Mental Floss: Instant Knowledge (39 page)

(specifically cashews)

USEFUL FOR:
cocktail parties, barroom banter, and scaring kids into picking out all the other mixed nuts

KEYWORDS:
shell shock, Shell station, or Shelley Long

THE FACT:
Cashews aren’t sold in shells…and there’s a darn good reason for it!

While pecans, walnuts, and the oh-so-easy-toeat pistachios can be shelled with relative ease, their brother the cashew is a nut that’s slightly harder to crack. In fact, if you got one in the shell, you’d be struggling to get it out for a good while. Why, exactly? Well, aside from the two layers of shell on the cashew nut, there’s also a slightly trickier toxic oil that contains anacardic acid and cardol that can cause blisters on the hands if touched. Cashews have to be roasted twice to be eaten—once to remove the outer shell, and again to remove the inner shell. So do you want ’em au natural and in their shells or all soft and ready to eat like we do?

(and its Tower to the People)

USEFUL FOR:
mocking Josef Stalin, mainly

KEYWORDS:
Stalin, Russia, really big swimming pools

THE FACT:
In 1931, Joseph Stalin ordered that the largest Orthodox Christian cathedral in the world be dynamited so he could build an enormous “Palace of the People.” The dynamiting was the easy part.

Wishing to replace the 355-foot-high church—the product of 44 years of backbreaking labor by Russian peasants—with a new structure taller than the Empire State Building, and capped with a gilded statue of Lenin taller than the Statue of Liberty, the “Man of Steel’s” mad scheme never came to fruition. The construction on the tower, meant to celebrate Communism’s strength, never took place because resources were diverted to fighting World War II. Stalin’s successor—Nikita Khrushchev—ordered a large swimming pool built where the cathedral had stood. Old women who remembered the original cathedral could be seen standing at the edge of the swimming pool, praying to forgotten icons. Recently, Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow’s autocratic mayor, tried to make up for Stalin’s mess by ordering the construction of a tacky reproduction of the original cathedral using precast concrete.

USEFUL FOR:
impressing inventors and diverting the conversation when you’ve been told to clean the carpets

KEYWORDS:
chores, chump, or challenge

THE FACT:
Forget Hoover. The real guy you should be thanking for the vacuum cleaner is a genius named Hubert Booth.

Hubert Cecil Booth was an Englishman who was always up for a challenge. In 1900, Booth saw a prototype of a dust-removing machine at London’s Empire Music Hall and suspected that he could improve on the idea. That wasn’t terribly surprising, considering that the machine was designed to force a blast of compressed air down, causing the dust to rise, which might have removed dust from one particular spot on the floor, but not necessarily the room. Predictably, this was somewhat inefficient. When Booth asked the machine’s inventor why it just didn’t suck
up
the dirt, the man became furious and told him that a machine like that just couldn’t be built. Challenge on! Booth started with a few suction experiments, and one short year later he patented the world’s first mechanical vacuum.

(you could never afford)

USEFUL FOR:
cocktail parties and small talk while ring shopping

KEYWORDS:
vacuum cleaner, Hoover, or Dust Buster

THE FACT:
What’s the most expensive material, per pound, in common use by physicists. Diamonds? Not even close.

Gem-quality diamonds cost only about $15 million per pound. It’s been estimated that Saddam Hussein was willing to spend $100 million per pound for weapons-grade uranium. But that isn’t it, either. Moon dust? Nope. Russian-retrieved moon dust (they had a robot return some) has been sold on the black market for less than $5 million per pound. Believe it or not, the most expensive substance per pound is an ultrahigh vacuum. Although it’s abundant in space, nobody has figured out a good way to bring them down to earth. The cost of making one is $4 followed by 21 zeros, so nothing else even comes close. And the price will only get more expensive, per gram, as the vacuums get better!

(and the whole M&M thing)

USEFUL FOR:
cocktail parties and chatting up rock and roll fans and entertainment lawyers

KEYWORDS:
prima donnas, egotistical contract agreements, or candy-coated shells

THE FACT:
Over the years, Van Halen’s gained a lot of notoriety for their demand that at every gig their dressing room had to contain a large bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed. It was for a better reason than you think, though.

While the fact has often been cited as proof of the band members’ towering egos, it was actually included by the tour promoters as an easy way of seeing if the concert venues had read the contract thoroughly (particularly the parts about technical requirements, etc.). But sneaky M&M tactics aside, Van Halen’s riders are also notorious for the sheer volume of alcohol they stipulate. One rider specified that their dressing room was to contain a case of beer, a pint of Jack Daniels, a pint of Absolut, a 750 ml. bottle of Bacardi Añejo rum, three bottles of wine, small bottles of Cointreau and Grand Marnier, and a 750 ml. bottle of one of five specific premium tequilas. Don’t forget six limes, margarita salt, shot glasses, ingredients for Bloody Marys, and a blender.