Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (37 page)

Doctors have identified more than a hundred different sleep disorders.

According to a 2002 study, counting sheep doesn't help you get to sleep any faster.

Most people could last for about two months without any food, but only 10 days without any sleep.

Only about 28 percent of American adults get eight hours of sleep a night.

One in four Americans falls asleep with the TV on at least three nights a week.

Some users of prescription sleep medications report a high rate of physical activity during sleep, including making phone calls and driving.

Somnambulism
is when you walk in your sleep.
Somniloquence
is when you talk in your sleep.

Lesson learned? 48 percent of new parents say they prefer sleep to sex.

Thomas Edison thought eight hours of sleep was a waste of time. He slept only three or four hours a night.

Albert Einstein, on the other hand, usually slept 10 hours a night.

40 million Americans experience bruxism in their sleep: jaw clenching and teeth grinding.

In the original story, Rip Van Winkle slept for 20 years;

Chromedome

“Cavities” are holes in your teeth, but a “calvity” is a hole in your hair. (Well, sort of. It's another word for baldness.)

To cure baldness, western European doctors prescribed a hair dressing of oil and burned bees or goose poop (ewww!). (It didn't work.)

Cleopatra used a mixture of horse teeth, bear grease, burned mice, and deer marrow to cure Julius Caesar's baldness. (It didn't work, either.)

Baldy was a first-draft name for one of Disney's seven dwarfs.

In ancient Rome, beauticians painted curls directly onto bald scalps.

Don't fixate on the hairs falling out. About a hundred typically fall out every day.

Women don't usually go bald without an accompanying medical condition.

Minoxidil, the chemical used in Rogaine, does slow follicle loss, as long as you don't stop taking it. How does it work? Researchers still haven't quite figured that out. In fact, hair growth was a puzzling side effect when minoxidil pills were originally prescribed…for high blood pressure.

Bottoms Up

Oldest operating tavern in the U.S.: the White Horse Tavern in Newport, Rhode Island, opened in 1673. For about 100 years, the building also operated as Rhode Island's colonial government headquarters.

Along the 750-mile California Melee road rally (an annual parade of old cars), the pit stops are at brewpubs.

President Martin Van Buren was born in a house attached to his father's tavern.

A poll in
Bartender
magazine found that the worst tippers are lawyers and doctors.

Buffalo wings originated at Frank & Teresa's Anchor Bar, which happens to be in Buffalo, New York.

The U.S. Marines' first recruiting station: the Tun Tavern in Philadelphia…in 1775.

Before becoming president, Abraham Lincoln co-owned a bar in Springfield, Illinois, called Berry & Lincoln.

The Green Dragon Tavern in Boston became known as the “Headquarters of the American Revolution”: the place where rebels plotted the Boston Tea Party and discussed plans for Paul Revere's famous ride. The original Green Dragon was demolished in 1828.

A company called “Drink Safe Technologies” sells bar coasters that test drinks for date-rape drugs. The coasters turn colors when you spill a contaminated drink on them.

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WHAT'S IN A NAME?

Beginning in the 13th century, Frankfurt, Germany, produced “frankfurters,” pork sausages that were a lot like modern hot dogs. Austria's Vienna (German name: Wien), made similar pork and beef sausages called “wieners.”

Cowa Dunga!

According to a 2005 Bristol University survey, birds are more likely to poop on white cars.

Wombats have cube-shaped poop—they use it to mark their territory because it can't roll away.

In ancient Egypt, some women used dung as a method of birth control. (It worked like a spermicide.)

The term “butterfly” comes from a Dutch word,
botervlieg
(“butter poop”), referring to greasy yellow residue from the butterfly's pollen-rich diet.

People make paper out of poop from herbivorous animals, including pandas, cows, elephants, moose, donkeys, and horses. One elephant can produce enough dung for 115 sheets of paper a day.

Like dung beetles, burrowing owls line their underground nests with cow dung. The composting dung insulates the nest to maintain a comfortable temperature and attracts insects for the owls to eat.

Bird dung crab spiders in Africa are so named because they look like a dab of bird poop, which camouflages them in the forest.

NASA slang for poop floating in space: “escapees.”

Arrrg…Pirates!

Privateers were pirates who were considered legitimate. Wealthy merchants financed their ships for a cut of the loot, and the privateers operated under immunity from their countries' piracy laws, as long as they agreed to ransack only enemy ships.

The term
buccaneer
originally meant “he who cures meat” in French, and France set up ranches in the Cayman Islands so that their ships could get beef to the New World. In the 1600s, though, the meat-curing men with knives and easy access to ships figured out that they could take those ships and make more money as pirates, so “buccaneer” took on a new meaning.

Pirate ships were democratic. All pirates aboard voted on major decisions, and the captain was elected and could be impeached.

In his time, privateer/pirate and tobacco-pusher Sir Walter Raleigh was also a renowned poet. (Historians note that Sir Walter spelled his last name “Ralegh.”)

Pirates sometimes tossed people overboard to their deaths, but they didn't really make people walk the plank. That was an invention of Robert Louis Stevenson in
Treasure Island
.

Edward Teach, better known as “Blackbeard,” used his fearsome reputation and scary dreadlocked beard to good effect. Most of the ships he attacked surrendered rather than fight his pirate crew. In return, he treated his captives well, not brutalizing or murdering them as some pirates did.

Some crews, like Henry Morgan's, had workman's compensation plans: if a pirate received a career-ending injury on the job, he'd be granted 600 pieces of gold—about $100,000 in today's money.

Not all pirates sailed the open sea. “River pirates” raided vessels on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers in the 1800s.

Pirates who sailed the Great Lakes plundered whiskey and venison instead of gold.

Pencil Me In

Until rubber erasers were invented, people often used crustless white bread to erase pencil marks.

Pencils are hexagonal because they were originally cut into that shape to keep them from rolling off tables.

A regular wood pencil can write 45,000 words.

Graphite isn't a form of lead, but people once thought it was, so the term “pencil lead” stuck.

Pencil lead is a mixture of graphite and clay. The more clay, the softer the lead.

Mechanical pencils were invented in 1877, but it wasn't until 1976 that somebody figured out how to store lead inside the pencil and feed one after another into the barrel.

Before becoming a writer, Henry David Thoreau worked in his family's pencil factory. Long after, he impressed friends by reaching into barrels of pencils and pulling out a dozen every time.

Hymen L. Lipman was the guy who first thought of putting an eraser on a pencil in 1858.

The world generates more than 14 billion pencils each year, almost two billion in the U.S. alone.

Money!

The Chinese issued the first known paper money. Facing a copper shortage during the early ninth century, Chinese emperor Hien Tsung authorized block-printed paper currency as a replacement for coins.

When Tibetans switched over to paper money in 1913, their rice-paper currency was hand-numbered by Tibetan calligraphers using black ink made from burned yak dung.

While a chemistry professor at Montreal's McGill University in the 1850s, Thomas Sterry Hunt came up with the ink used to make American dollars—it's been used to make greenbacks green since 1862.

It costs 9.6¢ to make a single dollar bill.

Most common name for currencies worldwide: “dollar.” Second most common: “franc.”

Since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, the U.S. dollar's value has fallen 98 percent.

Once used as currency: kettle drums (Indonesia), playing cards (Canada), and dogs' teeth (Solomon Islands).

Federal prisoners aren't allowed to carry money, so for many decades cigarettes were used as currency. But when smoking was banned in prisons in 2004, prisoners had to come up with a new gold standard. The solution: “macks,” 99¢ plastic-and-foil packs of mackerel from the prison commissary that could be exchanged for shoe shines, stolen food, homemade booze, and other services and contraband.

Pennies rarely stay in active circulation for long. Of all the pennies minted in a year, 70 percent are taken out of circulation within two years: dropped into drawers, grates, piggy banks, car seats, gutters, sofas, etc.

The official exchange rate of Vietnamese dongs is about 20,000 dongs to one American dollar.

Walk Like an (Ancient) Egyptian

Ancient Egyptian doctors used natural anesthesia found in plants, but they also sometimes just knocked patients unconscious with a wooden hammer.

The ancient Egyptians used penicillin before anyone knew what penicillin was. To treat infections, they placed moldy bread over the wound.

Peseshet of ancient Egypt (about 2400 BC) was the world's first known female physician.

King Tut was entombed with 36 ceramic jars of wine…to make his transition to the afterlife easier. He was also buried with plenty of fresh underwear—145 loincloths.

Egypt's most famous queen, Cleopatra, was actually Greek and a member of the Ptolemaic dynasty that ruled Egypt after the empire was conquered by Alexander the Great. She was also the first of the Ptolemaics to learn the Egyptian language and was the empire's last pharaoh.

An earthquake in the fourth century sank Cleopatra's royal palace into the ocean. The ruins were discovered in 1992, in the sewage-filled waters of Alexandria's harbor.

The last known Egyptian hieroglyphic inscription was made in 394.

Egyptian pharaoh Pepi II had his slaves smeared with honey to draw flies away from him.

Some ancient Egyptians shaved their armpits and used citrus-cinnamon deodorant.

Four million embalmed ibis birds were discovered in a single Egyptian cemetery—people sacrificed them to the god Thoth, who supposedly loved the birds.

Ammonia got its name from the Egyptian god Amun.

It took the ancient Egyptians about 2½ months and half a mile of cloth to turn a corpse into a full-fledged mummy.

Sweet Talk

A sweet Persian reed called
kand
gave us the word “candy.” Alexander the Great carried the treat back to Macedonia in 340 BC.

The average American will chow down on 24 pounds of candy per year.

Americans collectively buy an estimated 20 million pounds of candy corn for Halloween. Note: One kernel of candy corn provides enough energy for an adult to walk 150 feet.

For at least 3,000 years, licorice has been used to heal peptic ulcers and ease colds and coughs.

Swedish children dress up as witches and walk around neighborhoods collecting candy…on Easter.

During the Berlin Airlift of the late 1940s, after the Soviets sealed the borders of West Germany, the United States and its allies dropped more than 20 tons of candy to German children from airplanes.

Illinois taxes candy at a higher rate than other foods.

The New England Confectionery Company (NECCO) sponsored Admiral Richard Byrd's two-year Antarctic exploration in the 1930s. That explains why he carried with him a daily ration of a pack of Neccos for each crew member—a total of about 2.5 tons of the chalky candy wafers.

October 30 is “National Candy Corn Day.”

In 1923 the Curtiss Candy Company held a contest to name its latest candy bar. The winner: a clumsy klutz named Nikola “Butterfingers” Jovanovic, who sent in his nickname.

Eduard Haas III invented Pez in Vienna in 1927. The candy came only in the flavor of
pfefferminz
(peppermint). By taking the letters at the beginning, middle, and end, the company came up with PEZ. The novelty dispensers wouldn't appear until 1955.

Historical Nicknames

Theodore Roosevelt disliked being called “Teddy.”

President Steven Grover Cleveland, weighing in at 280 pounds, was called “Big Steve” and “Uncle Jumbo.”