Uncle John’s Facts to Annoy Your Teacher Bathroom Reader for Kids Only! (20 page)

Unlucky in China: The number 4. (The number 8 is lucky.)

LOOK OUT BELOW!

Wealthy people sometimes built two-story outhouses for their two-story houses. A bridge led from the house’s second floor to the top floor of the outhouse, which had a separate chute down to the pit so people below didn’t get an unwelcome…er, shower.

WIPEOUT

Most outhouses didn’t come with toilet paper; it was too expensive. Instead, people used old newspapers, catalogs, or magazines to clean up. Some even resorted to corn husks or leaves.

Year the first
X-Men
comic book was released: 1963.

CAN YOU DIG IT?

Here’s a great job: “Outhouse diggers” are archaeologists who excavate old outhouse pits. The waste turned into dirt long ago, and the diggers are mostly on the lookout for “treasures” that were tossed down the outhouse hole a hundred years ago or more. What do they find? Usually doll parts, inkwells, marbles, doorknobs, bottles, sword parts, dishes, bone-handled toothbrushes, and false teeth. (Outhouse digger rule: don’t bite your fingernails while on the job.)

A WASTEFUL CAREER

In the 1800s, cities hired “nightsoil collectors” to go around to a neighborhood’s outhouses at night and collect the waste. You’d think people only did this job long ago, but Brisbane, Australia, had nightsoil collectors on staff until the 1970s.

OUTHOUSE SPEEDWAY

Want to root for outhouses? Take a trip to Trenary, Michigan, which hosts a race called the Outhouse Classic every February. Organizers call it “a real gas,” and competitors try to outdo each other by racing their elaborately decorated outhouses down the street. Some of our favorite former entrants: the Flower Power Car Outhouse (decorated to look like a Volkswagen Beetle) and the Vati-Can, which was pushed down the street by a group of nuns.

A piece of unsliced bacon is called a “flitch.”

How do we know these magic tricks will amaze and delight your friends? Because we can read their minds
!

E
YE CONTROL YOU

The trick:
Tell someone to look straight ahead for a minute and then to look upward with his eyes (without raising his head). Then tell him to close his eyes while still looking up. Now, command him to open his eyelids. Other than some weak eyelid fluttering, your friend won’t be able to do it.

How it works:
It’s simple—if your eyeballs are looking up, your eyelids are physically unable to open.

THAR SHE BLOWS!

The trick:
Light a candle (with your parents’ help) and set it about eight inches behind a full two-liter bottle of water. Crouch down at table level, and blow really hard against the bottle. Even though the bottle blocks the candle, the flame will still be extinguished.

How it works:
It’s not magic. The air currents generated by your breath are strong enough to travel around the bottle and put out the candle—it only looks like you blew directly through the bottle.

Kids as young as seven can join the Society of American Magicians.

APPLES AND ORANGES

The trick:
Hand your friend an orange and an apple. Tell him to hold one in each hand. Then turn your back. Tell your friend to raise either the apple or the orange into the air and hold that arm straight above his head for about 15 seconds. Then tell him to put his arm down. Now, turn around…and tell him which arm he held up—the apple arm or the orange arm.

How it works:
Look for the hand that’s lighter in color. Blood will flow out of your friend’s hand when it’s raised, making it paler than the other hand.

DRY WATER

The trick:
This one is pretty cool. First, show your friend a bowl of water. Have him dip his hand in it to see that it is, indeed, a normal bowl of water. Now, dip
your
hand in the water. Remove it…your hand is completely dry!

Real name: Illusionist David Copperfield was born David Korkin in 1956.

How it works:
Before the trick, rub your hands with talcum powder, which repels water.

STOP TIME

The trick:
Find an old wind-up wristwatch and show your audience that it’s a working, ticking watch. Then place it on a table and use your magical powers to make it stop ticking.

How it works:
Use a table with a tablecloth. Hide a magnet under the tablecloth. When you put the watch on top of the magnet, it will stop the watch. (
Warning
: Be sure your watch is an old, cheap one—when you remove the magnet, it will start ticking again, but sometimes the trick affects the watch’s ability to tell accurate time.)

*      *      *

WHAT’S THAT SMELL?

The 16th-century painter Michelangelo had a reputation for being more than an amazing artist—his body odor was so bad, it drove people away. Most Europeans in Michaelangelo’s day didn’t take baths regularly because they believed that being too clean caused diseases. But the painter seemed smellier than most—while he was working on the Sistine Chapel in Rome, many of his assistants quit because he smelled so bad.

Maximum length of most dreams: 25 minutes.

These treats might make you wish you had a bigger mouth.

F
UDGE PHENOM

The world’s largest slab of fudge was a swirled vanilla-and-chocolate concoction that weighed more than two tons—as much as a pickup truck! Canada’s Northwest Fudge Factory made the mega slab in 2007. It was 166 feet long, 6 feet wide, and 3 inches thick. And it took 86 hours and 13 employees to make it.

LOLLY-PALOOZA

In 2002, Jolly Rancher made the world’s largest lollipop, a giant version of its regular-sized cherry lolly. The humongous pop weighed more than 4,000 pounds and was about 19 inches thick. The sucker broke the previous record for the largest lollipop by about 1,000 pounds.

COOKIE MONSTER

Take 30,000 eggs, 12,200 pounds of flour, 6,500 pounds of butter, 6,000 pounds of chocolate chunks, and what do you get? The largest chocolate-chip cookie in the world. The Immaculate Baking Company in Hendersonville, North Carolina, created the cookie, which weighed over 40,000 pounds—more than four large elephants.

People were once so afraid of being buried alive that “safety coffins” were invented A rope inside the coffin reached to the surface and was attached to a bell.

MEGA-BURGER

Mallie’s Sports Grill and Bar in Southgate, Michigan, boasts the world’s largest bacon cheeseburger: 134 pounds, and sitting on a 50-pound bun. According to the restaurant, it takes 12 hours and three men to put the burger together, and it costs $350. (You may want to get a friend to help you eat it.)

CUPCAKE COLOSSUS

Food Network chef Duff Goldman baked a giant cupcake for the show
Ace of Cakes
. The cupcake weighed 61.4 pounds and was more than a foot tall…about 150 times the size of a regular cupcake.

Even normal people do strange things.

E
XCUSE ME…OFFICER?

In January 2009, a 14-year-old boy put on a homemade uniform, walked into a Chicago police station, and successfully impersonated a police officer for five hours before anyone caught on. He was so convincing that he was assigned a partner and sent on patrol. It wasn’t until after his “shift” ended that the ruse was discovered: one of the officers noticed that the boy’s uniform was missing official patches. It turns out the kid wasn’t trying to cause trouble—he was just fascinated by police work. And as for why the police didn’t notice he was only 14, one of them said he “looked a lot older.”

JUST LET IT GO

A 10-year-old boy named Soski from Glendale, California, got angry while on a walk with his parents. So in a fit of rage, he tossed his teddy bear over a fence—and down a steep canyon. Soski regretted tossing the teddy almost immediately, and his mom agreed to climb down the canyon and get it. Halfway down, she slipped and couldn’t climb back up. So his dad went after her—and also slipped. They both ended up trapped 80 feet down, and firefighters had to pull them up with ropes. (And Soski never did get his teddy bear back.)

The words
czar
,
tsar
,
kaiser
, and
July
are all derived from the name Julius Caesar.

These guys took their environmental activism pretty far…all the way to Hawaii.

G
ARBAGE PATCH GUYS

More than 14 billion pounds of trash end up in the world’s oceans every year, and a lot of it concentrates in the North Pacific, in an area twice the size of Great Britain called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The Garbage Patch swirls along with the ocean’s current, which continuously moves clockwise and catches all kinds of debris (mostly plastic bags, bottles, and wrappers). And once all that trash gets caught in the current, it just stays there, polluting the ocean. So in 2008, two environmentalists named Marcus Eriksen and Joel Paschal built a raft out of trash and sailed it over the Garbage Patch, from California to Hawaii. Why? To try to make people more aware of ocean pollution.

IF YOU BUILD IT…

Eriksen and Paschal’s 30-foot “Junk Raft” was made of 15,000 empty plastic bottles. They wrapped the bottles in six large fishing nets to hold them together so the raft would float, used an old airplane cockpit as their cabin, and set up sails to power the raft.

A kangaroo can go for months without drinking water.

AN INCREDIBLE JOURNEY

On June 1, 2008, the men left Long Beach, California, and planned to take about six weeks to make the 2,600-mile journey. But right away, there were problems. They hadn’t glued the tops onto the plastic bottles, and as the raft sailed, the caps started coming off and filling the bottles with water. So the raft started to sink before Eriksen and Paschal even lost sight of the California coastline. Fortunately, Marcus’s fianceé lived nearby. She flew in a “rescue mission” via helicopter and dropped off a glue gun. The guys kept going, but spent the next month gluing the tops onto all the bottles.