Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (32 page)

Berry Specific

Grapes, persimmons, currants, coffee berries, tomatoes, peppers, pumpkins, and watermelons are all considered berries biologically. They are a class of fruit that is “fleshy and produced from a single ovary.”

In 1923 horticulturist Rudolph Boysen crossed several varieties of blackberries and raspberries to create a new variety, but a lack of commercial success made him lose interest in the fruit. A grower named Walter Knott later adopted a few of Boysen's neglected vines and began serving boysenberries fresh and in jams and pies.

Do you ever consume juniper berries? Sure you do, if you drink gin. It's the major ingredient.

Crows, bluebirds, rabbits, and deer can eat poison ivy berries without a problem; humans can't.

Berries bounce—supposedly, they're ready to eat if you drop one from chest height, and it bounces seven times.

In 1883 Calfornia's James Harvey Logan invented the loganberry. He was trying to crossbreed two blackberry varieties, but a nearby raspberry plant also got its pollen into the mix. Of the 50 seeds he planted, one became the loganberry.

In 1882 Canadian John Lake, founder of a Temperance Society commune in Saskatchewan, was contemplating what to call his alcohol-free settlement when a young disciple offered him a handful of berries. Lake liked the sound of the Cree name for the fruit,
misâskwatômin
(“early berries”), which he heard as “saskatoon” in English. It became the name of his new village.

Technically, a strawberry isn't a berry. It's an “accessory fruit,” like apples and pears. What we call the “seeds” are actually each an independent dry fruit that contains a microscopic seed inside. The luscious red part is part of the flower that holds dozens of seeds together.

Meet Some Meat

Ham isn't just any old piece of pig meat. It comes specifically off of the rump area.

Most spoiled meat is turned into tallow for pet food, automobile tires, cosmetics, soaps, candles, detergents, lubricants, crayons, and plastics.

Until 1966, Catholics were allowed to eat fish during Lent, but were not allowed to eat meat. For settlers in Africa, though, there was one exception: hippos. The reasoning was that since the animal spends so much time in the water, it could technically be classified as a fish.

Ants can't digest meat, but ant larvae can. So if an ant larva is fed meat, it vomits some of it back up, partly digested, for the adults to share.

According to some foodies, beavers, wombats, and crocodiles taste like pork; hippos and zebras taste like beef; lions and boa constrictors taste like veal; and baby wasps taste like scrambled eggs.

Human meat is also said to taste like pork (but we don't want to verify that).

Hoops, I Did It Again

Disneyland has a basketball court for employees inside the Matterhorn.

Nowadays the basketball team that's scored against gets the ball back. But before 1937, there was a jump ball after every basket.

In 1891 James Naismith invented basketball at a YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts. He asked the custodian for empty wooden boxes to use as targets, but there were none available. There were two peach baskets, though. Naismith nailed those to the balconies at either end of the gym, and they just happened to be 10 feet off the floor, which is why that is still the regulation height for baskets.

In the first pro basketball league (1898), players on the Trenton, New Jersey, team were paid $2.50 for home games and $1.25 for away games.

Wilt Chamberlain was the first professional basketball star who was more than 7' tall.

Michael Jordan was demoted to the junior varsity basketball team while in high school.

Slam dunks were banned in college basketball between 1967 and 1976.

Basketball is the only major sport invented in the U.S.

The Purefoods Tender Juicy Giants, a basketball team in the Philippines, are named after a hot dog.

Considering the notable shortage of lakes in Southern California, the name “Los Angeles Lakers” makes sense only if you know that the team began in Minnesota, whose nickname is “the Land of 10,000 Lakes.”

*
  
*
  
*

Alaska has the honor of being the state with the most outhouses.

Fish Facts

Native American tribes along the Pacific Coast used eulachon, a small ocean fish, as candles. The fish were so oily that people just strung wicks through the bodies and burned them, hence their other name: candlefish.

More than 800 fish species can vocalize sounds.

Men who sold fish were called “fishmongers.” Woman in the same occupation were called “fishwives.”

What's
ichthyoallyeinotoxism
? LSD-like hallucinations brought on by eating sarpa salpa, little spinefoots, and other kinds of tropical or coastal fish.

Raash
is an electric African catfish that grows up to 4 feet in length. In Arabic, the name means “thunder,” but its effects are more like lightning. The fish uses electricity to kill or stun its prey and to repel predators.

Most koi fish have a life span of 47 years, but Hanako, a koi from Japan, lived to be 226 years old.

Lungfish can survive out of water for months.

A Slooow List

Snails first slithered the earth about 600 million years ago.

Snails breathe through a thick layer of skin under their shells called the mantle.

Some snails have lungs, some have gills.

What is
heliculture
? The science of growing snails for food.

A snail crawls at an average speed of 0.03 mph…or about one foot every three minutes.

Some snails can hibernate in the winter and live off their fat. They can also hibernate in the summer during severe droughts. To avoid drying out, they seal their shells with a layer of mucus.

If a snail's eye gets severed, it will grow a new one.

The largest species of snail is the giant African land snail: it can weigh two pounds and have a shell that's 15 inches long.

All About Barbie

Totally Stylin' Tattoos Barbie (and her pal Totally Stylin' Nikki), who came with 40 temporary tattoos (including a lower back “tramp stamp”), made a small furor in 2009 among parents who weren't comfortable with their young daughters seeing Barbie inked up. (The dolls stayed on the market, though.)

Barbie's official birthday: March 9, 1959.

Barbie dolls sold in Japan have their lips closed, with no teeth showing, because in 1995 marketers from Mattel discovered that in Japan (as the
New York Times
put it), “women still cover their mouths with their hands when they laugh so as not to expose their teeth.”

Barbie's hometown, according to Mattel, is Willows, Wisconsin.

Barbie has a last name, and it isn't “Doll.” It's Roberts.

If Barbie were human, her measurements would be 38-18-28.

Barbie's first car: A pink 1962 Austin-Healey British sports car.

Mattel's 2010 Collector Barbie was Palm Beach Sugar Daddy Ken. He wore white pants and a lime-green jacket, and came with a tiny white lap dog.

Barbie outsells Ken by about two to one.

Don't Play That Again, Sam

•
  
An “earworm” is a song that repeats…and repeats…in the brain. What's the hallmark of a typical earworm? It's most likely to be a song with simple lyrics and a melody that you've heard many times.

•
  
Songs with lyrics were the most frequent tormentors, making up 74 percent of those reported. Another 15 percent were commercial jingles, and 11 percent were instrumentals.

•
  
In 2003 University of Cincinnati professor James Kellaris released a paper on earworms. He interviewed 559 students and found that 98% had experienced the phenomenon.

•
  
Dr. Kellaris, by the way, is credited with popularizing the term “earworm,” from a German word,
ohrworm
. However, the German word actually refers to something different: an overnight hit song that appears suddenly and quickly becomes popular.

•
  
Other words suggested for the phenomenon include serious submissions such as “involuntary musical imagery,” “obsessive musical thought,” “musical meme,” or “stuck song syndrome,” as well as some less-serious ones: “humsickness” or “repetitunitus.”

•
  
Most people have their own idiosyncratic list of songs that get stuck in their heads. In that 2003 study, the professor's personal list of top 10 earworm songs included two jingles (Chili's “Baby Back Ribs” and Kit-Kat's “Gimme a Break”) and one instrumental (the
Mission: Impossible
theme).
Other songs that ranked high included “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” “YMCA,” “We Will Rock You,” “Who Let the Dogs Out,” “Whoomp, There It Is,” and “It's a Small World After All.”

•
  
If the list above accidentally infected you with an earworm, here are some ways that people have used to dislodge them. Mentally switching to another song is very popular—even if it runs the risk of replacing one earworm with another. Trying to pass the earworm on to somebody else by singing or talking about the song sometimes works. Still others finish an earworm off by literally finishing it—instead of repeating a part of the song, they mentally continue all the way to the end, breaking the cycle…sometimes.

•
  
The most comforting news about earworms is that they almost never last more than 24 hours, and usually it's much less than that—typically 27 minutes, according to “earworm diaries” collected from subjects of another study.

*
  
*
  
*

HODGEPODGE

•
  
What are ray guns, drag pipes, and pea shooters? Mufflers, to motorcycle buffs.

•
  
At the 1893 Chicago Worlds Fair, Milton Snavely Hershey saw a chocolate-making machine from Germany and decided to go into the business himself. Hershey bars and Kisses are the result.

•
  
Women weren't allowed to run the marathon in the Olympics until 1984.

A Mark of Extinction

On September 1, 1914, the passenger pigeon officially went extinct when Martha, the last known survivor, died in the Cincinnati Zoo. Once the most abundant bird species in the world, its vast flocks became an easy target for hunters.

Hawaii's state bird is a goose called the nene, which evolved from visiting Canada geese about 500,000 years ago. In 1952 its population included just 30 birds, down from 25,000 in 1778. Rescued from extinction by the efforts of conservationists who bred them in nature reserves around the world, there are now about 800 in the wild and 1,000 in zoos.

More than 90 percent of all animal species in earth's history are now extinct.

The mylodon, a gigantic ground sloth the size of a black bear, survived through much of human history. It didn't become extinct until about 5,000 years ago.

Dingoes, introduced to Australia from Southeast Asia about 5,000 years ago, caused the extinction of the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, a doglike marsupial. The last thylacine on mainland Australia died during the 19th century, but the animals lasted until the 1930s on the isolated island of Tasmania.

Burned at the Skate

NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION

During the 15th and 16th centuries, the heyday of the Spanish Empire, the country's kings and queens tended to go brutally overboard in their support of the Roman Catholic Church. They forced Jews and Muslims to convert or get out of the country in 1492, and then created the infamous Inquisition to root out atheists, freethinkers, Christians of the wrong kind, and any former Jews and Muslims who were only
pretending
to be Catholic. Torture, forced confessions, and burnings at the stake were common tools used to “save” the souls of those deemed insufficiently Catholic.

In 1566 Spain's King Philip II got some disturbing news about a distant province ruled by his empire. Thanks to the devilish and revolutionary influence of people like Martin Luther and John Calvin, the scourge of Protestantism had taken root in the Spanish-controlled Netherlands. After trying out slightly gentler methods, Philip sent in Spanish troops with orders to scare the devil—or at least the Calvin and Luther—out of the locals. In response, many of the Dutch people rose up in rebellion, and Philip decided that anything, even mass murder, was acceptable in the effort to convince the Dutch to accept Catholicism.

THE SWORD OF THE LORD

Not all Dutch towns resisted or wanted trouble, but even that didn't help them. In November 1572, the city of Naarden tried to negotiate surrender with the Spanish by inviting the invading army to a lavish feast. But after the food and toasts and expressions of friendship and loyalty were finished, the army gathered the 3,000 residents into the town church. Moments after sending in a reluctant priest to tell the people to pray, the army rushed in with swords and began slaughtering the townspeople. Eventually, the soldiers burned the church down to make sure there were no survivors. Other cities and towns were similarly ransacked, and an estimated 100,000 people were killed.