Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (36 page)

In the early 1920s, Henry Ford was disturbed by how much scrap wood was being thrown out from his factories. So he convinced Edward Kingsford, his cousin-in-law, to use it to make charcoal briquettes. The Kingsford Company is still in business.

Lincoln Logs are among the few toys still sold whose wood hasn't been replaced with plastic. Not that they didn't try—from 1970 until 1990, the company sold an all-plastic version, but backed down after getting complaints.

Pound for pound, wood is stronger than steel.

Jenga game pieces are made of alder wood.

The inner layer of pine bark (called the “cambium”) is edible.

Many of the trees in Sequoia National Park are more than 2,000 years old.

A wood louse is just another name for a pill bug, doodlebug, or roly-poly.

In 2007 American Kevin Shelley cracked 46 wooden toilet seats over his head in one minute and set a world record.

Every year in the U.S., more trees are planted than are cut down.

More than 96 percent of the old-growth redwoods in California were logged from 1850 to 2000.

Technically, a cord of wood occupies 128 cubic feet. It takes that much wood to make about 1,000 copies of this book.

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CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?

Harry Houdini died on Halloween in 1926. In the following years, his wife Bess held Halloween séances based on his promise to contact her from “the other side.” (He never did.)

You Call That Cabbage?

CORN BY ANY OTHER NAME…

People have been messing with plants since the invention of agriculture, changing them dramatically from their original form. Wild corn, for example, domesticated since prehistory, now has at least nine different subspecies, from sweet corn to flour corn, each with different uses based on their levels of sweetness and starch. But they're still all recognizable as corn.

CULTIVATING CABBAGE

Wild cabbage is a very specialized plant. It grows only on limestone sea cliffs like the chalk cliffs of Dover, England, and is found only on the coasts of the English Channel and the Mediterranean. And even in those places, it was picky and didn't like competition from other plants.

A few millennia ago, though, people noticed how nutritious the plant was and how well it grew in and stored for all seasons, which would help to stave off starvation in winter. So farmers began digging up the cabbages near the edges of the chalk cliffs and moving them to other soils, methodically breeding plants that could grow in different climates and environments. Having noticed that cabbages had several edible parts, each with different textures and flavors, farmers began selecting plants that had bigger and better amounts of their favorite edible part.

After many seasons of artificial selection, the farmers' efforts paid off and produced plants that were so different from each other it was hard to recognize that they had come from the same plant. For example, farmers selecting plants for large bud size produced Brussels sprouts. Selecting for many flower heads produced broccoli. Selecting leafy growth gave us kale; for terminal buds, what we recognize as cabbage; and so on to include cauliflower, collard greens, broccoflower, kohlrabi, savoy, and Chinese kale.

Climb Every Mountain

There's no scientific agreement about how high something has to be before it's called a mountain instead of a hill. In the United States, some researchers say that point is about 1,000 feet. In the UK, the minimum is around 2,000 feet. The UN's definition is more complicated: 2,500 feet normally, but as low as 1,000 if the sides are particularly steep.

17 of the United States' 20 highest mountains are in Alaska.

A coal seam in Burning Mountain, in New South Wales, Australia, has been smoldering for 6,000 years. The flame moves about three feet south every year.

Mount Rainier in Washington State is considered one of the most dangerous mountains in the world because it is mostly hollow inside, and could collapse, which would wipe out Seattle, Tacoma, and the surrounding areas.

Coral, shells, and other sea fossils have been found on the tops of many mountains because the peaks began as flat surfaces underwater and were raised up over millions of years by tectonic pressure.

96 of the world's highest mountains (109 total) are in the Himalayas.

Building Bridges

The world's longest train bridge is China's Wuhu Yangtze River Bridge. It's 6.2 miles long.

The river Thames has seen several London Bridges. The first was a wooden one that was pulled down by rampaging Danes in 1014. A replacement, built in 1087, was destroyed by a tornado in 1091. It was quickly replaced, but burned in 1136. King Henry II built a stone bridge in 1176 that lasted 647 years until 1823. That one, made of granite, was found to be sinking and was sold in 1962 to a developer in Arizona. The final modern structure is still standing.

About 7,000 people cross the Brooklyn Bridge on foot or bicycle daily.

In the 1880s, when the Brooklyn Bridge was being built, its 275-foot towers were seven times taller than Manhattan's four-story skyline.

Con men regularly “sold” the Brooklyn Bridge to unwary tourists and new immigrants.

More than once, the police stopped insistent bridge “owners” from building their own tollbooths on the span.

What was the going rate for the Brooklyn Bridge? Usually about $200, although a pair of bridge-selling brothers once sold it for a mere $2.50 when that was all their “mark” had.

The only place to legally bungee jump from a bridge in California is on “the Bridge to Nowhere”—a never-used concrete bridge in Los Angeles County's rugged San Gabriel Canyon. It was built in 1936 for a highway, but was never used because the river it ran along kept flooding out the road while it was under construction. Today, the bridge is in a remote part of the Sheep Mountain Wilderness, reachable by only a strenuous hike of 10 miles round-trip.

The Boston University Bridge is the only place in the world where a boat can sail under a train running under a car driving under an airplane.

Favorite Haunts

California, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania have the most ghost sightings in the U.S.

In 1993 J. R. Costigan sued a country music bar in Wilder, Kentucky, claiming that a ghost had beaten him up in the men's room. He wanted the bar to give him $1,000 in damages and to post a “Beware of Vicious Ghost” sign on the men's room door. The judge dismissed the case.

The word
poltergeist
means “noisy ghost” in German.

Ghost researcher Dale Kaczmarek says that in 30 years, he's “never met a ghost [he] didn't like.”

Motorcyclists riding on Old Creek Road near Ojai, California, have reported seeing a headless “hogman” riding a 1940s motorcycle on dark, foggy nights.

Supposedly, Toronto's Hockey Hall of Fame, located in an old bank building, is haunted by Dorothy, the ghost of a bank teller.

Singer Sting believes in ghosts. He claims one visited him in his bedroom.

Sherlock Holmes's creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, also believed in ghosts…and bought into most psychic tricks he saw.

Noting that the bulk of video game players were male, the designers of Pac-Man went to great effort to make the ghosts “cute,” not scary, hoping to attract girls.

World's most haunted city: York, England, with more than 500 reported ghost sightings.

The word “larva” comes from the Latin word for ghost, probably because most larvae are translucent and white.

According to one poll, 34 percent of Americans believe in ghosts, an equal number believe in UFOs, 29 percent believe in astrology, 25 percent in reincarnation, and 24 percent in witches.

Just Deserts

The definition of a desert is an area that gets less than 10 inches of rain per year.

The Sahara, the world's third-largest desert, is nearly as big as the entire United States. About 2.5 million people live there. (It's also the world's hottest desert.)

The only continent that doesn't have a desert is Europe.

North America's largest is the Chihuahuan Desert. It's mostly in Mexico, but crosses the border into Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico.

20 percent of the earth's land surface is considered desert.

The desert tortoise, which lives the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts in the American Southwest, can survive for a year without water.

The longest-lived desert plant is the creosote bush, which can live for thousands of years by splitting and cloning itself into new bushes. One plant has been carbon-dated to 11,700 years ago.

The ancient Egyptians used castor bean oil to protect their skin from the blistering desert sun. Also, the dark kohl they applied around their eyes helped to minimize the glare of the sun.

The driest place in the world is the Atacama Desert in Chile. There are parts that have never recorded rainfall. The only precipitation comes from fog, measuring less than a quarter inch of liquid per year.

Not all deserts are hot. In fact, the world's two largest deserts are very cold: the Arctic and Antarctica.

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Some monkeys in Thailand teach their babies to floss their teeth.

Musical Notes

Queen is the only rock group that had at least one hit written by each member of the band.

Most North American car horns are tuned to the key of F.

Street musicians must audition for permission to play in New York City's subway stations.

Which song has the highest sheet music sales? It's “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” which sold more than a half million copies over eight months in 1923.

Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic inspired more than 20 pop songs.

Tina Fey's husband, Jeff Richmond, composed all the music for
30 Rock
.

Pianists and woodwind players often get inflamed tendons in their hands and wrists.

Brass players can suffer dental problems from pressure on their mouths. Violinists and violists are often pained by neck, back, and shoulder problems.

India's Lata Mangeshkar is the most-recorded musician in history. Over 40 years, she recorded more than 5,200 songs in 20 languages, mostly for Bollywood musicals.

Catgut, a type of strong cord, is not what it sounds like—it's actually made from sheep intestines. Linguists think it got its name from being used as strings on the
kit
, a small violin popular in 17th-century Europe.

Cows give more milk when they listen to music.

Van Morrison and Itzhak Perlman were both born on August 31, 1945.

Michael Jackson got his first gold record at age 10.

Longest-running TV music series of all time?
Soul Train
, which ran for 35 years from 1971 to 2006.

It isn't just rock and roll that damages hearing—many orchestra performers suffer at least some hearing loss, too.

What a Boar

Christopher Columbus brought the first pigs to the Americas (Cuba, actually) on his second voyage in 1493.

Hernando de Soto brought the first pigs to
North
America, landing in Florida with 13 in 1539. The ones that escaped into the swamplands became the first razorbacks.

Pigs get hairballs like cats do, but they can't cough them up. Instead, their stomachs form a rubbery shell around them, and the (harmless) masses remain inside the pig.

The world's largest pig hairball, the size and shape of a football, is on display at the museum of the Mount Angel Abbey in St. Benedict, Oregon.

Pigs don't sweat. They roll in mud to cool off.

We know of three separate historical conflicts called the “Pig War,” each of which began with a dispute about a pig.

A pig says “oink oink,” right? Well, not everywhere. It's “kryoo kroo” in Russia, “groin groin” in France, “hulu hulu” in China, “rok rok” in Croatia, “hrju hrju” in Vietnam, “grunz grunz” in Germany, and “buu buu” in Japan.

Most flu viruses first infect chickens, then pigs, and then spread to humans.

Humans worldwide eat pork more than any other kind of meat.

If it manages to evade the butcher's knife, a pig's natural life span is 15 to 20 years.

Pigs eat rattlesnakes and appear to be immune to the snakes' poison.

Pigs may look fat and out of shape, but on average, they can run a seven-minute mile.

The largest pig ever was named Big Bill, from Jackson, Tennessee. He tipped the scales at 2,552 pounds in 1933.

You're Getting Sleepy

In a lifetime, the average American will spend about 25 years sleeping.

Carbs make you sleepy. Protein makes you more alert.

Children who don't get enough sleep are 45 percent more likely to be overweight.