Read Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wise Up! Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Salvador Dalí wore a homemade perfume composed of artist’s glue and cow dung.
In 16th-century England, people who cleaned out cesspits were known as “gong farmers.”
The contents of King Louis XIV’s chamber pot were noted daily and entered in a logbook.
Cloacina was the Roman goddess of sewers.
The word “vomit” has the most entries in
The American Dictionary of Slang
.
A healthy human bladder can hold two cups of urine for up to five hours.
In the fourth century, Rome levied a tax on the sale of urine and excrement.
Geoffrey Chaucer, François Rabelais, Benjamin Franklin, and Mark Twain all wrote about flatulence.
If you’re average, you’ll swallow three spiders this year.
Tommy Bolt is the only pro golfer to have been fined for passing gas. (He did it in 1959 while an opponent was putting.)
You can’t burp in outer space.
There is a British beer called Old Fart.
Astronauts get “spacesick” so often that the space shuttle toilet has a special setting for vomit.
In French folklore, dreaming about poop is an omen that good fortune is on the way.
The bagpipe was originally made from the skin of a dead sheep.
The man who invented Jell-O was originally looking for a way to make a palatable laxative.
TORONTO.
North of the city is Lake Toronto. The Iroquois who once lived there called it Toronto, meaning “place where trees stand in water.” Who put trees in the lake? Another native group, the Hurons, planted saplings there to help trap fish.
CALGARY.
In the 1870s, when the area was a post for the Mounties (Mounted Police), it was named Fort Brisebois after officer Ephrem Brisebois. But in 1876, after Brisebois declared a woman from the nearby Metis tribe his common-law wife, his superior, Colonel James Macleod, angrily renamed the town. Macleod had just returned from a trip to Calgary—a popular white sand beach on the Isle of Mull off Scotland—so Fort Brisebois became Fort Calgary. The word “calgary” comes from the Gaelic
cala ghearraidh
, which means “beach of the meadow.”
QUÉBEC.
Before the French colonists arrived in the 1500s, the area was inhabited by the Algonquin people. The Algonquins called it Kebek, meaning “straight” or “narrow,” referring to the way the river (now the St. Lawrence) narrows at the Algonquins’ settlement (now Québec City). Explorer Samuel de Champlain made the word French in 1613, spelling it “Québec.”
OTTAWA.
In 1832, the British government hired a group of engineers, headed by Colonel John By, to build a canal in the colony of Upper Canada. The large camp that housed workers— called Bytown in the colonel’s honor—eventually grew into a town. In 1855, it became officially incorporated as a city, and took a new name from the Adàwe, the native people with whom Europeans traded during early colonization of the area. French settlers had corrupted the name Adàwe to Outaouak, and British settlers corrupted it to Ottawa.
Longest one-syllable word in the English language: “screeched.”
Hoping to improve the world’s communication, Ludwig Zamenhof created a language he called Esperanto (“one who hopes”) in 1887. It didn’t catch on.
The average American knows only about 10 percent of the words in the English language.
Five oldest English words still in use: town, priest, earl, this, ward.
According to language experts, virtually every language on earth has a word for “yes-man.”
More than 1,000 different languages are spoken on the African continent.
Most-studied foreign languages in the United States: Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Japanese.
An ancient Chinese written language called Nushu was created and used exclusively by women.
The world’s most widely spoken language is Mandarin Chinese.
Dante’s
Divine Comedy
established the Tuscan dialect as the basis of modern Italian.
Most common languages on the Internet: English, Japanese, and Spanish.
The Quechua language of Peru has 1,000 words for “potato.”
Until 1399, the first language of English kings was French.
The 1980s group Bananarama’s first single, “Aie A Mwana,” was sung in Swahili.
Studies show: most English speakers say “uh” before a short pause and “um” before a long pause.
The average American 12-year-old gets about $15 in weekly allowance.
About 10 percent of American households pay their bills with cash.
Eighty percent of U.S. Super Bowl viewers watch just for the commercials.
Eighteen percent of all the money spent on sporting goods is used to buy golf equipment.
Most Americans spend 45 minutes a day listening to recorded music.
Americans consume about 11.7 pounds of chocolate per person every year.
Americans have the highest average caloric intake in the world: 3,790 calories a day.
According to polls, the most popular sport in America is football.
Americans consume 450 hot dogs per second.
The average American ate 120 restaurant meals in 2008.
Number-one store-bought cookie in the United States: Oreos.
The average American credit card holder owes almost $2,200.
Americans spend over $630 million a year on golf balls.
Americans purchase about 40 percent of the indigestion remedies sold in the world.
More than 75 percent of all American homes have at least one can of WD-40.
Americans spend $2 billion per year on candles.
At any one time, there are 100 million phone conversations going on in the United States.
Rats can find their way through a maze faster when Mozart’s music is playing.
The Loch Ness Monster is protected by Scotland’s 1912 Protection of Animals Acts.
In the 1964 TV series, Flipper was played mainly by a dolphin named Suzy.
Jumbo the Elephant, a premier attraction at P. T. Barnum’s circus in the 1880s, brought the word “jumbo” into common usage.
Emperor Caligula issued invitations to banquets in his horse’s name and considered making the animal a consul.
Nabisco’s Barnum’s Animal Crackers celebrated its hundredth anniversary by adding koalas.
In 1948, four men took a cow up Switzerland’s 14,000-foot Matterhorn. They all froze to death.
Queen Henrietta of Belgium trained a llama to spit at people.
Russian czar Ivan the Terrible once had an elephant killed because it did not bow to him.
There are more tigers (in zoos and as pets) in the United States than there are tigers in the wild.
A loaf of bread…5¢
A postage stamp…2¢
The average house…$4,000
The average car…$500
A Coca-Cola…5¢
A movie ticket…7¢
A dozen eggs…34¢
A pound of flour…3¢
A camera…$6.95
A bathing suit…$1.75
A teddy bear…75¢
An apron…17¢
A lace parasol…$1.29
A pair of suspenders…18¢
The average yearly wage was $963.
A steak at the butcher shop went for 18¢ a pound.
Alexander Graham Bell’s father-in-law was the first president of the National Geographic Society.
Actor Kiefer Sutherland’s grandfather was the premier of Saskatchewan, Canada, for 17 years.
George Dern, actress Laura Dern’s grandfather, was Secretary of War under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Actress Helena Bonham Carter’s great-grandfather was former British prime minister Herbert Asquith.
James K. Polk was a great-grandnephew of John Knox, founder of Scottish Presbyterianism.
Whitney Houston and Dionne Warwick are cousins. So were James Madison and Zachary Taylor.
Tom Hanks is a descendant of Abraham Lincoln’s uncle.
Moe Howard of
Three Stooges
fame married Harry Houdini’s cousin.
Kaiser Wilhelm II, Czar Nicholas II, and King George V were all grandchildren of Queen Victoria.
Charles Bonaparte, who was the grandnephew of Napoléon, founded the FBI.
George W. Bush is related to Benedict Arnold, Marilyn Monroe, Winston Churchill, Princess Diana, Franklin Pierce, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Gerald Ford.
President John Tyler was a granduncle of Harry S. Truman.
American Idol
2002 runner-up Justin Guarini is a cousin of actor Samuel L. Jackson.
Hugh Hefner and Bing Crosby both had ancestors on the
Mayflower
.
The U.S. Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy…a socialist.
The Liberty Bell was nearly sold for scrap metal in 1828.
The American flag flies 24 hours a day at the White House (if the president is at home), at Valley Forge…and on the moon.
From 1790 to 1800, Philadelphia was the capital of the United States.
The United States actually declared its independence from Britain on July 2, 1776. But the Declaration of Independence wasn’t approved until July 4, 1776.
The green ink used for U.S currency was invented by chemist Thomas Sterry Hunt, who worked in Canada.
Drafts of the Declaration of Independence were written on hemp paper.
Under the U.S. Constitution, there is no way to remove a Supreme Court justice for incompetence.
Jacob Shallus, the calligrapher of the U.S. Constitution, was paid $30 for his work.
Connecticut, Georgia, and Massachusetts waited until 1939 to ratify the Bill of Rights.
Average cost to run for U.S. Congress in 2006: $1 million.
The original Bill of Rights prevented congressmen from raising their own salaries. (Today, they vote on their raises.)
During his administration, John Adams made it a crime to publish anything scandalous about the U.S. government.
Members of Congress don’t need postage stamps for official mail—their signature counts as a stamp.
Fish have been swimming on our planet for more than 400 million years.
Mackerel and tuna will die if they stop swimming.
Deep-sea fish can explode when brought to the ocean’s surface because of the rapid decrease in outside pressure.
Sea horses don’t have scales.
The bioluminescent lantern fish produces enough light to read by (if you could read underwater).
A bluefin tuna can weigh over 1,000 pounds.
Electric eels can produce discharges of up to 650 volts.
Flying fish can swim—and glide through the air—as fast as 40 mph.
Only animal that can see both infrared and ultraviolet light: the goldfish.
What fish can leave the water and walk on land? The spotted climbing perch, which uses its pectoral fins like legs.
Forty percent of the world’s fish species live in freshwater.
Catfish have 100,000 taste buds.
A shoal is a group of fish that swims loosely grouped together. A school is a tight-knit, organized group that swims at the same speed.
Fish yawn.
Scientists estimate that up to 15,000 fish species have yet to be identified.
World’s most venomous fish? The stonefish, which lives in the Pacific near Australia. It has 13 venomous spines on its back, and one sting can kill a human.
A giant squid’s eye is the size of a dinner plate.
More than 10 million LP (long-playing) records are still sold every year.
There are 250 million TVs in the United States—and 400 million in China.
From 1897 until the 1950s, most records were made of a mix of shellac, slate, cotton, and wax.
In 2007, the number of recorded CDs sold was about equal to the number of blank CDs sold.
In the Soviet Union, people often made homemade records called “bones”—they were etched onto discarded medical X-rays.
A standard DVD includes 7.5 miles of information.
The 1889 Nickel-in-the-Slot, a coin-operated phonograph that was a precursor to the jukebox, made $1,000 in six months.
Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio, opened the first radio station in England in 1897.
These days, most records are pressed onto recycled vinyl.
Betamax VCRs were available from 1975 until 2002.
The fax machine has been around since 1843…longer than the telephone.
Radio waves from broadcasts of the 1930s have already traveled past 100,000 stars.
Western Union invented singing telegrams to improve its “bad news” reputation.
World’s fastest computer: IBM’s Roadrunner can perform 1,000 trillion calculations per second.
Last movie released on laser disc:
Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace
.
The title of Phil Spector’s “To Know Him Is to Love Him” was taken from his father’s tombstone.
The earliest known will was written in 2550 BC.
About 50 people a week visit the grave of Harry Potter, a British man who died in 1939 and is buried in Israel.
King Tut’s third and inner coffin was made from 243 pounds of solid gold.
The three wise men are said to be interred in a cathedral in Cologne, Germany.
Hitler’s jawbone is reportedly kept “in a safe place” in Russia.
For decades after Emperor Nero’s death, people in Rome claimed to have seen him.
English poet Dante Rossetti put many of his unpublished poems in his wife’s coffin when she died in 1862. Seven years later, he retrieved them.
American outlaw Clay Allison’s tombstone reads, “He never killed a man that did not need killing.”
Marilyn Monroe, Natalie Wood, Walter Matthau, and Roy Orbison are all buried in the small Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles.
In 1813, a British doctor turned the vertebrae of King Charles I into a saltshaker.