Read Uncle John’s Did You Know? Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Uncle John’s Did You Know? (3 page)
• Dolphins hear by detecting sound waves transmitted through their skulls to an ear inside their heads.
• Hippos can drink as much as 66 gallons of water per day.
• A hungry polar bear can smell a seal from 20 miles away.
• Like dogs and wolves, rhinoceroses mark their territory by urinating.
• The honey badger’s favorite food? Honey, of course. To get to this prize, they’ll withstand hundreds of bee stings, an assault that would kill almost any other animal.
• One female mouse can give birth to more than 100 babies during a year.
• A platypus carries half of its body fat in its tail…and can draw on this energy reserve when food is scarce.
• The toucan must turn its head backward and rest its bill on its back to sleep.
• Three overcoats were once found in the stomach of a single shark.
• Ever laugh so hard you busted a gut? The Japanese expression for a belly laugh is “to boil tea with your belly button.”
• No matter how talented you are, sometimes you still don’t succeed. That’s why the Japanese say “even the monkey falls from the tree.”
• Even if you think you’re hiding, others can often still see you. The Japanese call that “hiding your head and showing your butt.”
• When bad things seem to pile up, we say, “When it rains, it pours.” The Japanese say, “The bee stings while you’re already crying.”
• A very popular person in Japan is called a “pulled octopus.” It’s like everyone is tugging on a different tentacle.
• If you’re a big fish in a small pond, you may believe you’re better than you really are. The Japanese say, “A frog in a well doesn’t know the ocean.”
• The English expression “casting pearls before swine” means giving something valuable to someone who won’t appreciate it. The Japanese call it “giving a coin to a cat.”
• Slugs have four noses.
• A praying mantis has only one ear.
• Not only do honeybees have hair on their eyes, they also have five eyes: three small ones on the top of their heads and two bigger ones in front.
• Snails have been known to sleep for three years. (No wonder it takes them so long to get anywhere.)
• A chameleon can move its two eyes in different directions at the same time.
• The boto dolphin of South America is unique among dolphins. Why? It’s pink.
• Open wide: Small birds called plovers are the dental hygienists of the animal world. They’ll hop into a crocodile’s open mouth and clean its teeth.
• The pupil of an octopus’s eye is rectangular.
• Armadillo moms always have four babies at a time. And the babies are always all the same sex.
• Freakiest freak? Here’s our candidate: The horned lizard uses special muscles to burst tiny blood vessels at the edges of its eyes so it can squirt a stream of blood at an attacker—from as far as three feet away.
Hop in and take this baby for a spin!
• The average American-made car contains 300 pounds of plastic.
• Why do they call it “rush” hour? In London rush-hour traffic moves at—ho-hum—just eight miles per hour.
• Eww! Roll down the windows! Over a lifetime, the average driver passes 912 pints of gas inside a car.
• In 1990 there was a traffic jam 84 miles long in Japan—a world record.
• Can you guess how long it took to assemble one Model T Ford on a production line in the 1920s? Answer: 1 ½ hours.
• In 1900 there were 109 automobile companies worldwide. Today there are about 2,000.
• About one man in three admits to daydreaming while driving.
• The six stars on the Subaru logo represent the Pleiades, a star cluster in the constellation Taurus.
• The average driver will honk 15,250 times in a lifetime. (Most American cars honk in the key of
F
.)
• You could have bought a Model T Ford for $260 in 1925.
• About half the German highway system has no speed limit.
• The average driver will curse 32,025 times in a lifetime of driving.
• The average person will spend two weeks of their life waiting for traffic lights to change.
• Early cars didn’t have steering wheels—they used levers.
In which we present a few stories about stories you may have read as a child
.
• Even though seeing a mermaid on a ship voyage was considered bad luck, the statue of Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid in Copenhagen harbor attracts a lot of sailors who touch her for
good
luck.
• The Brothers Grimm didn’t write those fairy tales; most were folk tales not meant for children. The brothers collected them from storytellers and began publishing them in 1812.
• Ever heard of Charles Perrault? Maybe not, but you know the 17th century Frenchman for his Mother Goose stories, including Cinderella, Puss-in-Boots, Little Red Riding Hood, and Sleeping Beauty.
• In the original folk tale, Goldilocks wasn’t a little girl who ate the bears’ porridge. She was an old woman who drank the bears’ milk. (In another version, she wasn’t even Goldilocks—she was Silverhair.)
• What’s Little Red Riding Hood’s first name? It’s not “Little”…it’s Blanchette.
• Oh, no, an ogre! The name Shrek comes from the German word
schreck
, which means “fear” or “terror.”
The origins of some common American last names that were based on old-time occupations
.
• A “Carter” was a delivery person who drove a cart from town to town.
• If your name is Cooper, one of your ancestors might have been a maker of wooden barrels. (From the old Dutch word
kupe
, meaning “tub.”)
• The name Kellogg literally means a hog-killer, a nickname for pork butchers, derived from “kill hog.”
• A “Parker” wasn’t a parking valet, he was the grounds-keeper of a park surrounding a nobleman’s estate.
• The name Stone comes from a worker who cut stone for a living.
• In the Middle Ages, “Leach” was a word for “doctor.” It came from an old English word
laece
, that also meant “leech”—because medieval doctors used blood-sucking leeches on their patients.
• A “Black” was a cloth-dyer whose specialty was shades of black.
• Do you know anyone named Chamberlain? A chamberlain was a personal servant who cleaned the chambers (rooms) of a nobleman’s home.
• A “Kemp” was a wrestler—from
cempa
, the old English word for “champion” or “warrior.”
• At 3° to 10°F, snowflakes are usually star-shaped. When it gets a little warmer, they’re shaped more like columns; a little colder, more like plates.
• Home Sweet Home: A Canadian company offers a two-day course in igloo building.
• Brazil, 2003: A 440-pound chunk of ice fell out of a cloudless sky. Scientists blamed it on global warming.
• Here’s how fast an average raindrop falls: 600 feet per minute. The average snowflake falls at a more leisurely pace: about 11 feet per minute.
• Record for the most snowfall on a single day: 47.5 inches of snow fell on Valdez, Alaska, on January 16, 1990.
• Look out below! A snowflake that spins like a top as it’s falling will usually be symmetrical when it hits the ground; if it falls sideways, it will probably be lopsided when it lands.
• Dirty snow melts faster than clean snow. Why? Because dirt particles are warmer than snow crystals.
• Mountain goats have a special feature on each hoof: a soft pad that acts as a powerful suction cup. Result: A mountain goat can walk up very steep mountains.
• The detergent most commonly used to clean elephants is Murphy’s Oil Soap.
• The housefly hums in the key of
F
.
• Why can’t birds live on the space station? Because they require gravity to swallow.
• What do reindeer and chimpanzees have in common? They both like bananas.
• Koalas’ fingerprints are nearly identical to humans’. (They could actually be confused at a crime scene.)
• The world’s termites outweigh the world’s humans 10 to 1.
• A full-grown eagle is powerful enough to kill a young deer and fly away with it.
• Some species of snails are venomous and can kill an adult human with a single bite.
• Wolverines, the largest members of the weasel family, have been known to pry apart the jaws of a steel trap they’ve been caught in.
• Canada has roughly 2 million lakes…more than half the lakes in the world.
• The last Canadian dollar bill was issued in 1989. It was replaced by the one-dollar coin, commonly called a “loonie”—after the loon bird engraved on it.
• St. Paul, Alberta, is home to the world’s first flying-saucer launching pad. It was built in 1967 to celebrate Canada’s centennial.
• Room to roam: On average, there are nine people per square mile in Canada, as compared to the 76 people crowded into each square mile in the U.S.
• The Dutch Royal Family moved to Ottawa as refugees during World War II. In gratitude, Princess Juliana of the Netherlands gave Ottawa 100,000 tulip bulbs in 1945.
• North America’s largest shopping mall: the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta. In addition to over 800 stores and restaurants, it boasts an amusement park, an indoor lake with four working submarines, 26 movie theaters, and a hockey arena.
• Canada and the United States share the longest unbroken boundary in the world—nearly 4,000 miles.
• Unusual Canadian place names: Blow Me Down, Spuzzum, Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, and Ta Ta Creek.
• Good news for people who are lactose intolerant: Chocolate aids in digesting milk.
• Now
that’s
progress: The first lollipop machines made 40 lollipops a minute. But today’s rate is 5,900 lollipops a minute—nearly 100 per second.
• The secret to blowing bigger bubbles is to chew your gum until the sugar is gone; sugar makes bubbles collapse because it doesn’t stretch.
• Candies that have been around for more than 100 years: Hershey bars, Tootsie Rolls, Cracker Jack, Good & Plenty.
• More than half of the marshmallows sold in summer are toasted over a fire.
• The world’s largest S’more was made from 20,000 toasted marshmallows and 7,000 chocolate bars. It weighed 1,600 pounds.
• The world’s largest lollipop (including the stick, of course, or it wouldn’t be a lollipop) weighed 4,031 pounds, measured 18.9 inches thick, and was more than 15 feet tall. The flavor was cherry.
• Imagine a plastic Easter egg about the height of a nine-story building. That’s how big it would have to be if it was filled with the more than 16 billion jelly beans that U.S. manufacturers produce for Easter every year.