Read Uncle John’s Did You Know? Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Uncle John’s Did You Know? (11 page)
• Farmington, Maine, holds a parade on the first Saturday in December to honor Chester Greenwood, the boy who invented earmuffs.
• The woolen swimsuits that people wore at the turn of the 20th century weighed about 20 pounds when wet.
• Men carried purses before women did. The purses were called “pockets.” But because they hung from a string and could be easily stolen, eventually they were sewn inside clothing and—
voilà!
—became the pockets we can’t live without today.
• The first knit socks were discovered in Egyptian tombs of the 3rd-6th centuries A.D.
Q:
If you see a moose kneeling, what’s he doing?
A:
Eating. He can’t graze like a cow—his neck is too short and his legs are too long—so he has to kneel to eat.
Q:
If it has one horn, it’s from Africa; if it has two horns, it’s from India. What is it?
A:
A rhino.
Q:
Dogs are color-blind when it comes to seeing green and red, so how do seeing-eye dogs tell the difference between a red traffic light and a green one?
A:
They don’t. Instead, they watch the flow of traffic to see when it’s safe to cross.
Q:
Are zebras white with black stripes or vice versa?
A:
Scientists are still arguing about it.
Q:
What kind of fish is a Portuguese Man-of-War?
A:
It’s not actually a fish—it’s an invertebrate, meaning it doesn’t have a backbone like a true fish does. It’s related to both jellyfish and coral. The Man-of-War isn’t really even one single animal: It’s a colony of four parts that work together to survive.
• Greenland isn’t very green—in fact, it’s almost entirely covered with snow and ice. Viking explorers named it Greenland to lure settlers there.
• It’s the yellow soil beneath China’s Yellow River that gave it its name.
• The Dead Sea really is dead. Located at the end of the Jordan River, the sea’s water evaporates and leaves heavy deposits of minerals, which makes it uninhabitable and much saltier than an ocean.
• The Ivory Coast in northwest Africa was once the center of the ivory trade for Europeans, who hunted elephants for their valuable ivory tusks.
• Why is the Red Sea called “red”? It could be from the occasional red algae that appear there, or it could have been named for nearby red mountains. Some people say it’s actually a mistranslation of “Reed Sea.”
• Huh? The Canary Islands were named for the wild dogs that lived there. You’ve heard dogs called “canines”?
Canis
is Latin for “dog”—and the ancient Romans named the islands.
• Ireland is called the Emerald Isle because of its green countryside, not because of any actual emeralds.
• Moscow’s Red Square isn’t red: It was so named because
red
means “beautiful” in Russian.
• There are more than 1,300 roller coasters in North America.
• Faster than a speeding bullet? The “Superman: The Escape” roller coaster at Six Flags Magic Mountain in California accelerates to 100 mph in 7 seconds.
• The Ferris wheel was the brainchild—and namesake—of George Ferris, a bridge builder from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The wheel debuted at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893.
• The world’s tallest roller coaster, Kingda Ka at Great Adventure in New Jersey, reaches its peak at 456 feet. It’s the world’s fastest, too—clocked at 128 mph.
• A 14-year-old German boy built a 300-foot-long
working
roller coaster in his backyard over the summer of 2005…but local officials made him tear it down.
• That whoopsy feeling you get when you float out of your seat on a roller coaster is called “airtime.”
• The world’s oldest operating amusement park—Bakken Amusement Park in Denmark—first opened for business in 1583.
• Insider’s name for high-speed spinning rides like the Tilt-A-Whirl: “Spin-N-Barf”
• How high the hoop: In pro basketball, the hoop is exactly 10 feet high.
• When the word “ski” is mentioned, three out of five Americans say that Colorado is the first place they think of.
• In major league baseball, the pitcher’s plate is 10 inches above the level of home plate. The pitcher’s mound is 18 feet across.
• The fastest recorded tennis serve? 153 miles per hour.
• The hurdles in the women’s 100-meter hurdle event are 33 inches high. In the men’s 400-meter hurdles, they’re 36 inches high. Which is only fair because on average, men are 3 inches taller than women.
• Old-time baseball player Hughie Jennings holds the records for being hit by the most pitches (287 times) and for being hit the most in a single season (51).
• Take that! A professional boxing glove weighs eight ounces.
• The top rope surrounding a boxing ring is 52 inches high.
• The length of a bowling lane is 60 feet from the foul line to the center of the first pin.
• In Spain, people pour chocolate milk or coffee on breakfast cereal.
• The average American drinks 400 glasses of milk per year.
• Roughly one in seven people is lactose intolerant, which means they have trouble digesting milk.
• Every year, the Kraft company makes enough Cool Whip to fill the Grand Canyon.
• Love cheese? You’ll probably eat more than a ton—2,000 pounds—of it in your lifetime.
• It takes 29 cups of milk to make one pound of butter.
• Butter’s yellow color comes from the beta-carotene in the grass that dairy cows eat. Butter is yellower in the summer, when grass is plentiful. In winter, it’s usually off-white.
• People added carrot juice to butter in the Middle Ages, thinking it made the color more attractive.
• Need something to cool off your mouth after eating spicy food? Try milk—it contains
casein
, a protein that soothes burning taste buds.
• Bad, but still good: Blue cheese was most likely discovered by accident centuries ago, when cheese was stored in caves. A batch of cheese probably got moldy, and some brave person decided to taste it anyway.
• Istanbul, Turkey, is the only city in the world located on two continents: Europe and Asia.
• Los Angeles’s full name—El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula—can be abbreviated to 3.63% of its size: L.A.
• The first city to reach a population of 1 million was Rome, Italy, in 133 B.C.
• In the year 1900, the largest cities by population were London, England (6.5 million), New York City (4.2 million), and Paris, France (3.3 million).
• The largest city in Africa: Cairo, with a population of over 7 million.
• 36% of New York City’s 8 million people are foreign-born; 41% of Los Angeles’s 4 million people are.
• Shanghai, China, has the highest population of any city in the world: over 14 million.
• New York City was nicknamed “the Big Apple” by jazz musicians of the 1930s, who used the slang expression “apple” for any town or city. Therefore, to play New York was to play the big time.
• Sea World owns 25 orcas—55% of the worldwide total in captivity. And, by the way, they’re not killer “whales,” they’re a type of dolphin.
• A zoo gorilla named Jambo made headlines in 1986 when a five-year-old boy fell into the gorilla enclosure and lost consciousness. Jambo placed himself protectively between the little guy and the other gorillas until he was rescued.
• Watch your hands: In 2004 a piranha was discovered living in a petting-zoo aquarium in Berlin, Germany.
• Jungle gym: Zookeepers in Anchorage, Alaska, installed a treadmill to help an elephant named Maggie lose some weight. The treadmill and a diet helped Maggie lose 1,000 pounds, down from 9,000.
• Zoo authorities in England sent a parrot into solitary confinement after the bird used some really bad language directed at two policemen, a mayor, and a priest. (They can’t figure out how he learned it.)
• About a month before St. Patrick’s Day in 2004, two polar bears in the Singapore Zoo turned green. A zoo spokesperson explained that it was because of harmless algae growing in their hollow hair shafts, and could be easily cured with a salt solution.
• The people who create sound effects for movies are called “Foley artists.” Sometimes they use very bizarre objects to find just the right sound, like snapping celery sticks to mimic the sound of bones being broken.
• In
Star Wars
, Chewbacca’s voice is a combination of sounds from a bear, badger, walrus, and camel.
• The sound of the tornado in
Twister
is a recording of camel moaning played back at slow speed.
• The background crowd noise in a movie or television show is called a
walla
. The term comes from the early days of radio (before TV), when dramas were performed. A group of actors would repeat the word “walla” over and over again, which was supposed to sound like the murmur of a crowd. Today’s walla actors use real words and conversations.
• In
The Matrix
, for the slow-motion shots where bullets slow down and the camera whips around, the sound designer put real bullets on strings and whirled them around to create the “whoosh” sound in the background.
• The ape’s roar in
King Kong
is a lion’s roar played at half speed, backwards.
• In
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
, the sound of E.T.’s waddling walk was created by squeezing a wet T-shirt stuffed with Jell-O.
• Elements named for famous scientists: einsteinium (after Albert Einstein) and fermium (after Enrico Fermi).
• Chlorine will keep your swimming pool clean, but its first use was as a chemical weapon in World War I.
• Superman’s home planet was named after the real element krypton, a gas that was discovered in 1898.
• Though it’s commonly thought to have an icky smell—kind of like rotten eggs—sulfur is nearly odorless. The stuff that smells bad is
hydrogen sulfide
, a gas that forms in sewers and swamps.
• Neon is colorless, but gives off a red-orange glow when it’s put in a vacuum tube and electricity is passed through it for a neon sign.
• Plastic is an organic compound, but it’s usually considered an inorganic material because it takes so long—centuries—to decompose.
• Mercury is one of only five elements that are liquid at room temperature. The others are
caesium, francium, gallium
, and
bromine
.
• The full chemical name of
tryptophan synthetase
(an amino acid) is 1,909 letters long.
• Metals that are resistant to corrosion—such as gold, silver, and platinum—are called “noble” metals.