Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (16 page)

Two towns straddle the border between Delaware and Maryland, and both are named by combining parts of both states' names: Marydel, Maryland, and Delmar, Delaware.

Delaware's state insect is the ladybug.

Delaware was the site of the first log cabins built in North America in 1638. They were the work of Swedes and Finns who had been living in log cabins in their home countries for many years.

Delaware is called the “First State” because it was the first to ratify the U.S. Constitution on December 7, 1787.

The Methodist Church was founded in Frederica, Delaware, in 1784.

You could probably walk across Delaware in a day or two. The state's widest part is 35 miles—the narrowest, just 9 miles.

Eleven concrete observation towers are spaced along Delaware's beaches. They were constructed during World War II to look out for German ships and submarines.

Dr. Henry Heimlich, who invented the Heimlich maneuver, was born in Wilmington.

Crickets Make Chirp Dates

Crickets may look like grasshoppers, but they're only somewhat related. They're closer to katydids.

Crickets eat almost anything, including other crickets. Not just dead ones, but also weak or sick ones.

A few of the 900 kinds of crickets are big enough to bite humans.

A cricket hears with its front knees. Each has a hollow structure that picks up vibrations like our eardrums and turn them into electrical impulses to the cricket's brain.

Only male crickets chirp.

Crickets can sing and eat at the same time.

It's a common myth that crickets chirp with their legs. Crickets play ridges on their wings like a washboard. Making sounds by rubbing body parts together has its own name: Scientists call it “stridulation.”

Chirping is the primary use for a cricket's wings. Most can't fly.

The loudest cricket chirp is a “come hither” song to attract females and warn other males away. When a female comes close, the sound changes to a very soft courting song.

Crickets make decent thermometers. The most accurate temperature bug is the snowy tree cricket, a light green cricket that lives in trees. If you count its chirps for 13 seconds and add 40, you'll get the temperature in Fahrenheit.

In the original
Pinocchio
story, the title character smashes an unnamed talking cricket with a mallet. In the Disney movie, of course, Jiminy Cricket took on a starring role.

In parts of Asia, crickets are considered good luck and are sometimes kept as pets in cages.

In America, chirping crickets are seen as a sign that a joke fell flat.

Time for Breakfast

By weight, many packaged cereals have more salt than potato chips, and more sugar than a can of soda.

The average American kid eats more than 15 pounds of cold cereal per year.

In Quebec, Cap'n Crunch cereal is called Capitaine Crounche.

Women who regularly ate cereal in the months before getting pregnant were more likely to have boys.

The first football player on a Wheaties box was Bronko Nagurski of the Chicago Bears, in 1937.

Post Toasties were originally named Elijah's Manna, but quickly changed in 1908 after religious groups protested the name as offensive.

In South Africa, Rice Krispies said “Knap! Knaetter! Knak!” In Sweden, “Piff! Paff! Puff!”

Cheerios was first named Cheerioats in 1941, but Quaker Oats threatened to sue about using “oats” in the name. The new name appeared in 1945.

Up in Smoke

Native Americans used tobacco to make tea and jelly.

President Woodrow Wilson had a pet ram named Ike that grazed on the White House lawn and loved to chew tobacco.

The Puritans considered tobacco to be a dangerous narcotic.

Before a huge rise in cigarette smoking in the 1930s, lung cancer was uncommon, even among workers in mines and sooty factories.

Lucky Strike got its name in 1871, inspired by stories from the gold rush about miners making lucky (gold) strikes.

One additive to cigarettes is ammonia, which dissolves nicotine from the tobacco and releases a more addictive dose to smokers. Others include theobromine and glycyrrhizin, bronchodilators that expand the airways and increase smoke intake.

Cigarette smoke contains at least 40 known carcinogens.

Winston Churchill smoked about 300,000 cigars in his lifetime.

In the 1920s, Listerine produced its own brand of “medicated” cigarettes.

Proverbs, Naturally

Every animal knows far more than you do.

—Nez Perce

The heart is but the beach beside the sea that is the world.

—Chinese

When a man moves away from nature, his heart becomes hard.

—Lakota

No matter how long the winter, spring is sure to follow.

—Guinean

The earth is mankind's only friend.

—East African

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.

—Chinese

When elephants fight, the grass gets hurt.

—East African

Man is preceded by forest and followed by desert.

—French

All riches come from the earth.

—Armenian

Everyone must pay his debt to nature.

—German

Nature without effort surpasses art.

—Latin

The tiger depends on the forest; the forest depends on the tiger.

—Cambodian

Nature does nothing in vain.

—Romanian

Listen to the voice of nature, for it holds treasures for you.

—Huron

Just let there be a forest, and there is sure to be a forest spirit.

—Russian

In nature, there is no such thing as a lawn.

—Albanian

In a moment the ashes are made, but the forest is a long time growing.

—Senecan

When the last tree has been cut down, the last river has been polluted, and the last fish has been caught, only then do you realize that money can't buy everything.

—Native Amer.

Fake Food

SCIENCE WILL SAVE US!

The decades during and after World War II were an exciting time to be a food chemist. The field was wide open for big, scientific improvements: new artificial colors and flavors to invent, longer shelf lives, and, in some cases, if a natural disaster wiped out an entire crop, a scientist could just invent a substitute. It was an exuberantly naive time, when the slogan might well have been “If life hands you chemicals, make lemonade anyway.” Up and down the food chain, the old way of doing things—growing food on farms with manure and crop rotation—gave way to a brave new world of synthetic fertilizers and miracle pesticides like DDT. Pigs, cows, and chickens that once ran wild were now safely contained inside a food factory where they could be managed efficiently, with no wasted feed or space. Today it all sounds a little like a dystopian nightmare, but back then, food chemists thought they were using science to solve big problems like world hunger, malnutrition, and too much waste.

Into that environment strode a superman of creativity: William A. Mitchell, who received 70 patents for fake foods between 1941 and 1976. Here are four of his biggest contributions to American cuisine:

1. ARTIFICIAL TAPIOCA

Shortly after Mitchell was hired at General Foods in 1941, he received his first assignment: save tapioca pudding. During the Great Depression, tapioca became a popular dessert, a lumpy, sweet comfort food that was cheap and easy to make. The problem was that cassava, the starchy root that was its main ingredient, came from Java, Indonesia. When the Japanese invaded the island, the supply was cut off. Mitchell saved the day by figuring out that a combination of food starches mixed with gelatin made a pretty convincing substitute.

2. POP ROCKS

Not all of Mitchell's inventions were soft and squishy; some were granular and full of carbon dioxide. Pop Rocks were a wonderful
mistake—they were originally designed to be mixed with water to make a carbonated soft drink.

3. TANG

Contrary to popular opinion (which was helped along by a misleading ad campaign), the powdered artificial orange drink Tang wasn't developed for the space program. Mitchell created it, General Foods introduced it in 1959, and…it flopped. Tang limped along for a few years, until NASA, looking for something to mask the unpleasant flavor of space capsule water, selected it for John Glenn's 1962 space mission. That did it. With a “breakfast of astronauts” advertising campaign, Tang zoomed to success.

4. COOL WHIP

Although it now contains (a little) milk and cream, Mitchell's original 1967 Cool Whip recipe was made up of water, hydrogenated vegetable oil, sugar, corn syrup, high-fructose corn syrup, artificial flavors and colors, and a bunch of other chemical stuff. It didn't taste like whipped cream, but it also didn't require as much refrigeration as the real stuff, making it ideal for picnics and church potlucks.

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WORDS OF LOVE

Pogonophilia:
Love of beards.

Wiccaphilia:
Love of witches.

Frigophilia:
Love of cold things.

Cyberphilia:
Love of the Internet.

Xylophilia:
Love of things made of wood.

Pteronophilia:
Love of being tickled by feathers.

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophilia:

Love of long words.

Bookstore Bits

The Babylonians started writing down stuff more than 5,000 years ago, and were the first people (that we know of) to leave written records. However, the first bound, modern-style book, called the
Codex
, dates from 4th-century Greece.

The first book printed in North America was a hymnal called
The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre
, published in Massachusetts in 1640.

In 1953 the books of John Dewey, Edna Ferber, Dashiell Hammett, and others were banned from the U.S. State Department's overseas libraries because the government decided the authors weren't sufficiently anticommunist.

A single page of a first-edition Gutenberg Bible is worth $25,000.

81 percent of Americans think that they could write a book.

The Greek titan Atlas holding up the world became a popular front illustration for bound collections of maps. That is how the “atlas” got its name.

You can copyright the contents of your book, but you can't copyright the title.

If you lined up every Harry Potter book sold, they'd circle the Earth twice.

San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore was the first in the U.S. to sell only paperbacks.

John Steinbeck experienced writers' self-doubt as much as anyone. While writing
The Grapes of Wrath
, he said, “If I could do this book properly, it would be one of the really fine books and a truly American book. But I am assailed by my own ignorance and inability.”

In 2004 a grade-school book report written by Britney Spears sold for $1,900 at auction.

Sweating the Smell Stuff

SMELL LIKE AN EGYPTIAN

Humans have been hiding their stinkiness by dousing themselves with fragrances for ages. The ancient Egyptians came up with a number of fresh and fruity scents. Some floral scents lasted as long as 20 years, and incense was also heavily used. (It had the benefit of masking not just the smell of a single user, but everybody in the room.) And in ancient Asia, people discovered that applying finely ground salt to the underarms worked wonders. When reapplied regularly during the day, the salt killed bacteria.

That's the thing—sweat by itself is odorless. Bacteria on the skin are what release smells when they start to break down sweat's trace amounts of fats. Diet, gender, age, hygiene levels, and genetics all give everybody a slightly different smell. Meat-eaters, for example, release more fats and proteins in their sweat, so they tend to smell stronger than vegans. Women's sweat tends to contain more sulfur, creating an oniony smell when bacteria go at it. Men, on the other hand, release more fatty acids that end up smelling cheesy. And shaved armpits are more likely to be smelly than hairy ones because the hair often wicks out enough moisture to help keep bacteria in check.

DRY UP

By the turn of the 20th century, deodorant manufacturing was in full swing. For example…

• The first modern antiperspirant was called Everdry, introduced in 1903. It had some problems, though. With an active ingredient of aluminum chloride, Everdry was acidic enough to irritate the skin and shorten the life of shirts by slowly eating holes under the arms. (That's still a problem: Even today, those embarrassing yellow armpit stains come from the ingredients of antiperspirants, not the sweat itself.)