Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Extraordinary Book of Facts: And Bizarre Information (11 page)

The seven Gummi Bears are named Gruffi, Cubbi, Tummi, Zummi, Sunni, Gusto, and Grammi.

Bellysinkers, doorknobs, and burl cakes are nicknames for doughnuts.

The double Popsicle stick was introduced during the Depression. It was designed so two people could share it.

Animal Crackers come in 18 different “species.”

In 1995 Kellogg Company paid $2,400 to a man whose kitchen was damaged by a flaming Pop-Tart.

World’s best-selling cookie: Oreo.

Five Jell-O flavors that flopped: celery, coffee, cola, apple, and chocolate.

Twinkie inventor Jimmy Dewar ate 40,177 Twinkies in his lifetime.

Sixty-nine percent of cake eaters eat the cake first, then the frosting.

The average American consumes 1 ton of ice cream in his or her lifetime.

Cranberry Jell-O is the only flavor that contains real fruit flavoring.

About 8 percent of students at the Dunkin’ Donuts Training Center fail the six-week course.

Aspartame is 200 times sweeter than sugar. Saccharin is 500 times sweeter.

There are more places to buy candy in the United States than there are places to buy bread.

A child laughs about 400 times a day. Adults laugh about 15 times.

More children are accidentally poisoned by toxic houseplants than by household chemicals.

The average American child uses 730 crayons by the age of 10.

The price of a sleepover in the Bronx Zoo’s Congo Gorilla Forest exhibit for 15 kids: $4,500.

The average American child takes his first trip to the mall at two months old.

A child just starting school knows about 6,000 words.

A four-year-old child asks about 437 questions a day.

The average kid eats 15 pounds of cereal a year.

The average child will eat 1,500 peanut butter sandwiches by high school graduation.

On average, kids ages two to five put their hands in their mouths 10 times an hour.

An American kid catches six colds a year. The average American kid in daycare catches 10 colds every year.

Forty-six percent of American kids don’t get an allowance.

Sixty-five percent of kids have had at least one imaginary friend by age seven.

Kids’ favorite superheroes: Spider-Man, Superman, and Captain Underpants.

Twenty-one percent of U.S. children say that if they were president, they’d “eat ice cream for every meal.”

Goldfish remember better in cold water than in warm water.

One mother shark can give birth to as many as 70 baby sharks per litter.

Pregnant goldfish are known as “twits.”

The great white shark is the only shark that can hold its head above water to observe activity on the surface.

Some Arctic and Antarctic fish have proteins in their blood that act as antifreeze.

Marine turtles rid their bodies of excess salt by weeping.

A shrimp’s heart is in its head.

Great white sharks can hear sounds from over a mile away.

A baby oyster is called a spat.

Sponges form 99 percent of all marine species.

Maximum life span of a goldfish in captivity: 25 years.

The glue that barnacles use to stick themselves to ship hulls is twice as strong as epoxy resin.

An adult electric eel generates enough electricity to power a medium-size house.

The Hall of Mosses (Washington)

Philip Morris Cigarette Tours (Virginia)

The Soup Tureen Museum (New Jersey)

The Testicle Festival (Montana)

Hippopotamus bites are almost always fatal. Reason: they’re very large bites.

The hippo weighs about 100 pounds at birth.

Elephants drink a minimum of 50 gallons of water a day.

Elephants spend 18 hours a day eating.

The ears of an African elephant can weigh up to 110 pounds each.

No matter what anyone tells you, elephants are not afraid of mice.

The elephant is the only animal with four knees.

An elephant grows six sets of teeth in its lifetime.

Lions and tigers can’t purr. Cougars can.

Force exerted by the jaw of an African lion: 937 pounds. By the human jaw: 175 pounds.

Lions are the only cats that live in packs.

Lions can mate more than 50 times a day.

Elephants can’t jump. Every other mammal can.

The cheetah is the only member of the cat family that cannot retract its claws.

A giraffe only sleeps about four hours a day.

Baby giraffes grow as much as one inch every two hours.

A giraffe’s tongue is 17 inches long.

Baby giraffes drop six feet to the ground when they’re born.

The giraffe has the highest blood pressure of any animal.

Giraffes are highly susceptible to throat infections because of their long throats—and because they can’t cough.

Benjamin Franklin once wrote an essay on the possibility of waterskiing.

What did Christopher Columbus look like? No one knows—his portrait was never painted.

P. T. Barnum staged the first international beauty contest.

Astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon with his left foot first.

Daniel Boone thought coonskin caps were uncivilized.

Though deaf and blind, Helen Keller learned English, French, and German.

Joan of Arc was 19 years old when she was burned at the stake.

Jimmy Hoffa’s middle name was Riddle.

Mussolini’s favorite cartoon character was Donald Duck.

Abraham Lincoln and William Shakespeare have no living descendants.

Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein married their first cousins.

Winston Churchill called his wife Kat. She called him Pug.

Albert Einstein couldn’t read until the age of nine.

Sigmund Freud smoked 20 cigars a day.

Napoléon Bonaparte was afraid of cats.

Cleopatra was married to Ptolemy XIII and Ptolemy XIV—both her brothers.

Cleopatra tested the potency of her poisons by feeding them to her slaves.

Mahatma Gandhi is buried in California.

Myth:
The driest spot on earth is in the Saharan desert.

Fact:
The driest place on earth is in Chile. It’s so dry in Calama, Chile, that 400 years went by without rain; the only source of moisture was the fog in the air. (A torrential rainstorm broke the 400-year dry spell in 1972, but the record remains intact.)

Myth:
Most of the world’s plant life is in the dense jungles of Africa and South America.

Fact:
The vast majority—85 percent, in fact—of the world’s greenery is in the oceans.

Myth:
All your fingernails grow at the same rate.

Fact:
If you’re right-handed, nails on your right hand grow faster; if you’re left-handed, nails on your left will.

Myth:
If you touch a baby bird, its mother will abandon it.

Fact:
Whether or not a mother can detect the scent of a human depends on the animal’s sense of smell. Birds have a poor sense of smell and would never know from it whether a human had touched their nests.

Myth:
Air fresheners remove offending odors from the air.

Fact:
Not even close. Actually they either cover smells up with a stronger scent, or make your nose numb so you can’t smell the bad stuff. The only way you can get rid of odors is with expensive absorption agents like charcoal or silica gel.

Myth:
Whales spout water.

Fact:
Whales actually exhale air through their blowholes. This creates a mist or fog that looks like a waterspout.

The game of lacrosse is about 600 years old.

Most popular sport on earth: soccer. It is played by 100 million people in more than 50 countries.

In 2002 runner Tom Johnson ran an 80 kilometer race (about 50 miles) against a horse—and beat it by 10 seconds.

There are about 10 trillion ways to play the first 10 moves in a game of chess.

Sports celebrity to appear simultaneously on
Time, Newsweek
, and
Sports Illustrated
: the racehorse Secretariat, in 1973.

John McEnroe once tied his shoelaces seven times during a match at Wimbledon.

Oldest major U.S. sporting event: the Kentucky Derby, first held in 1875.

Fifteen runners started the first-ever Boston Marathon. Only 10 of them finished it.

In an average day Canada imports 822 hockey sticks from Russia.

A runner consumes about seven quarts of oxygen while running a 100-yard dash.

Horse jockeys are the only U.S. athletes legally allowed to bet on themselves.

Oldest American college sport still in existence: rowing.

In the United States, Frisbees outsell baseballs, basketballs, and footballs combined.

First announcer to say, “He shoots, he scores!” during a hockey game: Foster Hewitt, in 1933.

In pro Ping-Pong, if players use white balls, they can’t wear white shirts. They can’t see them.

Check a map: Reno, Nevada, is west of Los Angeles, California.

Westernmost state in the United States: Alaska. Easternmost: Alaska. (It crosses the international date line.)

Tallest mountain on Earth: Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, 31,800 feet from the ocean floor.

Highest town in the United States: Climax, Colorado, at 11,302 feet above sea level.

Moscow is closer to Washington, D.C., than Honolulu is.

Alaska alone has as much coastline as the rest of the United States.

Coney Island isn’t an island, but it used to be.

Three Mile Island is two and a half miles long.

Israel is one-fourth the size of Maine.

There were 30 more countries in the year 2005 than there were in 1990.

What’s special about Cadillac Mountain, Maine, in the winter? It’s the first place you can see the rising sun in the United States. In the warmer months, it’s Mars Hill in Maine.

There are eight time zones in North America.

World’s biggest desert: the Sahara, at 3.5 million square miles. The Gobi is number two at 500,000.

In an average minute, 20,900 gallons flow from the Amazon River into the sea.

Shortest river: the D River in Oregon. It’s 120 feet long.

7 Wonders of

the Ancient World

Great Pyramid of Cheops

at Giza, Hanging Gardens of

Babylon, Statue of Zeus

at Olympia, Temple of Artemis

at Ephesus, Mausoleum at

Halicarnassus, Colossus of

Rhodes, Pharos (Lighthouse)

of Alexandria

7 Liberal Arts

Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic,

Arithmetic, Geometry, Music,

Astronomy

7 Deadly Sins

Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth,

Avarice, Gluttony, Lust

7 Seas

Red, Adriatic, Black, Caspian,

Mediterranean, Persian Gulf,