Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (4 page)

—Reuters

OOH, THAT STINGS

“A Pasadena, Texas, man who blasted a wasp’s nest with a 12-gauge shotgun was jailed after an errant pellet injured a 5-year-old boy in a nearby apartment. Police Sgt. J. M. Baird said Romeo Gonzalez, 18, fired the gun to break up the nest which was hanging from a tree outside his second-floor apartment. The pellet entered a first-floor apartment and struck David Marban in the thigh. The boy was hospitalized but is expected to recover.”

—CBS News

Technically speaking, coffee is a fruit juice.

ONE OF THESE DAYS, ARNOLD, POW…

“Joe Scarborough, a political commentator for MSNBC, failed to check his facts when he recently reported that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had advocated destroying the moon. Citing a British newspaper, Scarborough, a former congressman, quoted Schwarzenegger as saying: ‘If we get rid of the moon, women—those menstrual cycles are governed by the moon—will not get PMS. They will stop bitching and whining.’

“Scarborough then chided Schwarzenegger for insensitivity, saying: ‘I don’t know how it works in Austria, but let me tell you something, friend. Jokes about such matters are not laughing subjects to women in America.’ It turned out, however, that the remarks Scarborough attributed to the Austrian-born governor were actually made by a Schwarzenegger impersonator who regularly appears on the Howard Stern radio show. Eleven days later, Scarborough apologized to viewers and Schwarzenegger for ‘my terrible mistake.’”

—Reuters

WHAT’S COOKING?

“A married couple in Howard, Wisconsin, ducked behind a refrigerator when bullets began exploding in their oven. Police said the husband hid the ammunition and three handguns in the oven before the couple went on vacation out of fear that they would be stolen if someone broke into the house. Upon returning, the wife turned on the oven.”

—USA Today

BRAZIL NUTS

“A gang of prisoners in a Brazilian jail spent months digging a tunnel in a bid for freedom. But they emerged from the tunnel’s end inside the prison yard. The underground escape route, which had reportedly taken the 67 men months to complete, ended just one foot short of the main perimeter wall. Prison guards promptly took the crestfallen prisoners back to their cells,
Journal da Globo
reported last week. ‘They were so frustrated and we could not hold back our laughter, they were so dumb,’ a guard told the newspaper.”

—The Australian

Bill Clinton is the most widely traveled president in U.S. history.

CHICKEN NUGGETS

We pecked around our library and laid this egg—a page of chicken trivia
.

• There are over 150 varieties of domestic chickens. The most common egg-layers are White Leghorns and Golden Comets. The most common poultry varieties are Cornish Cross and Plymouth Rocks.

• Chickens and turkeys can cross-breed. The result is called a
turken
.

• The short-term egg-laying record was set in 1967 by a White Leghorn in Sri Lanka. She laid 17 eggs in six hours.

• If there’s no rooster in a flock of chickens, one hen will stop laying eggs and crow, assuming the role of protector.

• The chicken is the closest living relative of Tyrannosaurus rex.

• The amount of waste a chicken generates in its lifetime could power a 100-watt light bulb for five hours.

• Chickens are native to Asia. They were spread around the world as an easy food source, and were first brought to North America by Christopher Columbus.

• World record: In 1930 a chicken in New Zealand laid 361 eggs in 364 days.

• Typically, it takes a hen 24 to 26 hours to lay an egg, which hatches in 21 days.

• A chicken’s comb (the decorative head plumage) has a practical function: it keeps the bird cool. There are eight varieties: buttercup, pea, strawberry, V-shaped, silkis, cushion, rose, and single.

• Chickens can’t swallow while they are upside down.

• If a chicken has a white earlobe, its eggs will be white. If it’s earlobe is red, the eggs will be brown-shelled. An exception: Arucana chickens can lay green, pink, and blue eggs.

• Worldwide, chickens outnumber humans.

• World’s largest chicken egg: 16 ounces, laid by a New Jersey White Leghorn in 1956.

• Chickens have 24 distinct cries to communicate to one another, including separate alarm calls depending on what kind of predator is near.

Are you chicken when it comes to chickens? Then you have
alektorophobia
.

LIFE IN 1902

It’s amazing how much things have changed in 100 years
.

Average life expectancy in the United States: 46

Fourteen percent of American homes had a bathtub. Eight percent had a telephone.

Cost of a three-minute phone call from Denver to New York City: $11

There were 8,000 cars in the United States and 144 miles of paved road on which to travel.

Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all legal and available over the counter at any drugstore.

Speed limit in most cities: 10 mph

Mississippi, Iowa, Tennessee, and Alabama all had larger populations than California.

Average hourly wage in the United States: 22 cents (the average worker made between $200 and $400 a year)

Population of Las Vegas: 30

Ninety percent of doctors in the United States hadn’t attended college.

Leading causes of death in the United States: pneumonia, influenza, tuberculosis, heart disease, diarrhea, and stroke.

Crossword puzzles, canned beer, and iced tea hadn’t been invented yet.

Only six percent of American adults were high school graduates. Ten percent of adults were illiterate.

There were 230 reported murders in the United States.

Ninety-five percent of all births took place at home.

Sugar cost 4¢ a pound, coffee was 15¢ a pound, and eggs were 14¢ per dozen.

Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Hawaii, and Alaska were not yet states.

Most women washed their hair once a month and used egg yolks or borax for shampoo.

Eighteen percent of American homes had a full-time servant.

The Eiffel Tower was the tallest structure in the world.

Charles Dickens’s character Tiny Tim was originally called Small Sam.

THEY ARE WHAT YOU EAT

You eat these products and drink a few of them, too. But how much do you know about the people they’re named for?

M
RS. PAUL
In 1946 power plant worker Edward Piszek started selling deviled crab cakes in a local Philadelphia bar to earn money while the plant was on strike. “One Friday I prepared 172 and we only sold 50,” he recalled later. “There was a freezer in the back of the bar, so we threw ’em in there. It was either that or the trash can.” A week later the frozen crab cakes still tasted fine, so Piszek and a friend, John Paul, each chipped in $350 and started a frozen seafood business. Piszek’s mother pressured her son to name the company after her…but instead they named it Mrs. Paul’s Kitchens after John’s mom. Piszek bought out his partner in the 1950s but kept the Mrs. Paul’s name. In 1982 he sold the company to Campbell Soup for a reported $70 million.

EARL GREY

In his day Charles Grey, the second Earl Grey (1764–1845) was best known as the prime minister of Great Britain who ended slavery throughout the British Empire. Today he’s better known for the gift he received when a British envoy saved the life of a Chinese government official. The grateful official sent Grey a diplomatic gift of black tea flavored by the oil of a citrus fruit known as bergamot. Grey liked the tea and started serving it in his home; when his supply ran low, he asked his London tea merchant, Twinings, to make more. Guests who enjoyed the prime minister’s tea and wanted some for themselves would go to Twinings and ask for “Earl Grey’s tea.” Today it’s the most popular blend of tea in the world.

DR. LOUIS PERRIER

In 1902 Sir St. John Harmsworth, an English aristocrat, was seriously injured in an auto accident and went to Vergeze, a spa town in France, to recuperate. While there, a local doctor named Louis Perrier had him drink mineral water from
Les Bouillens
(“bubbling waters”), a natural spring he owned. Its supposed health-giving properties had been touted since the days of the Roman Empire; Harmsworth thought it would make an excellent mixer for whiskey for his friends back home. He bought the spring from Dr. Perrier, renamed it in his honor (who’d drink a mineral water called Harmsworth?), and started bottling it in green bottles shaped like the Indian clubs that Perrier had him swing for exercise. By the 1980s, Perrier was the world’s best-selling mineral water.

A lot of kids have it:
Lachanophobia
—fear of vegetables.

RUSSELL STOVER

As we told you in
The Best of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader
, an Iowa schoolteacher named Christian Nelson invented the world’s first chocolate-dipped ice cream bar in 1921, and at a dinner party someone suggested calling it Eskimo Pie. Here’s another part of the story: The person who came up with the name was Clara Stover, wife of Nelson’s business partner, Russell Stover. The Nelsons and the Stovers made a fortune their first year in business, but after 15 months, others began to copy their idea, nearly forcing them out of business. The Stovers sold their share for $25,000 and moved to Denver, Colorado, where they started making and selling boxed chocolates out of their home. Today Russell Stover Candies is the best-selling boxed chocolate brand in the United States.

DR. ANCEL KEYS

In 1941 the U.S. War Department asked Keys, a University of Minnesota physiologist, to develop a non-perishable, ready-to-eat meal that would be small enough to fit into a soldier’s pocket. Keys went to a local market and looked around for foods that would fit the bill. He came up with hard biscuits, dry sausages, hard candy, and chocolate bars; then he tested his 28-ounce, 3,200-calorie “meals” on six soldiers at a nearby Army base. The meals rated it only “palatable” and “better than nothing,” but they did relieve hunger and gave the soldiers enough energy to engage in combat. The Army threw in chewing gum, toilet paper, and four cigarettes…and named the packets “K-rations” in honor of their creator.

Melbourne, Australia, has an 8 p.m. curfew…for cats.

TOO RISKY FOR GUINNESS

If you make it into the
Guinness Book of World Records
and somebody breaks your record, your name gets taken out. Turns out there’s another way to get booted from the book
.

B
Y THE BOOK
If you published a book of world records, what kinds of records would you allow into your book? What kinds would you keep out? The people at the
Guinness Book of World Records
have been asking themselves those questions for more than 50 years.

Founding editors Ross and Norris McWhirter took a conservative approach from the start: anything having to do with hard liquor or sex was out. “Ours is the kind of book maiden aunts give to their nieces,” the brothers once explained. Crime was out, too—the brothers didn’t want readers breaking laws just to get in the book.

As the years passed and the
Guinness Book
grew into an international phenomenon, a new problem arose: Some categories that were pretty dangerous to begin with—sword swallowing, fire eating, etc.—became more so as the winning records climbed ever higher. Do you remember the “Iron Maiden” category? That’s where a person lies down on a bed of nails, has another bed of nails placed down on top of him, then has hundreds of pounds of heavy weights piled on top of that. There’s a physical limit to how many weights you can pile on a guy sandwiched between two beds of nails before he dies a horrible, crushing death. Sooner or later, somebody trying to get into the book in the Iron Maiden category was going to be killed in the attempt. “We feel that’s something we shouldn’t encourage,” Norris McWhirter said in 1981.

WRITTEN OUT

So in the late 1970s, the
Guinness Book of World Records
began to close the book on some records that had been around for years.

Pucker up! You use 20 different muscles when you kiss.

“This category has now been retired,” the editors stated after some entries, “and no further claims will be entertained.” A few years later, many such categories disappeared from the book altogether.

That might have been it if not for the fact that the
Guinness Book of World Records
had changed hands a few times since then, and each new owner has had their own ideas about what should be included in the book. Some categories that were once deemed too dangerous were brought back…though in a few cases the old world records were forgotten or ignored and replaced with new “world records” that didn’t even beat the ones they replaced.

So who’s back in? Who’s still out? What else is new? Here’s a look at how some of the more unusual categories have fared.

IRON MAIDEN

Record Holder:
Vernon Craig of Wooster, Ohio, who performed under the stage name “Komar”