Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (20 page)

Coldest place in the solar system: Triton, a moon of Neptune (-400°F).

Neptune takes 165 Earth years to go around the Sun once.

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DID YOU KNOW?

There are about 5,000 earthquakes every year in Alaska. North America's strongest recorded earthquake struck there on March 27, 1964. It had a magnitude of 9.2, stronger than San Francisco's famous 1906 earthquake.

Strange as a $2 Bill

John Trumbull's iconic 1818 painting
Declaration of Independence
is so associated with American history that a version of it was reproduced on the back of the $2 bill. But an anonymous somebody in the U.S. Bureau of Engraving decided to make some changes to Trumbull's work, and that's when things got a little strange.

      
• First of all, six signers of the Declaration of Independence were simply lopped out of the picture: four (George Wythe, William Whipple, Josiah Bartlett, and Thomas Lynch) from the far left side, and two (Thomas McKean and Philip Livingston) from the far right.

      
• A patterned rug that appears in the Trumbull painting was removed from under the feet of the five men standing in the center.

      
• In the painting, Thomas Jefferson is twisted about 90 degrees and his leg is outstretched like a ballet dancer in order to stand ever so slightly on John Adams's foot. The two men had a lot of respect for each other, but they were also political rivals for decades, belonging to opposite parties and running against each other for president. In the $2 bill version, though, the two men's feet are touching toe to toe.

      
• Finally, there is the curious case of James Wilson, who would eventually go on to become an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. In the place of the smooth-shaven, white-haired gentleman in Trumbull's painting, the $2 bill includes a young man with dark, close-cropped hair and a short goatee.

THE FINE PRINT

Having said all that, it's only fair to note that the original painting wasn't perfect to begin with. Trumbull pictured just 47 congressmen, even though there were 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence. And of the men he did include, several hadn't actually signed the document.

Meow Mix

Cats can hear sounds as high as 50,000 vibrations per second—people can't hear above the low 20,000s.

Cats don't have a great sense of taste, so they make food choices based on texture, scent, and appearance.

Male cats were called rams or boars until 1760, when an anonymous writer published
The Life and Adventures of a Cat
. Its main character, Tom, achieved widespread popularity, and male cats got a new name: tomcats.

Historians say you can probably thank (or blame) the Pilgrims for bringing the first domestic cats to the New World.

Siamese cats are mostly white when they're born. The markings come later.

There are about 77.7 million pet cats in the United States.

Nearly a third of all households have at least one cat. The average cat-owning home has 2.2 cats.

About half of all American pet cats get presents during the holidays.

Lions…

The lion, aka, the “king of the jungle,” lives mainly on the savanna grasslands.

In captivity, lions can live 20 or more years. In the wild, 15 years is typical for females and 12 years for males.

Female lions are social and live in stable prides with their cubs. Male lions have to fight constantly to retain their status in a pride.

Between their bulk and their mane, male lions are not good at hunting. The females do most of that work.

The first MGM lion was named Slats. On July 31, 1928, for the studio's very first “talkie” film—
White Shadows in the South Seas
—MGM added sound effects to its once-silent logo, turning the lion into a full-fledged growler.

Lions are sometimes attacked by South African giant bullfrogs.

A nursing lioness will suckle any of the pride's cubs.

The Cowardly Lion's costume in
The Wizard of Oz
was made from two real lion skins.

The leaping lion logo on the Detroit Lions' helmets is named Bubbles.

The world's youngest lion tamer, Jorge Elich, of the Circus Paris, started working unassisted in 2008…at age 8.

How do you cross a lion and a tiger? Very carefully. You can interbreed them, though they'd never do so in the wild. If the mom is a tigress, the result is a “liger”; if she's a lioness, a “tigon.”

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YOU'RE MY INSPIRATION

For the painting
American Gothic
(the farm couple with a pitchfork), artist Grant Woods's models were his sister and his dentist.

…and Tigers…

The tiger is the largest member of the cat family. Male Siberian tigers often grow to be 10 feet long and weigh more than 400 pounds.

Tiger stripe patterns are as unique as human fingerprints.

Unlike many wild animals, tigers breed easily in captivity. Perhaps too easily. There are so many captive tigers that they are often sold as pets.

The United States has 12,000 caged tigers, about twice the number of wild tigers worldwide.

Tigers are solitary creatures. Males and females get together briefly to mate, but otherwise live apart. They aren't necessarily hostile, though—two tigers meeting at a water hole may stop and rub cheeks like house cats.

Leopards and tigers can both swim, but tigers are the only cats that do it for fun.

A tiger's tongue is so rough that it can lick the paint off of a building.

An adult tiger can usually kill with a single swipe of its paw.

…and Bears…Oh My!

Polar, grizzly, and brown bears had the same ancestor 150,000 years ago. Even after they split into different species, they interbred during warm periods, when their habitats overlapped, and even now, they sometimes still do.

There's evidence that brown bears came from Ireland.

What does a king give another king who has everything? In 1252, Haakon IV of Norway gave England's Henry III a polar bear. Henry housed the animal in the Tower of London, with a chain long enough to let it fish and swim in the Thames.

Sometimes you wonder if scientists are biased against certain animals—the scientific name for the grizzly bear is
Ursus arctos horribilis
.

In the U.S., it's a federal crime to imitate Smokey Bear for profit. You can get six months in jail and have to pay a fine.

Polar bears at the San Diego Zoo turned green in the summer of 1978 because of algae in their enclosure.

At first, the U.S. Forest Service used Bambi the deer to promote forest fire prevention. But in 1944, when their contract ran out with Disney and they lost the right to use Bambi, they decided on something more intimidating and went with Smokey the Bear.

Koalas may look like bears, but they're actually marsupials.

A bear named Voytek helped carry ammunition for Polish troops during World War II.

Car license plates from Canada's Northwest Territories are shaped like polar bears.

They look fat and slow, but a grizzly bear can run faster than a horse for 100 yards or so. Brown and polar bears can run between 24 and 35 mph.

Antipodes

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Every point on earth has its opposite point, starting with the Arctic Pole and its opposite, the Antarctic (which literally means “opposite of arctic”). There's even a name for a location's opposite point—the spot where you'd end up if you tunneled straight down through the earth. That's called the
antipode
, a Greek word that means “opposed foot.”

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Antipodes are true opposites. If you're in the Western Hemisphere, your antipode is in the Eastern Hemisphere. If you're in the Northern Hemisphere, it's in the Southern. Your antipode is the farthest place on earth from wherever you are right now.

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Odds are very good that your antipode is under an ocean. In fact, only about 4 percent of the world's entire landmass has a dry antipode. That's partly because so much of the earth is covered by water (about 70 percent). But it's also because most of the dry land is in the Northern Hemisphere and very little of it is in the Southern. But because of that, if you live in the Southern Hemisphere, your odds of getting a dry antipode are vastly improved.

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The British often refer to Australia and New Zealand as “the Antipodes,” and their inhabitants as the “Antipodeans.” But technically, England and Ireland's antipodes are in the ocean just south of New Zealand. The actual land mass of New Zealand matches up with parts of Spain, Portugal, and Morocco.

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The Antipode Islands, located in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, were named for this phenomenon. First charted in 1800 by British Captain Henry Waterhouse of the HMS
Reliance
, the islands were originally called the Penantipodes (“nearly antipodes”) because they were the closest landmasses to London's antipode.

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Most of North America has an antipode in the Indian Ocean between Africa and Australia, but the extreme northern parts of Canada and Alaska are the antipodes to Antarctica. Hawaii is the only U.S. state that has a land antipode: Botswana in southern Africa.

Mixed Nuts

23 percent of psychiatrists in the United States do business in the New York City metro area.

Towering 1,064 feet above sea level, the highest point of Ohio's Hamilton County is the Rumpke Landfill. Locals call the 509-acre pile of trash “Mt. Rumpke.”

The backs of your knees are home to more different kinds of microbes than your gut is.

If the Milky Way galaxy were the size of Asia, our solar system would be the size of a penny.

Just in case mummies have to pee, ancient Egyptians included chamber pots in their burial crypts.

First rock band to play at an outdoor stadium: the Beatles at Shea Stadium (1965).

In 2008 psychologists introduced a new diagnosis: Facebook Addiction Disorder.

About one in six pregnant women gets a craving to chew on coal.

The most common birthday in the United States is October 5. (Approximate conception date: New Year's Eve.)

Ralph Teetor, the man who invented cruise control for cars, was blind.

Sterling silver contains 7.5 percent copper.

Americans use enough toilet paper each year to stretch to the sun and back.

Baby Talk

Archie Bunker on
All in the Family
was the first person to diaper a baby on TV.

The average baby cries at 115 decibels…only 10 decibels lower than a firecracker.

The “Cry Translator” iPhone app claims to help people identify five baby cries: hungry, sleepy, uncomfortable, stressed, or bored. (Reviewers likewise cried that the $4.99 app didn't work adequately, leaving them stressed out and annoyed as well.)

Average amount of sleep lost by parents in a baby's first year of life: 200 hours.

Still, experts say infants age 6 to 12 months old sleep about 10 to 11 hours at night and take a couple of one-to two-hour naps during the day.

At birth, babies usually cry in the key of C or C-sharp.

Q. Who was the first Canadian baby born on Canada's centennial (July 1, 1967)?

A. Pamela Anderson.

When a developer of the baby incubator couldn't get financial backers, he hired nurses and exhibited premature “incubator babies” at world's fairs. The exhibits were popular attractions, raising money and putting pressure on hospitals to invest in the life-saving boxes. New York's Coney Island had two incubator baby exhibits. Admission was 10¢…but free to the parents of the babies.

A German study found that newborn babies begin to cry with an accent within two weeks of birth.

What part of a baby's body is almost the same size in adulthood? The eyes. Unlike everything else, they grow only a little.

Sigmund Freud believed that morning sickness represented a loathing of the baby's father…and the woman's desire to vomit up her baby.

Technically, all babies are
galactophagists
. What does that mean? “One who feeds on milk.”

Eat Bugs!

“Entomophagy” is the eating of bugs by humans. It's more common than you'd think. And why not? Bugs outnumber humans by about 200 million to one.

In 2013 the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, noting that food production will have to double to feed 9 billion people in 2050, issued a report about the benefits of bug-eating for a hungry world.

According to the UN, there are more than 1,900 edible bug species worldwide. In order of consumption, the most popular are beetles (31 percent), followed by caterpillars (18 percent); bees, wasps, and ants (14 percent); and grasshoppers, crickets, and locusts (13 percent). Termites and dragonflies tied at 3 percent.