Mental Floss: Instant Knowledge (20 page)
Read Mental Floss: Instant Knowledge Online
Authors: Editors of Mental Floss
USEFUL FOR:
cocktail parties, trips to the zoo, and lecturing your kids about bear safety
KEYWORDS:
protection, condoms, or cuddly
THE FACT:
While koalas are pretty well known for sleeping, they should also be well known for sleeping around!
While few animals are as cute as the cuddly koala, they wouldn’t be much fun as pets. Koalas sleep up to 16 hours a day and aren’t all that peppy when they’re awake. Maybe that’s because stressed-out koalas are particularly prone to chlamydia. Yes,
that
chlamydia. The widespread STD among Koalas makes them prone to conjunctivitis (“pink eye”), urinary tract infections (no quick runs to the grocery store for some cranberry juice for these guys!), and incontinence. Which, by the way, is not only a reason not to have one as a pet, but also a reason to forgo the requisite “koala-holding picture” on your trip to Australia.
Though the White House had needed extensive repairs ever since British troops had set it on fire in 1814, reconstruction didn’t begin until the late 1940s with
PRESIDENT HARRY TRUMAN
, when he witnessed a piano fall through the floor.
What’s worse than forgetting to turn off your ringer at a somber event? Forgetting to turn off your pet. At
ANDREW JACKSON
’s funeral in 1845, his parrot had to be removed for swearing so much.
Talk about bizarre morning rituals:
PRESIDENT CALVIN COOLIDGE
liked having his head rubbed with petroleum jelly while he feasted on breakfast in bed.
USEFUL FOR:
cocktail party banter, chatting up botanists, and sparking road-trip conversation across the southland
KEYWORDS:
invincible, unwanted, or kudzu
THE FACT:
In 1876, the fast-growing vine kudzu made its way from Japan to the United States and quickly became all the rage. Little did people know how quickly the plant was going to wear out its welcome.
In the South, its heavy coverage provided shade from the heat, the livestock seemed to like the taste, and it even improved the quality of the soil. Kudzu seemed to have so many advantages, in fact, that in the 1930s the U.S. government helped farmers plant the vine all across the Southern states. Big mistake. Less than 20 years later, the kudzu had spread out of control, covering crop fields and trees, often killing the vegetation in its path. Today utility companies in the South spend millions of dollars trying to keep their poles and towers kudzu-free with no help from theU.S. government other than a list of vine-ridding tips on its Web site. Gee, thanks, Uncle Sam!
USEFUL FOR:
armchair travelers, people planning trips, and chatting up linguists and missionaries
KEYWORDS:
pidgin, PNG, or if you don’t speak the language…
THE FACT:
If you’re going to Papua New Guinea, you’ll probably need a translator, if not a few hundred of ’em.
No country has more linguistic diversity than Papua New Guinea (PNG). More than 800 languages are currently spoken in the country, and no one linguistic group contains more than a small percentage of the population. In fact, many languages of the interior are poorly known, although missionary linguists are working hard to record them in preparation for Bible translation. So how does Papua New Guinea function as a country, considering this welter of tongues? Some form of common speech is necessary, and PNG has one in English. Well, not exactly English as we know it, rather Melanesian pidgin English, based on a simplified vocabulary and local grammatical and sound structures. Thus, a foreign tourist would generally be labeled a
man bilong longwe ples
(or “man belong long-way place”).
USEFUL FOR:
lazy afternoons, justifying a thoroughly inactive lifestyle, or convincing yourself exercise isn’t the key
KEYWORDS:
lazy, genius, and lazy genius
THE FACT:
Edwin Shoemaker was a genius (and we don’t throw that word around lightly). After all, the guy forever blurred the distinction between sitting up and lying down by developing the world’s first reclining chair. Even more impressive: He was only 21 years old at the time.
Edwin Shoemaker came up with the concept back in 1928! Who knew a lazy kid with a lazy dream could make all that laziness work out so well? Of course, Fast Eddy’s initial model, a wood-slat chair intended for porches, wasn’t exactly the most comfortable thing in the world. It was fashioned out of orange crates and designed to fit the contours of the back at any angle. It took an early customer, appreciative of the concept but rather unexcited about the prospect of lying down on bare slats of wood, to suggest
upholstering
the invention. Shoemaker and his partner Edward Knabusch then held a contest to name the invention. “La-Z-Boy” beat out suggestions like “Sit ’n’ Snooze” and “The Slack-Back.”
USEFUL FOR:
impressing your fourth-grade teacher, or any seven-year old who’ll listen to you
KEYWORDS:
lemmings, suicide, or lemming suicides
THE FACT:
Lemmings don’t intentionally jump off cliffs—they do it because they’re morons.
Poor, oft-maligned lemmings—you couldn’t blame them for being suicidal, if they were, which they aren’t. So where exactly did the myth come from? The notion of lemming suicide extends back at least to Freud, who in 1929’s
Civilization and Its Discontents
explained the human death instinct in the context of the creatures. But the notion didn’t really take hold until Walt Disney’s 1958 so-called documentary
White Wilderness
hit the big screen. For the purpose of his film, the lovable animator shipped dozens of lemmings to Alberta, Canada, herded them off a cliff, taped them falling to their deaths, and passed it off as nonfiction. In reality, though, lemmings aren’t suicidal. They’re just dumb. The truth is, lemming populations explode in four-year cycles in Scandinavia, and when the tundra gets crowded, they seek out new land. Being stupid, they sometimes fall off cliffs, but not on purpose.