Read Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wise Up! Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Although King John of England signed the Magna Carta, he promptly had Pope Innocent III annul it.
Cleopatra wasn’t Egyptian. She was Greek.
During the French Revolution, King Louis XVI tried to escape, but he was easily recognized—because his portrait was on French currency.
Edward VIII abdicated the English throne in 1936, but he did rule again…as governor of the Bahamas.
Josephine Bonaparte’s divorce from Napoléon was the first under the Napoleonic code of law, which allowed women to file for divorce.
Snakes don’t blink because they don’t have movable eyelids.
The “warts” on a toad are actually toxin-filled glands.
The American alligator derives its name from the Spanish
lagarto
, or “lizard.”
During one summer, a single toad will eat about 10,000 insects.
The South American basilisk lizard is nicknamed the “Jesus Christ lizard” because it can run across the surface of water to escape predators.
During their lifetimes, alligators grow—and lose— about 3,000 teeth.
The poisonous copperhead snake gives off a scent like that of fresh-cut cucumbers.
More than 80 percent of the reptiles in Australia are native to the continent.
Horned toads are not toads—they’re lizards.
The Sonoran coral snake and the western hook-nosed snake both fart to scare off predators. (The noise scares them, not the smell.)
The U.S. Navy won’t accept any recruit with an “obscene” tattoo.
In 1995, Rebecca Marier became the first woman to graduate at the top of the class at West Point.
When they’re at sea, the crews of U.S. nuclear-powered submarines wear blue coveralls called “poopie-suits.”
Granola bars, instant noodle soup, and freeze-dried coffee were all invented by the military.
The only woman to receive the congressional Medal of Honor was Dr. Mary Walker, a surgeon in the Civil War.
Item most requested by American soldiers serving in Iraq: toilet paper.
Fliers with the Blue Angels have to be active-duty Navy or Marine Corps tactical jet pilots with a minimum of 1,350 flight hours.
In January 2006, the U.S. Army raised its maximum enlistment age to 39.
The U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS
Abraham Lincoln
has five gymnasiums and a basketball league with 22 teams.
England’s King George I (1660–1727) was German and could barely speak English.
At the 1912 Olympics, General George S. Patton placed fifth in the pentathlon.
If the 2004 U.S. presidential election had been held in Canada, John Kerry would have beaten George Bush 64 percent to 19 percent.
George
magazine (a political publication named for George Washington) was founded by John Kennedy Jr. in 1995. Its first cover featured Cindy Crawford.
George Washington played a version of baseball with his men at Valley Forge.
King George VI changed the date of his birthday from December 14 to June 9, so it wouldn’t interfere with Christmas.
Alabama governor George Wallace put himself through college by working as a professional boxer.
Author George Orwell was probably the first person to use the phrase “cold war,” in 1945.
The speeches of England’s King George VI (1895–1952) were written specifically to minimize his stammer.
On July 4, 1776, King George III wrote in his diary, “Nothing of importance happened today.”
Writers George Sand and George Eliot were women.
George Washington Carver made more than 300 products out of peanuts during the early 1900s.
Priciest painting by a female artist:
Calla Lilies with Red Anemone
(Georgia O’Keeffe, sold for $6.1 million in 2001).
The Roman Empire was knit together by more than 50,000 miles of roads.
Early Egyptians buried their dead in the desert. The heat and dryness of the sand dehydrated the bodies quickly, creating natural mummies.
Horse racing originated around 4500 BC among nomadic tribesmen in central Asia.
Ancient Egyptians slept on headrests made of stone.
At its height in AD 117, the Roman Empire covered 2.5 million square miles.
According to paleontologists, Neanderthals probably had high-pitched voices.
Sit-in strikes were conducted by Egyptian graveyard workers in the 12th century BC.
In ancient Rome, being born with a crooked nose was a sign of a good leader.
In ancient Egypt, doctors sometimes prescribed warm donkey droppings to relieve sore eyes.
During the Three Kingdoms period (AD 220–280), China’s name for Japan was Wa.
The earliest known pottery in the world comes from Japan’s Jomon culture, which emerged around 14,000 BC.
Ancient Roman wrestling matches had only one rule: no eye gouging.
The ruins of Carthage are located in Tunisia.
The word gymnasium comes from the Greek
gymnos
(naked) because athletes in ancient Greece often competed in the nude.
America’s oldest candy brand is the Necco wafer, sold since 1847. The eight original flavors: lemon, orange, lime, clove, cinnamon, wintergreen, licorice, and chocolate.
About 65 percent of American candy brands have been around for more than 50 years.
The marshmallows in Lucky Charms cereal are technically called “marbits.”
In 1915, William Wrigley Jr. sent free chewing gum to every person listed in the Chicago phone book.
Pez dispensers got their first character heads in 1955.
Three out of every four Snickers bars in the world are made at the M&M/Mars plant in Waco, Texas.
Streetlamps in Hershey, Pennsylvania, are shaped like chocolate kisses.
Every year, Americans eat about 95 million pounds of marshmallows…and more than 2.5 billion pounds of chocolate.
Chocolatier Clarence Crane invented Life Savers in 1912; the original flavor was called Pep-O-Mint.
How many M&Ms are there in a pound? About 192 peanut or 512 plain.
In the late 1960s, Pez tried to market flower-flavored candies.
U.S. candy makers manufacture more than 16 million jelly beans every Easter.
The first chewing gum to be widely advertised in the United States was Tutti-Frutti.
Time needed to produce a marshmallow Peep: six seconds.
The Sargasso Sea has no coastline. (It’s in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean.)
Florida’s beaches lose 20 million cubic yards of sand every year.
The United States has 12,383 miles of coastline; 6,640 miles of it are in Alaska.
First national seashore: Cape Hatteras National Seashore, in North Carolina, established in 1953.
Seventy percent of San Francisco Bay is less than 12 feet deep.
New York City has 570 miles of shoreline.
Alaska’s Glacier Bay has some of the largest tidal fluctuations in the world; high tide can be as much as 25 feet higher than low tide.
Tsunami waves can move from one shore of the Pacific to the other in less than a day.
The ocean off the Outer Banks of North Carolina has been called “the Graveyard of the Atlantic.” The total number of vessels lost near Cape Hatteras is estimated at more than 2,000.
Many of the streets in Paris are named for famous scientists. Here are five you might recognize:
1. Rue Ampère.
Named for French physicist André-Marie Ampère, who discovered electromagnetism. He initiated a standard system of measurement for electric currents, and the ampere unit of electric current was named for him.
2. Rue Copernic.
Named for Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who produced a workable model of the solar system with the Sun in the center in the 16th century.
3. Rue Pierre et Marie Curie.
Named for the Nobel Prize–winning couple who pioneered the study of magnetism and radioactivity, and discovered the elements radium and polonium in 1898. (Polonium was named for Marie’s homeland of Poland.)
4. Rue Galilée.
Named for Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher Galileo Galilei, who has been called the “father of modern science.”
5. Rue Foucault.
Named for Jean Bernard Léon Foucault, a French mathematician and astronomer who invented the gyroscope and a pendulum that demonstrated that earth rotates on its axis.
Worldwide, about 50 Bibles are sold every minute.
The Old Testament mentions almonds 73 times.
According to the Bible, King David played the harp.
The Bible is stolen more often than any other book in the world.
The word “and” is used 46,277 times in the King James Bible.
The five animals most often mentioned in the Bible are sheep, lambs, lions, oxen, and rams.
The word
bible
comes from the Greek
biblos
, meaning “book.”
The bagpipe is mentioned in the Bible (Daniel 3:5).
Saint John was the only one of the 12 apostles to die of natural causes.
The first man to translate the entire Bible into English was Englishman Myles Coverdale, in 1535.
The seven deadly sins: lust, pride, anger, envy, sloth, avarice, and gluttony.
According to the Bible, Noah invented wine and was the first person to eat meat.
Number of words in the King James Bible: 783,137.
Nowhere in the Bible does it say that there were three wise men.
Salt is mentioned more than 30 times in the Bible.
There are two talking animals in the Bible: the serpent and Balaam’s ass.
The final word in the Bible: “amen.”
In 1922, 87-year-old Rebecca Felton from Georgia became the first female senator. Time in office: two days. (It was a temporary appointment.)
Abigail Adams, the second First Lady, often expressed her political views openly, for which she was widely criticized as being “unladylike.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed the first female member of a presidential cabinet: Frances Perkins of New York was Secretary of Labor from 1933 to 1945.
Susan B. Anthony founded America’s first female political party: the National Woman’s Suffrage Society.
In 1980, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir became Iceland’s first (and only) female head of state.
First woman to head an Islamic government: Benazir Bhutto, former prime minister of Pakistan.
Miriam “Ma” Ferguson became the first female governor of Texas on January 20, 1925.
Wyoming boasts the nation’s first elected female public official: Estelle Reel, in 1895. She was Superintendent of Public Instruction.
One of the 19th century’s leaders of women’s suffrage, Victoria Woodhull, ran for U.S. president in 1872…even though she couldn’t vote.
Lady Nancy Astor, the first woman elected to the British House of Commons, was born in Virginia.
In 1916, Montana’s Jeannette Pickering Rankin became the first woman to serve in the U.S. Congress.
In August 2000, women filled the top five political and judicial posts in New Zealand.
Hillary Clinton was once a Republican.
The average life expectancy for Londoners in the 16th and 17th centuries was 39.7 years.
In 52 BC, Paris was attacked by the Romans, who called the city Lutetia, meaning “marshy place.”
In 1014, Viking ships pulled down and destroyed the London Bridge.
In 1789, when a Paris mob stormed the Bastille to start the French Revolution, it missed rescuing the Marquis de Sade by just days. (He’d been transferred to an insane asylum outside Paris, accused of egging on the rioters from his cell’s window.)
The 1666 Great Fire of London destroyed 13,200 homes but resulted in only six recorded fatalities.
The Great Plague of London (1665–66) was a bubonic plague that killed 20 percent of the city’s residents.
A French executioner was once fired because he pawned his guillotine.
In the 1840s, French criminals couldn’t be arrested from sundown to sunrise.
London was founded by the Romans in AD 47.
The first English historian was a monk known as the Venerable Bede (672–735).
During France’s Reign of Terror (1793–4), 17,000 people were beheaded.
The Marquis de Lafayette (who fought in the American Revolution) was labeled a traitor during the French Revolution because he sided with the middle class.
After England conquered Quebec in 1760, it offered to trade the region back to France for the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe. France declined.
Estimated weight of Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza: 6 million tons.
A Babylonian pyramid called Etemenanki may have inspired the Tower of Babel story.
Darius I of Persia connected the Nile to the Red Sea with a canal.
Stonehenge wasn’t the work of Celtic druids—it was built about 2,000 years before they arrived in Great Britain. Today, most historians think the Britons (ancestors of the modern British) built the monument.
The Great Pyramid of Giza is made of 2.3 million limestone blocks; each weighs 2 ½ tons.
Byzantine architects built the largest domes in the ancient world. The most famous example: St. Sophia, constructed in Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul, Turkey.
The Parthenon in Athens was nearly destroyed in 1687 when Turkish soldiers used it to store gunpowder.
Looking for Cutthroat Castle? You’ll find it in Colorado’s Hovenweep National Monument. No pirates there, though—Hovenweep consists of pre-Columbian Indian ruins.
The Great Wall of China was actually made of four different walls that were rebuilt and linked over 2,000 years.
The Villa Romana del Casale in Sicily includes a famous mosaic of bikini-clad Roman women exercising.