires about 88 pounds of oxygen daily.
When people see someone they like, their eyebrows raise for about two-tenths of a second.
By age 60, you will have lost 50 percent of your taste buds and 40 percent of your sense of smell.
If unwound, your DNA would reach from Earth to the Sun and back…more than 400 times.
Women are 70 percent more likely than men to live past the age of 100.
When you walk down a steep hill, the pressure on your knees is equal to three times your body weight.
Take your height and divide by eight. That’s how “tall” your head is.
A human body includes about 50 trillion cells.
A single gram of human feces contains 100,000,000,000 microbes.
Human capillaries are about 0.0003 inch in diameter…thinner than a hair.
Your eyeballs are 3.5 percent salt.
Each person sheds about 100 billion flakes of skin every day.
The average speaker sprays 2.5 microscopic droplets of saliva for every word spoken.
Love & Marriage
A gamomaniac is someone obsessed with proposing marriage.
In South Korea, a can of Spam is considered a great wedding gift.
By law, Princess Diana had to call Prince Charles “sir” until they were formally engaged.
Catherine Parr was married twice before she wed Henry VIII. She wed a fourth time after he died.
Inspiration for the Rolling Stones song “Angie”: David Bowie’s first wife, Angela.
To choose a wife, Ivan the Terrible had 1,500 women sent to Moscow for him to choose from.
Queen Victoria’s wedding cake had a circumference of more than nine feet.
Diana was the first British subject to marry an heir to the throne since 1659.
Most remarried couple: Richard and Carol Roble from New York, with 56 ceremonies. (The first was in 1969.)
Berengaria of Navarre (Spain) became the British queen when she married Richard I in 1191, but she never actually set foot in England.
It’s Elemental
Most abundant element in the universe: hydrogen. (Helium is second.)
There’s no mercury on Mercury—most of the planet is solid iron.
Mineral seepage creates the colors at Michigan’s Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. Red and orange are copper, green and blue are iron, black is manganese, and white is lime.
Most tin cans are actually made of steel, with a thin layer of tin to prevent corrosion.
Iron weighs more after it rusts. Why? Iron oxide (what iron becomes when it rusts) is heavier than iron alone.
The name of the radioactive element in smoke detectors is americium.
Among the ingredients in stannous fluoride, the cavity fighter found in toothpaste: tin.
Most-used metals in the world (in order): iron, aluminum, copper.
The element astatine gets its name from the Greek word astatos, meaning “unstable.”
Ewww!
Salvador Dalí wore a homemade perfume composed of artist’s glue and cow dung.
In 16th-century England, people who cleaned out cesspits were known as “gong farmers.”
The contents of King Louis XIV’s chamber pot were noted daily and entered in a logbook.
Cloacina was the Roman goddess of sewers.
The word “vomit” has the most entries in The American Dictionary of Slang.
A healthy human bladder can hold two cups of urine for up to five hours.
In the fourth century, Rome levied a tax on the sale of urine and excrement.
Geoffrey Chaucer, François Rabelais, Benjamin Franklin, and Mark Twain all wrote about flatulence.
If you’re average, you’ll swallow three spiders this year.
Tommy Bolt is the only pro golfer to have been fined for passing gas. (He did it in 1959 while an opponent was putting.)
You can’t burp in outer space.
There is a British beer called Old Fart.
Astronauts get “spacesick” so often that the space shuttle toilet has a special setting for vomit.
In French folklore, dreaming about poop is an omen that good fortune is on the way.
The bagpipe was originally made from the skin of a dead sheep.
The man who invented Jell-O was originally looking for a way to make a palatable laxative.
Canadian City Names
TORONTO. North of the city is Lake Toronto. The Iroquois who once lived there called it Toronto, meaning “place where trees stand in water.” Who put trees in the lake? Another native group, the Hurons, planted saplings there to help trap fish.
CALGARY. In the 1870s, when the area was a post for the Mounties (Mounted Police), it was named Fort Brisebois after officer Ephrem Brisebois. But in 1876, after Brisebois declared a woman from the nearby Metis tribe his common-law wife, his superior, Colonel James Macleod, angrily renamed the town. Macleod had just returned from a trip to Calgary—a popular white sand beach on the Isle of Mull off Scotland—so Fort Brisebois became Fort Calgary. The word “calgary” comes from the Gaelic cala ghearraidh, which means “beach of the meadow.”
QUÉBEC. Before the French colonists arrived in the 1500s, the area was inhabited by the Algonquin people. The Algonquins called it Kebek, meaning “straight” or “narrow,” referring to the way the river (now the St. Lawrence) narrows at the Algonquins’ settlement (now Québec City). Explorer Samuel de Champlain made the word French in 1613, spelling it “Québec.”
OTTAWA. In 1832, the British government hired a group of engineers, headed by Colonel John By, to build a canal in the colony of Upper Canada. The large camp that housed workers— called Bytown in the colonel’s honor—eventually grew into a town. In 1855, it became officially incorporated as a city, and took a new name from the Adàwe, the native people with whom Europeans traded during early colonization of the area. French settlers had corrupted the name Adàwe to Outaouak, and British settlers corrupted it to Ottawa.
Learning the Language
Longest one-syllable word in the English language: “screeched.”
Hoping to improve the world’s communication, Ludwig Zamenhof created a language he called Esperanto (“one who hopes”) in 1887. It didn’t catch on.
The average American knows only about 10 percent of the words in the English language.
Five oldest English words still in use: town, priest, earl, this, ward.
According to language experts, virtually every language on earth has a word for “yes-man.”
More than 1,000 different languages are spoken on the African continent.
Most-studied foreign languages in the United States: Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Japanese.
An ancient Chinese written language called Nushu was created and used exclusively by women.
The world’s most widely spoken language is Mandarin Chinese.
Dante’s Divine Comedy established the Tuscan dialect as the basis of modern Italian.
Most common languages on the Internet: English, Japanese, and Spanish.
The Quechua language of Peru has 1,000 words for “potato.”
Until 1399, the first language of English kings was French.
The 1980s group Bananarama’s first single, “Aie A Mwana,” was sung in Swahili.
Studies show: most English speakers say “uh” before a short pause and “um” before a long pause.
Everyday Americans
The average American 12-year-old gets about $15 in weekly allowance.
About 10 percent of American households pay their bills with cash.
Eighty percent of U.S. Supe
r Bowl viewers watch just for the commercials.
Eighteen percent of all the money spent on sporting goods is used to buy golf equipment.
Most Americans spend 45 minutes a day listening to recorded music.
Americans consume about 11.7 pounds of chocolate per person every year.
Americans have the highest average caloric intake in the world: 3,790 calories a day.
According to polls, the most popular sport in America is football.
Americans consume 450 hot dogs per second.
The average American ate 120 restaurant meals in 2008.
Number-one store-bought cookie in the United States: Oreos.
The average American credit card holder owes almost $2,200.
Americans spend over $630 million a year on golf balls.
Americans purchase about 40 percent of the indigestion remedies sold in the world.
More than 75 percent of all American homes have at least one can of WD-40.
Americans spend $2 billion per year on candles.
At any one time, there are 100 million phone conversations going on in the United States.
Menagerie
Rats can find their way through a maze faster when Mozart’s music is playing.
The Loch Ness Monster is protected by Scotland’s 1912 Protection of Animals Acts.
In the 1964 TV series, Flipper was played mainly by a dolphin named Suzy.
Jumbo the Elephant, a premier attraction at P. T. Barnum’s circus in the 1880s, brought the word “jumbo” into common usage.
Emperor Caligula issued invitations to banquets in his horse’s name and considered making the animal a consul.
Nabisco’s Barnum’s Animal Crackers celebrated its hundredth anniversary by adding koalas.
In 1948, four men took a cow up Switzerland’s 14,000-foot Matterhorn. They all froze to death.
Queen Henrietta of Belgium trained a llama to spit at people.
Russian czar Ivan the Terrible once had an elephant killed because it did not bow to him.