Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (38 page)
Read Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers' Institute
Infamous Roman emperor Caligula's real name was Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus. He got his nickname “Caligula” as a child. It means “Little Boots.”
Richard Nixon's nickname in college: “Gloomy Gus.”
During the Mexican-American War, future president Franklin Pierce was struck in the groin by his saddle. He passed out from the pain and got a new nickname: “Fainting Frank.”
Ronald Reagan's nickname was “Dutch,” short for “fat little Dutchman,” which is what his father thought he looked like as an infant.
In 1316 King John I of France was nicknamed and crowned “John the Posthumous” as he emerged from the womb because his father, “Louis X the Quarreler,” had died. Alas, the infant lived only five daysâmurdered, some say, by his ambitious uncle, “Philip the Tall.”
The Beatles were famous ambassadors for peace and love, but they also generated a lot of lawsuits. Here are some of them
.
BEATLES VS. EMI:
From 1979 through 2006, the Beatles skirmished with the record company EMI five different times. Four times, it was over royalties. The remaining issue was about EMI's plans to release the
Red
(hits from 1962â66) and
Blue
(hits from 1967â70) albums on CD in 1991 without the band's permission. The Beatles won every time, but after winning the last case and establishing their veto rights, they let EMI release the albums anyway.
BEATLES VS. APPLE:
Steve Jobs reportedly named his fledgling company Apple in part because he was a Beatles fan and they'd named their own multimedia company Apple Corps, which owned their record company Apple Records. The Beatles threatened to sue, and in 1981, Jobs's Apple settled by paying $80,000 and agreeing to stay out of the music business.
It didn't last long. In 1989 the Beatles' Apple Corps noted that Apple computers were being used to play, record, and mix music. The band sued again. This time, the computer company paid $26 million and won the right to create “goods and servicesâ¦used to reproduce, run, play, or otherwise deliver” music, but not any actual music.
Then came iTunes, and Apple Corps believed that the music store violated the terms of the agreement. So in 2006, they went back to court, but this time the Beatles lost, with the judge ruling that selling music was not the same as creating it. Faced with the prospect of endless appeals and litigation, the two companies came up with an agreement, reportedly involving Apple Computers spending half a billion dollars to buy the rights to everything called “Apple” and then leasing the music rights back to Apple Corps. Still, Beatles songs didn't appear in the iTunes Store until 2010
because the band's albums were re-released in digitally remastered form in 2009 and Apple Records wanted a year to sell CDs before offering the songs online.
BEATLES PUBLISHER VS.
SESAME STREET:
In 1965, as a way of reducing their income taxes, the Beatles converted their Northern Songs music publishing company into a public company, selling shares of it on the London Stock Exchange. But the tactic backfired, and control of their songs passed out of their hands and to ATV, a large media company that bought controlling interest. ATV was aggressive in protecting its profits and in 1984 sued Sesame Street Records for several million dollars for two parodies that played on
Sesame Street
: “Letter B,” sung by puppet beetles in the style of “Let It Be,” and “Hey Food,” sung by the Cookie Monster in the style of “Hey Jude.” The suit ended only when Michael Jackson bought ATV's rights to the Beatles' song collection in 1984. Under Jackson's new management, the lawsuit was settled for $50, which was paid out-of-pocket by composer Christopher Cerf, who wrote the parodies. In return, he got a nice letter from Paul McCartney, who said he liked the songs.
BEATLES PUBLISHER VS. “THE RUTLES”:
The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash
was a one-shot TV parody of the Beatles, produced in 1978 by Lorne Michaels of
Saturday Night Live
, and appearing on both British and American TV.
Monty Python
's Eric Idle wrote the script and starred as the Paul character. The songs were written (in a devastatingly effective imitation of the Beatles' style) by Neil Innes, a member of the surreal Bonzo Dog Band. George Harrison was also in on the joke, and appeared as a TV reporter. As they so often did, ATV sued. In the end, Innes was forced to share half of his songwriting profits with ATV.
BEATLES VS. NIKE:
In 1987 Capitol Records and Michael Jackson sold the rights to use the song “Revolution” in a shoe commercial. The Beatles sued, the case ended in a secret settlement out of court, and Nike stopped using the song.
Evidence shows that there have been at least five major ice ages in the earth's history. The earliest happened between 2.4 and 2.1 billion years ago.
The scientific definition of an ice age is any time period during which ice sheets cover “vast areas” of the earth's surface.
So technically, the earth is still in an ice age that began 2.58 million years ago.
The most recent major ice age in North America and Europe ended about 10,000 years ago, but during that time, the ice sheets covering Greenland, northern Europe, Canada, and much of the northern United States were more than two miles deep.
Enormous animals thrived during the last ice age: woolly mammoths, giant sloths, hamster-like creatures that were as big as oxen, armadillos the size of VW Bugs, oversized beavers with six-inch teeth, and a large, scavenging, flightless bird.
The average temperature during the last ice age was between about 46°F and 60°F degrees cooler than our average temperature today.
During the last ice age, elephants roamed every continent but Australia and Antarctica.
The Mississippi River inspired the longest painting in the world.
Panorama of the Mississippi
, by 19th-century American artist John Banvard, measured 1,200 feet long, representing a stretch of the river. (The painting is no longer with usâafter Banvard's death it was cut up to make theater backdrops.)
The longest river in the United States is the mighty Missouri, with 2,540 miles. The Mississippi is #2, with 2,340 miles.
Are you safe from sharks if you're in a freshwater river? Not necessarily. Bull sharks frequently swim up rivers from the ocean.
At least 10 of the Amazon River's tributaries are as large as the entire Mississippi River.
At Canada's Bay of Fundy, the Saint John River reverses direction at the bay's high tide. Because of a funneling effect in the bay, the water rises up to 48 feet, and a tidal wave rolls upstream, temporarily drowning rapids and reversing waterfalls.
Before environmental regulations were in effect, many rivers in industrial areas were so polluted that they often caught fire. The Cuyahoga River in Ohio, once among the dirtiest rivers in the U.S., caught fire at least 13 times, between 1868 and 1969.
The Amazon River is home to more species of fishâ2,100 and countingâthan the Atlantic Ocean.
The United States has 3.5 million miles of rivers.
The word
quebec
literally means “narrow passage,” or “strait” in the Algonquin language, referring to the place where the Saint Lawrence River significantly narrows.
The St. Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959. Even nowâmore than half a century after the St. Lawrence River overflowed ten Canadian villages in 1959âyou can see sidewalks, streets, foundations, and factory ruins of the ghost towns from boats and on satellite maps.
The Mars rovers
Spirit
and
Opportunity
contain pieces of metal from the World Trade Center.
Lead was one of the first metals used by humans, dating back to about 6500 BC.
In 1886 Charles Martin Hall of Ohio and Paul Heroult of Paris each independently discovered a way to make aluminum cheaply. Before that, aluminum was a rare and expensive metal, and aluminum dinnerware, for example, was an extravagance that only the very rich could afford.
Two million pounds of platinum ore may contain just one pound of metal.
Tonka uses 5.1 million pounds of sheet metal every year to manufacture its toy trucks.
The asteroid 3554 Amun, which will cross Earth's orbit around the year 2020, contains an estimated $20 billion worth of metals.
By the 1920s, Henry Ford was already recycling leftover metal from his production line.
The world's largest cast-metal statue is a 56-foot likeness of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire. Made for the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, it now stands on a hill in Birmingham, Alabama.
Most people have three to four grams of iron in their bodies.
Thin, pointy metal objects like forks generate more sparks in microwaves than thicker, rounded ones like spoons. (But it's recommended that no metal objects be microwaved.)
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DID YOU KNOW?
Felt-tip pens are made of nylon or some other synthetic instead of true felt, which is steamed and flattened wool.
Scientific term for insect poop: frass.
Marsupial babies go to the bathroom in their mother's pouches.
Dried dung from grazing animals is a favorite cheap fuel in many parts of the world. It burns well because it's mostly undigested hay, grasses, and other vegetation.
There's a precise and polite word for dog poop: “scumber.”
The survival of many plant species depends on the 165 pounds of poop excreted by the average elephant each day. The dung includes thousands of undigested seeds just waiting for a chance to grow in the newly enriched soil.
Armadillos eat a lot of dirt with their diets of small insects and snails, which is why their excrement looks like piles of clay marbles.
Many brands of fertilizer use composted human waste from sewage treatment plants, meaning we pay money to have it taken away and then we buy it back.
In your lifetime, you'll excrete a school bus's weight in poop.
â¦
Running TV special:
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
has aired annually since 1964. Second-longest:
A Charlie Brown Christmas
, running since 1965.
â¦
Train journey:
The Trans-Siberian Express from Moscow to Vladivostok takes eight days.
â¦
Nonstop canoe race:
The annual Missouri 340, in which teams canoe or kayak across the state of Missouri in a whirlwind 88 hours. Total distance: 340 miles.
â¦
Oscar acceptance speech:
Greer Garson in 1943 spoke for more than seven minutes.
â¦
Yard sale:
690 miles along Highway 127 from Addison, Michigan, to Gadsden, Alabama. Founded in 1987, the four-day event begins on the first Thursday in August.
â¦
Solar-powered plane flight:
646 miles, by a plane called
Solar Impulse
(2013).
â¦
Running network TV show of all time:
Meet the Press
first aired on November 6, 1947, and is still on today.
â¦
Documented paper airplane flight
(indoors with no wind, starting and ending at ground level): 27.9 seconds, set by Takuo Toda in Hiroshima, Japan, in 2009.
â¦
State motto
is “Hope.” It comes from the smallest state, Rhode Island.
â¦
Papal reign in history
ended on September 27, 1590. Pope Urban VII died of malaria just 13 days after his election.
â¦
Reign of a French king:
20 minutes. King Louis XIX, appointed king by a faction after the July Revolution of 1830, immediately abdicated in favor of another claimant, Louis Philippe.
â¦
Known vertebrate:
male stout infant fish. Found around the Great Barrier Reef, the little fish measures about a third of an inch.
â¦
National anthem:
Japan's national anthem takes about a minute to sing and has only one stanza of four lines. Its 800-year-old lyrics are “May you reign for eight thousand generations, until pebbles grow into moss-covered boulders.”
â¦
River:
the Doe River in Oregon is only 120 feet longâshorter than an Olympic swimming pool.
â¦
Alphabet:
The Rotokas language, spoken in the Solomon Islands. It consists of only 11 letters: A, E, I, O, U, G, K, P, R, T, and V.
On October 28, 1929, a Mrs. T. W. Evans gave birth to the first baby born up in the airâon a passenger plane above Florida.
According to studies, babies who use pacifiers are more prone to earaches.
Approximately 80 percent of babies are born with at least one birthmark.
Worldwide, hospitals give new mothers the wrong babies about 12 times a day.
1 percent of all babies born in the U.S. are conceived through in vitro fertilization.
More babies are born in September than in any other month.