Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (12 page)

•
  
Between 1955 and 2001,
MAD
ran no real ads. They ran plenty of parody ads, though, viciously mocking nearly every product you could name.

•
  
MAD
inspired so many imitators that founder/publisher Bill Gaines had a voodoo doll for each competitor labeled with a pin that was removed only when the imitator stopped publishing. Some of mostly short-lived imitators included
Cracked, Sick, Nuts!, Crazy, Whack, Riot, Flip
, and
Madhouse
. By the time of Gaines's death in 1992, only one pin remained, representing
Cracked
, founded in 1958. It stopped publishing in 2007, but still exists as a popular Web site.

•
  
Artist Sergio Aragones has contributed more than 12,000 wordless gags running in the margins and other blank spaces of the magazine. Once called “the world's fastest cartoonist,” Aragones's art has appeared in every issue since 1963, except one in 1964 when his drawings were lost in the mail.

*
  
*
  
*

THAT'S A LOT OF BOOKS!

The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world. It has more than 638 miles of shelf space to hold its 155 million items. It holds 35 million books and other print materials, 68 million manuscripts, 6.5 million pieces of sheet music, 3.4 million recordings, 13.6 million photographs, 5.4 million maps, and 100,000 comic books. Only about half of the Library of Congress's collection is in English. The rest includes materials in 470 languages.

The Writer's Desk

Mark Twain was the first author to submit a typewritten manuscript to a publisher. The book was
Life on the Mississippi
in 1883. Twain, who loved new gadgets, was also one of the first owners of a typewriter.

During the 33 years that author Anthony Trollope worked for the British post office, he wrote several novels by rising early and writing 1,000 words before work. Within postal circles, he's best known as the guy who invented the street-corner mailbox.

In all of his writings, Shakespeare mentioned the Americas only once, in
The Comedy of Errors
.

Before becoming a world-famous author, Kurt Vonnegut wrote press releases for General Electric.

Author Alissa Rosenbaum is better known as Ayn Rand.

Children's author Margaret Wise Brown—who wrote
Goodnight Moon, The Runaway Bunny
, and
The Bunny's Birthday
—loved to hunt rabbits. She collected their feet as trophies.

First-published authors range in age from four (Dorothy Straight, author of
How the World Began)
to 102 (Alice Pollock, author of
Portrait of My Victorian Youth)
.

Most historians now believe that Aesop, the Greek slave and author of fables, probably never existed.

Author Roald Dahl was married for 30 years to actress Patricia Neal.

Spy novel writer Ian Fleming was also a birdwatcher. He named his most famous character after a bird-guide author, ornithologist James Bond.

*
  
*
  
*

In 1994
Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg appeared as costumed extras in the Washington Opera's performance of
Ariadne auf Naxos
by Richard Strauss.

Police & Thank You

On average, more fast-food workers are murdered on the job than are police officers.

U.S. police officers are exempt from federal jury duty.

TV cops shoot their guns several times an hour, but the average for a real cop is once for every nine years of service.

New York City's first female police officers—dubbed “police matrons”—went to work in 1891.

The first U.S. city to use police cars was Akron, Ohio, in 1899. The cars were electric wagons that could go 16 mph and cover 30 miles before they needed to be recharged.

America's most successful police dog was Trepp, a Florida golden retriever, with more than 100 arrests to his credit.

Traffic police in South Korea are required by law to report all the bribes they receive.

40 percent of Americans believe police shows are “fairly accurate.” Only 14 percent of real police officers agree.

The average IQ of police officers is 104…just a little above the average of 100.

Uncle John's Page of Lists

4 WORDS THAT READ THE SAME UPSIDE DOWN

1.
Mow

2.
iPod!

3.
SOS

4.
Suns

4 HOLES IN ONE

1.
Youngest: Jake Paine, 3 years old, 65 yards

2.
Oldest: Harold Stilson, 101 years old, 108 yards

3.
Longest: Robert Mitera, 444 yards

4.
Most: Norman Manley, 59

3 BEST-SELLING ICE CREAM FLAVORS

1.
Vanilla

2.
Chocolate

3.
Butter pecan

TOP 5 U.S. BOY BABY NAMES, 2012

1.
Jacob

2.
Mason

3.
Ethan

4.
Noah

5.
William

TOP 5 U.S. BOY BABY NAMES, 1912

1.
John

2.
William

3.
James

4.
Robert

5.
Joseph

6 FAMOUS REDHEADS

1.
Genghis Khan

2.
Christopher Columbus

3.
Elizabeth I

4.
Thomas Jefferson

5.
Vladimir Lenin

6.
Malcolm X

TOP 5 U.S. GIRL BABY NAMES, 2012

1.
Sophia

2.
Emma

3.
Isabella

4.
Olivia

5.
Ava

TOP 5 U.S. GIRL BABY NAMES, 1912

1.
Mary

2.
Helen

3.
Dorothy

4.
Margaret

5.
Ruth

6 ACCIDENTAL INVENTIONS

1.
Velcro

2.
The Slinky

3.
Microwave ovens

4.
Superglue

5.
Teflon

6.
X-rays

State Songs

OKLAHOMA:
When the state government needed a state song, it settled on an obvious choice: “Oklahoma!” from the musical
Oklahoma
.

FLORIDA:
Florida's state song is “Old Folks at Home” by Stephen Foster, but it's not because of all the retired people who live there. The song's famous first line mentions a major waterway that runs through the state: “Way down upon the S'wanee River…” (The river's name is technically spelled “Suwannee.”)

The problem with “S'wannee River” was that Foster wrote it for a 19th-century minstrel show, and the original lyrics—complete with ethnic slurs—were sung in a phony black dialect about an African American longing to go back to the plantation where he had been “happily” enslaved. That's how the song was sung during state functions until the 1970s, when embarrassed singers started changing the lyrics to make them less offensive. In 2008 the state legislature finally made the lyric changes official.

KENTUCKY:
Another Stephen Foster tune that became a state song was “My Old Kentucky Home,” and it suffered from similar racial issues. In 1986 Kentucky legislators voted to revise “darkies,” the most objectionable word in the lyrics, to “people.”

MARYLAND:
The state's official song, “Maryland, My Maryland,” is sung to the tune of “O Tannenbaum.”

ARKANSAS:
Arkansas claims two state songs, one state anthem, and one state historical song, “The Arkansas Traveler,” written in the mid-1800s by Colonel Sanford Faulkner. In the 20th century, a state committee rewrote the lyrics to make them less offensive: the original was about a bumpkin fiddle player who wouldn't fix his leaky roof. Few people know either set of lyrics, but many know the melody—it's the kids' song “I'm Bringing Home a Baby Bumblebee.”

LOUISIANA:
One of Louisiana's official state songs is “Give Me Louisiana.” The other is “You Are My Sunshine,” a song long associated with Governor Jimmie Davis, who led the state from 1944 to 1948 and again from 1960 to 1964. Also a popular singer, Davis is the only governor of any state who has been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. And he may be the only governor-songwriter who took credit for a song he didn't actually write. Depending on who's telling the story, Davis either bought the music rights for $35 or just plain stole the uncopyrighted song from Oliver Hood (the mandolin player who wrote it) and credited himself as the songwriter.

GEORGIA:
Hoagy Carmichael's “Georgia on My Mind” makes sense as Georgia's state song…though the lyrics have always been open to interpretation and could be about the state or about a woman by that name. In 1979, almost 20 years after Georgia native Ray Charles made the song famous, the state legislature claimed it as its own, and Charles performed it on the legislative floor.

*
  
*
  
*

WHY BLUE FOR BOYS?

A century ago, babies of both genders wore white most often. Otherwise, though, pink symbolized boys and blue (long associated with the Virgin Mary) girls. After World War I, America's clothing industry began pushing those gender-specific colors, perhaps to make handing down baby clothes more complicated than buying new ones. Said a trade publication in 1918, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”

But then in the 1940s, the fashion industry abruptly reversed course and changed that tradition, in part because it was pushing pink as a way for women to reclaim their femininity as they moved out of wartime factories and fields. From then on, blue became a “boy” color and pink a “girl” color.

The Great 88

88 is considered a doubly lucky number in China because the Mandarin word for eight sounds like the word for “wealth.”

The International Astronomical Union recognizes 88 constellations in the sky.

Oldsmobile began using the Rocket 88 high-compression engine in 1949, giving the brand a cooler image. Ike Turner even recorded a rock tribute to the engine in 1951: “Rocket 88.”

88 is the only number between 11 and 101 that reads the same forward, backward, upside-down, in the mirror…and even in the mirror upside-down.

Eighty-Eight is the name of a town in Kentucky, named when the postmaster checked his pocket change and found 88¢.

88,000 barrels of oil per hour is the maximum capacity of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.

88 years is the amount of time that White Sox fans had to wait between winning the World Series in 1916 and 2004.

You Dirty Louse!

Anteaters, armadillos, bats, and platypuses are the only land mammals that don't get lice.

Westerners mostly consider lice to be more an annoyance than a danger, but the bugs carry lots of diseases, including trench fever, relapsing fever, and typhus, which have killed millions around the world. One victim of lice-passed typhus was diarist Anne Frank, who picked up the disease in a crowded concentration camp and died in 1945.

There are about 3,000 species of lice in the world.

A “nitpicker” was originally somebody who picked nits (the eggs of head lice) from people's hair.

People get three kinds of lice: head, body, and pubic. Body lice evolved from head lice after humans lost their lush body hair about 107,000 years ago.

Body lice live in clothing—primarily in the seams—and commute onto the skin mostly to feed. That's why one nickname for body lice is “seam squirrels.”

The British military originally coined the nickname “cooties” from
kutu
, the Polynesian word for pubic lice.

One type of specialized lice is
Haematomyzus
, a sort of industrial-strength louse that infects only elephants and warthogs. What makes this louse special is that it has a long, drill-like snout that can penetrate thick hides.

Lice that feed on mammals generally eat blood; lice that feed on birds eat dead skin and feathers.

Human lice must feed every 24 hours or they will starve to death.

The Building with the Most Stories

Before computers, libraries often had a room where patrons could use typewriters. That's how Ray Bradbury wrote
Fahrenheit 451
—at the UCLA library on a typewriter he rented for 20¢ an hour.