Uncle John’s Facts to Annoy Your Teacher Bathroom Reader for Kids Only! (18 page)

Realizing what he’d said, Nixon blushed. He didn’t win the election against Kennedy, but he was eventually elected president in 1968—with his wife Pat at his side.

GETTING HIS GOAT

Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd president of the United States (and grandson of William Henry Harrison, the ninth president), wasn’t known as a “people person.” He hated all the socializing that came with being president. In fact, he was so standoffish and cold that his staff called him the “Human Iceberg.” But Harrison had a fun side: He liked to skip work in the afternoon to play with his grandchildren, Mary and Ben, who also lived in the White House. He bought them a pet goat that they named His Whiskers.

But the goat was badly behaved, and one day, while pulling a cart with baby Ben inside it, the goat broke loose. Trailing the cart behind him, His Whiskers ran out the White House gate and into the street. President Harrison saw what happened and took off after them, waving his walking stick in the air. (Harrison eventually caught the goat and rescued Ben.)

Q:
Little Briar-Rose
is the original title of what fairy tale?
A:
Sleeping Beauty
.

AHEM, MR. PRESIDENT…

Presidents often entertain heads of state from other countries at state dinners, where good manners are very important. But things don’t always go as expected. When President Ronald Reagan hosted François Mitterand, the president of France, and his wife at a White House dinner in 1988, protocol dictated that President Reagan escort Mrs. Mitterand into the dining room.

They walked a few steps together, but then Mrs. Mitterand stopped suddenly. When the president urged her on, she whispered something to him, but he was baffled—he couldn’t understand French. Mrs. Mitterand was quietly trying to tell him that she couldn’t move because he was standing on the hem of her gown.

*      *      *

IT’S A BLOODY FACT!

•
The pressure your heart creates when it pumps your blood is strong enough to squirt it 30 feet.

•
Length of the total number of blood vessels in a human body: 60,000 miles…enough to go around the earth 2½ times.

•
Lobsters have blue blood.

•
The first recorded blood transfusion was performed in England in 1665. It was done between two dogs. The first transfusion on humans was in 1818 (also in England).

A cat has 500 skeletal muscles. (A human has 650.)

Next time you want to bring your teacher a gift, consider one of these foods.

S
TRANGE FRUIT

The durian from Southeast Asia is one of the largest fruits in the world—about the size of a football—and it’s covered in sharp thorns. It can be tricky to harvest: people simply wait for durians to fall off the trees (which grow to be 100 feet tall or more), or use a long pruning saw and gloves to pick them.

And this thorny fruit smells as nasty as it looks. The aroma has been compared to skunk spray, rotting flesh, stale vomit, and sewage. In fact, it smells so bad that many hotels in Southeast Asia won’t let tourists take durians into their rooms. They’re banned on taxis, buses, ferries, and airplanes, too. There are even “no durian” signs in Singapore’s subway stations.

But how does it taste? Surprisingly, most people say it’s delicious. If you can get past the stinky exterior, you’ll find several sections of cream-colored, custardlike pulp that can be eaten with a spoon. Durians also have large seeds that can be eaten raw, boiled, or roasted. People who love durians pay good money for them—as much as $15 per fruit.

Q. What’s a lemniscate? A. It’s another name for the infinity sign.

DIRTY, ROTTEN BEANS

Also known as petai beans, “stink beans” are about the size of almonds. They grow in long, thin pods and are used in Thai and Indian food…and are definitely an acquired taste. People who don’t like them claim that these crunchy beans smell like a mixture of farts, vomit, rotten garbage, and dirty toilets. But those who love them say that they taste delicious.

LOOK SHARP

If they got lost in the desert, cowboys in the Old West sometimes had to eat cactus plants. And today, people throughout the southwestern United States eat all kinds of cactus dishes—cactus jelly, roasted cactus, fried cactus, even raw cactus.

There are more than 200 species of cacti, and many of them have a sweet, gooey pulp. But beware—it takes special skills and tools to make them edible. Cactus harvesters have to roll the pieces around on the sand and then skin them with a sharp knife to get rid of all the needles and make sure no one gets stabbed.

The moon is a million times drier than Asia’s Gobi Desert.

School is a little like prison—people tell you what to do, you’re confined to campus, and you spend most days wishing you could break free…sort of like these guys.

L
IFE ON THE ISLAND

Alcatraz is a 12-acre sandstone island in San Francisco Bay. The city of San Francisco sits just a mile and a half away, but the icy ocean currents near the island are treacherous. In 1934, the U.S. government opened a high-security prison on Alcatraz and started shipping the country’s most dangerous criminals there—including famous ones like Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly.

Officials bragged that Alcatraz was escape-proof, and armed guards watched the inmates’ every move. The prisoners—locked in their cells for most of the day—weren’t allowed to talk, read newspapers, or listen to the radio. People nicknamed Alcatraz “the Rock,” and word leaked out that inmates often went crazy from the boredom and isolation.

Some of the prisoners, though, tried to escape. Most died in the attempt, either shot by guards or drowned in the ocean. But there was one famous escape attempt that may—or may not—have been successful.

The average meteor is about the size of a grain of sand.

A DIABOLICALLY CLEVER PLAN

In 1960, convicted bank robbers Frank Lee Morris and the Anglin brothers—Clarence and John—started plotting a getaway. Each had a small vent in his cell, and the men used nail clippers and spoons stolen from the dining room to pry loose the grills that covered the vents. The goal was to widen the vents and dig a tunnel to the outside. Then they would squeeze through the vents, escape through the tunnel, and use a makeshift raft to sail across the bay to dry land.

Covering up their progress would be hard, but the trio came up with some ingenious ideas:

•
They painted pieces of cardboard to look like the grills they’d pried off and then covered their holes with those. Where did they get the cardboard? They made it themselves, by soaking and mashing scraps of paper into a pulp and letting it dry under their mattresses.

•
They mixed the excess cement with soap and glue, and then molded the concoction into fake “heads” that they tucked into their beds at night to act as decoys while they were digging. They painted the heads with supplies from an art class and stuck real hair on them that they’d smuggled out of the prison barbershop. The heads fooled the guards for six months while the three men worked.

Each night, they crawled through the vents and crept toward the prison’s roof. They worked to pry away the bolts and bend the bars that blocked access to the outside. They also built a raft out of stolen raincoats and stored it in a corridor below the roof.

Singer Sheryl Crow’s two top front teeth are fake.

SO LONG, SUCKERS!

It took two years, but finally, their work was complete. On June 11, 1962, Morris and the Anglins squeezed through the bars, dragged their raft across the roof, and shimmied 50 feet down a drainpipe to the ground. Then they climbed a 15-foot fence topped with barbed wire…and disappeared.

Most people think the trio died in the bay. The water that night was a chilly 50°F, cold enough to cause hypothermia in minutes, and men on a Canadian fishing boat said they saw a body floating facedown in the water soon after. None of the prisoners were heard from again, even though all three had been notorious criminals. FBI investigators didn’t think they would just stop committing crimes. So what happened after they got into the water, no one knows. No bodies were ever found. The only trace of them was a black plastic bag with pictures of the Anglin family that washed up near the island a few days later. The fate of the three men remains a mystery.

Say “chopsticks” in Japanese:
Hashi
.

Remember: just because you learned it in school doesn’t make it true.