Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (8 page)

Why do Japanese insurance policies offer hole-in-one insurance? Because getting an ace can be financially disastrous in Japan. It's such a big deal that you're expected to give parties and expensive gifts to friends to mark your good fortune, sometimes costing tens of thousands of dollars.

Poorly Executed

After a series of tests with corpses and sheep, French officials finally tried out their new guillotine on a live prisoner, highwayman Nicolas Jacques Pelletier, on April 25, 1792. (It worked.)

Remember: prisoners are “hanged,” not “hung.”

James Rodgers, a Utah murderer who faced a firing squad in 1960, was asked if he had a final request. His response: “Why, yes—a bulletproof vest.”

In 1890 murderer William Kemmler of Buffalo, New York, became the first person ever executed by electric chair.

Only Confederate soldier (and only person in the U.S.) executed for war crimes: Henry Wirz. He ran the brutal Andersonville military prison, where nearly a third of the Union prisoners died of malnutrition and disease.

In 1888 the British Home Office issued a guide called the
Official Table of Drops
, prescribing the length of rope to be used for every body weight up to 200 pounds. The guide was popular with hangmen…until they discovered it was wrong because the rope lengths were too long. The Home Office issued a revised version in 1913, cutting the rope lengths two or three feet. For example, a 154-pound prisoner got 9 feet of rope in 1888, but 6½ feet in 1913.

It's traditional in a firing squad to load a blank cartridge in one random gun, allowing shooters to believe they didn't shoot the fatal bullet.

Being an axeman could be even worse than being a hangman. Take the anonymous beheader of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1587. Rather than one good clean head chopping, his first blow glanced off her lower skull and didn't kill her. A second blow killed her, but her head was hanging on by gristle, so he had to rock the axe blade back and forth to cut it. Her head finally detached and he triumphantly lifted it by the hair for the assembled company of nobles…but her hair was a wig, and her head slipped out and fell to the floor.

Rock the Vote

Ugly election campaigns aren't anything new: In 1800, during an especially bitter election, a pro–John Adams newspaper in Connecticut warned that electing Thomas Jefferson would mean “murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will all be openly taught and practiced.”

You can be jailed in Fiji, Chile, and Egypt for not voting.

Empleomania
is “an unnaturally high enthusiasm for holding public office.”

George Washington and James Monroe are the only U.S. presidents to win every state in an election. (Of course, this was when there were only 15 states, and they had no opposition.)

In ancient Athens, lawmakers were chosen by a lottery. They each served a one-year term and then were replaced.

Members of England's royal family do not vote because they are expected to remain politically neutral.

In 1893 New Zealand became the first country to allow women to vote in national elections—90,000 women showed up that year.

Wyoming was the first state to grant women the right to vote, in 1889. Nationwide, American women had to wait until 1920.

In 1997 Mike Soleto ran unopposed for the school board in Westmoreland, Kansas…and still lost. No one (including Soleto) voted for him.

In some states, if you vote by absentee ballot but die before Election Day, your vote still counts.

Congress chose early November for Election Day because it fell between the end of the fall harvest and winter's heavy snows. It's also always “the Tuesday after the first Monday” to avoid All Saints' Day on November 1.

The candidate who spends the most money usually wins the election.

Nine Facts About Eight Planets

Because it is so close to the Sun but has no atmosphere to hold heat or cold, Mercury has the largest temperature fluctuation of any planet in our solar system—from -280°F at night and 800°F during the day.

Venus turns so slowly that one Venus day (243 days on Earth) is longer than one Venus year (225 days on Earth).

Depending on their orbits at a given time, the distance between Mars and Earth can range from 3 light-minutes to 21. (A light-minute is the distance light can travel in a minute, just under 11,176,944 miles.)

Mars's sky has a pinkish tint because red dust from the planet's soil gets suspended in the atmosphere.

It would take 318 Earths to make one Jupiter.

Unlike most planets, Venus rotates clockwise, so the sun appears to rise in the west.

Jupiter is home to 66 of the 171 moons discovered so far in our solar system.

The tallest volcano on Mars is 17 miles high.

Besides Pluto, other dwarf planets include Ceres, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris. Ceres, Haumea, and Makemake are smaller than Pluto, but Eris is larger.

Pretty Fly for a Wright Guy

There are 15,095 airports or airfields in United States—more than in the next nine countries combined.

Every wonder how much loose change is left in those plastic bins at U.S. airport security checkpoints? Including foreign coins, the take for 2012 was $531,392, up from $487,869.50 in 2011.

Because more than 80 percent of Alaska's communities aren't connected by road to anyplace else, the state has 545 airports and airfields. Some of the state's airport codes include EEK (the town is actually named Eek), WOW (Willow), and GNU (Goodnews Bay).

London's Heathrow Airport got its name from a hamlet of that name that the airport displaced.

One of America's first airport hotels was Michigan's Dearborn Inn, commissioned by Henry Ford for his Ford Airport and finished in 1931. The hotel's still there, but the airport closed in 1933.

Oldest airfield: College Park Airport in Maryland, founded by Wilbur Wright in 1909 and still in use today.

Denver International Airport covers 53 square miles, making it larger than the city of Boston. However, Riyadh Airport in Saudi Arabia, which sprawls across 87 square miles of desert, is the world's largest.

The Pan Am Clippers of the 1930s didn't have wheels, and their runways didn't have pavement. The famous pioneering trans-Pacific planes were actually “flying boats” that took off and landed on water. Its mainland “runway”—an artificial harbor in San Francisco Bay—is still in Alameda, California.

Why does Chicago's O'Hare Airport have the code of ORD? It used to be called Orchard Place/Douglas Field.

The world's busiest airport is Atlanta International, serving 95 million travelers a year.

Base(ball) Instincts

A pitched baseball slows by about 8 mph by the time it reaches home plate.

Until 1845, it was legal to “plug” runners (i.e., hit them with a thrown ball to get them out).

The Cobb salad's namesake, Robert H. Cobb, was a first cousin of baseball legend Ty Cobb.

Baseball wasn't invented by one person, and various baseball-like games were around in England before the sport became popular in the United States. “Rounders” and “one old cat—two old cats—three old cats” were all popular variations in the early 1800s.

In 1910 Howard Taft began the presidential tradition of throwing out a ball to begin the baseball season.

Before he played baseball, Babe Ruth trained to be a tailor.

Average MLB player's salary: $3.4 million.

Baseball trading cards were once the “prize” that came with bubble gum, cigarettes, and Cracker Jacks. In the early 1960s, the cards were also printed on the backs of Post cereal boxes, requiring a steady hand with scissors to get them the exact right size and shape.

“Shoeless Joe” Jackson isn't in the Baseball Hall of Fame…but his shoes are.

Since 1997, David Lander (Squiggy on the 1970s TV show
Laverne & Shirley
) has been a pro baseball talent scout for the Los Angeles Angels and Seattle Mariners.

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“There are two theories on hitting the knuckleball. Unfortunately, neither works.”

—Charlie Lau, hitting coach

Beetlemania

There's a species of beetle named
Agra vation
. It got its name from its habit of eating the lead covering from underground cables.

The “Hitler beetle,” or
Anophthalmus hitleri—
a blind beetle found only in a few caves in Slovenia—was named in 1933 for Adolf Hitler. A furor of collecting has endangered it.

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld each have a slime-mold beetle named after them.

Other slime-mold beetles have been named for Pocahontas, the Aztecs, Hernán Cortés, and Darth Vader. (His beetle has a helmetlike head.)

The whirligig beetle, a water dweller, got its name because it swims in circles when frightened.

The deathwatch beetle got its name because its adults use a mating call that sounds like a ticking watch.

The museum beetle is so named because its larva feed on dried animal products, making them the scourge of natural history museums.

Mixing Apples…

Some apple varieties are as small as cherries. Others are as large as grapefruits.

Maria Ann Sherwood Smith found the first Granny Smith apple growing in her Australian orchard in 1868 from the remains of some French crabapples.

Canadian John McIntosh is to be given credit for the McIntosh apple. He found a seedling growing wild, probably from a discarded apple core, and cultivated it in 1811.

Most apple harvests are still picked by hand.

Apple cider can be frozen for up to a year. Just don't use a full or glass jug—it expands as it freezes.

The Gravenstein apple came to California sometime around 1820 with Russian immigrants, but it's been around for a while: In the 1600s, it first grew around Germany's Castle Graefenstein.

If you had eaten an apple a day from age 5 until you were 35, you would have eaten 10,957 apples.

The only apple native to North America is the crabapple.

It takes the energy from 50 leaves on an apple tree to produce one ripe fruit.

McDonald's buys 34 million pounds of fresh apples in a year, mostly from Michigan.

McDonald's keeps its Happy Meal apple slices from browning by dipping them in calcium ascorbate (a mix of calcium and vitamin C). They have a shelf life of two weeks.

The Red Delicious apple was cultivated by chance on a farm in Peru, Iowa. In 1872 it was first dubbed “Hiatt's Hawkeye” after the man who owned the farm.

Apple Currant was one of the first Pop Tart varieties.

…and Oranges

Oranges that grow higher on the tree have more vitamin C than the lower fruit.

A glass of orange juice contains about 22 grams of sugar. (Two squares of dark chocolate: 12 grams.)

The first oranges were cultivated in China as far back as 2500 BC. In a number of languages, including Dutch and German, the word for an orange translates to “China's apple.”

Orange trees, unlike apple trees, don't lose all their leaves during winter (or ever).

Oranges won't ripen off the tree.

If you want your oranges pure, grow them separately from grapefruits, lemons, and limes. Oranges crossbreed easily with any of them.

The popular navel orange is a freak of nature: Every navel orange tree is a clone of a single tree that mutated 200 years ago. The trees are sterile and can be grown only by being grafted onto the roots of another tree.

It is possible to grow other types of orange trees from seeds.

Orange peels consist of two parts: the exocarp (the orange, exterior peel) and the mesocarp (the white, inner peel).

In 1894 Charles Chapman, a descendant of Johnny Appleseed, introduced Valencia oranges to America from his orange grove in California.

Oranges have less vitamin C than strawberries.

How many sections in an orange? 9 to 12.

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A million dollars' worth of pennies weighs 288 tons.

Deaths on the Throne

WHO:
Roman emperor, Elagabalus

WHEN:
222

CAUSE OF DEATH:
Murder

Elagabalus became emperor as a teenager and was entirely unprepared for the job. Initially, his erratic behavior was entertaining, but eventually it became an embarrassment to the Roman power structures. Three wives, several rumored homosexual liaisons, and a few sacrilegious acts later, he was murdered in his bathroom.

WHO:
King Edmund II of England

WHEN:
1016

CAUSE OF DEATH:
Natural causes…or murder

When Edmund became king of England, he battled the Viking king Canute the Great for control of England. Edmund lost and eventually struck a deal dividing the disputed territories, agreeing that whoever died first would cede his territory to the other. Months later, Edmund was found dead in his bathroom…and Canute took over England. Officially recorded as death from natural causes, some historians now believe the timing of Edmund's death was too coincidental to be anything but murder.