Read Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wise Up! Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wise Up! (10 page)
The band Blondie was originally called Angel and the Snakes.
Basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s given name: Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr.
Writer Truman Capote’s real name was Truman Streckfus Persons.
Crooner Bing Crosby’s first group, in 1925, was called Two Boys and a Piano.
Ayn Rand’s own working title for her second book was
Second-Hand Lives
. Her editor suggested changing it to
The Fountainhead
.
Producer Robert Stigwood came up with the name “Bee Gees.” The band preferred “Rupert’s World.”
Neil Diamond once considered the stage name Neil Kaminsky.
Charles Dickens’s character Tiny Tim was originally called Small Sam.
Gene Simmons of KISS (real name: Chaim Witz) financed Van Halen’s first demo tape. He suggested that the band change its name to Daddy Longlegs. (They declined.)
In the United States, more than 18 billion text messages are sent every month.
American soldiers in Vietnam sometimes used Slinkies as radio antennae.
Roman emperor Claudius was signaled to join his army by a chain of bonfires from Britain to Rome.
James K. Polk’s 1845 presidential inauguration was the first reported by telegraph.
The last Western Union Singing Telegram was delivered in 1974.
In 2004,
Billboard
magazine added a “Hot Ringtones” chart.
In 1929, Herbert Hoover was the first president to put a phone in the Oval Office.
In 1871, five years before Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for the telephone, inventor Antonio Meucci filed a patent for a similar device, but could not afford the $10 fee.
Third-most-used language in the United States: American Sign Language. (English and Spanish are first and second.)
National Park WebRangers are kids who learn about the parks by solving mysteries and puzzles, playing games, and gathering secret words online.
Most common name in nursery rhymes: Jack.
In 21 states, spanking is still a legal form of punishment in schools.
Igor Stravinsky said his music was “best understood by children and animals.”
The melody to “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” is from a 1761 French song. (The lyrics date to 1806.)
Early European jesters made balloons out of animal bladders and intestines.
All-time best-selling lunch box: the Walt Disney School Bus (9 million sold between 1961 and 1973).
Sesame Street
’s Big Bird has a teddy bear named Radar.
First lunch box character from a TV show: Hopalong Cassidy (1950). The design sold 600,000 in its first year.
The first merry-go-round appeared at a fair in Philippapolis, Turkey, in 1620.
In one of their comic books, Batman and Robin traveled through time to save Marco Polo.
Comic superhero Captain Marvel’s appearance was modeled after actor Fred MacMurray.
The comic strip
Peanuts
was originally called
Li’l Folks
.
Who are the Springfield Isotopes, Shelbyville Shelbyvillains, and Salem Boulevardiers? Minor-league baseball teams on
The Simpsons
.
Since 1959, more than 105 million yards of fabric have been used to create Barbie clothes.
In the 1960s, DC Comics and Marvel Comics jointly trademarked the term “Super Hero.”
Donald Duck was Mussolini’s favorite cartoon character.
World’s most valuable comic:
Action Comics
#1 (1938), which introduced Superman. Cover price: 10¢. Present-day value for a copy in mint condition: $600,000.
Superman’s full Earth name: Clark Joseph Kent.
The 1960s comic book character Eclipso was called “The Genius Who Fought Himself.”
First published drawing by Charles Schulz: a 1937 cartoon for
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
.
Spider-Man’s first appearance came in Marvel Comics’
Amazing Fantasy
#15 (1962).
Salvador Dalí and Walt Disney once collaborated on a cartoon called
Destino
. They never finished it.
First female superhero to have her own comic book: Wonder Woman (1942).
Who was Hoyt Curtin? He wrote the theme songs for
The Flintstones
,
The Jetsons
, and
The Yogi Bear Show
.
Popeye
began as a comic strip in 1929.
Shaquille O’Neal’s favorite superhero: Superman. (He even has a Superman tattoo.)
Editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant founded the Bad Golfers Association in 1994.
Superman once gave Batman a ring of green kryptonite so that if Superman ever lost his mind and became a danger to humans, Batman could use the ring to defeat him.
Swedish golfer Jesper Parnevik once ate volcanic sand “to cleanse his system.”
Ted Nugent makes and sells his own line of beef jerky called Gonzo Meat Biltong.
Actor Vincent Price was also an author and a gourmet cook. In 1965, he published his own cookbook,
A Treasury of Great Recipes
.
Fletcher Davis, who once owned a diner in Athens, Texas, claimed he invented the hamburger in the 1880s.
Pro golfer Amy Alcott’s day job: short-order cook.
Alexander Graham Bell preferred to sip his soup through a glass straw.
Napoléon Bonaparte carried chocolate with him on all of his military campaigns.
Both Hitler and Mussolini were vegetarians.
Orville Wright numbered his chickens’ eggs so he could eat them in the order they were laid.
The Joy of Cooking
was first self-published by Irma Rombauer in 1931.
Singer Chaka Khan once came out with a line of chocolates called “Chakalates.”
Charles Lindbergh’s only food on his transatlantic flight: Four sandwiches.
Ernest Hemingway’s favorite food while writing: peanut butter and onion sandwiches.
In 1954, Alice B. Toklas (longtime partner of writer Gertrude Stein) published a cookbook and memoir called
The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook
. Its most famous recipe was for “Hashisch Fudge,” which included a mixture of fruit, nuts, spices, and “canibus sativa,” or marijuana.
The largest dinosaur was probably the Argentinosaurus. It grew to be 120 feet long and weighed 110 tons.
Some prehistoric dragonflies had wingspans as big as a hawk’s.
A hummingbird egg is the size of a Tic-Tac breath mint. A hummingbird nest can be the size of a walnut shell.
The world’s largest goldfish is 15 inches long. (He lives in Hong Kong and is named Bruce.)
The largest American alligator measured 19.8 feet in length.
Largest land invertebrate: the coconut crab. It can grow to be three feet across and cracks open coconuts with its pincers.
Longest snake in the world: the reticulated python, which can grow to more than 33 feet.
The annual Banana Slug Derby at California’s Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park is held on a course that’s 18 inches long.
World’s largest animal…ever: the blue whale. It can grow to be 70 feet long and can weigh up to 200 tons.
The largest bacterium can grow to the size of the period at the end of this sentence.
Smallest mammal on earth: the Etruscan shrew. It weighs less than a penny.
Largest rodent in North America and second-largest in the world: the beaver. (The world’s largest is the South American capybara, which looks like a big guinea pig.)
The tentacles of the giant arctic jellyfish can grow to be 120 feet long.
In space, fish swim in loops, rather than straight lines.
First Canadian in space: Marc Garneau (1984).
Animals that have flown in space: dogs, chimps, mice, spiders, frogs, and jellyfish.
The
Apollo 11
lunar module had only 30 seconds of fuel left when it landed safely on the Moon.
According to NASA, the foods astronauts miss the most are pizza, ice cream, and soda.
To date, only one man-made satellite has been destroyed by a meteor: the European Space Agency’s
Olympus
(1993).
Outer space officially begins 62 miles up.
Astronauts gave Walter Cronkite an “honorary astronaut” title for his 24-hour coverage of
Apollo 11
.
Nineteen years elapsed between the first and second women in space. Both were Russians.
First African American woman in space: Mae Jemison on the space shuttle
Endeavour
.
The mango is the world’s most popular fruit, but the most harvested are grapes, followed by bananas, apples, coconuts, and plantains.
For 3,000 years, hemp was the world’s largest agricultural crop.
There were more than 300 banana-related accidents in Britain in 2001. (Most people slipped on peels.)
A coffee tree yields about one pound of coffee in a year.
China grows more pears than any other country in the world.
China also grows the most sweet potatoes worldwide.
A company in Lancashire, England, grew the world’s tallest tomato plant—it reached a height of 65 feet.
The national symbol of Wales is the leek.
World’s smallest tree: the dwarf willow of the arctic tundra, which reaches only about two inches high.
The jungle’s most pest-ridden tree: the cacao, the source of chocolate’s main ingredient.
Cacao trees grow only in tropical climates, 20 degrees north or south of the equator.
The largest (and possibly smelliest) flower on earth is the
Rafflesia arnoldii
, which grows in the rain forests of Borneo and Sumatra. It’s nicknamed the “stinking corpse lily” and smells like a dead body.
Just 2 percent of Antarctica’s soil is free of ice, so only hardy plants grow there, including lichens, mosses, fungi, and liverwort.
Every second, the world’s rain forests lose about two football fields’ worth of area.
This page is about 500,000 atoms thick.
You have to process 88,000 pounds of liquefied air to get a single pound of neon gas.
At –90°F, your breath will freeze in midair…and drop to the ground.
Quick! Convert –40°C into Fahrenheit! Answer: –40°F. (It’s the one temperature that’s the same in both systems.)
A hundred calories will propel a bicycle three miles or drive a car 280 feet.
A gallon of water weighs 8.34 pounds.
The sun converts more than 4 million tons of matter into energy every second.
Only 5 percent of the stars in our galaxy are bigger than our sun.
Earthquakes travel at speeds of up to 4.8 miles per second.
The Milky Way galaxy moves through space at 170 miles per second.
Gallons of beer in a standard U.S. barrel: three.
Housing prices are usually lowest in winter and highest in summer.
Buy a new car at month’s end; that’s when dealers focus on volume of sales instead of commissions.
The best time to teach a dog new tricks is shortly after its first birthday.
Buy shoes in the afternoon, after you’ve walked around for a while. Feet tend to swell after you’ve walked, and you’ll get a better fit.
Most fish are delivered to stores on Mondays and Thursdays, so the freshest are usually available on Tuesdays and Fridays.
Best time to visit the emergency room: between 8:00 a.m. and noon on Wednesdays, Thursdays, or Fridays. Mondays and Tuesdays are the most crowded.
If you want to achieve the best workout, hit the gym in the morning. Your metabolism slows during sleep, so morning exercise jump-starts it.
Placing a bet? If it is on an underdog, wait until game time. But if you’re betting on a favorite, do it as soon as possible. Most amateurs bet on favorites close to game time, so bookies change the point spread to attract bets on the underdog.
Best time to have your photo taken: midday. In the morning, your face is puffy from sleeping, and by late afternoon, your face and eyes start to show fatigue.
Taking a trip and hoping to depart on time? Book the second flight of the day. Statistics show that an airline’s first departure is often delayed because so many other carriers are trying to send flights out at the same time.
A regulation baseball has 108 stitches.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, it took four years of apprenticeship to become a featherie golf ball maker.
A good pitcher can make a baseball curve as much as 17½ inches from a straight path.
There are 122 bumps per square inch on a Spalding basketball.
Glitter (disco) balls were first used in nightclubs in the 1920s.
When pitched, the average major league baseball rotates 15 times before it’s hit by the batter.
In 1935, the L.A. Young Golf Company introduced a ball with a honey-filled center.
The rubber used to make SuperBalls is called Zectron.
Average life span of an NBA basketball: 10,000 bounces.
Early tennis balls were leather pouches stuffed with wool or animal hair.
American inventor Charles Goodyear manufactured the first rubber soccer ball in 1855. Before that, soccer balls were usually made from pigs’ bladders.
Golf balls begin to lose their resilience after about a year.
In 2008, representatives from the Carnival Cruise Line (which created the ball) bounced a 36-foot-wide beach ball—the world’s largest— down Elm Street in Dallas, Texas. On its first day out, the ball hit a car antenna and popped, but it was later repaired.
Billiard balls used to be made of ivory. One tusk usually yielded about four balls.
Studies show: There are 7,500,000,000,000,000,000 grains of sand on the world’s beaches.