Uncle John’s Facts to Annoy Your Teacher Bathroom Reader for Kids Only! (23 page)

LOBSTERS AND MORE

In 2005, Sonya “Black Widow” Thomas gobbled up 44 lobsters in 12 minutes to win Maine’s World Lobster-Eating Championship. She also holds the world record for fruitcake, meatballs, cheesecake, eggs, and chili cheese fries. Oh—and she weighs just 105 pounds.

The Pig Olympics is an international sporting contest with pig competitors Its events include pig-racing, pig-swimming, and pigball.

OYSTERS AND PICKLED JALAPEÑOS

In April 2008, when Patrick “Deep Dish” Bertoletti was just 23 years old, he became the world’s oyster-eating champion after downing 34 dozen raw oysters in eight minutes. He also challenged “Locust” LeFevre’s pickled jalapeño record in 2008 (he ate 191 in 6½ minutes), but didn’t beat it. He graduated from college with a degree in—what else—culinary arts!

In movies, cowboys are usually portrayed by white men, but in reality, about 25 percent of them were African American. Here’s the Wild West story of history’s most famous black cowboy.

L
EARNING THE ROPES

Bill Pickett was born in Texas in 1870, the son of two former slaves. There were 13 children in the Pickett family, and there wasn’t much time for school. So Bill dropped out when he was 10 and got his first job—as a ranch hand.

The work was hard: Bill cleaned up around the place, fed the animals, and mucked out the stalls. But it brought him close to the horses, and he soon taught himself how to rope and ride.

PAYING HIS DUES

It wasn’t long before Pickett started putting on amateur shows around town, performing rodeo tricks for people on the street and passing around a hat to collect donations. For the next 20 years, he moved all over Texas, working as a cowboy—rounding up cattle and breaking horses—and putting on shows to make extra money. He and his brothers even started their own horse-breaking and ranching company: the Pickett Brothers Bronco Busters and Rough Riders Association.

In Saskatchewan, Canada, a hooded sweatshirt is called a “bunny-hug.”

STEER WRASSLIN’

During these years, Pickett perfected his rodeo techniques. His most impressive skill: a new trick called “bulldogging.” Today it’s known as steer wrestling, and here’s how it works: A cowboy on horseback races along next to a running steer. At just the right moment, he slides off of his horse, tackles the steer, and wrestles it to the ground.

There are lots of stories about how Bill Pickett came up with the bulldogging technique, but the most common one says that in 1903, while he was working at a ranch in Rockdale, Texas, Pickett came across a steer that just wouldn’t cooperate with him. The animal was running around the ranch, refusing to go into the corral, and antagonizing the entire herd of cattle. Pickett finally got fed up with the beast, raced him on horseback at full speed, and then tackled him. Still, the animal wouldn’t calm down, so Pickett bit him hard on the lower lip and took him to the ground.

RODEO ROYALTY

Today, steer wrestling is a common rodeo event (even though rodeo riders don’t bite steers on the lip). But when Bill Pickett introduced the technique in the early 1900s, no one had seen it before, and people were fascinated. He became so famous that, in 1905, he moved to Oklahoma and signed up with one of America’s most prestigious Wild West shows: the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Show. One of his colleagues in the show was “Buffalo” Bill Cody.

Old fogy: The computer mouse was introduced in 1968.

But still, many rodeo competitions wouldn’t let Pickett enter because he was black. So the management at the 101 Ranch often billed him as an American Indian. (He did have some Cherokee ancestry.)

LAST RIDE

Pickett worked for the 101 Ranch for almost 30 years. He performed in Mexico, Canada, South America, England, and the United States. But in 1932, he died after an accident in which one of the horses at the ranch kicked him hard in the head.

More than 50 years later, though, his legacy as the most famous black cowboy lives on: the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo, formed in 1984, is the only all–African American touring rodeo in the United States.

*      *      *

Cowboy proverb:
Never kick a cow chip on a hot day.

Smithsonian Institution founder James Smithson never set foot in the United States But after his death, his remains were entombed at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

What does Egypt make you think of? Pyramids, of course. There are lots of them…and people keep finding more.

O
FFICIAL TREASURE HUNTERS

Egypt has such a strong connection to its ancient culture that the country employs a high-ranking government official to discover and preserve artifacts. That person is Zahi Hawass, chief of antiquities. His job: to take teams of archaeologists into the Egyptian desert to uncover ancient tombs and pyramids.

In 2006, Hawass and his team of diggers started excavating in Saqqara, an area about 18 miles south of Cairo. Today, it’s a scientific site, but in ancient Egypt, Saqqara was a huge burial ground for pharaohs and other VIPs from the Egyptian capital city of Memphis.

DIG ON!

Hawass and his crew dug for two years with little success. They weren’t surprised; Saqqara had been an archaeological site for decades, and most scientists thought it had already been completely excavated. But finally, in November 2008, Hawass’s team found something. Sixty-five feet below the sand, they uncovered a 16-foot-tall section of a pyramid that was more than 4,000 years old and had once stood 45 feet high. The markings on the pyramid’s walls indicated that it was the resting place of Queen Sesheshet, the mother of Teti, founder of Egypt’s sixth dynasty.

Grave robbers had stripped the pyramid of its jewels and other treasure long ago, probably just a few hundred years after it was built. But the scientists kept digging… and looking.

Finally, in January 2009, they came across something incredible: Sesheshet’s mummy. Not the whole mummy, but parts of it—a skull and many bones. Both the pyramid and the mummy were great finds because very few of ancient Egypt’s pyramids were dedicated to women. They were mostly reserved for male royalty. According to Hawass, “You can discover a tomb or a statue, but to discover a pyramid, it makes you happy. And a pyramid of a queen—queens have magic.”

The center on a football team was once called the “snapper-back.”

Psst! Nobody loves doughnuts more than Uncle John. Whenever anyone brings a box of them to the BRI, it mysteriously disappears.

H
ISTORIC EATS

Doughnuts have been around for centuries—scientists have even found fossilized fried dough in ancient American Indian ruins. The word first appeared in writing in 1803, when an English cookbook included a recipe for doughnuts. And in America, author Washington Irving published
A Knickerbocker’s History of New York
in 1809. The book told funny stories about the city’s Dutch settlers. In it, he wrote about “balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat, and called doughnuts.”

DOUGH-NUT OR DOUGH-KNOT?

Those early doughnuts were called
olykoeks
(“oily cakes” in Dutch), and they didn’t have holes in the middle. They usually had a nut at the center because the dough in the middle of the balls didn’t cook thoroughly, and the nuts made the gooey centers tastier.

Some people believe that’s why the olykoek eventually got a name change: a dough-nut. But others think the name came from the fact that the pastries were sometimes braided or twisted into dough-knots.

What’s a
junkanoo
? A street parade celebrated in the Bahamas.

THE CAPTAIN’S SWEET MISSION

In 1847, an American sea captain named Hanson Gregory invented the doughnut hole. His mother, Elizabeth, was well-known throughout New England for her olykoeks. (Legend has it that hers were especially delicious because she added nutmeg to the dough and used hazelnuts for the center.) But Captain Gregory didn’t like the pastries’ soggy middles. On one sea voyage, he started cutting them out with the round top of a pepper tin and throwing them away.

When he got home and showed his mother the technique, she started cutting out the centers before frying the dough. And she discovered that if she did that, the pastry cooked all the way through.

DOUGHNUTS GO TO WAR

Over the next few decades, doughnuts with holes caught on all over the United States. During World War I, a group of women from the Salvation Army were in France, trying to help make the soldiers feel at home. In the summer of 1917, a unit near Montiers was soaked from 36 days of rain, and the women decided to make doughnuts to cheer everybody up. They rolled the dough with an old wine bottle, cut the doughnuts with the top of a baking soda tin, and deep-fried the dough in a soldier’s helmet, seven at a time. The men loved them.