…HUMAN WAIST
Cathie Jung from Connecticut has the world’s smallest waist. It’s only 15 inches—about as big as most people’s necks. How did she get it that small? By using a type of underwear called a corset. Jung thought tiny waists looked attractive, so she spent 25 years lacing her corsets tighter…and tighter. In fact, except when she’s in the shower, she’s never without a corset. It’s a tough life, though. She can’t really bend over. “I find it tricky sitting in low chairs,” she says. “Sometimes, I have to sit in the high chair.”
Watch out! Horses can kick backward, forward, and sideways.
…HUMANOID ROBOT
At just over six inches tall, this toy robot dances and even plays air guitar. The i-SOBOT from Japan is the smallest human-shaped robot in the world. It comes in a variety of colors (blue and white are the most popular). But it doesn’t come cheap—bringing one of these home will cost about $230.
…GUITAR
In 2003, researchers at Cornell University in New York built two nanoguitars. They’re so small—about the size of one human cell—that you can see them only through a microscope. But the scientists insist that not only are the guitars really there, their six strings (each is 100 atoms wide) are playable, too…even if the volume is so low no one can hear it.
* * *
WORLD’S LONGEST NOSE
Every year, Turkey holds a “world’s longest nose” contest to see who’s got the biggest snout. Since 2005, a man named Mehmet Ozyure—and his 3½-inch-long nose—have held the title. (On average, a human nose is about 2 inches long.)
Odds of being struck by lightning: 1 in 700,000.
DIM STARS
Why do we listen to celebrities?
“Smoking kills. If you’re killed, you’ve lost a very important part of your life.”
—Brooke Shields
“I have opinions of my own—strong opinions—but I don’t always agree with them.”
—George W. Bush
“Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.”
—Ivana Trump
“If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure.”
—Dan Quayle, former vice president
“Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can’t help but cry. I mean I’d love to be skinny like that but not with all those flies and death and stuff.”
—Mariah Carey
“These people haven’t seen the last of my face. If I go down, I’m going down standing up.”
—Chuck Person, basketball player
“So, where’s the Cannes Film Festival being held this year?”
—Christina Aguilera
“It was God who made me so beautiful. If I weren’t, then I’d be a schoolteacher.”
—Linda Evangelista, supermodel
Women ingest about 50 percent of the lipstick they put on Hey! Why is it called lipstick if you can still move your lips?
BRIGHT STARS
Oh, maybe this is why.
“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”
—Bill Cosby
“My mom is always telling me it takes a long time to get to the top, but a short time to get to the bottom.”
—Miley Cyrus
“Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.”
—Barack Obama
“Always have a vivid imagination, for you never know when you might need it.”
—J. K. Rowling
“Dealing with backstabbers, there was one thing I learned. They’re only powerful when you’ve got your back turned.”
—Eminem
“I’m only young once. Who cares if I’m a goofball?
—Ashton Kutcher
“My grandmother once told me, ‘Don’t let failure go to your heart and don’t let success go to your head.’”
—Will Smith
THE HOUSE THAT SARAH BUILT
Sarah Winchester was incredibly wealthy…and incredibly wacky. She spent more than 30 years building a house that (she hoped) would keep her safe from evil spirits.
LOADED!
Sarah Pardee married William Winchester in 1862. She was the daughter of a wealthy Connecticut family, and he was the son of Oliver Winchester, owner of the Winchester rifle company. In 1860, the company had developed the first rifle that could fire a series of bullets without reloading. (Before that, you had to clean and reload the gun after each bullet was fired.) Sales of that rifle—and many more that followed—earned the Winchester family millions of dollars.
MILLION-HEIRESS
Life was hard for Sarah. Her infant daughter died in 1866, and she never had another child. Then, in 1880, her father-in-law died, and her husband caught tuberculosis. He passed away the following year.
All of that was terrible, but it made Sarah extremely rich. She inherited $20 million and about half of the Winchester company, which brought her an additional $1,000 every day.
Actual warning on a box of sleeping pills: “May cause drowsiness.”
CURSED!
Soon after the death of her husband, Sarah started visiting psychics for comfort. One of them told her that the Winchesters had been cursed by the spirits of all the people who had been killed by their guns. According to that psychic, these spirits demanded revenge and were after Sarah. What’s more, her dead husband wanted her to move out of New England to escape the family curse. But there was a catch—once she started building a new home, she must never stop…not even for one hour. If she did, the evil spirits would claim her just as they had her baby, her father-in-law, and her husband.
Terrified, Sarah sold her home in Connecticut and moved to California. She found property in San Jose, not far from San Francisco. In 1884, she began building a house—construction went on nonstop for 36 years.
IF SHE BUILDS IT…
Sarah started with a farmhouse that sat on more than 160 acres, and she hired a team of carpenters to work on it around the clock. Every night at midnight, she held a séance to summon “good” spirits who, she said, provided the next day’s building plans.
There were no master plans—the carpenters just kept expanding the house. Rooms were built around rooms and doors opened to walls.
By 1906, the house stood seven stories high. Then on April 18, a strong earthquake struck, and the top three floors collapsed, trapping Sarah in a bedroom. She was eventually freed, but believed that the incident was the spirits’ way of telling her they were unhappy with her home improvements. To appease them, she boarded up 30 rooms in the front of the house.
Tears are made of almost all the same ingredients as urine.
But because the original psychic had said construction couldn’t stop, Sarah kept building. This time, though, she had a plan…sort of. She installed secret rooms, trapdoors, upside-down stair posts, and chimneys that didn’t work—all in an attempt to confuse the evil spirits that were after her.
HOW MYSTERIOUS
The hammering, sawing, and construction commotion came to a sudden stop on September 5, 1922, when 83-year-old Sarah Winchester died in her sleep. When told of her death, the workmen quit what they were doing immediately. Some even left half-pounded nails in the walls.
Today, the home, called the Winchester Mystery House, is open for tours. There are 160 rooms, 950 doors, 367 steps, 47 fireplaces, 17 chimneys, 3 elevators, and 2 basements. Spiderwebs and the number 13 show up everywhere: there are 13 candle holders in the chandelier and 13 stones in the spider-web-patterned stained-glass window. And the house is supposed to be haunted. Visitors claim to have heard mysterious footsteps, banging doors, and even Sarah herself playing the piano. So if you do visit, keep an eye out for ghosts.
President Ulysses S. Grant’s favorite breakfast: A pickle.
YOU ARE S
O ANNOYING!
How come some of the most popular movies have the most annoying characters?
SEND HIM FAR, FAR AWAY
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace is one of the highest-grossing American movies of all time. Millions of people saw the film, and it seems like almost of all of them were annoyed by the character of Jar Jar Binks. Even 10 years after the movie was released, he still ranks first on audience polls of the most annoying movie characters of all time.
A surprising twist: George Lucas, the creator of the Star Wars movies, didn’t intend for Jar Jar to be annoying. He was supposed to be funny so that he’d appeal to kids. The Star Wars team spent more than a year developing how Jar Jar looked, how he talked, how he moved. He’s tall and gangly, and he has a face that looks like a floppy-eared duck-billed platypus with stringy growths that resemble dreadlocks coming out of his head. The thing that most annoyed audiences, though, was Jar Jar’s voice. He had a dopey way of speaking that many people found irritating. (So if you really want to annoy your teacher, start talking like Jar Jar.)
Lucas and his team were surprised that people had such a negative reaction to Jar Jar. But they listened to the audience and cut back his role for the next film, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.
The kea of New Zealand is the world’s only mountain-dwelling parrot.
ALWAYS ANNOYING, BUT ALWAYS FUNNY
Besides being incredibly annoying, Ace in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Stanley Ipkiss in The Mask, and Lloyd Christmas in Dumb and Dumber all have something in common: they were played by Jim Carrey. Ace Ventura was Jim Carrey’s first big starring role, and since that movie came out in 1994, Carrey has had a successful career playing annoying characters.
According to many movie buffs, the things that some people find annoying about Jim Carrey’s characters are what others think are funny: his goofy faces, silly voices, and gross jokes. People even repeat his catchphrases—like Ace Ventura’s “All-righty then.”
Movie reviewers used words like “stupid,” “gross,” and “immature” to describe all three movies, but they were all hits and made Jim Carrey a superstar.
* * *
SPF Goo: Hippos ooze a red liquid from their skin’s pores. The ancient Greeks saw it and believed hippos sweated blood when they got too hot. But the Greeks were wrong—the red liquid is a natural sunscreen.
The Museum of Hoaxes says it has a real building in California But that’s a hoax. It’s just a Web site.
WALK ON WATER
Why swim or take a boat across the ocean when you can walk like Rémy Bricka did?
ONE-MAN OPERATION
In the early 1900s, one-man bands—in which a person strapped a bunch of instruments to his body and played them all at once—were popular. But by the 1980s, few people had heard of them. Still, Rémy Bricka tried anyway, traveling around France as L’Homme Orchestre, or “the One-Man Band.” Not many people turned out to see his act, so Bricka decided he needed to find another way to drum up some publicity. That’s when he came up with the idea of crossing the Atlantic Ocean…on foot.
Obviously, he couldn’t use regular shoes, so Bricka made two 14-foot-long miniature boats—a combination of canoes, water skis, and shoes made out of fiberglass—and strapped them to his feet. To propel himself across the water (and help him balance), he built a six-foot-long, double-bladed paddle.
STAYIN’ ALIVE
Bricka estimated that he’d be alone on the ocean for at least two months, so he knew he needed to take care of his basic needs. He planned to tow a small boat behind him, containing a sleeping chamber (it was actually a coffin without a lid), navigation devices, some food, and three water-purifying machines to make the salty seawater drinkable. He also packed his flute, which he would play to calm his nerves during any storms he encountered.
SEA CRUISE
On April 2, 1988, Bricka set out from the Canary Islands, off the northern coast of Africa. His destination: the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, about 3,500 miles away. He wanted to make the trip in 60 days, which meant he’d have to “walk” more than 50 miles a day in his fiberglass boat shoes.
Standing upright, rowing and towing his small boat, Bricka made good time. He glided across the water like a skier does on snow, and also tied a kite to his back that harnessed the power of the wind to move him forward. As fish and plankton swam or drifted by, Bricka scooped them up and ate them raw.
January 16—National Nothing Day—was first observed (or not) in 1973.
SOMETHING’S FISHY
Still, the trip wasn’t easy. Two of the three water desalinators broke, and the remaining one couldn’t purify enough water to meet his needs. So Bricka drank a quart of seawater each day—a dangerous decision that can lead to severe dehydration. He had also underestimated the amount of fish he’d be able to catch, and most days, he didn’t get enough to eat. His weight dropped from 160 pounds to 110 pounds.
But he kept going, and on May 31, 1988, he finally made it. A Japanese boat picked him up off the coast of Trinidad—an island about 300 miles south of his intended destination of Guadeloupe. This meant Bricka had actually walked across more ocean than he’d meant to.
TOUGH ACT TO FOLLOW
Rémy Bricka had successfully “walked” across 3,502 miles of ocean in just 60 days, a feat that earned him a spot in Guinness World Records. He recovered fully and returned to France, where—thanks to his new celebrity status—his one-man band act drew larger crowds for the next few months.
More than 10 years went by, and nobody dared to try to beat his astounding accomplishment until Bricka decided to do it himself. In April 2000, he set out to cross the Pacific Ocean on his fiberglass boat shoes. He left Los Angeles, hoping to arrive in Sydney, Australia, five months later, just in time for the Summer Olympics. This trip would be a lot harder—the Pacific Ocean is much bigger than the Atlantic. The distance from Los Angeles to Sydney: 7,500 miles.
The world’s best-selling musical instrument is the harmonica.
COMING UP SHORT
This time, though, Bricka was better prepared. His boat carried $100,000 worth of equipment, including a satellite phone, a GPS tracking device, and freeze-dried meals. He got a corporate sponsor—Stoeffler, a French food supplier—to pay for it all. The company even donated an 11-pound tub of sauerkraut.
But once again, nothing went smoothly. In August, his phone broke, and he ran out of food (including the sauerkraut). Then a storm blew in, causing 50-foot swells that roughed up him and his boat. Fortunately, he had a backup handheld text messaging device. So Bricka wrote to his wife back in Paris: “Come pick me up now, or I’ll have to hitchhike.”
Ten days later, an American tuna boat found him 500 miles south of Hawaii. He’d been out 153 days and covered 4,847 miles. He hadn’t made it all the way to Australia, but it was still a longer journey than his Atlantic Ocean trip.
So what motivates someone to walk across the ocean? “Our time on Earth goes by very quickly,” Bricka says. “In eternity, our time is one second. So in this second, I will use this time to realize my dream.”
Popular pizza toppings in Japan: Eel and squid.
THE KING’S MENU
Elvis Presley made great music, but his food preferences were a little odd. Imagine what your teachers would say if you showed up with these snacks.
ROYAL ROADKILL
Young Elvis’s family was so poor that they often ate squirrels, possums, pigs’ feet, and pigs’ ears for dinner.
HIS FAVORITE FOODS
•Fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches
•Burned bacon
•Sauerkraut
•Chitterlings (boiled animal intestines)
FANTASTIC FOOD FEAT
When he was in his 20s, Elvis could eat eight cheeseburgers and two BLTs, and drink three milk shakes…all in one sitting!
WHAT WOULD YOU DO FOR A PB&J?
Elvis once flew to Denver, Colorado, after hearing about a restaurant that made great pea
nut butter and jelly sandwiches. He had 22 of them delivered to the airport runway and ate them on the flight back to Memphis.
During his lifetime, Elvis Presley gave away more than 80 Cadillacs.
25 WAYS TO SPELL SHAXBERD
The next time you get marked down on an assignment for poor spelling, consider telling your teacher that you spell words “the Elizabethan way.”
THE NAME GAME
Almost everyone considers William Shakespeare to be the greatest writer in the history of the English language. His plays—like Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream—are widely performed today. And in his own time (the late 1500s and early 1600s), his plays were the most popular in London. But as much as everyone loved Shakespeare in those days, there was one thing they had trouble agreeing on: how to spell his name.
In Shakespeare’s era (called the “Elizabethan era,” because Queen Elizabeth I was the queen of England at the time), the spelling of words was often inexact. Back then, very few people could read, and Londoners spoke in many different dialects. That made spelling a tricky business. The result: historians have discovered that “Shakespeare” was spelled at least 25 different ways from the time he was born in 1564 to 1623, when his plays were first published.
Uncle John’s Facts to Annoy Your Teacher Bathroom Reader for Kids Only! Page 7