Most popular chocolate candy in the U.S.: M&M’s. Most popular M&M color: brown.
IT COULDN’T BE DONE
A poem by Edgar A. Guest
Somebody said that it couldn’t be done
But he with a chuckle replied
That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one
Who wouldn’t say so till he tried.
So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin
On his face. If he worried he hid it.
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it!
Somebody scoffed: “Oh, you’ll never do that;
At least no one ever has done it”;
But he took off his coat and he took off his hat
And the first thing we knew he’d begun it.
With a lift of his chin and a bit of a grin,
Without any doubting or quiddit,
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it.
There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done,
There are thousands to prophesy failure,
There are thousands to point out to you, one by one,
The dangers that wait to assail you.
But just buckle in with a bit of a grin,
Just take off your coat and go to it;
Just start to sing as you tackle the thing
That “cannot be done,” and you’ll do it.
There are more than two million species of life on Earth.
RIDDLE ME THIS
What’s black and white and read all over? A blushing zebra… and this page of riddles! (Answers are on page 283.)
1. A mother has seven children. Half of them are boys. How is this possible?
2. If there are five rubber duckies on the counter and you take away two, how many rubber duckies do you have?
3. What’s different about the letters on the top row?
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
4. How many letters are there in the alphabet?
5. It has holes in its top and bottom, its left and right, and all through its middle. But it still holds water. What is it?
6. How can you throw a ball a short distance and have it stop and then come right back to you? (Hint: You can’t bounce it off anything or tie it to a string.)
7. Where is the ocean the deepest?
8. What gets wetter and wetter the more it dries?
9. What turns everything around but doesn’t move at all?
10. What is big and slimy, smells really bad, has bubbles on its head, 82 eyes, seven mouths, a green shirt, and sings the blues?
Country with the most hospitals: China, with 67,807. (It also has the most people.)
PLAY BALL !
You kick them; you throw them; you even trip over them on your way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Here are some facts about balls.
TOSS UP
Centuries ago, balls were made from whatever materials that people had on hand—leather or linen and stuffed with reed, straw, corn husks, or even small pieces of metal. The ancient Mayans discovered how to turn the sap of several different plants into the spongy substance we now know as rubber. And they used it to make solid rubber balls.
But the strangest, most awful ball of all: throughout history, the heads of criminals and enemies were sometimes used as balls. Greeks, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, and many other cultures did it. It was the ultimate insult.
GOLF BALLS
The first golf balls were made of wood. Later they were made out of leather, stuffed with boiled chicken feathers. Today they’re plastic molded around a rubber core.
Around 1848 golfers realized that balls flew farther at the end of the day than at the beginning of the day. Why? They were all scuffed up. That’s when they started adding dimples to golf balls.
American golf balls made today have 336 dimples stamped into each little sphere. The number of dimples, plus their size and shape, can reduce wind resistance, give the ball more loft (height), and send the ball twice as far as a smooth ball.
Hike! A form of football was played in China as early as 500 B.C.
BASEBALLS
Every Major League baseball is sewn by hand, held together with exactly 108 stitches. Here’s how it’s done:
A baseball has a small cork core, which gets wrapped first with thin rubber bands, then with 369 yards of yarn. The hand stitcher then dips the ball in glue, places the “pill” (the glue-dipped ball) into a frame, and stretches two cowhide covers over it. The covers are pulled together with pliers and tacked into place. Last, the stitcher sews the covers together, using 88 inches of red cotton thread. It takes an average of five minutes to sew a baseball. What’s the life span of a ball in a professional game? About six pitches.
FOOTBALLS
The first footballs were round and were nearly impossible to throw, let alone catch. Over time they became more watermelon-shaped. Finally, the American football evolved into the perfect catching, throwing, kicking, and running ball with a very odd shape…and a very odd name: prolate spheroid.
In the early days, the football constantly leaked air, so the refs would stop play for 30 mintues several times each game while players took turns blowing up the ball. Today, each NFL team uses about 48 balls per game. Referees bring in a new ball for every kick and punt.
Softball was originally known as “kitten ball,” “mush ball,” and “diamond ball.”
UFOS
Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…
FLYING SAUCERS!
In 1947 amateur pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying his private plane near Mt. Rainier, Washington, when he suddenly saw nine gleaming objects flying in formation. He opened his side window and then looked again to be sure they weren’t a reflection or a mirage. Arnold had no idea what they were, but he was able to calculate their speed: 1,600 mph—nearly three times faster than any plane could fly.
When he landed to refuel in Pendleton, Oregon, he told a newspaper reporter for the East Oregonian what he’d seen. He described the objects as moving “like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.” He said they had a batlike shape, but the newspaper reported the objects as “saucer-like.” No one knows what Arnold actually saw—real alien spacecraft, an optical illusion, or maybe some experimental secret weapons—but we do know that’s how the term “flying saucers” was born.
FOO FIGHTERS!
During World War II, pilots reported seeing glowing balls of light flying beside their airplanes. These were called “foo fighters,” a term based on the expression “where there’s foo, there’s fire” from Smokey Stover, an old comic strip. The U.S. pilots believed that foo fighters were secret German weapons or surveillance devices. Only after the war did they discover that German pilots had also seen the glowing lights, which they thought were secret weapons from the United States.
The Dead Sea isn’t a sea, it’s a lake. But it is dead—it’s so salty that no fish can live in it.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
In 1948 Dr. Allen Hynek, an astronomer from Northwestern University, worked with the Air Force to help investigate reported UFO sightings. To make his research easier, Dr. Hynek divided the sightings into four categories:
Close Encounters of the First Kind: When UFOs are seen at a distance, but no contact is made.
Close Encounters of the Second Kind: When UFOs leave behind evidence, such as burns on the ground. Or if the UFOs interact in any way with objects on Earth, such as causing car engines to suddenly die or lights to turn on and off.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind: When aliens from outer space are seen.
Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: When aliens communicate with people on Earth. (This includes reports of people being abducted by aliens.)
MEN IN BLACK
They’re not just in the movies. In 1953 Albert K. Bender, organizer of a small UFO research bureau, claimed to have been visited
by three “men in black.” They knew of Bender’s organization and warned him to keep silent about anything having to do with UFOs. After they left, Bender was sick for three days.
See if you can taste it: McDonalds sugarcoats their fries so they’ll turn golden-brown.
Since Bender’s encounter with these three mysterious men, reports of MIBs (as they are called by UFOologists) began to surface all over the country. Here’s what would happen: when someone saw a UFO and tried to tell the world about it, three men dressed in black suits, driving a big black car, would show up at their door. They’d warn that person not to report their UFO encounter. The MIBs often claimed to represent some government agency and would briefly flash an official-looking ID. When the MIBs left, the witness would feel terribly ill. Soon, the person would be too frightened to talk about the UFO—or anything else—they had seen.
Some witnesses have described the MIBs as “Asian-looking” with “exceptionally long fingers” and “metallic” or “electronic” voices. They are usually wearing sunglasses to cover their eyes and driving mint-condition black cars, like Cadillacs, from the 1950s.
Could the men in black be government agents trying to keep witnesses from talking about flying saucers or aliens from other worlds? Or could they actually be aliens, sent to silence us earthlings? The truth is out there…somewhere.
Tree’s a crowd: More than a third of the U.S. is covered in forest.
LEGO MASTER
This could be the coolest job ever: You sit around all day playing with Legos; your supply of the little plastic bricks is endless; and you get paid a lot. Your job title: “Master Builder.”
WORKPLACE HEAVEN
Inside a 203-acre complex in Enfield, Connecticut, is one of the most unusual offices in the world: A singing Lego robot rolls across the floor. A Lego bald eagle plays a Lego banjo on a Lego shelf. Tiny green Lego gremlins peek out from under Lego plants. And lying around on the plush carpeting in the middle of it all is a dedicated team of Legomaniacs busily building their next masterpiece. Who are they? The Lego Master Builders.
STEPPING THE BRICK
Here are a few success stories for aspiring Legomaniacs.
• As a teenager in the 1980s, Francie Berger wrote the Lego company and asked if she could order two million standard red Lego bricks. They didn’t take her seriously at first, but after she built a working farm out of Legos they brought her on as a designer. She became the very first Master Builder.
• Bill Bodge built a model of Teddy Roosevelt and took it to his job interview. They told him to take it apart and create Carmen Miranda, the Brazilian singer/actress famous for wearing fruit on her head. He did it—and got the job.
First basketball player to appear on a box of Wheaties: Michael Jordan in 1988.
• Kurt Zimmerle spent an entire summer building an exact replica of the Biltmore mansion in North Carolina. He even built billiard tables with sticks and balls. Lego was impressed, but before they would hire him, they wanted to make sure he knew how to “step the brick” (Lego lingo for making round objects out of square pieces). So Kurt built a perfectly round Lego snowman. He was hired.
• “The goal,” says Master Builder Steve Gealing, “is to make creations look so real that people have to look twice and say ‘Was that really made of Legos?’”
LEGOLAND
What else have the Lego Master Builders built? Here are a few examples:
• Scale versions of New York City, Washington, D.C., and the California coastline—all down to the tiniest details, such as cable cars traversing the hilly streets of San Francisco.
• A 6-foot-tall surfing hippopotamus
• A 15-foot-tall replica of Albert Einstein’s head that welcomes guests to Lego Mindstorms, a workshop where you use computers to control Lego Technic models.
• A 3D replica of the Mona Lisa
• Life-size giraffes, zebras, lions, and elephants. (You can see them on the Safari Trek at Legoland in San Diego).
The Earth has an approximate mass of 12,976,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds.
• A 54-inch replica of the Aztec calendar.
Sound like something you’d like to do? Get in line. They get thousands of job requests a year. It’s hard to get in—but not impossible. You just have to be good. Really good. (If you can make round objects out of rectangular pieces, you’re well on your way.) But here’s the good news: you don’t need any special tools, just your hands, a great imagination…and lots of Legos.
LEGO LORE
• Lego was started in the 1930s by a poor Danish carpenter named Ole Kirk Kristiansen, who went door to door selling hand-carved wooden toys.
• “Lego” is a contraction of the Danish phrase leg godt, which means “play well.”
• Lego manufactures 400,000 2x4 bricks every day.
• Legos come in 84 colors—18 are translucent.
• The smallest Lego piece is the golden coin in the Knights’ Kingdom set.
• There are two Legoland theme parks: one in San Diego and one in Denmark. It took 30 million bricks to build the one in San Diego. And if you think that’s impressive: the Legoland in Denmark has more than 50 million bricks.
• It would take about 40 billion Lego bricks laid end to end to get to the moon.
Persians first began using colored eggs to celebrate spring in 3000 B.C.
YOUNG AUTHORS
Do you dream of being an author when you grow up? Well, you don’t have to wait—lots of kids have written books and had them published.
CHILD AUTHOR: Anne Frank
HER STORY: Although she was not published during her lifetime, Anne Frank is probably the best-known young author in the world. Anne was a 13-year-old Jewish girl whose family was forced to hide from the Nazis during World War II. She kept a daily diary of her experiences with her family as they hid in an attic in Amsterdam, Holland. Eventually the family was betrayed and taken away to concentration camps. Only Anne’s father survived. When he returned to the attic where they had hidden for two years, he discovered his daughter’s diary and had it published in 1947 under the title, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.
Anne’s spirit shines in the darkness of wartime as she writes,
It’s a wonder I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they’re so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.
The Diary of a Young Girl has been translated into 67 languages, has been made into several movies and a play, and is one of the most widely read books by teenagers all over the world.
What’d they do before that? Trains didn’t have toilets until the 1850s.
CHILD AUTHOR: S. E. Hinton
HER STORY: Most people think S. E. Hinton is a man, because every Hinton novel is about troubled teenage boys. But Susan Eloise Hinton is actually a girl. Her first book, The Outsiders, is about the poor kids—“greasers”—clashing with the rich kids—“socs” (short for “socials”)—on the streets of Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was published in 1967, when she was 17, and has since sold more than a million copies. Because she often writes from a boy’s point of view, she uses her initials instead of her full name. She says, “I figured that most boys would look at the book and think, ‘What can a girl know about stuff like that?’”
During her life, Hinton has written several books that have turned into hit movies: The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, Tex, and That Was Then, This Is Now. Speaking of Tulsa, where she’s lived most of her life, she explains, “It’s a pleasant place to live if you don’t want to do anything.”
CHILD AUTHOR: Gordon Korman
HIS STORY: Canadian-born Gordon wrote his first book, This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall, in 1975, when he was 12 years old. He wrote it because his new English teacher—who was actually a track and field coach and had never taught language arts before—gave an unusual assignment: every kid in class had to write a novel. Gordon wrote his novel and, amazingly,
got it published by Scholastic. (He dedicated it to his English teacher, Mr. Hamilton.) Next he wrote Go Jump in the Pool. By the time he graduated from high school, Gordon had written and published five books. Since then he has written more than 45 books for kids and teens. Korman says that 50% of what he writes is based on things that really happened and 50% is imaginary. The Disney Channel TV series The Jersey is based on his NFL Monday Night Football Club book series.
There are more cows in Saskatchewan, Canada, than there are people.
CHILD AUTHOR: Chad Merkley
HIS STORY: Merkley was a second grader in Snohomish, Washington, when he became the Grand Prize winner of Raintree Steck/Vaughn Publishers’ 1998 Publish-a-Book contest. His book, Too Many Me’s, is about an eight-year-old inventor named Albert who creates robots to perform his chores. The robots cause problems, so Albert decides to clone himself to finish all the work. The cloning idea turns out to be more of a problem than a solution. “I got the idea from watching a news story on TV about the cloning of sheep,” Chad said. The whole writing process, including editing, took three and a half months, but it was worth it—Chad was presented with a publishing contract!
About half of the world’s rainforests are in Brazil.
CHILD AUTHOR: Alexandra (Ally) Sheedy
HER STORY: Ally wrote She Was Nice to Mice in 1975 when she was 12 years old. It’s the story of Esther Esther, an inquisitive mouse who is taken back in time through her family history to the days of Queen Elizabeth I and William Shakespeare. The book became an instant bestseller. But that wasn’t Ally’s first taste of fame—she had already been dancing with the American Ballet Theatre for six years. After her book was published, she was asked to write articles for the Village Voice and New York Times. As if being a dancer and writer wasn’t enough, Ally soon added acting to her resume. By the time she was 15, she was acting in plays and in commercials. Then she starred in hit movies like WarGames, The Breakfast Club, and St. Elmo’s Fire. Even though she had become a movie star, Sheedy never gave up her writing. In 1991 her book of poetry, Yesterday I Saw the Sun, was published to rave reviews.
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