Uncle John’s Facts to Annoy Your Teacher Bathroom Reader for Kids Only! (13 page)

TOUGH ACT TO FOLLOW

Rémy Bricka had successfully “walked” across 3,502 miles of ocean in just 60 days, a feat that earned him a spot in
Guinness World Records.
He recovered fully and returned to France, where—thanks to his new celebrity status—his one-man band act drew larger crowds for the next few months.

More than 10 years went by, and nobody dared to try to beat his astounding accomplishment until Bricka decided to do it himself
.
In April 2000, he set out to cross the Pacific Ocean on his fiberglass boat shoes. He left Los Angeles, hoping to arrive in Sydney, Australia, five months later, just in time for the Summer Olympics. This trip would be a lot harder—the Pacific Ocean is much bigger than the Atlantic. The distance from Los Angeles to Sydney: 7,500 miles.

The world’s best-selling musical instrument is the harmonica.

COMING UP SHORT

This time, though, Bricka was better prepared. His boat carried $100,000 worth of equipment, including a satellite phone, a GPS tracking device, and freeze-dried meals. He got a corporate sponsor—Stoeffler, a French food supplier—to pay for it all. The company even donated an 11-pound tub of sauerkraut.

But once again, nothing went smoothly. In August, his phone broke, and he ran out of food (including the sauerkraut). Then a storm blew in, causing 50-foot swells that roughed up him and his boat. Fortunately, he had a backup handheld text messaging device. So Bricka wrote to his wife back in Paris: “Come pick me up now, or I’ll have to hitchhike.”

Ten days later, an American tuna boat found him 500 miles south of Hawaii. He’d been out 153 days and covered 4,847 miles. He hadn’t made it all the way to Australia, but it was still a longer journey than his Atlantic Ocean trip.

So what motivates someone to walk across the ocean? “Our time on Earth goes by very quickly,” Bricka says. “In eternity, our time is one second. So in this second, I will use this time to realize my dream.”

Popular pizza toppings in Japan: Eel and squid.

Elvis Presley made great music, but his food preferences were a little odd. Imagine what your teachers would say if you showed up with these snacks.

R
OYAL ROADKILL

Young Elvis’s family was so poor that they often ate squirrels, possums, pigs’ feet, and pigs’ ears for dinner.

HIS FAVORITE FOODS

•
Fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches

•
Burned bacon

•
Sauerkraut

•
Chitterlings (boiled animal intestines)

FANTASTIC FOOD FEAT

When he was in his 20s, Elvis could eat eight cheeseburgers and two BLTs, and drink three milk shakes…all in one sitting!

WHAT WOULD YOU DO FOR A PB&J?

Elvis once flew to Denver, Colorado, after hearing about a restaurant that made great peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. He had 22 of them delivered to the airport runway and ate them on the flight back to Memphis.

During his lifetime, Elvis Presley gave away more than 80 Cadillacs.

The next time you get marked down on an assignment for poor spelling, consider telling your teacher that you spell words “the Elizabethan way.”

T
HE NAME GAME

Almost everyone considers William Shakespeare to be the greatest writer in the history of the English language. His plays—like
Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet
,
Macbeth
, and
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
—are widely performed today. And in his own time (the late 1500s and early 1600s), his plays were the most popular in London. But as much as everyone loved Shakespeare in those days, there was one thing they had trouble agreeing on: how to spell his name.

In Shakespeare’s era (called the “Elizabethan era,” because Queen Elizabeth I was the queen of England at the time), the spelling of words was often inexact. Back then, very few people could read, and Londoners spoke in many different dialects. That made spelling a tricky business. The result: historians have discovered that “Shakespeare” was spelled at least 25 different ways from the time he was born in 1564 to 1623, when his plays were first published.

Q: You have a ZIP code, but do you know what “ZIP” stands for?
A: Zone Improvement Plan.

WILLIAM WHO?

His name was always pronounced the same, and the differences in spelling had to do with the different ways people wrote the same sounds. For example, “ck,” “ks,” “kes,” and “x” all made the same sound, and in some accents, “berd” could even sound like “peare.” Why? In Shakespeare’s day, there was no authority on how to spell words, and no common dictionary to look them up in, so spellings always varied.

Without further ado, here are the 25 different ways to spell “Shakespeare”:

1)
The most common spelling was “Shakespeare.”

2)
Shakespere

3)
Shakespear

4)
Shakspeare

5)
Shackspeare

6)
Shakspere

7)
Shackespeare

8)
Shackspere

9)
Shackespere

10)
Shaxpere

11)
Shexpere

12)
Shakspe-

13)
Shake-speare

14)
Shaxberd

15)
Shak-speare

16)
Shakspear

17)
Shagspere

18)
Shaksper

19)
Shaxpeare

20)
Shaxper

21)
Shakespe

22)
Shakp

23)
Shaksp.

24)
Shakespheare

25)
Shakspe

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue… well, at least that much is true.

FACT?
Italian Christopher Columbus sailed under the flag of Spain because he couldn’t get financial backing at home for his voyages. Everybody thought the world was flat and worried that he would sail off the edge.

WRONG!
Columbus wanted to sail west to Asia. Everybody else had sailed east, but Columbus thought a trip west would be faster and easier. He did have a hard time getting money for the trip, but it wasn’t because people in the 1400s thought the world was flat. Educated people knew the world was round. Investors and the Italian government thought Columbus was underestimating how far away Asia was. They didn’t want to fund his voyage because they thought he’d run out of supplies during the trip.

FACT?
Christopher Columbus discovered America.

WRONG!
He was looking for India, but he actually landed in the Bahamas, not what’s technically North America. And he was definitely not the first person to “find” the Americas. Native American tribes had lived there for thousands of years, and Icelandic explorer Leif Eriksson established a colony in Newfoundland (now part of Canada) around AD 1000.

Q: What should you say to a vampire who wins an award?
A: “Con-dracula-tions!”

On
page 50
, we told you about the gold hidden somewhere in the British Virgin Islands. Here’s another hunt. Arrgh…do you have your pirate ship ready
?

S
EEKING:
More than 50 tons of gems, pearls, gold, coins, and silver bars worth around $50 million today.

LAST SEEN…
80 to 90 miles north of the Dominican Republic, in an area of the Atlantic Ocean known as the Silver Bank. The place got its name because so many treasure ships sank there.

THE LEGEND:
In 1641, the
Nuestra Señora de la Concepción
was loaded with treasure and headed back to Spain from Mexico when a hurricane struck. The ship lost its masts, flooded with water, and then drifted for a week before it smashed into a reef. Most of the crew was killed in the wreck. Soon after, pirates came and stole many of the riches from the disabled ship. But they didn’t get far before they hit a nearby reef and went under, too.

The average human bladder can hold two cups of urine for up to five hours. (Yuck!)

Forty-six years after the
Concepción
sank, the British government sent a man named William Phips to find it. In 1687, Phips and his crew started to search hundreds of miles of reef in the Atlantic. Finally, one of his men swam down to admire a coral formation and saw guns—a shipwreck! Another look revealed a chunk of silver.

In all, the Phips crew salvaged 32 tons of treasure—in the process, they had to fight off pirates and other treasure seekers. After a few weeks, though, they ran out of food and water and had to leave the
Concepción
behind.

KEEP LOOKING

Phips kept only a sixteenth of the riches he found—he turned the rest over to England. King James II eventually made him a knight and the governor of the Massachusetts colony. But he never recovered the remaining
Concepción
loot.

Three hundred years later, another American tried. In 1978, a treasure hunter named Burt Webber found Phips’s site. Amazingly, some treasure remained, including 60,000 silver coins, gold bullion, and expensive Chinese porcelain. Even though the shipwreck had been plundered many times over the years, the
Concepción
’s leftovers were still worth $14 million!