Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (13 page)
Read Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers' Institute
The record for the most-overdue library book is 288 years. In 1955 England's University of Cambridge library received a book that was taken out in 1667.
During the Middle Ages, the House of Wisdom was a massive library in Baghdad. It survived until 1258, when it was destroyed by a Mongol invasion.
In 1814, after the British invaded Washington, D.C., and burned the Library of Congress, Thomas Jefferson sold the government 6,487 of his personal books to restart its collection.
Ben Franklin founded America's first public library in Philadelphia in 1731. It's still open to the public.
Harvard University's libraries contain at least three books bound in human skin.
The Library of Congress adds about 20,000 new items every day.
United States libraries lend about 3 million items a day.
Libraries have been around a lot longer than books. Early Egyptian libraries included materials that had been pressed into clay tablets and baked.
Among the books in the prison library at Guantánamo Bay are the Harry Potter and Twilight series.
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The U.S. Postal Service owns the world's largest collection of rubber stamps.
Floating garbage gets trapped in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a huge floating island mostly composed of plastics that get caught in the center of the giant, circular Pacific current. Because of the distance and currents, it takes about six years for garbage from the West Coast of the United States to reach the patch, but trash from Asia takes only a year.
If someone says your home is “midden” style, don't take it as a complimentâa “midden” is an ancient garbage pit.
Americans throw out about 4.5 pounds of garbage a day, enough stuff to fill 63,000 garbage trucks.
Americans call it a garbage truck, but the British call it a “dustbin lorry.”
Ancient city ruins are usually found many feet underground because of garbage. In ancient times, it was too hard to move the trash out of town or build enough garbage pits to bury it. So people spread it around and covered it with a layer of soil. Almost all ancient cities were built and rebuilt many times on progressively higher layers of layered garbage and dirt.
80 percent of the waste produced by humans on shore ends up in the oceans.
Whales, dolphins, and porpoises are close relatives. They're all descendants of a hoofed animal related to pigs and cattle that gradually adapted to full aquatic life about 40 million years ago. Dolphins divided fully from the others only about 10 to 12 million years ago.
Dolphins have been observed using toolsâsuch as sponges to protect their snoutsâand teaching the knowledge to their young.
Male dolphins fight each other fiercely over mates.
Six of the animals we call “whales” are really dolphins: melon-headed whales, long-finned and short-finned pilot whales, killer whales (orcas), pygmy killer whales, and false killer whales.
Dolphins sometimes attack people. Tilikum, an orca at SeaWorld Orlando, holds the record: three people in three incidents in 1991, 1999, and 2010. He killed trainers the first and third time. The second death was a man who sneaked into the orca tank after hours.
Generally, though, dolphins are friendly to humans and sometimes help us out. In Santa Catarina, Brazil, dolphins drive fish toward fishermen on the shore and signal when to cast the nets. They eat what the nets miss.
The Russian composer Igor Stravinsky attended law school, but didn't like it much. In four years he attended fewer than 50 class meetings.
Mozart belonged to the Order of Freemasons and wrote several compositions for their meetings. Masonic legends also inspired his fantasy opera
The Magic Flute
.
An anonymous Marine wrote the words for the “Marine's Hymn,” but for the melody, he used composer Jacques Offenbach's 1867 comic opera
Genevieve de Brabant
.
Sixteen-year-old Briton Euphemia Allen wrote “Chopsticks” in 1877. She called it “The Celebrated Chop Waltz” because you played it by “chopping” with your hands.
There are musical notes on every street sign in Mozart, Saskatchewan.
On October 12, 1609, young English composer Thomas Ravenscroft published a collection of folk songs called
Deuteromelia
. Within its pages was a new song that's still around today: “Three Blind Mice.”
Legends claim that composer Johannes Brahms hated cats so much that he spent leisure time shooting arrows at them. But it turns out that this wasn't true; it was just a nasty rumor circulated by his rival, composer Richard Wagner.
Despite the plot of the movie
Amadeus
, composer Salieri was not Mozart's bitter rival. They were actually colleagues, and Salieri admired Mozart a great deal.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart started playing the harpsichord when he was four, and gave concerts for royalty a year later. He published his first piano piece at the age of seven.
Your nose (and your ears) will continue to grow throughout your lifetime.
Osmophobia
is the fear of smells.
Osphresiolagnia
is the love of smells.
A tortoise drinks through its nose.
In 2008 Dutch winemaker Ilja Gort insured his nose for $8 million.
The lowest part of your nose, the skin that separates your nostrils, is called your
columella nasi
.
Physician Amynthas of Alexandria, Greece, performed the first known nose job in the third century BC.
American plastic surgeons remove about 5,469 feet of noses each year.
Old homicide detective trick: Smearing a menthol rub under the nose helps a lot when dealing with decomposing bodies.
The
nasturtium
is such a nasty-smelling flower that its name in Latin means “a twist of the nose.”
Q: What is “digital emunction”? A: It's a fancy way of saying “picking your nose.”
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Reality show:
The X Factor
(the American version). The show costs about $3.5 million per episode to produce.
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Spice on your grocer's shelf:
saffron. It takes the stamens of nearly 5,000 blossoms just to get one ounce.
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Divorce:
Australia's Rupert and Anna Torv Murdoch ($1.7 billion in 1999).
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Etch-A-Sketch:
The 1985 Executive model was made of silver and gemstones ($3,750).
â¦
Car to insure in the United States:
Cadillac Escalade. (Least expensive: Ford Taurus.)
â¦
State in which to play golf:
Nevada. (Cheapest: Nebraska.)
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Wedding:
Prince Charles and Lady Diana ($48 million, 1981).
â¦
Coffee:
Kopi Luwak ($300 per pound). Its beans are handpicked out of the poop of the
Paradoxurus
, a tree-climbing marsupial. Coffee connoisseurs say it has a unique flavor. (We're sure it does.)
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Commercial:
$33 million for a 2004 Chanel ad starring Nicole Kidman.
â¦
Motorcycle:
The MTT Turbine Superbike, powered by a Rolls-Royce Allison engine ($185,000).
â¦
Video game:
Grand Theft Auto IV, which cost $100 million to develop.
â¦
TV pilot episode:
Lost
($11.5 million in 2004).
â¦
Aircraft:
The military bomber Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit, at $2.2 billion per plane.
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QUOTE ME
“There is no more expensive thing than a free gift.”
âMichel de Montaigne
If you're ever stuck in a dark room with only a fluorescent bulb and a cat, rub the fluorescent bulb on the cat. The static electricity created will make the bulb glow.
In AD 46, a Roman doctor first used electricity to successfully fight pain, using an electric fish to provide the juice. The only negative side effect: occasionally a patient got electrocuted.
The rain-resistant fabric Gore-Tex was originally created as a coating for electrical wires.
Nikola Tesla, who invented the alternating current system we still use today, died penniless in a New York City hotel.
Electronic equipment really does get dusty faster than other household furnishings because electrical fields attract dust.
Your brain produces enough electricity to power a lightbulb.
A third of the world's population has no electricity.
Washington State produces about 20% of the world's hydroelectric power.
But China's Three Gorges Dam is the largest producer of hydroelectricity in the world.
If you chew a Wint-O-Green Life Saver in the dark, it will emit blue-green sparks because, when the crystalline molecules fracture, a process called
triboluminescence
creates electrical sparks.
December 20, 1880, was the day that electric lights went on for the first time in Broadway's theater district.
Fire Station #6 in Livermore, California, has a lightbulb that has been burning continuously since its installation in 1901.
Electric eels are the most famous, but about 500 other creatures also generate electricity.
Benjamin Franklin experimented with electric shocks on stroke victims.
1.
Portland, Oregon, got its name from a coin toss. When Asa Lovejoy from Boston and Francis Pettygrove of Portland, Maine, both wanted to name the West Coast city after their hometowns, they flipped a coin. It came up heads, and Pettygrove won.
2.
A coin toss also determined that Sheffield, Illinois, would be named after founder Joseph Sheffield instead of cofounder Henry Farnam.
3.
When the Wright brothers took their first airplane to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, they flipped a coin to see who would try to fly it. Wilbur won. He stalled after takeoff, though, spending only a few seconds in the air before crashing. The next day, his brother Orville tried. He got into the air for 12 seconds and traveled 120 feet, making his flight the one recognized as the first.
4.
On February 3, 1959, rock pioneer Richie Valens flipped a coin with guitarist Tommy Alsup to decide who was going to ride on a chartered plane instead of the freezing-cold tour bus. Valens wonâ¦and then lost. The plane crashed on takeoff, killing him, Buddy Holly, and J. P. “the Big Bopper” Richardson.
About 75,600,000 pumpkin pies are baked every fall and winter in the United States.
The Great Fire of London in 1666 started on Pudding Lane in the east end and ended on Pye Street in the west. An old fire monument says that this proves the fire was God's punishment for gluttony.
Pie makers have their own lobbying group, the American Pie Council, sponsored by various pie-related companies. It's “committed to preserving America's pie heritage.”
Pies have been honored by four American holidays: National Pie Day (January 23), Pecan Pie Day (July 12), Raspberry Cream Pie Day (August 1), and Pumpkin Pie Day (December 25).
Sing a song of sixpence? They really did put live birds into pies in the 1600s. And the birds did fly out when the pie was broken open. The crusts of live-bird pies were baked beforehand with a hidden hole in the bottom. The birds were placed inside the cooled crust right before being delivered to the table.
Other living things were used in pies, but the most memorable was a “court dwarf”âa little person in a royal court who was often the butt of jokes. In 1626 Jeffrey Hudson, aka “Lord Minimus,” burst out of a pie to surprise England's Queen Henrietta Maria.
Keep this in mind when pricing pizza: A 10-inch pie yields a little more than two 7-inch ones (78.5 square inches versus 77). A 14-inch pizza yields a little less than two 10-inch ones (157 square inches versus 154).
The first pies appeared in Egypt around 9500 BC.
The trademark of longtime kid-show host Soupy Sales was getting hit in the face with a pie. He was hit with about 19,000 shaving cream pies since his first show in the 1950s.
The first pie-in-the-face in a movie splattered comedian Ben Turpin in
Mr. Flip
(1909).
It takes about 100 years for a cave stalactite to grow 1 inch.
Bats always turn left when they exit a cave.
The world's largest sea cave is near Florence, Oregon. It's as tall as a 12-story building.
For the 1960s
Batman
TV series, creators used Bronson Cave in L.A.'s Griffith Park. You can still visit it today. According to chiroptologists (bat scientists), you can find 32 bat species in Texas.
Bracken Cave near San Antonio hosts the largest bat colony in the country. Population: about 40 million.
