Read Uncle John’s Did You Know? Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Uncle John’s Did You Know? (5 page)
• When a wasp attacks a skipper caterpillar, the little wormlike critter fires defensive poop balls from its butt. These missiles travel at six feet per second! Evidently the smell of skipper caterpillar poop is like perfume to the wasp, because it will turn around and immediately zoom off in the direction of the dookie.
Think the classroom’s weird? Try the courtroom
,
• Actual court case:
The United States v
. 350
Cartons of Canned Sardines
.
• Shades of Stephen King: A 375-pound woman stepped on a 53-year-old grave, and it collapsed under her weight. She’s suing the cemetery.
•
Harry Potter
publisher Scholastic sued a newspaper for more than $100 million for running a review of Harry’s latest book three days before it was released, and revealing the surprise ending.
• Someone is suing Palm, Inc. for “deceptive marketing practices” because one of their PDAs was advertised as displaying more than 65,000 colors—but it’s really only capable of producing 58,621.
• A 15-year-old boy who joined a Babe Ruth Baseball League didn’t get to play as much as he thought he should. He sued the league for a refund of his entry fee. (He lost.)
• A lot of junk: A man who was having heart attacks and got diabetes because he’s obese is suing McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, and KFC because they didn’t tell him that he shouldn’t eat so much fast food.
• Top dog: When two dogs approach each other, the dog that’s wagging its tail very slowly will be the dominant of the twosome.
• Detector dogs trained to look for drugs at airports can sniff out 400 to 500 packages in about 30 minutes.
• Every pile of dog poop that goes unscooped attracts about 144 flies.
• For every 130 dogs who try out for police work, only one is qualified.
• It may look like one, but according to breed standards, it isn’t officially a Chihuahua if it weighs more than six pounds.
• Bloodhounds aren’t specialists in smelling blood—their name comes from “blooded hound,” referring to their pure breeding.
• A group of greyhounds is called a
leash
of greyhounds.
• The Basenji is known as a dog that doesn’t bark. That’s a myth—it does bark on rare occasions. But it sounds more like a scream.
• Those little dogs called “lapdogs” were once popular among the wealthy because they could be put into bed first to attract the bedbugs and fleas. (Eww!)
• Newfoundlands are good swimmers because they have webbed feet.
• Next to Warsaw (the largest city in Poland), there are more people of Polish origin in Chicago than in any other city on Earth.
• About 85 million people live in deserts. That’s about 13% of the world’s population.
• The South Pacific nation of Fiji is made up of 332 islands, most of which are uninhabited.
• The official dance of Mexico: the Mexican Hat Dance.
• The Yanco tribe of the Amazon cannot count beyond three. Why? They don’t have any words for larger numbers.
• There are 75 towns in the world named Waterloo.
• Most rivers flow south, and a few flow north, but the Tonle River in Cambodia does both. Six months of the year it flows north, and the other six months it flows south.
• Lost and Found Department: In one year, 7,026 umbrellas and 19,583 articles of clothing were found on London’s buses, trains, and taxis.
• The first event at the first Olympics, held in 776 B.C., was a foot race. The winner was Koroibos, who worked as a cook.
• The Games were held every four years for 12 centuries—until A.D. 393.
• The ancient Olympic Games never had a marathon race. The first marathon was held in Athens in 1896.
• Famous Greeks like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Hippocrates attended—or even competed in—the ancient Olympics.
• In A.D. 67, the Roman emperor Nero won a series of events—not because he was a great athlete, but because he was the emperor of the most powerful state in the world and everybody had to lose to him.
• No holds barred: The
pankration
event was a kick-boxing and wrestling match between two men. It could go on all day, and everything was allowed except eye gouging, nose gouging, biting, or using a weapon.
• According to ancient Olympic regulations, bribing a judge or an opponent would be punished by whipping.
• Married women weren’t allowed to attend the ancient Games. If they were caught, they’d be thrown off a cliff.
• The human body is mostly water—about 70%. How watery are you? If you weight 80 pounds, 56 pounds of it is water. That’s about 112 eight-ounce glasses of water in
you
.
• Every day about 10 billion tiny scales of skin rub off your body.
• The Japanese believe blood types determine personality traits. Type A: calm, trustworthy. Type B: creative, excitable. Type AB: thoughtful, emotional. Type O: confident, good leader. (Uncle John is Type O.)
• Itch, ouch, itch, ouch: Babies who wear disposable diapers are five times more likely to get diaper rash than babies who wear cloth diapers.
• Sweaty feet? No wonder! Feet have about 250,000 pores oozing a quarter of a cup of liquid each day.
• A blink lasts about .15 seconds. Every person blinks for roughly 23 minutes per day. In just one day, all the blinks of all the people in the world would add up to 267,000 years of darkness.
• Mom is right: Carrots
are
good for your eyes. Your body converts the carotene in carrots into vitamin A, which is essential for proper vision.
• Brazil has the most plant species in the world: more than 56,000.
• Not the grandest? The deepest canyon in the United States isn’t the Grand Canyon. Hell’s Canyon, along the Oregon-Idaho border, is more than 8,000 feet deep. The Grand Canyon is less than 6,000.
• World’s largest city: Davao City, in the Philippines, with an area of over 1,500 square miles.
• China is bordered by more countries than any other: Its 16 neighbors are Afghanistan, Bhutan, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Macau, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, North Korea, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Vietnam.
• The Netherlands boasts the highest concentration of museums in the world.
• Ushuaia, Argentina, is the southernmost city in the world.
• Hawaii’s Mount Waialeale is the world’s wettest location: it gets about 460 inches of rain per year.
• The steepest street in the world is Baldwin Street in Dunedin, New Zealand, with an incline of 38%.
A little background music, please, maestro
…
• Instruments named after their inventors: the saxophone (Adolphe Sax), the Moog synthesizer (Dr. Robert Moog), and the theremin (Leon Theremin). The sousaphone was named after bandleader John Philip Sousa, but he didn’t invent it.
• After some California preschool students took musical keyboard lessons for eight months, their IQs rose by 46%.
• In 2006 a violin made in 1707 by famed violin maker Antonio Stradivari sold for $3.5 million.
• Some scientists believe that Stradivarius violins sound so good because of microscopic holes in their wood. The holes may have come from soaking the wood in seawater or coating it with borax.
• Former president Bill Clinton played the saxophone in jazz bands when he was a teenager.
• The combined tension of the strings in a grand piano is as much as 30 tons.
• Traditional circus music was played on a calliope (ca-LIE-oh-pee), a kind of organ that runs on steam. It was named for Calliope, the Greek muse of poetry.
•
Ukulele
is Hawaiian for “jumping flea,” because a player’s fingers move really fast when playing it.
• The first religion to spread beyond the society where it originated: Buddhism.
• Medieval experts on religion believed there were 399,902,004 angels in the universe.
• There’s a statue of Buddha in Tokyo that’s 394 feet tall—more than twice the height of the Statue of Liberty.
• Seven out of 10 people believe in life after death.
• The ancient Egyptians worshiped more than 2,000 different gods and goddesses.
• According to Norse mythology, Valhalla, the heaven reserved for brave Viking warriors slain in battle, has doors so wide that 800 warriors could walk through them shoulder-to-shoulder.
• But I couldn’t help it! The Puritans considered being born on a Sunday a huge sin.
• Some people think the Shroud of Turin bears Jesus Christ’s image at his crucifixion. Others think it’s a hoax, possibly perpetrated by Leonardo da Vinci.
• Hinduism is one of the world’s oldest religions, dating to 1500 B.C. Hindus call their religion
sanatana dharma
, meaning “eternal truth.”