Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (26 page)

A typical church organ has hundreds of pipes. The world's largest, in Atlantic City's Convention Hall, uses 33,112 pipes.

The earliest pipe organ comes from the third century BC.

Early organs used water to power them, but that changed in the mid-1800s when steam, gasoline, and eventually electricity took over.

The organ pipes used for bass notes take up a lot of space. Some newer pipe organs, called hybrids, “cheat” by using traditional pipes for most notes, but generate the lower tones electronically to save money and space.

Organ makers often add “facade” pipes that don't make a sound, but look nice. Most of the pipes of an organ are hidden behind the ones you can see. Some are less than an inch long.

Warmer temperatures than normal will make an organ go slightly sharp; colder temps make it slightly flat.

Dead at 27

Rock 'n' roll is a dangerous business…and a superstitious one. All of these stars died at the age of 27.

Janis Joplin

Jimi Hendrix

Jim Morrison

Robert Johnson

Amy Winehouse

Dave Alexander (The Stooges)

Ron “Pigpen” McKernan (Grateful Dead)

Alan “Blind Owl” Wilson (Canned Heat)

Pete de Freitas (Echo and the Bunnymen)

Malcolm Hale (Spanky and Our Gang)

Jeremy Ward (The Mars Volta)

Brian Jones (Rolling Stones)

Kurt Cobain (Nirvana)

Pete Ham (Badfinger)

Kristen Pfaff (Hole)

Rudy Lewis (Drifters)

Freaky Tah (Lost Boyz)

Gary Thain (Uriah Heep)

Bloodsuckers

There are more than 3,500 species of mosquitoes. Only a couple hundred bite people.

It would require 1.12 million mosquito bites to completely drain your blood.

Only female mosquitoes bite. They need blood to lay viable eggs. Male mosquitoes live on flower nectar.

Citronella, catnip, rosemary, lemon oil, eucalyptus oil, and marigold all have a reputation for repelling mosquitoes. They don't exactly keep the bugs away, but they mask the smell of carbon dioxide, rendering humans invisible to the pests. Mosquitoes find us by smelling our exhaled breath, so if you can confuse them with scents, you're less likely to get bitten.

The best way to avoid mosquitoes is by draining any standing water, no matter how small, every week. That includes birdbaths, kid's pools, tree holes, rainwater drains, and even little-used drains in and around your house. Mosquito larvae need to live 7 to 14 days in water.

Mosquitoes normally travel no more than half a mile from their point of origin.

A mosquito's wings beat 300 to 600 times per second.

Unsung Space Travelers

FRUIT FLIES

The first travelers in space were not humans, dogs, apes, or monkeys, but plain, everyday fruit flies. In 1947, at the beginning of the space race, the United States launched a V-2 rocket carrying seeds and fruit flies from White Sands, New Mexico, in an effort to study the effects of radiation beyond the Earth's atmosphere. The rocket went up 68 miles to the edge of outer space. Then the capsule detached, the parachute engaged, and the capsule fell back to Earth. The bugs and seeds survived the journey.

IBERIAN RIBBED NEWTS

In 1985 Soviet scientists operated on 10 newts, amputating one of their front limbs and an eye lens before launching them into space. Why would they do such a thing? The Soviets wanted to know if the missing limbs would regenerate in zero gravity in the same way they regenerated on Earth. In fact, the newts healed significantly faster when in space than similarly amputated control groups back on Earth.

ROUNDWORMS

When the space shuttle
Columbia
disintegrated over Texas in 2003, its seven crew members died. So did the silkworms, garden orb spiders, carpenter bees, Japanese killifish, and harvester ants that had been on the shuttle with them as part of various experiments. The only known survivors were roundworms called nematodes that were found intact in the debris.

All Aboard!

Before steam engines, trains were pulled by horses or mules. But before that, they were powered people. The first railroad was built in Greece in the sixth century BC and was pushed along by slaves.

The shortest and steepest railroad in the U.S. is at Dubuque, Iowa. It rises at an incline of 60 degrees and is only 296 feet long.

The first coin-operated toilet was unveiled in a train station in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1910. At that time, most people had never seen an indoor toilet and came to gawk, making it hard for travelers to actually use them.

Every July since 1979, thousands of people have gathered along the railroad tracks in Laguna Niguel, CA, and dropped their drawers for “Moon Amtrak Day.”

In railroad lingo, to “buckle the rubbers” meant to connect the pneumatic air, steam, or signal hoses that ran between cars.

Two common phrases that began as railroad terms: “Making the grade” referred to getting to the top of a steep slope. And “getting sidetracked” meant moving trains or cars off the main track onto a short auxiliary track for loading, unloading, or temporary storage.

The hobby of trainspotting entails tallying every rail engine that you see. The champion of all time is England's Bill Curtis, who, over 40 years, “tracked” more than 85,000 different locomotives in 31 countries.

The first steam-powered railway was built in England in 1825.

India has the most railroad stations in the world: 7,083.

Tourists on trains stopping in Palisade, Nevada, in the 1870s often complained that the Wild West wasn't very wild. So the townspeople staged gunfights to make things more exciting.

Olympic Facts

The first U.S. city to host the Summer Olympics was St. Louis in 1904. In a scandalous turn of events, the apparent winner of the marathon, American Fred Lorz, was disqualified after riding in a car for most of the run.

Tug of war was an Olympic event from 1900 to 1920.

The oldest medalist was Oscar Gomer Swahn of Sweden, who won the 1920 “double-shots team running deer” shooting competition at age 72. The oldest female gold medalist was American Eliza Pollock, a 63-year-old who won at archery in 1904.

From 1968 to 2000, all female Olympic competitors were required to take a “gender verification exam.” All except one: England's Princess Anne, who competed in an equestrian competition in 1976, got a royal exemption.

At first, the exams just required groups of women athletes to parade unclothed past medical experts who made sure they didn't have male genitalia. Eventually, the Olympics added a blood test for the male hormone androgen, since it is what is responsible for the increased size and muscle mass advantages in men.

The tests were needed, said Olympics officials, because men were cheating and competing as women to gain an unfair advantage. During the 1936, for example, German high jumper Dora Ratjen was revealed to be a man named Hermann Ratjen. He came in fourth. The very masculine “Press sisters” from Russia each won a gold medal in the 1960s. And North Korea's Sin Kim Dan broke records in sprinting at the 1964 Games…until “her” father recognized her as his long-missing son.

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The temperature
of the lit end of a cigarette when the smoker is inhaling is about 1,652°F.

Uncle John's Page of Lists

3 EARLY JAPANESE ANIME SHOWS ON AMERICAN TELEVISION

1.
Astro Boy
, 1963

2.
Gigantor
, 1966

3.
Kimba the White Lion
, 1966

2 BODY PARTS THAT PEOPLE HATE THE MOST

1.
Thighs (women)

2.
Rear (men)

5 EARLY VIDEO GAMES

1.
Nim: a counting/math game, 1951

2.
OXO: tic-tac-toe, 1952

3.
Tennis for Two: like Pong, 1958

4.
Mouse in a Maze: a labyrinth chase for cheese, 1959

5.
Spacewar: two spaceships battling, 1961

2 REDUNDANT PLACE NAMES

1.
Pago Pago

2.
Walla Walla (Washington)

5 U.S. CITIES THAT PEOPLE SAY THEY MOST WANT TO MOVE TO

1.
Denver, CO

2.
San Diego, CA

3.
Seattle, WA

4.
Orlando, FL

5.
Tampa, FL

6 CHILD ACTORS WHO BECAME MORE FAMOUS AS ADULTS

1.
Ryan Gosling

2.
Jason Bateman

3.
Leonardo DiCaprio

4.
Elizabeth Taylor

5.
Neil Patrick Harris

6.
Ron Howard

4 FOUNDING FATHERS WHO WERE FREEMASONS

1.
George Washington

2.
Benjamin Franklin

3.
John Hancock

4.
Paul Revere

THE 4 MOST-RECYCLED PRODUCTS IN THE U.S.

1.
Asphalt (99%)

2.
Steel (88%)

3.
Paper (66%)

4.
Aluminum cans (65%)

THE FIRST 4
ROLLING STONE
MAGAZINE COVER IMAGES

1.
John Lennon

2.
Tina Turner

3.
The Beatles

4.
Jimi Hendrix, Donovan & Otis Redding

Annoying Musical Instruments

VUVUZELA

The facts:

The 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa brought the vuvuzela to the attention of the world. Loud enough to cause hearing loss, the long plastic horn typically plays a single tone in the hands of a novice. But you didn't even have to be in the soccer stadium to be annoyed by this instrument—TV viewers also complained about the continuous buzz coming from their screens.

• A vuvuzela can generate 144 decibels of sound. The U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Heath recommends that the maximum exposure to a sound at 100 decibels be less than 15 minutes a day.

• Besides causing ear pain, a study by a British doctor found that the instrument also launched microparticles of saliva that can stay suspended in the air for hours, making it a near-perfect mechanism for spreading colds and flu.

• Since the 2010 World Cup, many sports events and venues have banned the horns.

Why it deserves (at least a little) respect:

• Some South Africans consider vuvuzelas to be a symbol of national pride.

• They can be the sound of freedom. Vuvuzelas were used in several demonstrations in 2010: against British Petroleum's headquarters in London after its massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and in Wisconsin against Governor Scott Walker's antiunion laws.

• Since a vuvuzela is essentially a bugle without curves, brass, or a purity of tone, skilled players can wrestle harmonic tones out of a vuvuzela, making it possible to play “Taps,” “Reveille,” and other bugle calls.

JEW'S HARP

The facts:

The only thing harplike about the Jew's harp is that you pluck it. This small metal instrument includes a reed that players hold against their lips and pluck. It's got a metallic wang-wanga-wanga sound—sometimes heard on world music or really old country and bluegrass records—and changes in pitch come from moving your mouth, opening your throat passage, and altering your breathing slightly.

There are lots of theories about why it's called a Jew's harp, but no one is really sure where the name comes from. Some say it came from “jaw harp” or the French word
jeu
(“toy”) or the Dutch name
jeugd
(“youth”) harp.

Why it deserves (at least a little) respect:

• Some historians claim it's the oldest non-drum instrument in the world, with pictorial evidence from a Chinese drawing from the fourth century BC.

• It's one of the few instruments that uses a person's skull, cheeks, and head cavity as its sounding board, amplifier, and pitch changer.

• Between 1769 and 1771, composer Johann Albrechtsberger wrote at least seven concertos for Jew's harps and strings, of which only three are still known to exist.

• Twelve Jew's harps were included among the gifts explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark brought to make peace with Native Americans as they traveled across America from 1804 to 1806.

ACCORDION

The facts:

The squeezebox had a heyday during first half of the 1900s, but these days, it's most often scorned as a fixture of polka and zydeco bands or Lawrence Welk types in bowties. True, goofball Weird Al Yankovic and the band They Might Be Giants have used accordions since the 1990s, but they were generally being sarcastic.