Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (23 page)
Read Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers' Institute
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Migration route (mammal):
The California gray whale travels up to 10,000 miles every yearâfrom its summer feeding grounds along Alaska's coast to winter breeding grounds off Mexico's Baja California peninsula.
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Life span (land animal):
The giant tortoise. Captain James Cook gave the oldest tortoise on record to the Tongan royal family in 1777. It died in 1965 at 188 years old.
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Life span (birds):
The Laysan albatross can live for 42 years.
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Time without water:
Giraffes can go several months without a drink.
It takes about 12 pounds of sugar beets to make one pound of sugar.
In 1890 the average American consumed five pounds of sugar per year. Today, it's about 140 pounds.
The sole ingredient of both rock candy and cotton candy: pure sugar, sometimes with coloring.
It takes three feet of sugarcane to fill a single-serving sugar packet.
Sugarcane not only provides 78 percent of the world's sugar supply, but it's also the source of a fiber called
bagasse
that's used in wallboard, plastics, and heating fuel.
A two-pound bag of sugar contains about 5 million individual grains.
The first person to add sugar to gum was a dentist: William Finley Semple, in 1869.
In 1893 sugar producers called in a few favors and got the U.S. military to help them overthrow Lili'uokalani, the last queen of Hawaii.
Brown sugar isn't a healthier, more natural, or less refined sugar. It's just white sugar with a little molasses mixed in.
Caterpillars hardly ever sleep. It gets in the way of their eating, which is how they spend nearly every minute of their active life.
Caterpillars have mouths, but moths and butterflies don't. (They have a proboscis for sniffing up moisture instead.)
Moths don't eat clothesâtheir caterpillars do.
It takes about 2,000 to 3,000 silkworm cocoons to make a pound of silk. The caterpillars inside are usually killed.
A silkworm wraps itself in one long thread of silk from its salivary glands. That thread can measure a mile long.
Caterpillar feces is a major find for the fungus grower ants of Central and South America. They gather the droppings to grow mushrooms in huge underground chambers.
There are more than 1,000 species of Eupithecia caterpillars worldwide, and all were thought to be vegetarians. That was until scientists took a good look at the species in Hawaii and discovered that 15 of them gobble down other bugsâ¦including other Eupithecia caterpillars.
A caterpillar has three times as many muscles as a human: about 2,000 to a human's 650.
“Peyote” came from the Aztec word
peyutl
. That means “caterpillar's cocoon,” which may refer to the woolly white tufts on a cactus.
Caterpillar
means “hairy cat” in Old French.
Silkworms, domesticated at least 5,000 years ago, no longer occur in the wild. Over the years, their moths have lost the ability to fly and have become dependent on humans.
The small town of Circle, Alaska, got its name from gold miners, who christened the town in 1893 and believed that they sat squarely on the Arctic Circle. They were wrong, thoughâthe circle that inspired the name lies 50 miles north.
The ring for a sumo match consists of a 15-foot circle made of rice-straw bales. The goal is to stay on your feet and inside the circle while muscling the other wrestler down or out.
The oldest existing letter in the English alphabet is O.
If you drew a circle around the equator and another around the poles, the equatorial circle would be 68 miles larger.
The classic monk haircutâwhich involves shaving the top of the head so that a near-perfect halo of hair encircles the cleared areaâis called a “tonsure.” It's long been a symbol of humilityâ¦or sometimes humiliation. In the ancient Byzantine empire, deposed kings and their sons were tonsured, and, as if a bad haircut weren't enough, castrated.
Circuses are usually performed in one, two, or three rings because the word
circus
meant “circle” in Latin.
The term “eke name” in early English meant “additional name.” It eventually morphed into “nickname.”
In 1896 Leo Hirshfield named his chewy chocolate rolls after his daughter, whose nickname was “Tootsie.”
Writer Thomas Lanier “Tennessee” Williams wasn't from Tennessee. He was born in Mississippi, but he chose “Tennessee” as a nickname because his father was from there.
Q: Who nicknamed Conan O'Brien “Coco”? A: Tom Hanks.
As a child, Brazilian soccer player Edson Arantes do Nacimento hated being called by the nickname Pelé.
Virginia Woolf's childhood nickname was “Goat” because, her brothers claimed, she was eccentric and “prone to accidents.”
World War I ace the Red Baron wasn't really a baron. Manfred von Richthofen was called that only by his enemies. The Germans called him
Der Rote Kampfflieger
(“the Red Battle Flyer”).
Albert Einstein was so slow to learn to talk that his family's maid called him “the dopey one.”
When nerdy Tiger Woods played on Stanford University's golf team, he picked up a new nickname: “Urkel,” after the accordion-playing nerd on TV's
Family Matters
.
Ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope chose to live on the streets and ignore societal norms (like hygiene and good manners), so people nicknamed him “the Dog.” In Greek,
kunikos
means “doglike,” and his followers became known as “cynics.”
Charles Dickens nicknamed his wife “Dearest Darling Pig.”
Someone invented tennis in France, during the 12th century. It was called
jeu de paume
, or “game of the palm,” because you played it like handball. Later, when racquets were added, the game got a new name:
tenetz
(“get and hold”).
Although the French invented tennis, the British refined it into the game we know today.
According to the Oxford Dictionary, the term “love” (meaning zero points) is probably short for “to play for love of the game” instead of for a reward.
An official tennis rule: “The racquets must not provide any kind of communication, instruction, or advice to the player during the match.”
Between 1908 and 1960, tennis rules said that a server had to keep one foot on the ground at all times.
Tennis ball felt is usually made of wool.
When dropped onto concrete from a height of 100 feet a regulation tennis ball must bounce 53 to 58 inches.
Tennis balls are fuzzy to slow down the game. The fuzz increases wind resistance, reduces bounce, and grips the racquet strings slightly for ball control.
Red wine has about 25 calories per ounce.
One ton of grapes will make 160 gallons of wine.
California's first winemakers were Spanish missionaries.
French chemist Louis Pasteur first developed pasteurization to preserve wine.
Historians say that the
Mayflower
had a sweet, sticky smell from transporting wine.
It can take up to two years to remove all the solid impurities (grape skins, dead yeast cells, and other debris) from wine. This step, called “racking,” consists of draining out the gunk at the bottom of the barrel every now and again.
What's a vineroon? It's another name for a winemaker.
A standard oak barrel holds enough wine to fill about 300 bottles.
Stomping grapes for wine may
look
fun, but it was exhausting and could be dangerous. Grape skins are slippery, and the juice gives off carbon dioxide. Grape stompers sometimes died of asphyxiationâ¦or fell and drowned.
Food on the space station comes from plastic or foil packages and requires no cooking. That saves energy, which comes from solar panels.
Spacecraft from Earth sometimes bring fresh fruit and vegetables.
Urine is collected, purified, and recycled into drinking water.
Solid waste is collected in individual plastic bags and stored for transfer back to Earth. This is an improvement over previous space stations where hundreds of bags of excrement were jettisoned into space and still orbit Earth to this day.
The International Space Station has wi-fi.
Crews are typically made up of six members, each staying about six months, with arrival and departure times staggered.
Crews bathe with wet wipes, a water jet, rinse-less shampoo, and soap from a toothpastelike tube. Toothpaste is edible to save water.
Sleeping quarters have to be well-ventilated with fans or else a bubble of carbon dioxide forms around the sleeper's head, causing oxygen deprivation.
Your feet contain about a quarter of the bones in your body.
Scientists have found 350,000-year-old fossilized human footprints.
Saint Servatus is the patron saint of people suffering from foot injuries. (He's also the guy who protects us from rats.)
Aristotle believed that going barefoot diminished the libido.
That numbness when your foot goes to sleep is called “obdormition.”
On average, your feet hit the floor 7,000 times a day.
Paris Hilton's feet are so big (size 11) that she has designers custom-make her shoes.
What is “epidermophytosis”? That's the technical name for athlete's foot.
Chocolate comes from the cacao tree,
Theobroma cacao
. It's a fitting name because
theobroma
comes from the Latin words for “food of the gods.”
Mayan emperors were often buried with jars of chocolate. The average American consumes approximately 11.7 pounds of chocolate each year, but only 29 percent choose dark chocolate over milk.
Chocolate comes from the ivory-colored seeds of the cocoa tree's fruit. Each melonlike fruit contains 20 to 50 seeds. About 400 seeds are required to make a pound of chocolate.
In 1974 a Pepperidge Farm employee in a Downington, Pennsylvania, plant died after falling into a vat of chocolate. His name: Robert C. Hershey.
The chemical theobromine is what makes chocolate fatal to petsâmany animals don't metabolize it well. Generally, the darker the chocolate, the more theobromine.
People who are depressed eat about 55 percent more chocolate than people who aren't.
The Mars Candy Company is not named for the planet, but for its founder, Frank Mars.
Cocoa butter liquefies at a temperature slightly below 98.6°F, which is why it melts in your pocket. M&Ms were invented to provide sugar shells that had a higher melting temperature.
The Aztecs discovered and named
chocolatl
, but they used it as a beverage for its feel-good effects, not its flavor. In fact,
chocolatl
meant “bitter water.”
British candy maker Cadbury made the world's first heart-shaped box of chocolates in 1861.
White chocolate has all the fat and sugar of chocolate, but none of the healthy flavonoidsâ¦and no solid cocoa. It does contain cocoa butter, though.
In 2004 interviewers asked British office workers if they would reveal their computer passwords in exchange for a chocolate barâ71 percent said they would.
Cocoa usually starts losing flavor after about six months.
Saint Sebastian is the patron saint of unruly children.
According to Crayola, American children between the ages of two and eight spend 28 minutes a day coloring.
Worldwide, the average child receives $32 worth of toys per year. The average American kid: $328.
Two out of three people admit that they had imaginary friends when they were little.
Unintentional consequence of those “this is your brain on drugs” commercials: some young kids refused to eat fried eggs, fearing that they were laced with drugs.
“You have 'em, I'll amuse 'em.” That's what Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) said about being a parent. He never had any kids of his own.
Thomas Edison burned down his father's barn when he was six, “just to see what it would do.”
Each year, the average American child eats more than 15 pounds of cold cereal.
One in 200 kids is a vegetarian.
70 percent of American daycare centers use TV to keep the kids entertained.
On average, American parents spend twice as much time in their cars as with their kids.
One in three British kids says their mum prefers the cat to their dad.