Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wise Up! (16 page)

The step pyramid at Saqqara, Egypt, is considered the oldest man-made building still standing.

Rome’s ancient stadium, the Circus Maximus (for horse and chariot racing), could hold up to 250,000 people.

Sister Acts

MARY AND ANNE BOLEYN

Mary (a.k.a. the other Boleyn girl) became the mistress of England’s King Henry VIII before her more famous sister ended up marrying him. Most historians think Mary was the older of the two, and some believe she had two children by Henry. In 1519, at the age of 20, Mary joined the English court as “maid of honor” to Catherine of Aragon, Henry’s first wife, who was then the queen of England. Mary’s sister Anne joined the court soon after.

Anne rejected Henry’s amorous advances for at least a few years before he decided to divorce Catherine to marry her. Meanwhile, Mary married and was widowed. Her second husband was a commoner, which prompted the family to disown her. Mary, her husband, and their children moved to the countryside, where Mary lived out the rest of her days. (Things didn’t go as well for Anne. She was beheaded in 1526 to make room for Henry’s third wife, Jane Seymour.)

CHARLOTTE, EMILY, AND ANNE BRONTË

All three grew up in Yorkshire, England, during the 19th century, the daughters of an Anglican clergyman. They all published their first novels in the same year: 1847. Charlotte’s
Jane Eyre
was an overnight success. Emily’s
Wuthering Heights
wasn’t an immediate hit with readers, but it caught on a few years later and today is considered one of the finest English novels ever written. Younger sister Anne’s
Agnes Grey
was considered good but not great.

Emily never finished her next novel; she died at age 30 of tuberculosis. Anne died at 29, also of tuberculosis. Charlotte, the only one to marry, outlived them both and made it to age 38 before succumbing to an illness probably related to her pregnancy.

LILLIAN AND DOROTHY GISH

Lillian was in her late teens and Dorothy was about 13 years old when they started making silent movies for director D. W. Griffith
in 1912. Lillian starred in Griffith’s classic
Birth of a Nation
(1915), and both had roles in his
Orphans of the Storm
(1921).

Later, Lillian took on Broadway roles in
Uncle Vanya
and
Camille
and made her last movie in 1987:
The Whales of August
, starring Bette Davis. She never married. The less-famous Dorothy specialized in comedies, but did drama, too. Dorothy’s last movie was
The Cardinal
in 1963. She died of pneumonia at a clinic in Italy in 1970, with her sister by her side. Lillian died in her sleep in 1993 at the age of 99.

BARBIE AND SKIPPER ROBERTS

Barbie’s younger, shorter (9.25 inches to Barbie’s 11.5 inches) was introduced in 1964 in three varieties (blonde, brunette, and redhead) and had a demure sideways glance, as opposed to her big sister’s forward gaze. Skipper’s first accessories included a wire stand, comb and brush, red flats, headband, and swimsuit. Her older sister had been launched—as a blonde and a brunette—in 1959 with gold hoop earrings, sunglasses, and black open-toe heels.

Over time, Skipper’s image changed, a marketing effort to make her more “appealing.” By the time she was removed from the market in 2003, she was almost as long-legged and shapely as Barbie, who remains one of the most popular toys in the world.

VENUS AND SERENA WILLIAMS

Superstar tennis players Venus and Serena Williams have both been ranked number one in the world by the Women’s Tennis Association. Born in 1980 and 1981, respectively, they’re the youngest of five sisters. Their father Richard wanted all his daughters to play tennis—he’d admired the game since he was a young man—but only Venus and Serena showed a natural aptitude for the sport. Both started their training at the age of four.

The sisters have played each other more than 20 times professionally, and the results are fairly even. As a doubles team, they’re near unbeatable—taking home two Olympic gold medals, in 2000 and 2008. Both women are also fashionistas and have their own designer clothing lines.

Firsts

First telephone call from Earth to the Moon: President Richard Nixon called the crew of
Apollo 11
on July 21, 1969.

Steve Jobs introduced the first iPod on October 23, 2001; it cost $400. Since then, more than 173 millions units have been sold, with the iPod Shuffle going for just $79.

On June 4, 1927, millionaire Charles A. Levine was the first passenger on a transatlantic flight leaving the United States.

First album released on compact disc: Billy Joel’s
52nd Street
, on October 1, 1982.

First electronic computer: the ENIAC—Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer. It was unveiled on February 14, 1946, and cost $500,000 to build.

Johnson & Johnson introduced the first decorative Band-Aid in 1951.

Year the first home video game console went on sale: 1972.

First popular transistor radio: the Regency TR-1. It was released in 1954 and cost $49.95, about $395 today.

The first interactive video game: a missile simulator created in 1947.

Inventor Martin Cooper, who worked for Motorola, made the first cell phone call on April 3, 1973. (He called his rivals at AT&T). His inspiration for the phone? The communicators on
Star Trek
.

The first
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader
was published in 1988.

The first direct-dial transcontinental call was made on November 10, 1951; it took 18 seconds to connect. This was an improvement on the first transcontinental call made in 1915, which took 23 minutes and needed five operators to connect.

Age Doesn’t Matter

Youngest student ever admitted to the Baltimore Peabody Conservatory of Music: Tori Amos. She was five.

Sydney Greenstreet was 62 when he made his film debut in
The Maltese Falcon
.

By the age of four, Mozart could learn a new piece of music in half an hour.

John Cleese reached the height of six feet by the age of 12.

Jazz singer Mel Tormé’s first gig: singing with the Coon Sanders Nighthawks Orchestra. He was four.

Julie Andrews had mastered a four-octave singing range by age eight. Average person’s range: three octaves.

Fourteen-year-old Bobby Fischer became the youngest chess grand master in history when he won the title in 1958.

Laura Ingalls Wilder didn’t publish her first book until she was 65.

William James Sidis, a child prodigy, entered Harvard University at the age of 11 in 1909. (The school had refused to let his father enroll him at age nine.)

Robert Redford turned down the lead in
The Graduate
because he felt he was too old for it. Dustin Hoffman, who took the part, was 30—the same age as Redford.

Katharine Hepburn, an avid golfer, started playing at the age of five.

Golfer Bobby Jones won the Georgia State Amateur Championship at age 14.

Sergei Prokofiev composed an opera at the age of nine.

Colonel Harlan Sanders started his finger-lickin’-good chicken business in his 60s.

Calls of the Wild

Studying the musical features of animal sounds—like cricket chirps and whale songs—is called zoomusicology.

According to scientists, frogs croak, bark, cluck, click, grunt, snore, squawk, chirp, whistle, trill, and yap.

Some male songbirds sing more than 2,000 times a day.

Mockingbirds can imitate almost any sound, from a car alarm to a cat’s meow.

Giant pandas emit a bleat like sheep.

A lion’s roar is about as loud as a chainsaw.

Apes gibber, deer bell, and hippos bray.

Cats can make more than 100 different vocal sounds; dogs can make about 10.

Dolphins communicate in several frequencies, many of which are higher than the human ear’s limit. So we can only hear some of their vocalizations.

A lion’s roar can be heard five miles away.

Burial Grounds

The Paris Catacombs were built in abandoned quarries in 1788 to house bones moved from overcrowded graveyards around the city.

A “graveyard” is usually associated with a church and located on church property. A “cemetery” is an independent burial ground.

Fairview Cemetery in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is the burial site for more
Titanic
casualties than any other cemetery in the world. Of the more than 1,500 victims of the disaster, 121 are buried there.

Jim Morrison, Isadora Duncan, Sarah Bernhardt, Moliere, and Marcel Marceau are all buried in the famous Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Composer Frederic Chopin’s heart is encased in a pillar at the Holy Cross Church in Warsaw, Poland. (The rest of him is buried in Paris.)

A crematorium can cremate a 180-pound body in 1 ½ hours.

Largest cemetery in Europe: Zentralfriedhof in Austria. It opened in 1874 and holds more than 3 million bodies.

World’s largest cemetery: Wadi-us-Salaam in Iraq, with more than 5 million graves.

World’s oldest pet cemetery: the Cemetery of Dogs in Paris opened in 1899 in response to a new law stating that pet owners could no longer leave their animals’ bodies in the city’s streets or rivers.

Lenin’s embalmed body has been on display in Moscow’s Red Square since 1924.

People started building tombs aboveground in New Orleans in the 1700s because cemeteries often flooded during heavy rainstorms, and buried coffins would be pushed out of the ground.

Books

More than 100 romance novels are published every month in the United States.

Indiana University’s main library sinks an inch per year…because of the weight of the books.

First published in 1985, the
Klingon Dictionary
has sold more than 250,000 copies.

One of ancient Persia’s highranking government officials took his 117,000-volume library with him everywhere. The books were carried on the backs of camels trained to walk in alphabetical order.

Iceland publishes four times as many books per capita as the United States.

Later in his life, the famous lover Giovanni Casanova worked as a librarian.

By the year 1500, there were 10 million books in print.

Clergyman John Harvard didn’t found the college; he donated a library to the school, which was named for him later.

The Oxford English Dictionary
lists 39 euphemisms for “bathroom” and 49 words that can be used to describe buttocks.

In 2007, Harlequin introduced a series of romance novels about NASCAR.

More than 450,000 of Bob Hope’s jokes are housed at the Library of Congress.

The pages of this book will eventually turn brown, due to oxidation.

In the 1700s, the best-selling book in the world was the multivolume
Diderot’s Encyclopedia
, compiled by Frenchman Denis Diderot.

Cash Crops

Leading producer of cranberries in the United States: Wisconsin.

MSG is found naturally in wheat.

A single acre of wheat can produce more than 3,000 loaves of bread.

There are about 1,300 kernels in a pound of corn.

Bugs Bunny’s favorite type of carrot is called Danvers.

There are more than 7,000 varieties of tomatoes.

Oranges and strawberries do not ripen after being picked. Avocados and bananas do.

The celtuce plant is a hybrid, part celery, part lettuce.

The indentation on the bottom of an apple is called the calyx basin.

Tomato juice is the state beverage of Ohio.

Avocados are often called a “perfect” food because they contain nearly all the vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients (including protein) that the human body needs.

Cranberries are sorted for ripeness by bouncing them. A ripe berry can be dribbled like a tiny basketball.

There are 7,500 varieties of apples—2,500 of them grow in the United States.

On average, there are seven peas in a pod.

Potatoes and sweet potatoes are distantly related. But yams and sweet potatoes aren’t related at all.

Ninety-nine percent of the pumpkins sold in the United States end up as jack-o-lanterns.

Crime and…

Number of shopping carts stolen from Los Angeles stores in 2005: 6.2 million.

People most often killed during bank robberies: the robbers.

In 1981, a Los Angeles man was arrested for hiding under tables and painting women’s toenails.

About 509 million songs were legally downloaded in 2006—in the same year, 5 billion were downloaded illegally.

Your risk of being murdered is greater on January 1 than on any other day of the year.

Four most common arrests in the United States: drunk driving, theft, drug possession, and public drunkenness.

First rock star ever arrested onstage: Jim Morrison. (It happened twice—in 1967 and 1968.)

*    *    *

BIG OOPS

In 1965, Johnny Cash accidentally started a fire in California’s Los Padres National Forest. He destroyed 508 acres.

…Punishment

In 2008, one out of every 100 Americans spent time in jail.

When the FBI was founded in 1908, it had 34 investigators. Today there are more than 15,000.

Only seven women have ever made the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list.

In convict lingo, “Getting a Valentine” means to receive a one-year jail sentence.

Last state to abolish flogging as a legal punishment: Delaware…in 1972.

In Charleston, South Carolina, people who are arrested can be charged $1 for the ride to jail.

The only formal qualification needed to be appointed a Florida executioner: You must be at least 18 years old.

*    *    *

BORED?

A Virginia man made an eight-mile-long chain of chewing-gum wrappers. (It took him 38 years.)