Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Extraordinary Book of Facts: And Bizarre Information (9 page)

Wasps kill more people in the United States every year than snakes, spiders, and scorpions combined.

Bees are born fully grown.

Termites eat wood twice as fast when listening to heavy metal music.

Water freezes before a cockroach’s blood will.

Pound for pound, spiders, flies, and grasshoppers all contain more protein than beef.

World’s fastest flying insect: the deer botfly, capable of flying 36 miles per hour.

A hive of honeybees eats up to 30 pounds of honey over the winter.

The mayfly’s eggs take three years to hatch. Life span: about six hours.

Houseflies prefer to breed in the middle of a room.

To let the public know that bananas should be allowed to ripen at room temperature, not in the refrigerator, in 1944 United Fruit commissioned a song and a character: Chiquita Banana. The song was so popular that it was once played on the radio 376 times in one day.

We each have about eight ounces of salt inside us. It’s vital for regulating muscle contraction, heartbeat, nerve impulse transmission, protein digestion, and the exchange of water between cells, so as to bring food in and waste out. Deprived of salt, the body goes into convulsion, paralysis, and death.

It’s healthy to eat about 1/3 ounce of salt a day, but if you eat more than four ounces at once, you’ll die.

We can never run out of salt. There’s enough in the oceans to cover the world 14 inches deep.

Salt is hygroscopic, which means it absorbs water. That’s why you can’t drink seawater; it will dehydrate you.

Only 5 percent of the salt we mine goes into food. The rest goes into making chemicals.

When salt is made by vigorous boiling, it forms cubic crystals, but when it’s naturally dried, it makes pyramid-shaped crystals. The pyramid-shaped crystals are particularly sought after for kosher use and in fine cooking.

It takes four gallons of seawater to make a pound of salt.

Salt is often found with oil and is often used by oil companies as an indicator of where to drill.

For centuries salt was served in a bowl, not a shaker. It couldn’t be shaken, since it absorbs water and sticks together. The Morton Salt Co. changed that in 1910 by covering every grain with chemicals that keep water out—thus its famous slogan, “When it rains, it pours.”

The water in our bodies (we’re 70 percent water) has the same saltiness as the seas.

CAUGHT RED-HANDED

Meaning:
Caught in the act

Origin:
For hundreds of years, stealing and butchering another person’s livestock was a common crime. But it was hard to prove unless the thief was caught with a dead animal . . . and blood on his hands.

GIVE SOMEONE “THE BIRD”

Meaning:
Make a nasty gesture at someone (usually with the middle finger uplifted)

Origin:
There are many versions. The “cleanest”: Originally “the bird” referred to the hissing sound that audiences made when they didn’t like a performance. Hissing is the sound that a goose makes when it’s threatened or angry.

MAKE MONEY HAND OVER FIST

Meaning:
Rapid success in a business venture

Origin:
Sailors through the ages have used the same hand-over-hand motion when climbing up ropes, hauling in nets, and hoisting sails. The best seamen were those who could do this action the fastest. In the 19th century, Americans adapted the expression “hand over fist”—describing one hand clenching a rope and the other deftly moving above it—to suggest quickness and success.

CLEAN AS A WHISTLE

Meaning:
Exceptionally clean or smooth

Origin:
This phrase appeared at the beginning of the 19th century, describing the whistling noise made as a sword tears through the air to decapitate a victim cleanly, in a single stroke.

TO BREAK THE ICE

Meaning:
To start a conversation

Origin:
“Severe winter weather is a major nuisance to operators of
boats. Until the development of power equipment, it was frequently necessary to chop ice at the river’s edge with hand tools in order to make channels for plying about the river. The boatman had to break the ice before he could actually get down to business.” (
Cassell Everyday Phrases
, by Neil Ewart)

PULL YOUR OWN WEIGHT

Meaning:
To do one’s share or to take responsibility for oneself

Origin:
“The term comes from rowing, where a crew member must pull on an oar hard enough to propel his or her own weight. In use literally since the mid-19th century, it began to be used figuratively in the 1890s.” (
Southpaws & Sunday Punches
, by Christine Ammer)

Fresh ground beef

Hamburger buns

Case of Pepsi

Case of orange soda

Brownies

Milk

Half-and-half

6 cans of biscuits

Chocolate ice cream

Hot dogs

Sauerkraut

Potatoes

Onions

Bacon

Fresh fruit

Peanut butter

Banana pudding

Meat loaf

Cigarettes

Dristan

Super Anahist

Contac

Sucrets

3 packs each of Spearmint, Juicy Fruit, and Doublemint gum

Dogs are mentioned 14 times in the Bible. Cats aren’t mentioned even once.

Longest name in the Bible: Mahershalalhashbaz (Isaiah 8:1).

The Bible has been translated into Klingon.

The Bible is the most shoplifted book in the United States.

The word
sermon
does not appear in the Bible.

Sixty percent of atheists and agnostics say they own at least one Bible.

First hotel to stock Gideon Bibles: the Superior Hotel in Iron Mountain, Montana, in 1908.

The word
girl
appears in the Bible once.

Most mentioned woman in the Bible: Sarah, 56 times.

Only two books in the Bible are named for women: Ruth and Esther.

Over 6 billion copies of the Bible have been sold.

According to the Bible, there were two windows on Noah’s Ark.

English novelist Arnold Bennett died in Paris in 1931. Cause of death? “Drinking a glass of typhoid-infected water to demonstrate that Parisian water was perfectly safe to drink.”

JOYCE C. HALL

Hall started out selling picture postcards from a shoe box, but soon realized that greeting cards with envelopes would be more profitable. He started a new company, Hallmark Cards, a play on his name and the word for quality, and in 1916 produced his first card. But the innovation that made Hallmark so successful had little to do with the cards themselves—it was their display cases. Previously cards were purchased by asking a clerk to choose an appropriate one. Hall introduced display cases featuring rows of cards that the customer could browse through. When he died in 1982, the company he founded in a shoe box was worth $1.5 billion.

DAVID PACKARD

David Packard was an engineer with the General Electric Company. In 1938 he moved to California, where he renewed a friendship with William Hewlett. The two went into the electronics business, making oscillators that were smaller, cheaper, and better than anything else on the market. Working from a small garage in Palo Alto, the Hewlett-Packard company earned $1,000 that first year. Today the garage is a state landmark: “The Birthplace of Silicon Valley.” Packard died in 1996 leaving an estate worth billions.

CHARLES FLEISCHMANN

An Austrian native who first visited the United States during the Civil War, he found our bread almost as appalling as our political situation. At the time, bread was mostly homebaked, using yeast made from potato peelings, and its taste was unpredictable. The next time he came to America, Fleischmann brought along samples of the yeast used to make Viennese bread. In 1868 he began to sell his yeast in compressed cakes of uniform size that removed the guesswork from baking. In 1937 yeast sales reached $20 million a year. After
Prohibition ended, Charles and his brother Maximillian found another use for their yeast—to make Fleischmann’s distilled gin.

PAUL ORFALEA

After graduating from the University of Southern California, Orfalea opened a small copy shop next to a taco stand in Santa Barbara, starting with a single copy machine. Business was brisk. He soon expanded the store, then branched out to the rest of California, and then all over the country. And all the stores bore his name, the nickname he got in college because of his curly red hair—Kinko’s.

GODFREY KEEBLER

Opened a bakery in Philadelphia in 1853. His family expanded it. Today Keebler is the second-largest producer of cookies and crackers in the United States.

WILLIAM SCHOLL

As an apprentice to the local shoemaker, Billy Scholl’s work led him to two conclusions: feet were abused, and nobody cared. So, in a burst of idealism, Scholl appointed himself the future foot doctor to the world. Strangely enough, it actually happened. By the time he became a doctor at 22, Scholl had invented and patented his first arch support; in fact, he held more than 300 patents for foot treatments and machines for making foot comfort aids. And his customers seemed to appreciate it—a widow once wrote him that she buried her husband with his Foot-Eazers so he would be as comfortable as he was in life. Until he died, in his 80s, Dr. Scholl devoted himself to saving the world’s feet, adhering always to his credo: “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise.”

SIR JOSEPH LISTER

Even before the mouthwash that bears his name was invented, Lister fought germs: he campaigned against filthy hospitals and against doctors who performed surgery in their street clothes. When St. Louis chemist Joseph Lawrence invented the famous mouthwash, he named it Listerine both to honor and to take advantage of Lister’s well-known obsession with cleanliness.