Read Uncle John’s Did You Know? Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Uncle John’s Did You Know? (8 page)
Fascinating facts about farts
.
• Another name for farting:
flatulence
.
• Burp, burp, fart, burp, fart, fart, burp, fart, burp, fart—10 down, 5 to go. Most of us (including you) burp or fart as least 10 to 15 times per day.
• Beans are famous for making you fart, but cauliflower, broccoli, apples, milk, raisins, and popcorn can make you fart even more than beans do.
• A fart smells the same to the farter and the farted-at. But since the fart blasts away from the farter, the other guy usually smells it first.
• A fart can take 30 to 45 minutes to travel through your body. Bon
voyage
, and be sure to let us know (loudly) when it gets to the end of its trip.
• If farts could be measured like water, the gas you pass each day would amount to between one cup and one half gallon.
• Picture this: You’re up in space without a spacesuit. And you fart. Hang on, because the force is enough to propel you forward through space.
• If you soak dried beans in water for twelve hours before cooking, they’ll produce less flatulence.
• It may not be ladylike, but the fact is that women fart three times more often than men.
• Hailstones the size of bowling balls fell on Coffeyville, Kansas, on September 2, 1970.
• Great balls of fire: Thousands of people have reported seeing what’s called “ball lightning”—glowing balls that are as bright as light bulbs—flying though the sky, or even entering their houses.
• In 1979 a thunderstorm in Norwich, England, generated 2- to 4-inch flakes of ice that fluttered out of the sky like falling leaves.
• Whirlwinds (or “dust devils”) usually just carry sand and debris, but they’ve also been known to suck up flames from nearby forest fires and carry them away.
• Golf-ball-size hailstones fell in Alberta, Canada, in 1953, killing 36,000 ducks—not to be confused with a 1933 storm in Worcester, Massachusetts, that generated huge hailstones that contained
freshly frozen
ducks.
• The secondary rainbow in a double rainbow is the exact reverse of the primary rainbow: The red is on the inner edge and the blue is on the outer edge.
• An 1877 issue of
Scientific American
reported a rain of snakes, some as big as 1 ½ feet long, that fell out of the sky in Memphis, Tennessee.
• A “sun dog” is a bright spot in the sky that’s 22 degrees to the left or right of the sun.
• Where are they? “Land of the Midnight Sun,” “Land of Enchantment,” and “Land of 10,000 Lakes,” are the nicknames of Alaska, New Mexico, and Minnesota, respectively.
• What city has the most telescopes in the world? Tucson, Arizona.
• The first log cabins in North America were built in 1683 by Swedish immigrants in Delaware.
• Coolest state? It could be Florida. In 1851 Dr. John Gorrie of Apalachicola, Florida, patented the process of manufacturing ice.
• In a competition for “Longest Main Street in the United States,” Island Park, Idaho, would win: Its main street is 33 miles long.
• In 1928, Baltimore, Maryland, became the home of the first umbrella factory in America.
• Visit the Elephant Hall in the University of Nebraska State Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska, and you’ll see the world’s largest collection of elephant skeletons.
• The next time someone you know gets a parking ticket, tell them to blame it on Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. That’s where, in 1935, the first parking meter was installed.
Q:
Why do mosquitoes bite?
A:
They need the protein in blood to produce their eggs—that’s why only female mosquitoes bite.
Q:
Beehives seem like pretty busy places, but how many bees have been known fit into one hive?
A:
A beehive can contain as many as 80,000 bees at a time.
Q:
Is it true that doctors once used bloodsucking leeches as a medical treatment for sick people?
A:
Yes. Back in the 1800s, doctors thought leeches could drain “bad blood” from sick patients. The practice was so widespread that leeches became an endangered species. (Some doctors still use them.)
Q:
How many legs does the biggest centipede have?
A:
The biggest,
Scolopendra gigantea
, only has 46 legs, but other centipedes have as many as 350. Millipedes can have up to 750 legs!
Q:
Why doesn’t a mayfly have a mouth?
A:
Because it has a life span of only one or two days, and doesn’t eat. (It does eat in its immature stage, when it’s called a
naiad
.)
• It’s against the law to sing off-key in North Carolina.
• You may be headed straight for jail if you dare to wear New York Jets clothing in Ada, Oklahoma.
• Don’t box with a kangaroo in Myrtle Creek, Oregon. The law forbids it. (There are kangaroos in Oregon?)
• It’s illegal to sleep on top of a refrigerator outdoors in Pennsylvania.
• Curb your appetite! No one is allowed to bite off another person’s leg in Rhode Island.
• In Charleston, South Carolina, the fire department is legally permitted to blow up your house.
• In Texas, it’s illegal to sell your eye.
• It may be inconvenient, but you’re not allowed to wash your mule on the sidewalk in Culpeper, Virginia.
• Kirkland, Illinois, law forbids bees to fly through any of its streets. (Has anyone told the bees?)
• Whew! It’s against the law for a monster to enter the city limits of Urbana, Illinois.
• In Zion, Illinois, you are not permitted to give lighted cigars to dogs, cats, or other animals kept as pets.
• It’s illegal to go whale fishing in Nebraska.
• In Hartford, Connecticut, it’s against the law to educate a dog.
• In Chicago, Illinois, you’re breaking the law if you fish in your pajamas.
• You’ll just have to let your nose run in Waterville, Maine, because it’s illegal to blow it in public.
• In Louisiana, it’s against the law to gargle in public.
• The state of Massachusetts absolutely forbids dueling with water pistols.
• Not that you’d want to, but teasing skunks is against the law in Minnesota.
• If a child burps during a church service in Omaha, Nebraska, his or her parents may be arrested.
• In New Jersey, it’s illegal to slurp your soup.
• Oklahoma law prohibits anyone from making “ugly faces” at dogs.
• Don’t whistle underwater in Vermont. It’s against the law. (But how do you do it, anyway?)
• According to Washington State law, you may not pretend your parents are rich.
• In Mesquite, Texas, it’s illegal for children to have “unusual haircuts.”
• In a group of 23 people, there is a 50% chance that two of them will have the same birthday.
• When it’s written out as “forty,” 40 is the only number whose letters are in alphabetical order.
• A two-inch-diameter garden hose will carry four times as much water as a one-inch-diameter hose.
• If a person had started counting the moment they were born and continued without stopping until they turned 65, they still wouldn’t have counted to a billion.
• Roll the dice. If one die reads “three,” what’s on the opposite side? Four. How do you know? The numbers on opposite sides of a die always add up to seven.
• In case you ever want to call the White House with a comment, the phone number is (202) 456-1111.
• Try this on a calculator: What is 11,111,111 multiplied by itself? 123,456,787,654,321
• If you counted all the black spots on all the dalmations in every scene of
101 Dalmatians
, you’d see 6,469,952 of them.
• To date, the year 1888 requires the most Roman numerals: MDCCCLXXXVIII.
HAIL TO
THE CHIEF
• In a survey of 500 historians, Warren G. Harding was voted the worst president in American history.
• President Andrew Jackson believed the Earth was flat.
• The tallest president was 6’4” Abe Lincoln; the shortest was James Madison, at 5’4”.
• Julie Nixon, daughter of 37th president Richard Nixon, is married to David Eisenhower, grandson of 34th president Dwight Eisenhower.
• President Jimmy Carter’s boyhood home was built from plans purchased from a Sears catalog.
• The U.S. interstate highway system was the brainchild of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who based the idea on the German
autobahns
(highways) he’d seen after World War II.
• The president gets a 21-gun salute; the vice president gets only 19.
•
Q:
Which U.S. president served for only 32 days?
A:
William Henry Harrison. On his inauguration day, he caught a cold that developed into fatal pneumonia.
• James Buchanan was the only bachelor president. Ronald Reagan was the only president who had been divorced.
• How much soil had to be dug out to create the Panama Canal? More than 175 million cubic yards.
• The Chinese used rice flour to strengthen the bricks when they were building the Great Wall.
• The Eiffel Tower—the tallest structure in the world when it was completed in 1889—was built just to show that iron could be as strong as stone…but much lighter.
• The first paved road was built around 2500 B.C. in Egypt. The ancient Egyptians used it to haul stones for the construction of the pyramids.
• The deepest hole ever dug is in Russia, on the Kola Peninsula. Its purpose: to research the structure of the earth’s crust. Its depth: 7 miles.
• It took more than 10 million bricks to build the Empire State Building.
• Who’s taller? It happened in 1929 in New York City: Just when the Manhattan Trust Company finished what they thought was the world’s tallest building, workers at the Chrysler Building hoisted a spire—hidden inside the building—up through the top of the roof to steal the coveted title.
