Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (29 page)

In 1970, 126 men and one woman started at the first New York City Marathon…and only 55 (all men) finished. In 2011, 30,200 men and 17,563 women started, and only about 478 of the runners
didn't
finish.

Legend has it that the first marathon, held in 490 BC, had one contender, a Greek messenger who ran from the Battle of Marathon back to Athens to announce a victory over the Persians.

Susie Hewer of the United Kingdom knits five-foot-long scarves…while running in a marathon. Hewer has done it
several
times to raise money for Alzheimer's awareness. A recent run-and-knit was the London Marathon in April 2013. Hewer's time was 5:05:23, and her scarf was 6½ feet long, a personal best.

Guinness World Records
keeps track of lots of marathon records, including finishers dressed as an astronaut (3:19:37), in a wetsuit (3:25:00), carrying an 80-pound pack (5:58:58), in a gorilla or other full-body animal suit (3:31:36), and costumed as an insect (3:24:10).

*
  
*
  
*

A baby turkey is called a “poult.”

The Name Is Smith, John Smith

In the United States, more than 2.3 million people are named John Smith. But who were the most notable John Smiths in history?

•
  
The most famous John Smith (1580–1631) was an adventurer who helped found the Jamestown colony in Virginia and who wrote vividly of being saved by Pocahontas.

•
  
John Smith (1661–1727), nicknamed “Thrice-Hanged,” was a burglar who was unsuccessfully hanged three times in England before finally being exiled to Virginia.

•
  
John Smith (1750–1836) composed the tune of “The Anacreontic Song,” which America stole for its national anthem.

•
  
John Smith (1798–1888) was one of the first curators of Kew Gardens in London and oversaw its transition from a private to a public space.

•
  
John Smith (1837–?) invented shorthand, went to jail for tax resistance, and created his own system of utopianism.

•
  
Two John Smiths won the Medal of Honor, and two others won the Victoria Cross.

•
  
John Smith, an Australian minister who goes by the nickname “Bullfrog,” founded the God's Squad, a scruffy Christian biker gang that ministers to bikers.

•
  
John Smith was a pro wrestler in the 1990s who went by the name of J. T. Smith. His gimmick was that he suffered a head injury and woke up thinking he was Italian. He founded a tag-team named the Full-Blooded Italians that was notable for the fact that none of them were really Italian.

•
  
John Smith, better known as Ranger Smith, was Yogi Bear's foil in cartoons.

•
  
John Smith, played by George Peppard and nicknamed Hannibal, was the leader of TV's
A-Team
.

Land of Lincoln

Illinois boasts that its the Land of Lincoln, but it was just one of his homes. He also lived in Kentucky, Indiana, and Washington, D.C.

Chicago was the site of one of America's first private detective agencies. Cook County sheriff Allan Pinkerton started the Pinkerton Agency in 1851. The agency acted as guards for presidents, but also as infiltrators, spies, and hired goons for corporations wanting to stop unions.

The world's first Dairy Queen opened in Joliet, Illinois, in 1940.

Chicago was home to the first 24-hour drive-in funeral home. Video cameras and a 25-inch color TV allowed people to drive up and view a dead loved one without leaving their cars.

The original Morris the Cat, spokes-feline for 9Lives cat food, was discovered by animal talent agents in the Hinsdale, Illinois, animal shelter and adopted shortly before he was supposed to be euthanized. Maybe that's why Morris's
real
name was Lucky.

It's against the law to offer a dog or other domesticated pet a cigar in Zion, Illinois…but no mention is made of cigarettes or pipes.

Really Dead, or Just Mostly Dead?

BURIED ALIVE

In the 17th and 18th centuries, there was a widespread phobia among Europeans and Americans about being mistaken for dead and waking up in a coffin, buried alive. Books and the popular press spread lurid stories of people waking right before the coffin was nailed shut and of corpses in morgues with their fingers chewed off—a sign, it was said, that the panicked people awoke and chewed their own hands in hunger (although rats were more likely).

There was (at least a little) reason to worry. As anatomist Jacques Bénigne Winslow admitted in 1740, “The onset of putrefaction is the only reliable indicator that the subject has died.”

In response to the panic, inventors got busy creating coffins with ropes attached to signal bells aboveground. Writer Hans Christian Andersen used his own method—before going to sleep each night, he'd place a sign on his bedstand that read, “I only APPEAR to be dead.”

HOW TO TELL IF HE'S REALLY DEAD

Helpful doctors also came up with reassuring procedures to revive people who only “appeared to be dead.” For example, using a special pipe to blow tobacco smoke up a suspected corpse's anus was thought to be a solid way of separating the quick from the dead. If the person was alive, the smoke was supposed to stimulate breathing.

Winslow himself suggested measures to decide whether a person was really a corpse. “The individual's nostrils are to be irritated by introducing sternutaries, errhines, juices of onions, garlic and horse-radish…. The gums are to be rubbed with garlic, and the skin stimulated by the liberal application of whips and nettles. The intestines can be irritated by the most acrid enemas, the limbs agitated through violent pulling, and the ears shocked by hideous Shrieks and
excessive Noises. Vinegar and salt should be poured in the corpse's mouth and where they cannot be had, it is customary to pour warm Urine into it, which has been observed to produce happy Effects.”

If the “happy effects” didn't appear, it was time for extreme action like cutting the bottoms of the feet, thrusting needles under the toenails, and pouring hot wax on the forehead. If none of these abuses actually elicited a response, doctors assumed that they could safely pronounce the person dead. And as a general rule, they did—as far as history knows, none of these methods ever revived anyone.

*
  
*
  
*

PRINCE OF POPPERS

•
  
Bubble wrap's official name—given by the Sealed Air Corporation, which owns the trademarked title—is “Bubble Wrap® Brand Cushioning material.” (The company's offices provide boxes of bubble wrap for stressed employees to pop.)

•
  
Puchipuchi
, the Japanese word for bubble wrap, came from the sound that the bubbles make when you pop them.

•
  
The bubbles in the wrap don't have to be round. They can be made in nearly any shape. In 1997 the Torninova Corporation in Italy offered wrap with heart-shaped bubbles.

•
  
Inventors inadvertently came up with bubble wrap in 1957 when they tried to create textured wallpaper by sealing bubbles between two shower curtains. They discovered that it didn't really work as wallpaper, and bubble wrap was born.

•
  
As of 2013, there were more than 250 Facebook pages dedicated to bubble wrap.

Tea Time

Technically, “tea” is only made of water poured over the leaves of the tea plant,
Camellia sinensis
. The herbal and other varieties around today aren't
real
tea.

Dry tea is about 3 percent caffeine by weight.

Black, white, yellow, green, and oolong teas all come from the same plant. The type and color depend on how the tea is processed.

The 10th century BC marks the earliest record of tea drinking in China.

In China, tea was considered a medicine before it was considered a beverage. That transition took place during the Tang Dynasty, between 618 and 907 AD.

Tea grows in India and was used as a medicine there too, but Indians didn't begin drinking tea as a beverage until British colonists introduced Chinese varieties there.

One pound of tea makes about 200 servings.

80 percent of the tea drunk in America is black tea, iced.

The official “hospitality drink” of South Carolina is tea, presumably iced and heavily sweetened. That may be because America's first tea farm was planted in Summerville, South Carolina, in 1890.

The estimated value (in today's dollars) of the 342 chests of tea dumped into the harbor during the Boston Tea Party is $700,000.

TV's talking horse of the 1950s, Mister Ed, had a filming-day diet of 20 pounds of hay and a gallon of sweet tea.

Although the British are now thoroughly associated with tea drinking, it didn't become a popular beverage there until the early 18th century.

Some research indicates a lower rate of cancer among green tea drinkers.

The English, Irish, and Kuwaitis drink more tea per capita than Americans.

Revenge of the Nerds

Electrical engineer Hurley Smith invented the pocket protector in 1943.

Dr. Seuss first used the word nerd—although as a fictitious animal, not in the context of a computer geek—in
If I Ran the Zoo
.

A quiet lonely child, Fred Rogers of
Mister Rogers
fame found solace in a rich fantasy world, brought to life with puppets.

Orville Redenbacher was obsessed by popcorn from his childhood days in the 4H Club, eventually doing crossbreeding experiments in the 1950s and 1960s.

Redenbacher turned down a position at West Point in order to study agronomy at Purdue.

At Atari, Steve Jobs was transferred to a one-person night shift after calling coworkers names and giving up bathing.

Midwestern teenage nerds Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman.

Bill Gates scored 1590 on the SAT. His business partner, Paul Allen, scored a perfect 1600.

Shoo Fly, Don't Bother Me

Houseflies have been flying long before there were houses: about 65 million years.

A fly's wings flap at 200 beats a second—that's what makes the buzz.

Female flies lay 75 to 100 eggs at a time, and those eggs hatch in eight to twelve hours. They can repeat the process four to five times in a lifetime (which lasts up to four weeks).

During World War I, doctors accidentally discovered that housefly maggots (the larva stage) clean out open sores and help them heal. Maggot urine even disinfected the wound.

Flies vomit as they land on food, softening it to make the food easy to slurp up.

Alaskans swear that there are no houseflies in their state.

Flies are often the first sign of spring. They survive extreme cold by hibernating and wake up with the first spring thaw.

Female flies are slightly larger than males.

They fly at only about 4.5 mph.

Flies see the world like a wide-angle mosaic. Their two big eyes are really 3,000 to 6,000 simple eyes that give a big picture of what's around them but never let them focus in on details.

Flies have three more simple eyes on the tops of their heads that they use to know which way is up when flying.

*
  
*
  
*

About half of all peanuts
grown in the U.S. become peanut butter. The rest go to snack nuts and confectionery.

The Aloha State

The rainiest spot in the world is Kauai's Mt. Waialeale. It consistently records about 460 inches of rain per year.

Hawaii has the highest life expectancy of any state.

McDonald's and Burger King restaurants in Hawaii sell SPAM for breakfast.

Mark Twain was one of the first Americans to try surfing while in Hawaii. He wrote, “I tried surf-bathing…the board struck the shore…without any cargo, and I struck the bottom about the same time.”

But it was author Jack London, who visited Hawaii in 1907, who is credited with helping to save the sport from extinction. He wrote an article about his surfing teacher, George Freeth, and that generated enough interest that Freeth was invited to give surfing exhibitions up and down the California coast.

The state's motto is
Ua Mau Ke Ea O Ka Aina I Ka Pono
(“The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness”).

Barking Sands Beach on Kauai is called that because the sand's texture and formations make it sound like a dog barking when the waves roll in.

The native people called their land Owyhee, or Hawaika—early accounts differ. Whatever they said, English settlers heard it as “Hawaii.”

The Hawaiian island of Molokai was once a leper colony—sufferers were quarantined there to keep the incurable disease from spreading.