Uncle John’s Facts to Annoy Your Teacher Bathroom Reader for Kids Only! (3 page)

Little Red Riding Hood
, by the Brothers Grimm

Was the Big Bad Wolf eating people too violent? Nope. Officials in two California school districts thought the story might encourage kids to drink because one of the illustrations shows a bottle of wine among the food Red brings to her grandmother.

Where’s Waldo
?, by Martin Handford

The public libraries of Saginaw, Michigan, tried to ban the first Waldo book in 1989 because some of the pages supposedly contained “dirty things”—like the bare back of a sunbather in a beach scene.

Mickey Mouse comics

In 1938, just before World War II, Italy’s National Conference of Juvenile Literature banned all books featuring Mickey Mouse. Why? The organization thought the character encouraged kids to think for themselves and be individuals, concepts that clashed with the politics of Italy’s dictator at the time, Benito Mussolini.

The Diary of a Young Girl
, by Anne Frank

Anne Frank’s diary is a sad account of her time living in an attic and hiding from the Nazis during World War II. In 1983, the Alabama Textbook Commission tried to remove the book from schools because the group thought it was “a real downer.”

J. K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was turned down by eight publishers.

Some critters do people tricks better than people.

M
ONKEYING AROUND

Macaque monkeys often imitate human beings, but none do it better than Momoko, a monkey who lives in Nagasaki, Japan. She scuba dives, water-skis, windsurfs, and snow skis.

Her owner, Katsumi Nakashima, adopted Momoko from a shelter. He got her used to the water in his bathtub and then took her boating. At first, he towed the monkey slowly behind his boat on a four-foot-long surfboard with handlebars. But soon Momoko was shooting across the water on water skis at almost 20 mph.

The six-year-old monkey’s favorite sport, however, is scuba diving. Wearing a yellow wetsuit and a breathing mask made to fit her face, Momoko swims to the ocean floor on her own and sits on a rock watching the colorful fish swim by.

PIG OUT

There’s a saying: “Don’t try to teach a pig to sing,” meaning don’t attempt the impossible. But teach a pig to ride a skateboard, play songs, and golf? That’s not so hard…at least not for Bacon and Porkchop, two potbellied pigs from Colorado. The pair can do dozens of incredible tricks, like shooting a ball through a basketball hoop and raising a flag.

Time it took Dr. Seuss to write the text for
The Lorax
: 45 minutes.

It all started in the 1990s when Lynne Vincent convinced her husband John to bring home a little black piglet named Bacon from an animal shelter. Pigs have a good memory, which makes them fast learners. “I just started training him to be smarter than my friends’ dogs,” John recalled. It worked. After a few weeks of training, Bacon had learned all the typical commands: he could shake, turn in a circle, and fetch. From there, it wasn’t a big leap to 360-degree slam dunks and jumping 18-inch hurdles.

Bacon was later paired with another pig that Lynne and John adopted, a white piglet named Porkchop. The two became a stage team. They sing and act (and learned to do impersonations of James Bond, Stevie Wonder, and Elvis Presley). Porkchop even landed a role on an episode of the television show
Diagnosis: Murder
. And when the pair performed on
The Tonight Show
, Jay Leno observed, “Pigs like this only come around once in a lifetime.”

British astronomer William Whewell coined the term “scientist” in 1833.

You’ve got 10 toenails—so how about 10 toenail facts
?

1. MOON SPOTS

That white spot at the base of your toenails (and fingernails) shaped like a half-moon is called the “lunule,” a name that comes from the Latin word for “moon.”

2. WORLD’S LONGEST

In 1991, a woman from California named Louise Hollis set (and still holds) the record for the longest combined toenail length: her 10 nails were 7.25 feet long. How much time does she spend filing and painting them? Two days every week.

3. CLIP ME TENDER

The Loudermilk Boarding House Museum in Georgia contains about 30,000 Elvis Presley artifacts. Here you’ll find a wart, a vial of sweat, and a toenail…all said to have come from the King himself. (Some Elvis experts debate the authenticity of the toenail, though, so it’s just called the “Maybe Elvis Toenail.”)

There’s a Spaghetti Museum in Pontedassio, Italy.

4. OUCH!

About 5 percent of people complain of ingrown toenails, that painful condition where the toenail grows into the surrounding skin.

5. ANOTHER KIND OF TOENAIL

The Devil’s Toenail in Llano County, Texas, is a 350-foot-tall sandstone hill that looks like a giant toenail.

6. MOTHER KNOWS BEST

Gorilla mothers use their teeth to trim their babies’ toenails.

7. TOENAILS TELL THE TALE

The chemicals in your toenails can tell doctors lots of things: if you’re at risk for skin cancer or heart disease, what you eat and drink, whether you take prescription drugs, and even where you’ve lived.

8. A STAR IS BORN

Thomas John Ashton’s 1852 book
A Treatise on Corns, Bunions, and Ingrowing of the Toenail: Their Cause and Treatment
contains a section on toenails. It’s believed to have been the first time the subject of toenails showed up in a published book.

Let those piggies free! August 6 is Wiggle Your Toes Day.

9. FAST HANDS

Toenails grow four times more slowly than fingernails. (It takes about eight months to grow a new toenail.)

10. NECKNAILS

Marathon runner Jan Ryerse was always breaking off parts of his toenails when he ran races. (They collected in his shoes.) So he decided to craft a memento: a toenail necklace. Most of the toenails are his, but he also took donations from family, friends, and fans to fill it out.

*      *      *

TAKE HEART

•
People who’ve suffered a bad breakup or the death of a loved one are more likely to have a heart attack.

•
Most people think their heart is located on the left side of their chest, but it’s not. Your heart is in the center, right between your lungs.

•
Make a fist—your heart is about that size.

Actual book title:
The Little Book of Horse Poop

Stuff you didn’t know about celebrities.

•
Both of
Jack Black’s
parents were rocket scientists.

•
When he was a young man,
President Richard
Nixon
worked at an Arizona carnival. As a young man,
President Gerald Ford
was a model.

•
Rihanna’s
real name: Robyn Fenty.

•
Ashton Kutcher
,
Jon Heder
(
Napoleon Dynamite
), and
Scarlett Johansson
all have twin siblings.

•
Cameron Diaz
washes her face only with bottled Evian water.

•
Kelly Clarkson
initially wanted to be a marine biologist. Then she saw the shark movie
Jaws
, changed her mind, and decided to be a singer instead.

•
Barack Obama
met his wife Michelle when he took a job at a law firm in Chicago—she was his boss.

•
When she was 11, singer
Taylor Swift
won a national poetry contest. Her entry: a three-page poem called “Monster in My Closet.”

•
Right before he was supposed to record his first album in 2003,
Kanye West
was in a car accident, which required his jaw to be wired shut. He didn’t quit rapping, though. Instead, he sneaked out of the hospital and recorded his first single, “Through the Wire”—with his jaw still wired shut.

If Oprah Winfrey married writer Deepak Chopra, she’d be Oprah Chopra.

When Uncle John was a teenager, he ran off to join the circus…as a toilet paper roll juggler, of course. So to honor his fellow performers (and lucky page #13), he put together this list.

•
Don’t sleep inside the big top.
It could collapse, and anyone inside might be killed.

•
Never look back during a parade.
Circus performers always keep their eyes forward to leave behind any misfortune or bad memories.

•
Don’t whistle under the big top.
Before high-tech headsets and computers, the backstage workers at a circus whistled to each other to give stage cues: when to drop a curtain, when to light the human cannon, etc. If the performers whistled, too, it could throw off the entire show. Today, no one whistles…just in case.

•
Don’t count the audience.
This old theater superstition applies to the circus as well and was designed to protect the performers. If the audience was too small, it might make them feel self-conscious; too large, and they might get stage fright.

•
Never take a picture of an elephant’s trunk pointing down
—it will make the circus’s luck run out.

In Nepal, never point your toes at anyone. It’s considered insulting.

Forget what your teachers may have told you—some jobs require skills you can’t learn in school.

T
HAR SHE BLOWS!

Joseph Pujol was born in France in 1857, and as a teenager, he discovered that he had a unique and special talent: he could fart at will. One day, while swimming in the ocean, Joseph took a deep breath before dunking his head underwater. When he breathed in, he felt a whoosh of cold water enter his body through his bottom. Soon, Joseph started doing the trick to entertain his friends: he’d suck in water through his behind and then shoot it out. Then, he discovered he could also do it with air.

After high school, Pujol joined the army and honed his farting skills by performing them for other soldiers. He learned to make different notes with his farts and even played tunes on a small flute called an ocarina.

A CHEEKY STAGE ACT