Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (33 page)

DUTCH THREAT

News of the massacres spread quickly through the rest of the Netherlands, and resistance became the only way the Dutch could see to throw off the Spanish invasion, even for towns that had been loyal to the empire and Catholicism. That wouldn't be easy, though. The Spaniards were marching toward Amsterdam, and the small cities along the way didn't have the armies to resist them. But evacuating thousands of citizens on short notice with winter coming wasn't possible either. Still, they couldn't just wait around to be killed. So what
could
they do?

Further complicating matters was the fact that the Netherlands didn't have any mountains or other high places to use defensively. In fact, because so much of the Dutch countryside had once been swamps, lakes, and ocean floor, 30 percent of its land is actually below sea level and most of the rest, just barely above it. But then, officials in the city of Alkmaar in the central part of the country came up with a plan so crazy it probably shouldn't have worked.

Here's how the plan went: Flood everything. Breach the levees and dikes that kept rivers and the waters of the North Sea at bay. Create a huge lake on farmland around the city, making it difficult for marching armies to reach its gates. The townspeople went to work—opening water gates, digging holes in levees, and damming rivers. Soon there was water everywhere, and it was too deep to cross on foot. Other towns did the same thing, and when the Spanish army arrived, it looked out helplessly over broad waters and stopped dead.

THE ICE BRIGADE

The Spanish then retreated back to their ships and decided to attack Amsterdam by way of its harbor instead. Time was running out, though, because winter was coming. For the Spanish, that looked like it might be a silver lining: When the cold of winter came, all of those lakes would freeze into ice highways.

The first test of that theory came shortly afterward when the ragtag Dutch fleet was frozen into the Amsterdam harbor, making the Dutch unable to confront the Spanish ships head-on. Taking that advantage, Spanish troops began marching across the ice to attack the ships first, and then they planned to head to the coastline on foot.

But as they marched gingerly across the frozen ice, they were confronted by a horrifying apparition. Wave after wave of Dutch soldiers flew across the surface of the ice with incredible speed, flitting into range just long enough to fire a musket before retreating again behind walls of ice and frozen snow. The Spanish soldiers had never seen anything like it: “It was a thing never heard of before today,” the Spanish Duke of Alva recounted with grudging admiration, “to see a body of musketeers fighting like that on a frozen sea.”

THE AGONY OF THE FEET

The Spanish didn't stay for long. Alva ordered a quick retreat…or at least as quickly as the Spanish soldiers could go with slippery shoes and frostbitten toes. The Dutch skating masters followed, pushing Alva's men back to their ships and picking off several hundred of them in the process.

Alva killed a few Dutch soldiers and finally got his hands on the real cause of their high-speed dexterity: ice skates. He sent a pair back to Spain with a message that his soldiers needed skates of their own. When he received that message, the king of Spain ordered 7,000 pairs of ice skates made, and the Spanish military started offering skating lessons.

EPILOGUE

The Spanish became decent skaters, but as defenders, the Dutch held a significant advantage. They were also able to push the Spaniards onto thin ice by cutting the frozen flooded cities at tactical spots, creating deadly traps that sent their enemies plunging deep into freezing water. The Dutch also doubled their fighting forces by teaching civilian women how to shoot and repair damaged walls (often raiding Catholic churches for statues and using them as building material to taunt and demoralize the Spanish).

The war lasted for 80 years, alternating between stalemates and horrifying brutality, but by 1648, the Netherlands and Belgium had driven out the Spanish once and for all. The Dutch continued to refine strategic flooding as a defensive tactic, adding forts along roads and bridges. The “Dutch Water Line” remained effective as a defensive strategy until the air power of World War II finally made it obsolete.

Giddy-Up!

Men's suit coats have a slit in the back because the slit kept the coats from riding up when the wearer was on a horse.

The outer coverings of major league baseballs have been made of cow leather since 1974. Before that, it was horsehide.

1,100 horses were used during the filming of
Gone With the Wind
.

Arabian horses have one less rib and one less lumbar bone than other horse breeds.

Horses lie down for only about 43 minutes a day.

Secretariat, the Kentucky Derby's fastest horse, finished the race in 1 minute, 59 seconds in 1973. That's about 37.5 mph.

An adult horse produces 10 gallons of saliva every day.

Out of the 205 bones that make up a horse's body, 80 are in its legs.

The 1¼-mile Dubai World Cup, run on a sandy, desert track, is the richest horse race ever. The winner takes home $10 million.

Let's Talk About Love

According to researchers, most people will fall in love seven times before they get married.

It's not surprising that romantic love triggers the
ventral tegmental
, the brain's pleasure center. But it also stimulates the
caudate nucleus
, which is associated with memory and learning.

The maple leaf is a symbol of lovers in China and Japan.

Love and fear cause the same physical reactions: pupil dilation, sweaty palms, and elevated heart rate.

Traditionally, if you receive 13 roses, it means that the flowers have come from a secret admirer.

One poll showed that Americans believe Democrats are better lovers than Republicans.

The technical term for being obsessively infatuated with another person is “limerance.”

Male mice sing love calls to females, but don't expect to hear them, unless you record them and reduce the pitch. The songs of mousy love are in tones too high for humans to hear.

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LOVELY QUOTES

“One is very crazy when in love.”

—Sigmund Freud

“Love is the net where hearts are caught like fish.”

—Muhammad Ali

“The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.”

—Anaïs Nin

“We had a lot in common. I loved him and he loved him.”

—Shelley Winters

Gouda Nuff!

There are about 400 varieties of cheese.

The world's worst-smelling cheese is French Vieux Boulogne—supposedly, it smells like a barnyard.

Italy has a thriving black market for an illegal cheese that contains live maggots, the larva of the “cheese fly” (
Pophilia casei
). The traditional Sardinian sheep's milk cheese called
casu marzu
uses the larvae for fermentation. Some people try to remove the larvae before eating it; others don't. Either way, if the maggots are not alive when you buy it, the cheese is considered to be spoiled.

Cheddar cheese came from a village of the same name in Somerset, England. It's naturally white, but often artificially colored orange, using an extract of the annatto fruit.

What does the maggoty cheese taste like? It has an ammonia flavor that can linger as an aftertaste for several hours. Also, when disturbed, the maggots can propel themselves six inches, so it's traditional to cover your eyes.

Goat and cow cheeses are the most common, but there are also horse, llama, zebra, buffalo, camel, reindeer, donkey, and yak cheeses.

He may or may not have been the first person to put a slice of cheese on top of a hamburger, but the trademark name “cheeseburger” was issued in 1935 to Louis Ballast of the Humpty Dumpty Barrel Drive-In in Denver, Colorado.

The holes in Swiss cheese are called “eyes.”

For a few months in 1942, the only type of cheese that could be sold legally in the United States was American cheese. But after objections by cheese lovers and America's cheese-making World War II allies (the British), the rule was rescinded.

Great (and Not-So-Great) Lakes

Canada has about two million lakes—more than 60 percent of the world's total.

Of the world's five biggest lakes, three are Great Lakes. In order: Caspian Sea (Middle East), Lake Superior, Lake Victoria (Africa), Lake Huron, and Lake Michigan.

HOMES is the acronym that will help you remember the Great Lakes: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior.

Michigan borders every Great Lake except Lake Ontario. Any spot in the state is within 85 miles of one of the lakes.

Lake Tahoe isn't huge, but it is deep—it holds enough water to cover all of California with 14 inches of water.

Florida's Okeechobee Lake is about half the size of Rhode Island…but only nine feet deep.

On November 20, 1980, Louisiana's Lake Peigneur suddenly disappeared. A Texaco crew drilling for oil on the lake's bottom struck a salt mine a quarter-mile below, and in just four hours, a whirlpool sucked the entire 1,300-acre lake into the ground. Luckily, no lives were lost, and the lake eventually refilled.

Maryland has no natural lakes. What it has comes from digging and damming.

The world's oldest lake, about 30 million years old, is Lake Baikal in Siberia.

There are no permanent lakes in Saudi Arabia.

Some volcanic lakes—like Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines—have water so acidic from escaping gases that it can burn through human flesh in minutes.

Mousetrap

Mice have had a remarkable career as pests. In fact, they are so successful that, throughout history, people have put an awful lot of effort into keeping them out of their homes, food stores, and businesses. That's tough, though—mice can flatten out their bodies and slide through cracks as thin as ⅜ of an inch, meaning that if a pencil can roll under a door, so can a mouse.

Cats and some dogs make good mousetraps, but to some people, having cats and dogs is almost as bad as infestation by mice. So it's not surprising that thousands of mouse-catching contraptions have been invented over the years. What
is
surprising, though, is that, for hundreds of years, most didn't work very well. They were too complicated, too bulky, and too easy for the rodents to escape from.

HOOKER TRAP

That all changed in 1894 when a brand-new mousetrap came out of Abington, Illinois, patented by a man named William Chauncey Hooker. The design was simple, effective, cheap to manufacture, and—as its name “Out O' Sight” implied (complete with the face of a mouse peeking out from the middle O)—easy to hide. Although revolutionary at the time, the wood-and-wire, spring-snap trap quickly became the leading design, and today it's the most recognizable one.

Hooker and his mousetraps were a huge success. But they might have done even better if it weren't for an Englishman who not only stole Hooker's design, but the credit for it as well.

THE WILY ENGLISHMAN

Even today, if you look up the inventor of the mousetrap, you may run across the name of James Henry Atkinson from Leeds, Yorkshire. A self-described “ironmonger,” the wannabe inventor had received patents for various contraptions before, but his mousetrap application to the British Patent Office in 1898 was unique: the trap was small, elegant, simple, cheap to manufacture, and easy to hide.

He called it the “Little Nipper,” and it was a near-perfect copy of the design Hooker had patented three years earlier. “It is quite likely that Atkinson had seen the Hooker trap in the shops or in advertisements,” admitted British historical writer Stephen Dulkin. Back then, this sort of infringement happened a lot because the British Patent Office didn't begin systematically researching whether a claimed invention had been done before until 1905.

Over the years, other mousetraps were invented besides Hooker's. Some are arguably better than one that kills mice by breaking their spines with a brutal snap of metal. But although some have gained a little bit of traction, the Hooker trap continues to rule the mousetrap kingdom.

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JON STEWART SEZ

“If you don't stick to your values when they're being tested, they're not values: they're hobbies.”

“Fatherhood is great because you can ruin someone from scratch.”

“I have complete faith in the continued absurdity of whatever's going on.”

“You wonder sometimes how our government puts on its pants in the morning.”

“I always knew I shouldn't have said that.”

America's Old Roads

America's first transportation network was built about 2,500 years ago. Native Americans established land and river routes by 500 BC, allowing for travel, migration, and trade among communities throughout North and South America.