Read Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wise Up! Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wise Up! (8 page)
During World War II, the Soviet army had three female air divisions.
Record-breaking pilot Jackie Cochran (the first woman to break the sound barrier and to fly a jet across an ocean) was one of the founders of the WASP, the Women Airforce Service Pilots, during World War II.
Beginning in 1976, women could train to be U.S. military pilots. But they weren’t allowed to fly combat missions until 1993.
A women pilots’ club, the Ninety-Nines, began in 1929 with 99 members (hence the name). Today, the group lists more than 5,000 female pilots on its roster.
Today, women make up about 6 percent of all U.S. pilots.
Amelia Earhart’s reason for making her (doomed) 1937 trip around the world: “I want to do it because I must do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be a challenge to others.”
World’s longest hot dog: a 1,996-foot wiener made by the Sara Lee Corporation for the 1996 Olympics.
Largest art museum: the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia (322 galleries, nearly 3 million works of art).
The world record for the most golf balls balanced on top of each other is seven.
World’s largest baseball card collection: the Metropolitan Museum of Art (200,000 cards).
Largest mass yodel: 1,795 people, participating in the 2004 Yahoo! Yodel Challenge.
The world’s largest jazz festival took place in Quebec in 2004; more than a million jazz fans turned out.
World’s largest playable electric guitar is 43' 7 ½" long and weighs 2,244 pounds.
Largest free concert ever: Rod Stewart in Brazil, 1994. More than 3.5 million people attended.
Minute Maid Park in Houston, Texas, has a 50,000-square-foot sliding glass door, the world’s largest.
The world’s longest golf course: the 8,450-yard Jade Dragon Snow Mountain Golf Club in Lijiang, China.
The world’s oldest rock band that’s still together is the Dutch group Golden Earring, which formed in 1961.
Pink Floyd’s
Dark Side of the Moon
was on the charts longer than any other album in history (741 weeks).
Largest group with a hit single: “Battle Hymn of the Republic” by the 375-member Mormon Tabernacle Choir (1959).
In computer lingo, a nybble is four bits, or half of a byte.
E-mail was introduced into the White House in 1992.
The Vatican has named Saint Isadore the patron saint of computers and the Internet.
At its height, Elwood Edwards’s AOL “You’ve Got Mail” greeting was heard 18,000 times a minute.
One survey showed that, of 25,500 standard English words, 93 percent had been registered as dot-coms.
Sixty-three percent of online music suppliers are based in Europe.
In 2004, the first “robot conductor” led the Tokyo Philharmonic. They played Beethoven’s Fifth.
The patent name for the first computer mouse was “X/Y position indicator for a display system.”
The iCarta is a combination iPod and toilet-paper holder.
The South Korean government has promised to put a robot in every home by 2013.
First downloadable single to sell more than a million copies: Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl” (2005).
The billionth song downloaded from iTunes: Coldplay’s “Speed of Sound.”
Computer equipment gets dusty faster than furniture.
First nonhuman to be named
Time
magazine’s Person of the Year: the personal computer (1982).
ISREALITES.
The word “Israelite” is an English translation of a term found in the ancient texts that make up the Jewish Torah and the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. It means “Children of Israel” and refers to an ancient nomadic people who were enslaved by the Egyptians around 1585 BC. Their language, Hebrew, is still in use today and is the world’s oldest. It’s a Semitic language, like Arabic, and comes from a word that means “one who traverses.” Today, Hebrew is one of two official languages of Israel. (Arabic is the other.)
CANAANITES.
When the Israelites arrived in “the promised land” of Canaan (which took up most of modern-day Israel), they discovered a group of people already living there…the Canaanites. The civilization was protected by walled cities and included a thriving merchant class. One of Canaan’s most-traded goods was a purple dye made from the secretions of indigenous snails. In cuneiform, an ancient type of picture writing, the word for “Canaan” looked like the symbol that meant “reddish purple.” So the Israelites’ promised land was known to locals as the “Land of the Purple Dye.”
PHILISTINES.
This seafaring culture invaded and occupied modern-day Israel and Lebanon around 1200 BC. There’s a lot of debate among historians about what region the Philistines called home, but today, many people believe that they originally hailed from Greece.
BEDOUINS.
Desert-dwelling Arabs, the Bedouins have been around for thousands of years and consist of dozens of different communities throughout the Middle East. They typically herd sheep and goats and are known for being polite, hospitable hosts who regularly invite other travelers into their homes. Today, as during biblical times, many Bedouins live in handwoven tents
called
beit al-sha’ar
, or “houses of goat hair.” The tents are so durable that they keep out the cold in winter, the heat in summer, and shrink in the rain to become waterproof.
ZEALOTS.
In the Bible, “zealots” were Jewish rebels who plotted to overthrow the Roman government. The word comes from the Greek
zelotes
, which means “emulator” or “follower.” One zealot, Simon, was a disciple of Jesus.
* * *
SHAKESPEAREAN INSULTS
“You should be women, and yet your beards forbid me to interpret that you are so.”
—Macbeth
“[Thou art] a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise breaker, the owner of no one good quality.”
—All’s Well That Ends Well
“Thou stale old mouse-eaten dry cheese!”
—Troilus and Cressida
“I scorn you, scurvy companion. What, you poor, base, rascally, cheating, lack-linen mate! Away, you moldy rogue, away!”
—Henry IV, Part II
“Go prick thy face and over-red thy fear, thou lily-liver’d boy.”
—Macbeth
“Thou art like the toad, ugly and venomous.”
—As You Like It
“If thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool; for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them.”
—Hamlet
The name originally considered for the TV show
Friends
was
Insomnia Café
.
The Lone Ranger
was the first TV show ever to be shown in reruns.
Eighty percent of Hollywood executives believe there’s a link between TV violence and real violence.
Families who turn off the TV during meals tend to eat healthier.
Jerry Seinfeld turned down $5 million per episode to continue
Seinfeld
past 1998.
Billy Graham broke his strict rule against watching TV on Sunday for the Beatles’ first appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show
.
There are more than 80 different games on
The Price is Right
.
Most popular TV show in the world in 2008:
CSI
.
The Emmy Award was originally called the Immy. It’s named after TV camera “imaging” tubes.
Most-watched series finale of a TV drama:
Magnum, P.I.
(1988).
The town of Notrees, Texas, founded in 1946, was named for its lack of vegetation.
Three most common U.S. town names: Midway, Fairview, and Oak Grove.
The state of Georgia was named for England’s King George II. Louisiana was named for King Louis XIV of France.
Shortest place name in the United States: Y, Alaska.
Portland, Oregon, got its name in a coin toss…tails, and it would have been Boston, Oregon.
Marfa, Texas, took its name from a character in Dostoyevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov
. The town was used as a locale for the movie
Giant
and other films.
In 1916, Berlin, Ontario, changed its name to Kitchener due to anti-German sentiment during World War I.
Whiskeytown, California, got its name when donkeys lost their footing on a local trail and spilled a load of whiskey into a nearby ravine.
Around 2100 BC, the Sumerians were the first to write down official legal codes. Their first law: a ban against witchcraft.
Red hand—which means being caught “red handed,” or with blood on your hands—is a Scottish legal term that dates to 1432.
Historians believe that the American 12-person jury system came from the Vikings, who used committees of 12 “law men” to hear crimes.
The first U.S. Supreme Court case:
West v. Barnes
, tried in 1791. The court upheld a law saying a plaintiff had to file his case in person in Washington, D.C., to get a hearing.
Louisiana still refers to the Napoleonic Code in its state law.
American police officers were first required to read suspects their Miranda rights in 1966, but those rights are required only if the police want to interrogate someone they’ve detained. Police can arrest and hold people without issuing a Miranda warning, as long as they don’t subject the person to questioning.
Until President John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963, it wasn’t a federal crime to assassinate the president.
First Nobel Peace Prize winner: Jean Henri Dunant, founder of the Swiss Red Cross (1901).
Wangari Maathai of Kenya was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize (2004).
John Enders cultivated polio in a test tube, and in 1954, he—not Jonas Salk—got a Nobel Prize for his work.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., at age 35, was the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
António Egas Moniz won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for developing the lobotomy (1949).
There is no Nobel Prize for mathematics.
Pearl S. Buck was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1938.
To date, there are no female Nobel laureates in economics.
Winston Churchill won a Nobel Prize—not for peace, but for literature.
Marie Curie was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes.
At last count, Ozzy Osbourne has been in rehab 14 times.
Princess Diana’s favorite band was Duran Duran.
For the band Emerson, Lake, and Palmer’s 1977 tour, they took 63 roadies…including a karate instructor.
On waking from a diabetic coma, Jerry Garcia’s first words were, “I’m not Beethoven.”
Angus Young of AC/DC performed in a gorilla suit before settling on his schoolboy look.
Merle Haggard was born in a converted train car.
Mark Twain called the accordion the “stomach Steinway.”
Jimi Hendrix played a comb and wax paper “kazoo” on his 1968 recording of “Crosstown Traffic.”
Vincent van Gogh’s self-portrait shows a bandaged right ear—he painted a mirror image. (He actually cut off the left one.)
Steven Tyler of Aerosmith insists that no one call him Steve.
Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac estimates that he spent $8 million on cocaine.
Vivien Leigh hated kissing Clark Gable while filming
Gone With the Wind
. She said he had bad breath.
Tom Cruise writes with his right hand, but does almost everything else left-handed.
In 1966, singer Joan Baez sued cartoonist Al Capp for parodying her in one of his comic strips. She lost.
Al Capone’s business card said that he was a used furniture dealer.
The flying trapeze was invented in late 19th-century France by Jules Léotard, namesake of the leotard.
Diameter of a standard circus ring: 42 feet…the size needed for a horse to circle comfortably at full gallop while a standing performer rides on its back.
In 1793, George Washington attended one of the first circus performances in America.
On September 13, 1916, an elephant named Mary was hanged for murder in Erwin, Tennessee. The crime: killing a circus worker.
The shout “Hey, Rube!” can be used either as a rallying call or as a cry for help for circus people involved in a fight.
Actor Burt Lancaster worked as a circus acrobat from 1932 to 1939…and did his own stunts in the 1956 movie
Trapeze
.
“Equilibristics” is an act that combines juggling and gymnastics.
The Emmett Kelly Museum in Sedan, Kansas, honors Kelly, a circus performer who created the now-famous sad-faced clown in the 1930s. He modeled it after Depression-era hoboes.
Human cannonballs aren’t blasted from the cannon with gunpowder—they’re propelled by a catapult. The flash, smoke, and boom are supplied by fireworks.
Most famous little person act: the Doll family, made up of four siblings (three sisters and a brother). The group performed with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus from the 1920s to the 1950s.
Technically, knife throwing falls under the heading of “impalement arts.”
The triangular soft part on the underside of a horse’s hoof is called a frog.
A group of hares is a down. (A group of hairs is called a wig.)
In Sweden, cockroaches are called
kackerlacka
.
The swollen, light-colored section seen on earthworms: the clitellum.
What do you call a cross between a Tibetan yak and a buffalo? A yakalo.