Uncle John's Electrifying Bathroom Reader for Kids Only!

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

One afternoon, an African woman placed her baby in the shade of a tree while she worked. Soon after, an elephant herd strolled by and saw the baby. The elephants seemed to worry that the baby would be disturbed by flies, which can be a problem in that part of Africa. The mother watched, amazed, as several of the elephants pulled big leaves from the trees and covered the sleeping babe with them. The elephants were so gentle and quiet that they didn’t even wake the baby. When the baby was covered, the elephants continued on their way.

  Why do geese honk when they fly? One reason: To avoid midair collisions.

  SPACE WASTE

  Here are some of the most disgusting facts we could find about space travel.

  UFOS (Unidentified Flying Odors)

  • Some astronauts in the early 1960s had trouble with the plastic bags they used to poop in. More than once, a wayward poop floated out of the bag before the astronaut could seal it shut.

  • Apollo astronauts left some boots and some bags of urine on the moon to cut down on the weight of the ship for the return trip to Earth.

  • Since saving water is very important in space, there was no laundry on Skylab. The astronauts were supplied with more than 200 pairs of underpants. Dirty clothes were thrown into a tank under the floor.

  • Astronauts have to exercise daily to keep their muscles in shape. So where does the sweat go when a person works out in space? It doesn’t drip off their faces or run down their armpits—it collects in a puddle about the size of a dinner plate on their backs. The astronaut has to wipe it off quickly or the sweaty puddle will float away.

  • Millions of people watched Buzz Aldrin of Apollo 11 take his first steps on the moon. But what none of them realized was that the urine bag strapped to his left ankle had broken, so he took his first steps with pee filling up his boot.

  Your armpit is also known as an axilla.

  CHILD PRODIGIES

  A child prodigy is a kid with extraordinary talents whose genius is recognized at an early age. (Uncle John was not a child prodigy… unless you consider farting a “talent.”)

  TIGER WOODS

  Tiger Woods was born to golf. At only six months old, he was already imitating his dad’s golf swing as he watched him chip balls into a net in the backyard. As soon as Tiger could walk, his dad put a golf club in his hand. (The club was sawed in half to be the right size.) In 1977, two-year-old Tiger was already so good at golf that he got to putt against the famous comedian, Bob Hope, during their TV appearance on The Mike Douglas Show. By the time Tiger started first grade, he was outplaying most adults. Sports Illustrated and other magazines wrote articles about this golfing wonder.

  Total Concentration

  Tiger’s father, who was his coach and mentor, had him listen to motivational tapes designed to keep him focused only on the game. While Tiger played, his father would shout, wave his hands, and throw balls onto the green to try to distract him, but Tiger was able to stay focused.

  Tiger won his first tournament when he was eight… and he never looked back. At the age of 21, he became the youngest player ever to win professional golf’s most prestigious competition, the Masters Tournament. In 2001 Tiger was the first golfer in history to be the reigning champion of all four major golfing championships at once: the PGA, the British Open, the U.S. Open, and the Masters. With his competitiveness, strength, concentration, and love for the game, who knows how far Tiger Woods will go!

  Keep moooo-ving: Boston’s street plan was based on existing cow paths.

  BOBBY FISCHER

  Born in 1943 in Chicago, Bobby Fischer was six years old when his sister taught him how to play chess. Bobby quickly became so thoroughly absorbed in the game that his mother worried. “Bobby isn’t interested in anybody unless they play chess and there just aren’t many children that like it,” she said. She even placed an ad in the local newspaper—the Brooklyn Eagle—inviting other children of Bobby’s age to come and play chess with him. But by then Bobby had already found the Brooklyn Chess Club.

  Chess Master

  By the time he was 10, Bobby was playing in tournaments and winning often. At 15, he became the youngest International Grandmaster in chess history. In 1972, at the age of 29, he became the only American ever to win the Chess World Championship. Then he disappeared from sight.

  House pets? Plants grow better when you pet them.

  For nearly 20 years, chess fans wondered where he was. Many thought he was dead. Rumors spread that he had gone a little crazy and was hiding. In 1992 he reappeared to win a chess match in Yugoslavia and then disappeared again. Even today, chess fans are still searching for Bobby Fischer.

  WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

  Mozart is perhaps the world’s most famous child prodigy—and the most popular composer of classical music in history. Even today recordings of his music outsell those of any other composer.

  Born in 1756 in Salzburg, Austria, Wolfgang could hear any sound and correctly identify the pitch when he was only two. There is a story that he heard a pig oink and yelled, “G-sharp!” Someone duplicated the pitch on the piano and it was G-sharp!

  At age three, Wolfgang climbed onto the piano bench next to his older sister and started playing. He learned to play the piano in only 45 minutes! By the time he was four, he was making up his own compositions and playing the violin.

  And at the age of six, he went on tour and played for all the kings and queens of Europe. He wore a velvet coat with lace ruffles and a small gold sword hanging at his side. Audiences adored him. Francis I of Vienna called him “ein klein hexenmeister” (“a little master wizard”).

  All-American sport? Costa Rica produces every baseball used in the major leagues.

  Child’s Play

  At only eight years old, Wolfgang wrote his first symphony; he wrote his first opera at 11. This amazing artist could hear an entire symphony played only once, and then write it out note for note. He could hear a piece of music, and not only replay it, he could play it backward—from the last note to the first!

  Mozart died when he was only 35 years old. But in his short life, this Austrian composer wrote many masterpieces, including symphonies and operas such as The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni. In fact, if you played every one of Mozart’s pieces in a row, it would take you 202 hours. That’s more than eight days of round-the-clock listening!

  ***

  TWO MORE AMAZING KIDS

  • Louis Braille lost his eyesight in 1812 at the age of three. Improving on the experiments of others who created raised-letter alphabets for the blind, Louis was 15 years old when he invented his own version: a form of raised-dot lettering. What’s it called? Braille, of course!

  • Lotte Frutiger climbed Mt. Allalinhorn in 1927. The mountain—located in the Swiss Alps—is 13,289 feet high and covered with ice. Climbing it would be quite a feat for an adult… but she was only eight years old.

  Are they house-trained? The Inuit tribe of Canada adopts bear, fox, and seal cubs as pets.

  LA CUCARACHA

  Have you ever gone to the kitchen for a midnight snack and flipped on the light, only to discover 10 zillion cockroaches running for cover? Those little hard-shelled guys are everywhere. Why? They’re survivors.

  DIE HARD

  Cockroaches can live in practically all climates and temperatures. They can live for a month without food and a week without water. And they can hold their breath for 40 minutes. Here are some more amazing facts about these amazing creatures:

  • They’re old. Cockroaches have been around longer than almost every living creature on Earth. They were here even before the dinosaurs. They are one of the most adaptable creatures on Earth.

  • They’ll eat anything. Cockroaches are perfectly at home in your kitchen—they love your food. But if you don’t have any food, they’ll eat the grease off your stove, the paint from your wall, and the wiring in your TV. They’ll eat soap. They’ll eat paper. They’ll even eat the sweat out of your sneakers. Yum!

  • They’re sneaky. Cockroaches c
an go practically anywhere. They can flatten themselves as thin as a piece of paper and slip through tiny cracks. They have an oily coating that helps to make them extra slippery.

  • They’re big. There are more than 3,500 kinds of cockroaches in the world. They come in all shapes and sizes. The Oriental cockroach is about an inch long and is shiny black. The Australian giant burrowing cockroach is about the size of an adult finger. But the biggest cockroach of all is the giant hissing cockroach from Madagascar. It’s about four inches (10 cm) long. (Yes, it really hisses!)

  Starstruck: Our galaxy contains about 100 billion stars.

  • They can fly. Sorry, but it’s true. The brown-banded cockroach is one kind that flies. Another is the Cuban cockroach (it’s green). Good news: the giant hissing cockroach doesn’t fly.

  • They outnumber us. Cockroaches mostly live in caves or under logs, but there are some that really like living with people. They especially like big cities. And they love big families. Put two German cockroaches (a male and female) together in your kitchen cupboard, and within a year you’ll have 50,000 cockroaches.

  • They don’t have a brain! A cockroach’s entire nervous system is in its main body, which means it has very little of what you would call a brain. That’s why—are you ready for this—a cockroach can live for 10 days without its head!

  Late bloomer: Grover Cleveland was the only U.S. president to get married while in office.

  MIRROR,

  Uncle John loves to look at himself (we can’t figure out why), so he decided to look into the origin of mirrors.

  THE DAWN OF MIRRORS

  Sometime, hundreds of thousands of years ago, some early human (let’s call him Og) happened upon a pool of water. Og looked down into the pool and saw a face looking back at him. He was probably terrified at first, maybe even thought about running away… until it dawned on him that he was looking at himself! And people have been obsessed with their own reflections ever since.

  Thousands of years would pass before people figured out how to make their own mirrors. The first ones were made in Turkey from polished volcanic glass. In ancient Egypt, mirrors were made of bronze and had elaborately carved handles of wood, ivory, or gold. The Greeks created a school for mirror makers. Students learned the art of polishing metal with sand without scratching its reflective surface. And in Rome, mirrors were made out of gold.

  THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

  So when were glass mirrors invented? In the 1300s, in Venice, Italy—home to the greatest glassblowers in the world. The artisans figured out a way to put a thin film of metal (a combination of tin and mercury) on the back of green glass and thus invented the modern-day mirror.

  If you had $10 billion and spent $1 every second, it would take you 317 years to go broke.

  The Venetians refused to tell anyone else how they made the mirrors. And to make sure their secret was safe, the entire glass industry was moved to the secluded island of Murano. Any worker caught leaving the island or smuggling out mirror pieces was put to death. The glassblowers grew very rich because everyone in Europe wanted to own one of their beautiful mirrors.

  THE SECRET IS OUT

  Finally, King Louis XIV of France smuggled two workers off the island and paid them to give him the mirror-making technique. The Venetian glassmakers discovered the spies, but it was too late—the secret was out!

  In 1835 a German chemist invented the modern process of making mirrors, using silver as a reflective backing instead of tin and mercury. With his silvering process, mirrors could be mass-produced. They were no longer just for the rich—everyone could own one.

  How much did a catcher’s mitt cost in 1897? About 20¢. Today one costs about $55.

  THE HAUNTED TOMB

  The Caribbean island of Barbados is known for its tropical climate, its sandy beaches—and its restless dead.

  THE CHASE FAMILY CRYPT

  Col. Thomas Chase and his family were wealthy English settlers living on Barbados in the early 1800s. They owned a large burial crypt in the graveyard of Christ Church. One of their relatives, Mrs. Thomasina Goddard, was the first to be placed in the crypt. The following year Thomas Chase’s infant daughter, Mary, died and her casket was placed alongside Mrs. Goddard’s. Then the vault was sealed shut.

  Four years later, Dorcas Chase, Thomas Chase’s teenage daughter, died. But when the family unsealed the vault, they discovered something peculiar: Mary Chase’s tiny coffin had been moved to the opposite side of the crypt—and it was standing up on one end. Mrs. Goddard’s casket hadn’t moved. Assuming the crypt had been broken into by grave robbers, the family returned Mary’s casket to its proper place, laid Dorcas’s coffin next to it, and sealed the crypt even tighter than before.

  A MOVING EXPERIENCE

  Only 34 days later, Thomas Chase killed himself. And when the crypt was opened…all the coffins were still in place. The crypt was again tightly sealed and would not be reopened until 1816, when another child related to the Chase family died.

  In its lifetime, a sheep will produce enough wool to make about 14 sweaters.

  This time when the vault was unsealed, the hinges on the doors were so rusty, that it took two men to pry them open. But when the family peered into the dark vault, they saw that the caskets had been tossed about the crypt… all except for Thomasina Goddard’s, which was left untouched.

  The mourners were baffled: these coffins weighed more than 500 pounds each. The one built for Thomas Chase was extra heavy. It had taken eight men to carry it into the tomb. Yet this coffin appeared to have been hurled across the tomb as if it weighed nothing.

  When the next family member died, crowds of people showed up at the funeral to see if the coffins had moved. They weren’t disappointed: all of the coffins were out of place, each one standing on end against the walls of the crypt. All, that is, except Mrs. Goddard’s.

  FINAL MOVEMENT

  Everyone on the island was talking about the haunted tomb, so the governor of Barbados decided to investigate. He checked the walls of the tomb to make sure there were no secret passages. Then he had workers spread sand over the floor, so the footprints of any intruders would be seen. Lastly, he had the door cemented shut. He even put his own personal seal in the cement. Even if someone opened the tomb and cemented it shut again, they wouldn’t be able to copy his seal.

  Q: What do Dolly Parton and Danny DeVito have in common? A: They’re both 5 feet tall.

  Nine months later, the governor opened the tomb. What did he find? The seal was still in place, the cement had not been touched, and no footprints were in the sand. But every single coffin—except Goddard’s—had been tossed on end, as if a hurricane had passed through the place.

  The governor decided to put an end to this ghostly business. He had all the coffins moved and the tomb left empty. It remains so to this day… or does it?

  ***

  “DOC, YOU GOTTA HELP ME” JOKES

  Patient: Doc, you gotta help me—I can never remember what I just said!

  Doctor: When did you first notice this problem?

  Patient: What problem?

  Patient: Doc, you gotta help me—I think I’m a smoke detector!

  Doctor: It’s okay, don’t be alarmed.

  Patient: Doc, you gotta help me—I get a sharp pain in my right eye every time I drink hot chocolate!

  Doctor: Try taking to spoon out of the cup.

  Patient: Doc, you gotta help me—my hair keeps falling out. What can you give me to keep it in?

  Doctor: How ‘bout a shoe box?

  World’s longest river: The Amazon, at 4,194 miles long.

  MIND READER

  Would you like to be a mind reader like Uncle John the Magnificent? All you need is a turban and a trusty assistant. (Okay, you can skip the turban, but you do need a helper.)

  ACT I: The Introduction

  Lights up

  You: “Ladies and gentlemen, I, (insert your name) the Magnificent, have the amazing ability to read your minds. Wit
h the help of my able assistant, (insert your friend’s name), I will demonstrate my incredible powers to everyone in this room.”

  Pause for dramatic effect, then slowly scan the room, pausing to stare directly into the eyes of one or two people.

  You: “In just a few moments, I will leave this room and wait in a soundproof booth offstage. While I’m gone, you will select one single object in this room. When I return, I want you to use your collective brainpower to focus on that object and I, (insert your name) the Magnificent, will identify that object.”

  Your assistant chooses someone from the audience to escort you to another room. That person will be able to swear that you didn’t hear a thing.

  ACT II: The Setup

  Your Assistant: “Ladies and gentlemen, would you now please pick one item in this room. It can be a piece of furniture, a small item of any sort, or even a person.”

  World’s oldest national park: Yellowstone, established in 1872.

  Your assistant takes suggestions and the group agrees on an item. Now your assistant will ask another audience member to go bring you back into the room. Don’t let your assistant get near you again, so the audience will trust that you aren’t cheating.

  ACT III: The Payoff

  You: “Before we begin, does everyone agree that I have no way of knowing what item or person was selected by you, the audience? All right, then I, (insert your name) the Magnificent am ready to begin.”