Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (14 page)

Ever hear the phrase “as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar”? The actual rock is made of gray limestone…and is not so solid. It's riddled with at least 180 caves.

The world's largest cave system, complete with 400 miles of known passageways, is the aptly named Mammoth Cave; most of it lies under Edmonson County, Kentucky.

Why is the Bottomless Pit in New Mexico's Carlsbad Cavern called that? Because stones tossed in it never made a sound. Turns out, though, that it's only 140 feet deep and lined with very soft dirt.

School Daze

In the American colonies, only about one in ten boys finished school. The rest became apprentices or went directly to work.

In 1852 Massachusetts became the first state to introduce compulsory education, requiring that all children from ages 8 to 14 attend school for at least three months a year. By 1918, all American states had a compulsory education law on the books.

President Andrew Jackson was an elementary school dropout who believed that the world was flat.

Thomas Edison didn't get along with school officials and was homeschooled by his mother. Although his education was superior in many ways—self-directed and centered around his own curiosities—his grammar and spelling were atrocious throughout his life.

College graduates earn about $450,000 more over a lifetime than people who have only a high school diploma.

The average college student also carries about $27,253 in student loan debt.

The Aztecs Said It First

The Aztecs spoke a language called Nahuatl, and it's still spoken today by 1.5 million people who live in central Mexico. Here are some of the words that English speakers “borrowed” from them:

Avocado:
from
āhuacatl
(“testicle”)

Cocoa/cacao:
cacahuatl
(“cacao plant”)

Chicle:
tzictli
(“sticky stuff”)

Chili:
xilli
(“hot pepper”)

Chocolate:
xocolātl
(“bitter water”)

Coyote:
cóyotl
, (“trickster”)

Mesquite:
mizquitl
(“mesquite shrub”)

Mescal:
metl ixcalli
(“oven-cooked agave,” which describes how you get the juice to ferment)

Peyote:
peyōtl
(“caterpillar,” from the cactus's fuzzy button)

Quetzal:
quetzalli
(“standing brilliant tail feather”)

Shack:
xahcalli
(“wooden hut”)

Tamale:
tamalli
(“food of meat and corn”)

Tomato:
tomatl
(“swelling fruit”)

American Bison Get Buffaloed

What North Americans usually call a buffalo is actually a bison. The only places on earth you'll find wild buffalo are in Africa and Asia.

They're big, but bison can run as fast as 40 mph.

Many bison snore.

Canada's largest park, the Wood Buffalo National Park in Alberta and the Northwest Territories, is bigger than Switzerland. Wood buffalo are a subspecies of the plains bison found in the United States, but the Canadian versions are bigger and heavier.

“Buffalo Bill” Cody killed more than 4,000 buffalo (well, bison) in two years…back when people thought that was something to brag about.

In the 1860s, the Kansas Pacific Railroad often allowed passengers to shoot at bison.

The Canadian city of Regina, Saskatchewan, was originally called “Pile o' Bones” after a large bison burial ground that was found there.

You can tell a bison is irritated by looking at his tail: In general, if the tail is hanging and relaxed, the beast is relaxed, too. The stiffer and higher the tail, the more angry the bison.

Bison and cattle are closely related. You can crossbreed the two if you mate a domestic bull with a bison cow. The resulting calves are a “beefalo” hybrid with fertile females and mostly sterile males.

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In the American West, turkeys were moved like cattle, in “drives” of up to a thousand birds.

The First Woman to…

…climb Mount Everest:
Junko Tabei (1975).

…be elected to a U.S. political office:
Susanna Salter became mayor of Argonia, Kansas, in 1887. Women in Kansas had won the right to vote earlier that year.

…be elected to the U.S. Congress
: Jeannette Rankin, (1916). Rankin was a lifelong pacifist, was one of 50 representatives who voted against entering World War I, and was the only one to vote against entering World War II, declaring, “As a woman, I can't go to war and I refuse to send anyone else.”

…earn a U.S. pilot's license:
Harriet Quimby (1911).

…die as a pilot in a plane crash:
Harriet Quimby (July 1912).

…fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean:
Amelia Earhart (1932). She equaled Charles Lindbergh's flight exactly five years after him.

…make the cover of
BusinessWeek
magazine:
Brownie Wise (1954). Wise invented the home-party selling model for Tupperware; it's since been copied by Mary Kay Cosmetics and many other businesses.

…be nominated for United States president:
Victoria Woodhull, nominated by the Equal Rights Party (1871).

…weightlift four times her body weight:
Carrie Boudreau, 490 pounds (1995).

…argue a case before the Supreme Court:
Belva Lockwood (1879).

…earn more than $100,000 in a single year as a pro athlete:
Billie Jean King (1971).

…swim the English Channel:
Gertrude Ederle (1926). She made it in 14 hours, 31 minutes—two hours faster than the male record at the time.

Fear Factor

“We humans fear the beast within the wolf because we do not understand the beast within ourselves.”

—Gerald Hausman

“If you talk to the animals they will talk with you and you will know each other. If you do not talk to them, you will not know them, and what you do not know, you will fear. What one fears one destroys.”

—Chief Dan George

“Suspicion, the offspring of fear, is eminently characteristic of most wild animals. Courage and timidity are extremely variable qualities in the individuals of the same species, as is plainly seen in our dogs.”

—Charles Darwin

“There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.”

—Andre Gide

“The wolf that one hears is worse than the orc that one fears.”

—J. R. R. Tolkien,
The Fellowship of the Ring

“Fear helps me from making mistakes, but I [still] make lot of mistakes.”

—Steve Irwin

“A cat bitten once by a snake dreads even rope.”

—Arab proverb

“There is no living thing that is not afraid when it faces danger. True courage is facing danger when you are afraid.”

—L. Frank Baum,
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

“I had a linguistics professor who said that it's man's ability to use language that makes him the dominant species on the planet. That may be. But there's another thing that separates us from animals. We're not afraid of vacuum cleaners.”

—Jeff Stilson

“Perhaps the wilderness we fear is the pause within our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace. Wilderness lives by this same grace.”

—Terry Tempest Williams

Trick or Treat?

Not all things that happened on October 31 were spooky. Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on a church door, beginning the Reformation in 1517. Nevada became the 36th state in 1864. The Lincoln Highway, the first cross-country route in America, officially opened in 1913. The Battle of Britain ended in 1940. And the global population reached 7 billion in 2011.

Americans spend more than $1.5 billion on Halloween costumes each year.

In the ninth century, the Catholic Church established All Saints' Day on November 1. The church service was called
Allhallowmas
, so the ghostly night before became known as
All Hallow's e'en
.

Trick-or-treating likely came from the ninth-century custom of “souling.” Christian beggars went door to door, promising to pray for dead relatives if the residents gave them a “soul cake.”

Jack-o'-lanterns were originally meant to represent souls in purgatory. In Ireland and Scotland, they were made of turnips.

Georgia On My Mind

Georgia was named after King George II of England, who signed the charter papers for the new colony.

Edward Teach, the pirate known as Blackbeard, is said to have made his home on Georgia's Blackbeard Island.

The World of Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta (the birthplace of the fizzy beverage) gives visitors a chance to taste soft drinks from all over the world.

In 2010 Georgia state legislators claimed that the border drawn between it and Tennessee was accidentally a mile farther south than intended and proposed that the boundary be shifted…which, during a bad drought, would've allowed them to claim water from the Tennessee River. For the 10th time since 1887, Tennessee said no.

James Pierpont, who wrote “Jingle Bells,” hailed from Savannah…a place that almost never gets any snow.

The first newspaper published in a Native American language was the Cherokee
Phoenix
. It first appeared in New Echota, Georgia, in 1828.

Georgia was the last state to be allowed back into the United States after the Civil War; it didn't return officially until 1870.

In 1842 Georgia's Dr. Crawford W. Long was the first to successfully use ether as an anesthetic. He put a patient to sleep, and then painlessly removed a tumor from the man's neck.

More than 3,000 unknown Confederate soldiers are buried in Atlanta's Oakland Cemetery. The mass grave is marked by a marble sculpture of a dying lion lying on a Confederate flag.

The Okefenokee Swamp near the Florida border has very little solid ground, so it makes sense that it got its name from a Native American word meaning “trembling earth.”

Is Nose Mucus Phlegm? No, It's Snot

Mucus in your nose catches harmful dust, fungi, viruses, and bacteria before they can get to your lungs.

The body generates about a quart of mucus a day.

Mucus glands also add protective mucus to your stomach, lungs, eyes, ears, and urogenital systems.

In animals, mucus protects the slimy skins of amphibians, the gills in fish, and the bodies of snails and slugs.

Almost all of the nasal mucus your body produces gets swallowed, mostly unconsciously.

What's
rhinorrhea
? The medical term for a runny nose.

“Mucus” covers about everything slimy in your body, but in the respiratory tract, it's often called “phlegm.”

Yellow or green mucus usually means a bacterial infection, but too much clear, watery mucus can be a sign of virus infection or allergies.

Human tears have three layers: an oily layer, a liquid layer, and a mucus layer.

Phlegm keeps your lungs from drying out and catches pollutants that your nose misses. It even fights pollutants, which is why smokers' bodies produce more phlegm and the coughs to expel it.

The German word for mucus is
nasenschleim
(“nose slime”).

As a young man, Steve Jobs followed a vegetarian, “mucus-free” diet, in which he avoided foods that supposedly contained or stimulated mucus. He believed doing so would mean he'd rarely have to bathe. (His coworkers disagreed.)

All About Peanut Butter

The earliest peanut butter patent went to Marcellus Edson of Montreal, Canada, in 1884. But centuries before, the Aztecs used a peanut paste made from mashing peanuts.

One acre of peanuts produces enough peanut butter for 30,000 sandwiches.

There are approximately 1,080 peanuts in a 24-ounce jar of peanut butter.

The JIF plant in Lexington, Kentucky, is the world's largest peanut butter factory, squeezing out 190 million pounds of the stuff every year. That's enough to coat 55 football fields one foot thick.

The average American eats 3.3 pounds of peanut butter per year.

Peanut butter really is good for removing chewing gum from your hair.

In the Netherlands, peanut butter is called
pindakaas
(“peanut cheese”).

One study says that peanut butter is the second most recognizable scent to Americans. (Coffee came in first.)

Periscope Up

Cornelius Drebbel built the first submarine in 1620 for England's Duke of Buckingham. It was propelled by oars.