Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (44 page)

In 1909 University of Arkansas football coach Hugo Bezdek said that his team was like a “wild bunch of razorback hogs.” Proud of this lofty praise, they have been the Razorbacks ever since.

Alma, Arkansas, is the self-proclaimed spinach capital of the world. The people of Alma are so proud of their spinach status that the front of their chamber of commerce building sports a giant statue of Popeye.

Crater of Diamonds State Park, near Murfreesboro, is the world's only diamond mine open to the public.

Famous Arkansans include U.S. president Bill Clinton, author and poet Maya Angelou, civil rights activist Eldridge Cleaver, baseball great Dizzy Dean, and five-star general Douglas MacArthur.

The first female U.S. senator was Hattie Ophelia Wyatt Caraway from Arkansas, first elected in 1932 (and again in 1938).

It's against the law in Arkansas to purposely mispronounce the name of the state.

*
  
*
  
*

Gamophobia
is the fear of marriage.

Get Your Peanuts

The oldest peanut remains were found in Peru, dated to 7,600 years ago.

Peanut plants self-pollinate and require about five months before the pods are ready to pick.

The United States is one of the world's largest peanut exporters and is #3 in peanut growing. (China and India are #1 and #2.)

Peanut shells can be recycled into plastic, fuel, wallboard, glue, paper, and rayon.

About 1 percent of all Americans have a mild to severe allergy to peanuts, and they account for 50 to 100 deaths in the United States each year.

A NASCAR superstition says that peanuts or their shells in the garage are bad luck.

Peanuts are legumes in the bean family. They grow with their flowers aboveground and their fruit (the peanut shells and seeds) belowground.

Beer Nuts are just sweetened and salted peanuts. They contain no beer.

There are four types of peanuts grown in the United States: Spanish (for their high oil content), runner (good flavor, high yields), Virginia (large peanuts for salting and roasting in shells), and Valencia (best type for boiled peanuts).

*
  
*
  
*

AN EASY, EFFECTIVE FRUIT-FLY TRAP

You can make this in minutes: Place cider vinegar or a slice of a banana in a jar as bait. Roll and tape a sheet of paper into a funnel, and place it in the jar with the small opening at the bottom. Fruit flies will easily fly and crawl in, but won't easily find their way out. The jar can be sealed and the fruit flies released outside.

The Blues

Blue is a hard natural pigment to come by, making it a latecomer in art. That's why you won't find blue in cave paintings. The earliest synthetic blue paint appeared in Egypt around 2500 BC.

Ultramarine was the most expensive color during the Renaissance because it was created by grinding high-grade lapis lazuli stones into powder. The semiprecious stones came from modern-day Afghanistan, and the color is called “ultramarine” because it traveled
ultramarinus
—Latin for “beyond the sea.”

Cobalt blue is now a standard color in an artist's palette, but it wasn't available as a paint color until 1802.

It's not just a reflection from the sky—clear water really is (very slightly) blue. You have to look through a lot of it to see the color, though, which is why deep water is such a deep blue and shallow water doesn't seem to show any color.

In Germany, being “blue” means being drunk.

During medieval times, Europeans figured out a cheap way to make blue dye from a plant called woad. The process involved soaking woad leaves in human urine and leaving it out in the sun. As it dried, it slowly turned blue.

Teal blue is named after the color of the blue feathers around the eyes of the teal duck.

*
  
*
  
*

HOW DOC MARTENS WERE BORN

Dr. Klaus Martens, a doctor in the German army during World War II, injured his ankle while skiing during his leave. When he returned to duty, he discovered that army-issued boots didn't provide great support, so he designed his own shoes, creating his first pairs from leather looted from a cobbler's shop and rubber from truck tires.

Cheers & Booze

Pound for pound, women can absorb 30 percent more alcohol into their systems than men.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms prohibits manufacturers from using the word “refreshing” to describe alcoholic beverages.

During Prohibition, temperance activists proposed rewriting the Bible to remove all references to alcohol, including instances where Jesus drank wine.

The official state distilled spirit of Alabama is Clyde May's Conecuh Ridge Whiskey. From the 1950s to 1980, May, a well-known bootlegger, produced 300 gallons of booze a week in a still he designed and built himself.

The term “booze” comes from the Dutch word
busen
(“to drink heavily”).

If you're drinking a tequila
con gusano
, the “worm” is actually the larva of the
Hypopta agavis
moth, which lives on the agave plant that the tequila is made from.

The U.S. city with the highest alcoholism rate: Boston, Massachusetts. The lowest: Provo, Utah.

Change Your Password!

Two computer-jargoned streets in Silicon Valley: Infinite Loop, where Apple is headquartered, and Optical Drive.

Carl Sagan got mad when he discovered that Apple's in-house staff was calling one of its pre-released computers the “Carl Sagan.” He complained, so they changed it to BHA. He was placated until he learned that the initials stood for “Butthead Astronomer.” He sued and lost.

PCs infected with software that allows hackers to control them remotely are called “zombie computers.”

Fox Mulder's computer password on
The X-Files
: TRUSTNO1.

Most-used computer password of all time: password. Second most: 123456.

St. Isidore is the patron saint of computers and the Internet.

In 1946 the University of Pennsylvania built ENIAC, the first fully operational electronic digital computer. It weighed 27 tons and took up 1,800 square feet of floor space.

“Bugs” didn't originate with computers. Thomas Edison used the term in the 1870s when talking about small flaws and difficulties when inventing.

People generally read an item 25 percent more slowly on a computer screen than on paper.

Electronic equipment attracts dust, thanks to electrical fields. It's one reason the first home computers were beige—researchers at Apple determined that it hid dust best.

41 percent of Americans say they've considered attacking their computers—7 percent have done it.

*
  
*
  
*

There are 132 countries
whose gross domestic product is less than Bill Gates's net worth.

Firefly Facts

Most types of lighting emit a lot of heat—an incandescent bulb, for example, loses 90 percent of its energy to heat. But nearly 100 percent of the energy in a firefly's light goes to illumination, and almost none is heat.

Adult fireflies don't survive over the winter. Their larvae dig into the ground and emerge in the spring.

Each firefly species has its own distinct flash pattern.

Fireflies eat small snails and insects during their one-to two-year larval stage, but many don't eat at all in their adult life.

Special effects in 16th-century theater productions used crushed fireflies as a luminescent powder.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park is home to at least 19 species of fireflies.

A firefly's adulthood lasts only one to two weeks.

It would take more than 40 fireflies to provide enough light to read by.

Technically, fireflies are not flies—they're beetles.

Lightning bugs and fireflies are the same thing, and glowworms are usually their larva. (Sometimes, glowworms are also flightless females.)

Even though fireflies light up, predators generally leave them alone because they taste terrible and are often poisonous.

*
  
*
  
*

DID YOU KNOW?

Solar flares are magnetic enough to disrupt electronics, but they also throw off some animals' navigation. Fish, bees, fruit flies, turtles, birds, and even some mammals use the earth's magnetic field to monitor their movement, location, or altitude.

The Joy of Socks

When Bobby Orr played hockey, he didn't wear socks. Neither did Albert Einstein, who called them an “unnecessary complication.” Einstein didn't even wear them on formal occasions, like his citizenship ceremony.

Knitted socks from AD 200 have been discovered in Egyptian tombs.

Women in Texas used to be penalized with prison time if they adjusted their stockings in public. (Fortunately, that law is no longer on the books.)

St. Fiacre is the patron saint of stocking makers.

Cabbies in Halifax, Nova Scotia, are required to wear socks.

In the 1950s, school dances were called “sock hops” because they were usually held in the school gym, and the coaches didn't want the dancers' shoes to ruin the finish on their basketball courts. So the kids danced in their socks.

About half of the socks in the United States are manufactured in Burlington, North Carolina.

The first pantyhose were created for actresses and dancers in the 1940s. To facilitate quick costume changes, their stockings were sewed to their underwear.

Toys for Tots

The doll was probably the first toy in history.

Marbles got their name because, in the 18th century, they were actually made of polished marble.

The powder inside an Etch-A-Sketch is finely ground aluminum.

The largest North American display of toy trains—more than 1,200 train sets in all—is at a theme park called Entertrainment Junction in West Chester, Ohio.

Ruth Handler created Barbie and Ken dolls in the 1950s. She named them after her kids.

When the Hubble Space Telescope's antenna was damaged during its launch in 1990, NASA scientists built a model with Tinker Toys to figure out how to fix it.

What gives crayons their distinctive smell? Beef fat.

Many nonelectronic kids' toys—from Legos to Barbies to soldiers—can be cleaned in the dishwasher. (Small things in a mesh bag, of course.)

A medical student used an Erector Set to design the first artificial heart pump.

Before latex, kids used pig's bladders to make balloons.

Most dollhouses are built at 12:1 scale, which makes things easy—anything that's a foot long in our world becomes an inch long in the dollhouse world.

Full name of toy store magnate FAO Schwarz: Frederick August Otto.

Lego is the world's largest tire manufacturer—they make 306 million toy tires every year.

*
  
*
  
*

OLD CHINESE PROVERB

“
A child's life is like a piece of paper on which every passerby leaves a mark.”

What Americans Do (and Don't) Know

22 percent of Americans can name all five characters in the Simpson cartoon family.

55 percent (wrongly) believe that the Constitution established the United States as a Christian nation.

Only half of Americans know that Judaism is older than Christianity.

40 percent can name all three branches of the government: executive, legislative, and judicial.

1 in 5 Americans believe that a friend or relative was abducted by aliens.

49 percent know that the United States is the only country to have used atomic bombs in war, and 84 percent know the basics of what happened at Pearl Harbor in 1941.

29 percent of Americans between the age of 18 and 24 couldn't point to the Pacific Ocean on a map.

75 percent know that America fought the British for independence.

20 percent believe that the sun revolves around the earth.

41 percent can't name the sitting vice president at any given time.

The Name's the Game

The Rules:
We'll give you a collection of words (like goat, club, and hill). You need to figure out a first name that can be added to the beginning or end of each word to create a new word or phrase that makes sense. (If you came up with “billy” as the answer for the example, you're ready to play.)

              
1.
Cat, turkey, thumb, uncle, peeping

              
2.
White, sled, for apples, 's your uncle

              
3.
Swiss, postal, perfectly, furter, 'enstein