Uncle John’s Facts to Annoy Your Teacher Bathroom Reader for Kids Only! (12 page)

MILLION-HEIRESS

Life was hard for Sarah. Her infant daughter died in 1866, and she never had another child. Then, in 1880, her father-in-law died, and her husband caught tuberculosis. He passed away the following year.

All of that was terrible, but it made Sarah extremely rich. She inherited $20 million and about half of the Winchester company, which brought her an additional $1,000 every day.

Actual warning on a box of sleeping pills: “May cause drowsiness.”

CURSED!

Soon after the death of her husband, Sarah started visiting psychics for comfort. One of them told her that the Winchesters had been cursed by the spirits of all the people who had been killed by their guns. According to that psychic, these spirits demanded revenge and were after Sarah. What’s more, her dead husband wanted her to move out of New England to escape the family curse. But there was a catch—once she started building a new home, she must never stop…not even for one hour. If she did, the evil spirits would claim her just as they had her baby, her father-in-law, and her husband.

Terrified, Sarah sold her home in Connecticut and moved to California. She found property in San Jose, not far from San Francisco. In 1884, she began building a house—construction went on nonstop for 36 years.

IF SHE BUILDS IT…

Sarah started with a farmhouse that sat on more than 160 acres, and she hired a team of carpenters to work on it around the clock. Every night at midnight, she held a séance to summon “good” spirits who, she said, provided the next day’s building plans.

There were no master plans—the carpenters just kept expanding the house. Rooms were built around rooms and doors opened to walls.

By 1906, the house stood seven stories high. Then on April 18, a strong earthquake struck, and the top three floors collapsed, trapping Sarah in a bedroom. She was eventually freed, but believed that the incident was the spirits’ way of telling her they were unhappy with her home improvements. To appease them, she boarded up 30 rooms in the front of the house.

Tears are made of almost all the same ingredients as urine.

But because the original psychic had said construction couldn’t stop, Sarah kept building. This time, though, she had a plan…sort of. She installed secret rooms, trapdoors, upside-down stair posts, and chimneys that didn’t work—all in an attempt to confuse the evil spirits that were after her.

HOW MYSTERIOUS

The hammering, sawing, and construction commotion came to a sudden stop on September 5, 1922, when 83-year-old Sarah Winchester died in her sleep. When told of her death, the workmen quit what they were doing immediately. Some even left half-pounded nails in the walls.

Today, the home, called the Winchester Mystery House, is open for tours. There are 160 rooms, 950 doors, 367 steps, 47 fireplaces, 17 chimneys, 3 elevators, and 2 basements. Spiderwebs and the number 13 show up everywhere: there are 13 candle holders in the chandelier and 13 stones in the spider-web-patterned stained-glass window. And the house is supposed to be haunted. Visitors claim to have heard mysterious footsteps, banging doors, and even Sarah herself playing the piano. So if you do visit, keep an eye out for ghosts.

President Ulysses S. Grant’s favorite breakfast: A pickle.

How come some of the most popular movies have the most annoying characters
?

S
END HIM FAR, FAR AWAY

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
is one of the highest-grossing American movies of all time. Millions of people saw the film, and it seems like almost of all of them were annoyed by the character of Jar Jar Binks. Even 10 years after the movie was released, he still ranks first on audience polls of the most annoying movie characters of all time.

A surprising twist:
George Lucas, the creator of the Star Wars movies, didn’t intend for Jar Jar to be annoying. He was supposed to be funny so that he’d appeal to kids. The Star Wars team spent more than a year developing how Jar Jar looked, how he talked, how he moved. He’s tall and gangly, and he has a face that looks like a floppy-eared duck-billed platypus with stringy growths that resemble dreadlocks coming out of his head. The thing that most annoyed audiences, though, was Jar Jar’s voice. He had a dopey way of speaking that many people found irritating. (So if you
really
want to annoy your teacher, start talking like Jar Jar.)

Lucas and his team were surprised that people had such a negative reaction to Jar Jar. But they listened to the audience and cut back his role for the next film,
Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones
.

The kea of New Zealand is the world’s only mountain-dwelling parrot.

ALWAYS ANNOYING, BUT ALWAYS FUNNY

Besides being incredibly annoying, Ace in
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
, Stanley Ipkiss in
The Mask
, and Lloyd Christmas in
Dumb and Dumber
all have something in common: they were played by Jim Carrey. Ace Ventura was Jim Carrey’s first big starring role, and since that movie came out in 1994, Carrey has had a successful career playing annoying characters.

According to many movie buffs, the things that some people find annoying about Jim Carrey’s characters are what others think are funny: his goofy faces, silly voices, and gross jokes. People even repeat his catchphrases—like Ace Ventura’s “All-righty then.”

Movie reviewers used words like “stupid,” “gross,” and “immature” to describe all three movies, but they were all hits and made Jim Carrey a superstar.

*      *      *

SPF Goo:
Hippos ooze a red liquid from their skin’s pores. The ancient Greeks saw it and believed hippos sweated blood when they got too hot. But the Greeks were wrong—the red liquid is a natural sunscreen.

The Museum of Hoaxes says it has a real building in California But that’s a hoax. It’s just a Web site.

Why swim or take a boat across the ocean when you can walk like Rémy Bricka did
?

O
NE-MAN OPERATION

In the early 1900s, one-man bands—in which a person strapped a bunch of instruments to his body and played them all at once—were popular. But by the 1980s, few people had heard of them. Still, Rémy Bricka tried anyway, traveling around France as
L’Homme Orchestre,
or “the One-Man Band.” Not many people turned out to see his act, so Bricka decided he needed to find another way to drum up some publicity. That’s when he came up with the idea of crossing the Atlantic Ocean…on foot.

Obviously, he couldn’t use regular shoes, so Bricka made two 14-foot-long miniature boats—a combination of canoes, water skis, and shoes made out of fiberglass—and strapped them to his feet. To propel himself across the water (and help him balance), he built a six-foot-long, double-bladed paddle.

STAYIN’ ALIVE

Bricka estimated that he’d be alone on the ocean for at least two months, so he knew he needed to take care of his basic needs. He planned to tow a small boat behind him, containing a sleeping chamber (it was actually a coffin without a lid), navigation devices, some food, and three water-purifying machines to make the salty seawater drinkable. He also packed his flute, which he would play to calm his nerves during any storms he encountered.

SEA CRUISE

On April 2, 1988, Bricka set out from the Canary Islands, off the northern coast of Africa. His destination: the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, about 3,500 miles away. He wanted to make the trip in 60 days, which meant he’d have to “walk” more than 50 miles a day in his fiberglass boat shoes.

Standing upright, rowing and towing his small boat, Bricka made good time. He glided across the water like a skier does on snow, and also tied a kite to his back that harnessed the power of the wind to move him forward. As fish and plankton swam or drifted by, Bricka scooped them up and ate them raw.

January 16—National Nothing Day—was first observed (or not) in 1973.

SOMETHING’S FISHY

Still, the trip wasn’t easy. Two of the three water desalinators broke, and the remaining one couldn’t purify enough water to meet his needs. So Bricka drank a quart of seawater each day—a dangerous decision that can lead to severe dehydration. He had also underestimated the amount of fish he’d be able to catch, and most days, he didn’t get enough to eat. His weight dropped from 160 pounds to 110 pounds.

But he kept going, and on May 31, 1988, he finally made it. A Japanese boat picked him up off the coast of Trinidad—an island about 300 miles south of his intended destination of Guadeloupe. This meant Bricka had actually walked across more ocean than he’d meant to.