Uncle John’s Facts to Annoy Your Teacher Bathroom Reader for Kids Only!

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  Q: Why did the student refuse to accept an unsharpened pencil?

  A: She said it was totally pointless.

  IT’S GOOD FOR YOUR TEETH

  Forget what grown-ups have told you: your teeth actually benefit from chewing gum…as long as it’s sugarless. Chewing gum makes your mouth produce saliva, which cleans your teeth.

  IT’S GOOD FOR YOUR EARS

  As a plane becomes airborne, the pressure inside it drops. Why? Air pressure is lower at higher elevations.

  But going from one level of pressure to another can make people sick. So planes that fly higher than 3,000 feet use air-pressurization systems inside their cabins. Sometimes, though, those fancy systems don’t get the air pressure quite high enough. The result: some passengers get painfully blocked-up ears. The best way to relieve this is to gently force air out of your ears. And the best way to do that is to chew gum. The motion moves your ears and pushes the air out. Ah, relief!

  BEAR HAVEN

  We’ll admit it, some teachers are cool, and here’s one we especially like. Every summer, he welcomes a few unusual guests into his home—wild bears.

  MOUNTAIN MAN

  For most of his life, Charlie Vandergaw was a high-school science teacher in Anchorage, Alaska. But in the mid-1980s, he retired and bought 40 acres of land in the Alaskan wilderness. There, he set up a homestead called Bear Haven, with just a small main house and a couple of outbuildings. He has no phone, no Internet, and no TV. To reach his property, he has to fly there in a small plane because the closest road is more than 20 miles away. But Vandergaw’s not starving for company. He’s made some unusual friends—the black and grizzly bears who live nearby.

  THE FIRST: BIG JACK

  Vandergaw didn’t always love bears; at one time, he hunted them. But one summer day in the 1980s, he met a bear whom Vandergaw says “wanted me for a friend.” The black bear crawled across the yard on his belly, so Vandergaw did the same. Eventually, they got close enough to touch noses, and Vandergaw named the bear Big Jack. He started feeding Big Jack when he came by.

  Soon, other bears began showing up on Vandergaw’s property—more than 10 in all. There’s Walt, a 500-pound black bear who ambles through the front door most mornings to say hello. Annie and her cub Peanut like to climb trees on the property. And Cookie is an enormous grizzly who loves to play. Vandergaw says, “She’d come in and just play with the irrigation system and I’d feed her. She eventually let me feed her out of my hand.”

  World’s largest wind farm: The Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center in Texas.

  BRING IN THE LAW

  Feeding bears by hand, though, is illegal in Alaska. In fact, feeding any wild animal is against the law there. Authorities worry that feeding wild animals makes them feel too comfortable with humans, which also makes them more willing to come into areas where people live.

  New Zealand’s kiwi bird is about the size of a chicken, but its eggs are 10 times larger.

  Bear attacks on humans are rare—only 20 people died from bear attacks in Alaska in the entire 20th century. (Between 1975 and 1985 alone, 19 Alaskans were killed by dogs.) But when bears do attack, they usually kill. In 2003, an environmentalist named Timothy Treadwell, who’d been living among wild bears on and off for 13 years, was mauled and killed in Alaska’s wilderness. His story gained national attention because Treadwell had been making a documentary about his experience, and the event scared a lot of people.

  So Alaska’s government has been trying to close down Bear Haven for years. Thus far, though, Vandergaw hasn’t budged. He’s heard all the criticisms and agrees that most people (kids especially) should never approach or try to feed one of these animals. His situation is unique, he believes, because he invites the bears to his home, rather than invades their forest territories like Treadwell did. And plus, he isn’t scared of his bears. Vandergaw says, “I don’t even think about being eaten. Why would they want to eat me?”

  * * *

  BLUE BEARS?

  It’s true…sort of. Technically, they’re “glacier bears”—black bears with bluish-black coats. The coloring probably evolved during the last Ice Age (about 18,000 years ago) so the bears could blend into their icy blue habitat in southeastern Alaska. Today, only about 100 of the blue bears exist in the world.

  In medieval Britain, dead bodies were often taken to cemeteries along special highways called “corpse roads.”

  THINGS TO DO IF YOU’RE DEAD

  Have you ever wondered what happens to bodies that are donated to science?

  CADAVER CAPERS

  Most people are buried or cremated after they die. But some choose to donate their bodies to science. That means they allow scientists and medical students to study them after they’re dead. But Uncle John wanted to know—what exactly happens to the bodies?

  MEDICAL SCIENCE

  Most bodies donated to science go to medical schools, where students use them to learn medical techniques. Three or four students usually “share” a body. They take turns dissecting it and examining it as part of their medical training. They might practice surgeries or learn how the different internal organs actually look.

  Doctors practice on bodies, too. Surgeons who want to learn new techniques use different parts of donated bodies. For example, a doctor who wants to learn how to do a new kind of face-lift would get a severed head to work with. Another doctor who is practicing knee surgery might examine the same corpse’s leg.

  DOWN ON THE FARM

  “Body farms” are outdoor labs where human bodies are left outside to decompose. Once a body has broken down, scientists study how different conditions might affect it. For example, hot weather will make a body rot faster than cold weather. Crime investigators can then use that information as a model for finding out how long ago a person died and sometimes even whether or not he was murdered.

  Forensic entomology—the study of how insects affect human corpses—is a new kind of science being studied at body farms. Forensic entomologists try to determine how long a person has been dead based on the types of insects that live or feed on the bodies. For example, if earthworms are living under a body, that means it’s been undisturbed for at least a week. But if beetles are there, the body hasn’t been moved in months.

  CRASH-TEST DEAD DUMMIES

  Another use for dead bodies: to test automobile safety. Many car manufacturers start out using plastic crash-test dummies—mannequins with built-in equipment to measure the force of an accident. But the joints of crash-test dummies don’t move the same way human joints do. It’s also hard to tell what kind of injuries a real person might get in a crash by looking at broken plastic. So the car companies also use bodies. Some of the most important advances in car safety—like shoulder seatbelts and air bags—were tested on human bodies.

  For vampires only? Phengophobia is the fear of daylight.

  THE GREAT HOUDINI

  David Copperfield? David Blaine? Please! Harry Houdini is history’s most famous magician, and he pulled off some incredible tricks that still astound people today.

  INVENTING HOUDINI

  Harry Houdini wasn’t his real name. The kid who grew up to be Houdini was born Ehrich Weiss in Hungary in 1874, and moved to the United States with his family when he was four. They settled first in Appleton, Wisconsin, and then moved to New York City.

  Houdini showed promise as an escape artist and performer at a young age. Sometimes, he broke into locked kitchen cabinets to steal treats. And his first appearance onstage came when he was just nine. He called himself “Ehrich, Prince of the Air” and put on a show in which he swung from a trapeze.

  As a teenager, he decided to perform in magic shows for money. He admired a French magician named Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, and friends and family had called Ehrich “Ehrie” when he was a kid. So he put the two together to come up with the stage name Harry Houdini.

  President Theodore Roosevelt kept a pet macaw parrot named Eli Yale.

  GREAT ESCAPES

 
Harry Houdini performed all over New York City and on Coney Island, the city’s seaside amusement park. Sometimes he worked alone; other times, he performed with his brother Theo, and later, Bess Rahner, a singer and dancer he married in 1894.

  But his magic shows weren’t particularly interesting, and his tricks weren’t unique. So in 1895, Harry, Theo, and Bess joined a traveling circus, hoping to gain more experience performing for a wider group of people. That’s where Houdini found his true calling as an escape artist.

  In their circus act, he and Theo performed a trick where they switched places inside a locked trunk. People loved it, and Houdini spent hours each day trying to improve it. He also experimented with escapes from handcuffs, safes, and other locked objects.

  The more escapes he put in his act, the more famous he became. Houdini even ran an ad offering $100 to anyone who gave him a pair of handcuffs he couldn’t get out of. (No one ever came up with any.) Finally, in 1900, he put on a show at Scotland Yard, the headquarters of London’s police department, where he was chained to a pole but escaped. After that, he became a superstar.

  HARRY IN A CAN

  Houdini perfected dozens of escapes, but his most famous usually included locks, handcuffs, and being buried alive or submerged in water. One of his most famous tricks was the “Milk Can Escape.” Houdini called it “the greatest escape I’ve ever invented.” It worked like this: A handcuffed Houdini climbed into a milk can. (In the early 1900s, dairy farmers often delivered milk in decorated metal cans that stood two or three feet high.) Then his assistants filled the can with water, locked him inside, and surrounded the can with a screen so that the audience couldn’t see how Houdini did the trick. About two minutes later, he appeared from behind the screen, dripping wet and gasping for breath…and the audience cheered.

  Like excitement? You may not want to move to Boring, Maryland though it might be better than living in Middelfart, Denmark.

  Many people thought Houdini must have had supernatural powers to be able to perform the tricks he did. But the truth was just that he practiced constantly and was incredibly skilled with locks. In the case of the “Milk Can Escape,” he only had to break the seal of the lid, wiggle his way out of the can, and then pick the lock on his handcuffs.

  JUST SAY BOO

  Houdini’s other passion was debunking ghost stories. In the early 20th century, a group of people called Spiritualists said they could talk to the dead by holding special ceremonies called séances. People paid huge amounts of money to come to the séances, hoping to speak with their deceased loved ones. Sometimes the loved ones even appeared as ghostly apparitions…or so people thought.

  Houdini didn’t buy it. He was so skilled with trickery that he believed the ghosts who showed up had to be illusions. So he attended séances all over the United States, revealed the tricks, and exposed the hosts as frauds.

  CURTAIN CALL

  One of Houdini’s stage tricks was to allow someone to punch him hard in the stomach while he remained standing and didn’t flinch or show any pain. How did he do it? By doing vigorous exercises ahead of time to strengthen his stomach muscles, and then tightening them before the blow to protect his internal organs. One day in 1926, a fan asked if he could try it out. Houdini agreed, but the fan hit him before Houdini was ready. The blow ruptured his appendix, and he died a few days later.

  It wasn’t the end of Houdini, however. Spiritualists tried to contact his ghost. (He never answered.) And hundreds of magicians and escape artists who came after him—including David Copperfield and David Blaine—list Houdini as an inspiration.

  Want to learn how to do your own magic tricks?

  Grab your white rabbit and materialize on page 145.

  Popular fast-food snack in Japan: Takoyaki, or octopus dumplings.

  SCAREDY-CAT

  Everyone has phobias, even Uncle John. (He’s got “dirtythroneophobia.”) Here’s a list of some phobias he finds funny—plus a few that make him cower in fear.

  Ablutophobia: fear of washing or bathing

  Selenophobia: fear of the moon

  Ecclesiophobia: fear of church

  Dentophobia: fear of the dentist

  Genuphobia: fear of knees

  Geniophobia: fear of chins

  Lachanophobia: fear of vegetables

  Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia: fear of long words

  Hodophobia: fear of traveling on roads

  Octophobia: fear of the figure 8

  Triskaidekaphobia: fear of the number 13

  Paraskavedekatriaphobia: fear of Friday the 13th

  Scolionophobia: fear of school

  Philemaphobia: fear of kissing

  Panophobia: fear of everything

  Phobophobia: fear of phobias

  In Indonesia, don’t touch another person’s head—it’s considered offensive.

  CODE TALKERS

  What’s the best way to send messages during wartime? Hire a special group of Americans to create an unbreakable code.

  FEELING INSECURE

  During World War II, the U.S. Army and Navy were having a terrible time sending messages within their ranks. The Japanese had found ways to intercept and break every code the Americans came up with. Not wanting to have that same trouble, the Marines needed a code the Japanese couldn’t crack. A man named Philip Johnston provided the solution.

  LANGUAGE OF THE FEW

  In 1942, Johnston was living in California and working as an engineer. But as a child, he’d spent most of his time on Navajo Indian reservations all over the United States. His father was a Protestant missionary who brought the family along while he did his work, and as a child, Johnston had played with Navajo children and learned to speak their language.

  Now in his 50s, he heard that the U.S. Marines were looking for a way to send secret messages to each other, and he immediately thought of his childhood friends. The Navajo language seemed perfect: it was only spoken—there were no written words—and very few people in the world could understand it.

  Planning a trip to the moon? Don’t bother to take a compass The moon doesn’t have a magnetic field, so a compass won’t work.

  WHALES AND HUMMINGBIRDS

  Johnston took his idea to Major James E. Jones, who was stationed at a Marine base in Oceanside, California. Jones thought the idea was interesting, but he wasn’t sure it would work because there weren’t any Navajo words for military terms. They couldn’t just use English words for things like “tank”—that would make the code easy to crack.

  But Johnston had a solution. Instead of using English words, he suggested they assign Navajo words to stand in for the military terms the language lacked. For example, they could use the Navajo word for “whale” to mean “battleship,” and the word for “hummingbird” could mean “fighter plane.”

  Jones was impressed, and he asked Johnston to demonstrate the code for his commanding officers. Everything went so well that, in the spring of 1942, the Marines were allowed to hire and train 29 Navajos for the job. They became known as “code talkers.”

  READY FOR BATTLE

  Those first 29 men helped to create the code. They decided which words would mean what, and then memorized the list…about 450 words. But what if they needed a new word, one that wasn’t on the list? They had a solution for that, too. In those cases, the message sender would transmit what sounded like a mixed-up collection of Navajo words. But the message receiver would know to translate the Navajo words into English. Then, the first letter of each English word would spell out the word being sent. For example, a message might look like this:

  tsah = Needle

  wol-la-chee = Ant

  ah-keh-di-glini = Victor

  tsah-ah-dzoh = Yucca

  And the word would be “Navy.”

  READY FOR ACTION

  The first 29 Navajo code talkers headed off to war in 1942 and were stationed all over the Pacific. By 1945, more than 350 Navajos had joined the Marines as code talkers. They played a role in almost every
major American victory over the Japanese, especially the crucial 1945 Battle of Iwo Jima. According to one of the soldiers, “Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.”

  The Japanese managed to intercept many of the Navajo messages, but they were never able to crack them. Finally, in August 1945, thanks in part to the Navajo soldiers, the Americans and their allies won World War II.

  The white rhino and black rhino are both the same color: Gray.

  MORE BIZARRE ANIMAL ACTS

  In the wild world of animals, some are wilder than others. (The first part of the story appears on page 7.)

  POLLY WANNA ROLLER-SKATE?

  Kiri, a Congo African gray parrot from Seattle, Washington, is a star roller skater. She wears small skates that her trainer, Tani Robar, taught her to use, and shows off her roller disco moves…for peanuts. During her shows, as applause eggs her on, Kiri pushes each leg forward until she reaches the end of the stage. Then the parrot turns, skates back to center stage, and twirls in a circle.

  Kiri does other tricks, too. She loads groceries into a mini shopping cart and pushes it wherever Robar says. She also rolls a bowling ball down a ramp into a set of pins. And she plays dead. Kiri lies very still on her back while holding daisies—so she’s “pushing up daisies.”