Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (45 page)

              
4.
Cracker, hammer, lumber, car, Monterey

              
5.
Cake, Appleseed, on the spot, here's, come lately

              
6.
Lazy, blackeyed

              
7.
Mafia, Juan

              
8.
Board, fold, duck, of sale, Buffalo

              
9.
Rose, Christmas, 'land, Typhoid

              
10.
Water, trade, hall, German, beauty

              
11.
Runaround, Peggy, for custody

              
12.
Diamond, against, without, chest

Answers

1. Tom, 2. Bob, 3. Frank, 4. Jack, 5. Johnny, 6. Susan, 7. Don, 8. Bill, 9. Mary (or Merry), 10. Mark, 11. Sue, 12. Hope

Thicker Than Water

About 7 percent of a human body's weight is blood.

The length of the arteries, veins, and capillaries in an adult's circulatory system equals about 60,000 miles.

Blood really
is
thicker than water…about five times thicker.

Most phobias cause blood pressure to rise, but
hemophobia
, the fear of blood, causes it to drop, sometimes to the point of fainting.

There are four major blood types: O, A, B, and AB. Type O is a “universal donor” because it can donate red cells to all four. Type A can donate only to A or AB. Type B can donate only to B or AB. Type AB can donate only to AB.

On
Star Trek
, Spock's blood type was “T-negative,” presumably an “only in Vulcan” blood type.

Eating too much licorice can cause abnormal heart rhythms—1 to 2 ounces of real licorice per day for two weeks or more can do it.

Just 30 minutes of exposure to secondhand smoke makes platelets in the bloodstream stickier. As a result, blood clots form more easily, which can block arteries and cause heart attacks.

Eel blood is toxic to humans.

Borderline Nations?

NO COUNTRY FOR ANY MEN

The 1783 Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War, but it left in question the exact border between the eastern United States and Canada, which remained under British control. Until 1842, when the Webster-Ashburton Treaty settled most of the questions, there were swatches of land along the New York/Vermont/New Hampshire/Maine borders that didn't technically belong to either country. And in the 60 years between the two treaties, at least three independent “republics” sprang up in the region.

REPUBLIC OF UPPER CANADA

Location:
Navy Island in the Niagara River

What happened:
In December 1837, after unsuccessfully fighting to win independence from England, a Canadian rebel group led by journalist and former mayor of Toronto William Lyon Mackenzie fled to Navy Island above Niagara Falls, one of the areas that didn't officially belong to either the United States or Canada (today it's Canadian land). They declared the island to be a brand-new country, the Republic of Upper Canada. American sympathizers, still holding a grudge against the British after the War of 1812, supplied the rebels with food, weapons, and money via a steamship called the
Caroline
.

The Republic of Upper Canada didn't last long. In less than a month, British and Canadian loyalists had crossed into New York and captured the ship, setting it ablaze and loose to plummet over Niagara Falls. Mackenzie and his group withdrew from Navy Island in January 1838.

REPUBLIC OF INDIAN STREAM

Location:
Between Quebec and New Hampshire

What happened:
Indian Stream is a small tributary of the Connecticut River located near the small town of Pittsburg, New Hampshire, but in the early 1800s, it flowed through no-man's-land. In the 1790s, two groups of Canadian settlers got land grants from the Abenaki people, one of the local Native American tribes, to
move in. They didn't take sides in the border disputes initially, but by the 1830s, both the British (who controlled Canada at the time) and American tax collectors came knocking. And so, not wanting to be taxed by either government, the 300 Indian Stream settlers proclaimed themselves the sole inhabitants of an independent country.

That lasted about three years. In 1835, after a sheriff from Canada “invaded” to arrest a man whom the British claimed owed them a tax debt, Indian Stream's citizens fought back, freed the man from debtors' prison, and ultimately joined New Hampshire.

REPUBLIC OF MADAWASKA

Location:
Between Maine and New Brunswick

What happened:
In the early 1800s, an American settler named John Baker moved from southern Maine into no-man's land along the Maine/Quebec/New Brunswick border. By 1827, Baker was so tired of waiting for the State of Maine to rule that his house was in America (and not Canada) that he decided to start his own country—the Republic of Madawaska, a Maliseet Indian term that meant “where one river runs into another with watergrass.” This proclamation was important to Baker because he was fed up with the government, but it was more important to some of his neighbors, Acadians who had been deported as a group from Canada in the mid-1700s because they were the descendants of French Catholics, rather than British Protestants. Although many Acadians immigrated to the American South and become the “Cajuns” of New Orleans, many of Baker's neighbors just wanted a safe place to live that wasn't in Canada, and so they were happy to declare themselves citizens of the new republic.

The British weren't so happy about it, though. On the same day that Baker established his country, British troops from Canada arrested him and put him on trial for conspiracy and sedition. He was ultimately fined £25 and sentenced to prison until he paid it…or two months, whichever came first. This set off an international incident between Canada and the United States that lasted for 15 years. It even triggered a border conflict in 1838 and 1839 called the Aroostook War, which included a lot of diplomatic meetings, threats, shouting, militia-massing on both sides, and incendiary editorials…but no actual combat. Eventually, diplomats from London
and Washington negotiated that Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 to settle the northeastern Canada/United States border issue once and for all, and the Republic of Madawaska became part of the Canadian province of New Brunswick.

FUTURE REPUBLICS?

Despite mostly solving the problem by dividing up the border territories, the treaty-makers missed a couple of spots. Even today, North Rock Island and the Machias Seal Island in the Gulf of Maine are
still
in dispute—though if you're thinking of setting up settlements there, be aware that both islands are barren and rocky, with lots of fog and no trees. North Rock is only about the size of a football field and is full of seals. Machias—bigger, but only 20 acres—includes an ancient lighthouse staffed by two members of the Canadian Coast Guard, so expect armed resistance to your plans…or at least polite objections.

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HISTORICAL HODGEPODGE

•
    
Lord Stanley, governor general of Canada, donated the Stanley Cup in 1894, but he never saw a Stanley Cup game. He moved back to England before the first tournament.

•
    
The first American paper currency was a 12-pence note designed by Paul Revere and issued in 1776 by the State of Massachusetts. It's known as the “codfish bill” because of the illustration of a codfish at the top.

•
    
Spokane, Washington, was the first place to celebrate Fathers' Day, on June 19, 1910. It didn't become a permanent national holiday until Richard Nixon signed a bill in 1972.

•
    
In 1829 thousands of high-spirited citizens arrived at the White House to celebrate Andrew Jackson's inauguration. His aides finally lured the mob out of the building with washtubs filled with whiskey and orange juice.

•
    
Ronald Reagan was the first president to nominate a woman to the Supreme Court: Sandra Day O'Connor in 1981.

In Hot Water

For a geyser to occur, it needs a volcano with molten magma bubbling not far from of the surface. Water flows underground until it reaches the hot liquid rock, where steam builds up below it. Eventually the steam explodes, shooting thousands of gallons of water still flowing down from the surface into the air.

Geysers give off a lot of geothermal energy. The world's largest geothermal power plant is the Geysers in Sonoma County, California, which makes enough electricity to power a city the size of San Francisco. And Australia alone has enough untapped geothermal energy to power the country for 2.6 million years.

An accidental, man-made geyser erupts every 40 minutes in Calistoga, California. A man drilling for water in the late 19th century opened a passageway to magma below, allowing groundwater to flow into it.

Hot springs are also heated by water warmed by magma. Some are just warm, but springs heated by molten rock can be scalding.

Mars has geysers, too, except they're dry. During Mars's spring thaw at its south pole, frozen carbon dioxide (“dry ice”) melts. The gas it releases shoots jets of sand into the air.

Geyser, by the way, comes from the Icelandic (Old Norse) word
geysa
(“gush.”)

Hot springs typically contain sulfur, magnesium, lithium, calcium, and other harmless minerals, but some have radium as well.

Some organisms, viruses, and plants can live in a hot spring's waters. One is the
Naegleria fowleri
, also known as “the brain-eating amoeba.”

Half of the world's geysers are in Yellowstone National Park.

GOALLL!

Soccer is the world's most popular sport. It's regularly played by 250 million people in 200 countries and is watched by many more.

In 1863 the newly formed British Football Association met at London's Freemasons' Tavern to codify the uncivil sport of “football” (soccer).

75 percent of the world's soccer balls are made in Pakistan.

In 2007 the Ivory Coast national soccer team helped secure a truce between the government and rebel forces by playing a soccer match that brought both armies together peacefully for the first time.

According to a poll, 1 in 20 British kids thinks Adolf Hitler was a German soccer manager.

Before soccer referees used whistles, they waved handkerchiefs to indicate fouls.

The penalty system of using a yellow card (for a warning) and a red card (for an expulsion from the game) is a pretty new invention The cards were first introduced in the 1970 FIFA World Cup.

The first soccer balls were made of animal stomachs or bladders. They rarely lasted an entire game.

Modern soccer balls aren't round—they're truncated icosahedrons. That means they're made of 12 black panels that are five-sided, and 20 white panels that are six-sided.

The Waves

Q. WHY IS THE SUN ORANGE AND THE SKY BLUE?

A.
The sun's light is actually white and the atmosphere around us (made up of gases and dust) is almost clear (which is why we can see the stars at night). “White” light contains every color of the rainbow, as well as many more that are invisible.

When the light from the sun hits the earth's atmosphere, the gases and dust particles scatter it a bit and disrupt all the colors in the light. The red light, traveling in long waves, has to travel through fewer of the particles, so it makes a beeline through the atmosphere. The blue light waves zigzag. (It's like the difference between tossing a rock and a handful of sand.) So when you glance up at the sun, you see its red-yellow waves heading more or less straight toward you, but its blue waves scatter on their way down, lighting up the atmosphere and making the sky look blue.

Q. IS THIS ALSO THE REASON SUNSETS ARE RED AND ORANGE?

A.
No. When the sun is near the horizon, its light passes through a lot more of the atmosphere. That atmosphere is often very polluted, and most pollution is orange. The sun's light illuminates that color.

Q. ARE LIGHT WAVES AND RADIO WAVES PRETTY MUCH THE SAME THING?

A.
Pretty much. Our eyes can see only a very narrow range of frequencies. The ones we can see are light waves. The ones we can't see are microwaves, X-rays, radio waves, and so on, depending on their length. But they're all electromagnetic waves.

Q. HOW LONG ARE THE OTHER ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVES?

A.
That's where it gets a little weird. Light waves are tiny, only about the size of bacteria or even an atom. We see them because there are so many clustered together. Radio waves are longer: they can range from the length of a human to the length of a football field.

Index

$2 bill,
153