Uncle John’s Did You Know?

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  • The Romans used IIII to represent the number 4, as opposed to IV, because IV was the symbol reserved for Jupiter, the chief Roman god.

  • The first recorded wrestling match took place in Japan in 23 B.C.

  • The city of London was founded in 43 B.C.

  • The longest Roman aqueduct was 87 miles long. It’s still there—in Tunisia—but it’s been falling into ruin since the 14th century.

  • No one knows exactly what Cleopatra looked like, but she was probably not nearly as beautiful as she’s depicted in the movies.

  • King Hammurabi’s code of laws was carved into a eight-foot-high stone that was placed in the middle of Babylon 3,700 years ago—even though hardly anyone at the time could read. If you ever want to see it, it’s in the Louvre Museum in Paris.

  GAMES

  • Historians think the game of darts originated as archery practice for soldiers.

  • Chinese checkers was invented in Germany.

  • In 1991 Judit Polgar of Hungary, age 15, became the youngest chess Grandmaster in history. Her sisters, Susan and Sofia, are also chess champions.

  • Some soda vending machines in Japan have a game built in. If you press the drink-selection button at the right moment, your drink will be free.

  • Charades was so popular in the 1930s and 1940s that it was called “The Game.”

  • Jacks is descended from a game called “knucklebones” that was played with sheep bones.

  • The average speed of a dart heading toward a dartboard is 40 mph.

  • Playing tip: You can extend a game of Hangman by giving the hanging man a hat, bowtie, and shoes.

  • The game Othello originated in China more than 3,000 years ago, but in Japan it was a favorite game of the samurai.

  • Croquet made its first and last appearance at the Olympics in 1900. The matches also marked the first time that women competed in the Games.

  AMAZING

  ANIMALS

  • Dolphins hear by detecting sound waves transmitted through their skulls to an ear inside their heads.

  • Hippos can drink as much as 66 gallons of water per day.

  • A hungry polar bear can smell a seal from 20 miles away.

  • Like dogs and wolves, rhinoceroses mark their territory by urinating.

  • The honey badger’s favorite food? Honey, of course. To get to this prize, they’ll withstand hundreds of bee stings, an assault that would kill almost any other animal.

  • One female mouse can give birth to more than 100 babies during a year.

  • A platypus carries half of its body fat in its tail…and can draw on this energy reserve when food is scarce.

  • The toucan must turn its head backward and rest its bill on its back to sleep.

  • Three overcoats were once found in the stomach of a single shark.

  JAPANESE

  SAYINGS

  • Ever laugh so hard you busted a gut? The Japanese expression for a belly laugh is “to boil tea with your belly button.”

  • No matter how talented you are, sometimes you still don’t succeed. That’s why the Japanese say “even the monkey falls from the tree.”

  • Even if you think you’re hiding, others can often still see you. The Japanese call that “hiding your head and showing your butt.”

  • When bad things seem to pile up, we say, “When it rains, it pours.” The Japanese say, “The bee stings while you’re already crying.”

  • A very popular person in Japan is called a “pulled octopus.” It’s like everyone is tugging on a different tentacle.

  • If you’re a big fish in a small pond, you may believe you’re better than you really are. The Japanese say, “A frog in a well doesn’t know the ocean.”

  • The English expression “casting pearls before swine” means giving something valuable to someone who won’t appreciate it. The Japanese call it “giving a coin to a cat.”

  FREAKS OF

  NATURE

  • Slugs have four noses.

  • A praying mantis has only one ear.

  • Not only do honeybees have hair on their eyes, they also have five eyes: three small ones on the top of their heads and two bigger ones in front.

  • Snails have been known to sleep for three years. (No wonder it takes them so long to get anywhere.)

  • A chameleon can move its two eyes in different directions at the same time.

  • The boto dolphin of South America is unique among dolphins. Why? It’s pink.

  • Open wide: Small birds called plovers are the dental hygienists of the animal world. They’ll hop into a crocodile’s open mouth and clean its teeth.

  • The pupil of an octopus’s eye is rectangular.

  • Armadillo moms always have four babies at a time. And the babies are always all the same sex.

  • Freakiest freak? Here’s our candidate: The horned lizard uses special muscles to burst tiny blood vessels at the edges of its eyes so it can squirt a stream of blood at an attacker—from as far as three feet away.

  CARS BY THE

  NUMBERS

  Hop in and take this baby for a spin!

  • The average American-made car contains 300 pounds of plastic.

  • Why do they call it “rush” hour? In London rush-hour traffic moves at—ho-hum—just eight miles per hour.

  • Eww! Roll down the windows! Over a lifetime, the average driver passes 912 pints of gas inside a car.

  • In 1990 there was a traffic jam 84 miles long in Japan—a world record.

  • Can you guess how long it took to assemble one Model T Ford on a production line in the 1920s? Answer: 1 ½ hours.

  • In 1900 there were 109 automobile companies worldwide. Today there are about 2,000.

  • About one man in three admits to daydreaming while driving.

  • The six stars on the Subaru logo represent the Pleiades, a star cluster in the constellation Taurus.

  • The average driver will honk 15,250 times in a lifetime. (Most American cars honk in the key of F.)

  • You could have bought a Model T Ford for $260 in 1925.

  • About half the German highway system has no speed limit.

  • The average driver will curse 32,025 times in a lifetime of driving.

  • The average person will spend two weeks of their life waiting for traffic lights to change.

  • Early cars didn’t have steering wheels—they used levers.

  ONCE UPON

  A TIME

  In which we present a few stories about stories you may have read as a child.

  • Even though seeing a mermaid on a ship voyage was considered bad luck, the statue of Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid in Copenhagen harbor attracts a lot of sailors who touch her for good luck.

  • The Brothers Grimm didn’t write those fairy tales; most were folk tales not meant for children. The brothers collected them from storytellers and began publishing them in 1812.

  • Ever heard of Charles Perrault? Maybe not, but you know the 17th century Frenchman for his Mother Goose stories, including Cinderella, Puss-in-Boots, Little Red Riding Hood, and Sleeping Beauty.

  • In the original folk tale, Goldilocks wasn’t a little girl who ate the bears’ porridge. She was an old woman who drank the bears’ milk. (In another version, she wasn’t even Goldilocks—she was Silverhair.)

  • What’s Little Red Riding Hood’s first name? It’s not “Little”…it’s Blanchette.

  • Oh, no, an ogre! The name Shrek comes from the German word schreck, which means “fear” or “terror.”

  LAST NAMES

  The origins of some common American last names that were based on old-time occupations.

  • A “Carter” was a delivery person who drove a cart from town to town.

  • If your name is Cooper, one of your ancestors might have been a maker of wooden barrels. (From the old Dutch word kupe, meaning “tub.”)

  • The name Kellogg literally means a hog-
killer, a nickname for pork butchers, derived from “kill hog.”

  • A “Parker” wasn’t a parking valet, he was the grounds-keeper of a park surrounding a nobleman’s estate.

  • The name Stone comes from a worker who cut stone for a living.

  • In the Middle Ages, “Leach” was a word for “doctor.” It came from an old English word laece, that also meant “leech”—because medieval doctors used blood-sucking leeches on their patients.

  • A “Black” was a cloth-dyer whose specialty was shades of black.

  • Do you know anyone named Chamberlain? A chamberlain was a personal servant who cleaned the chambers (rooms) of a nobleman’s home.

  • A “Kemp” was a wrestler—from cempa, the old English word for “champion” or “warrior.”

  THE COLD

  TRUTH

  • At 3° to 10°F, snowflakes are usually star-shaped. When it gets a little warmer, they’re shaped more like columns; a little colder, more like plates.

  • Home Sweet Home: A Canadian company offers a two-day course in igloo building.

  • Brazil, 2003: A 440-pound chunk of ice fell out of a cloudless sky. Scientists blamed it on global warming.

  • Here’s how fast an average raindrop falls: 600 feet per minute. The average snowflake falls at a more leisurely pace: about 11 feet per minute.

  • Record for the most snowfall on a single day: 47.5 inches of snow fell on Valdez, Alaska, on January 16, 1990.

  • Look out below! A snowflake that spins like a top as it’s falling will usually be symmetrical when it hits the ground; if it falls sideways, it will probably be lopsided when it lands.

  • Dirty snow melts faster than clean snow. Why? Because dirt particles are warmer than snow crystals.

  IT’S A

  WILD WORLD

  • Mountain goats have a special feature on each hoof: a soft pad that acts as a powerful suction cup. Result: A mountain goat can walk up very steep mountains.

  • The detergent most commonly used to clean elephants is Murphy’s Oil Soap.

  • The housefly hums in the key of F.

  • Why can’t birds live on the space station? Because they require gravity to swallow.

  • What do reindeer and chimpanzees have in common? They both like bananas.

  • Koalas’ fingerprints are nearly identical to humans’. (They could actually be confused at a crime scene.)

  • The world’s termites outweigh the world’s humans 10 to 1.

  • A full-grown eagle is powerful enough to kill a young deer and fly away with it.

  • Some species of snails are venomous and can kill an adult human with a single bite.

  • Wolverines, the largest members of the weasel family, have been known to pry apart the jaws of a steel trap they’ve been caught in.

  OH, CANADA

  • Canada has roughly 2 million lakes…more than half the lakes in the world.

  • The last Canadian dollar bill was issued in 1989. It was replaced by the one-dollar coin, commonly called a “loonie”—after the loon bird engraved on it.

  • St. Paul, Alberta, is home to the world’s first flying-saucer launching pad. It was built in 1967 to celebrate Canada’s centennial.

  • Room to roam: On average, there are nine people per square mile in Canada, as compared to the 76 people crowded into each square mile in the U.S.

  • The Dutch Royal Family moved to Ottawa as refugees during World War II. In gratitude, Princess Juliana of the Netherlands gave Ottawa 100,000 tulip bulbs in 1945.

  • North America’s largest shopping mall: the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta. In addition to over 800 stores and restaurants, it boasts an amusement park, an indoor lake with four working submarines, 26 movie theaters, and a hockey arena.

  • Canada and the United States share the longest unbroken boundary in the world—nearly 4,000 miles.

  • Unusual Canadian place names: Blow Me Down, Spuzzum, Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, and Ta Ta Creek.

  SWEET DREAMS

  • Good news for people who are lactose intolerant: Chocolate aids in digesting milk.

  • Now that’s progress: The first lollipop machines made 40 lollipops a minute. But today’s rate is 5,900 lollipops a minute—nearly 100 per second.

  • The secret to blowing bigger bubbles is to chew your gum until the sugar is gone; sugar makes bubbles collapse because it doesn’t stretch.

  • Candies that have been around for more than 100 years: Hershey bars, Tootsie Rolls, Cracker Jack, Good & Plenty.

  • More than half of the marshmallows sold in summer are toasted over a fire.

  • The world’s largest S’more was made from 20,000 toasted marshmallows and 7,000 chocolate bars. It weighed 1,600 pounds.

  • The world’s largest lollipop (including the stick, of course, or it wouldn’t be a lollipop) weighed 4,031 pounds, measured 18.9 inches thick, and was more than 15 feet tall. The flavor was cherry.

  • Imagine a plastic Easter egg about the height of a nine-story building. That’s how big it would have to be if it was filled with the more than 16 billion jelly beans that U.S. manufacturers produce for Easter every year.

  ADVENTURES IN

  BUBBLE-LAND

  • Part 1: Coat the inside of a glass with vegetable oil and then pour in some soda pop. You won’t see many bubbles yet. That’s because the oil smooths over the microscopic bumps (called nucleation sites) that draw the carbon dioxide gas out of the soda.

  • Part 2: Now, drop some sugar into the soda and…bubbles galore! The rough surface of the sugar crystals provides the nucleation sites necessary to extract the dissolved gas.

  • Part 3: Where does all that foam come from in an ice cream float? Answer: The rough, icy surface of the ice cream draws the bubbles out of the soda, and then milk proteins coat the bubbles, producing a sturdy foam.

  • Part 4: Mixing baking soda (a base) and vinegar (an acid) is another way to make carbon dioxide bubbles.

  • The Grand Finale: Outside, in as big a space as you can find, open a large bottle of diet soda and position it so it won’t tip over. Warn any spectators to stand a few feet back, then drop a whole roll of Mentos candies into the bottle at the same time, and get out of the way. The soda will erupt like a fireworks display.

  ARTSY-FARTSY

  • In 1983 Japanese artist Tadahiko Ogawa made a copy of the Mona Lisa completely out of toast.

  • Van Gogh signed his paintings using only his first name: Vincent.

  • Frederic William Goudy designed 122 different typefaces. (You’re reading one of them right now.)

  • Leonardo da Vinci never put a signature or date on the Mona Lisa.

  • German artist Bernd Eilts fashions dried cow manure into wall clocks and small sculptures.

  • Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold for $82.5 million, making it the most expensive painting ever sold at auction. It now belongs to a private collection.

  • Artist Claes Oldenburg created a 45-foot-tall clothespin for Philadelphia’s Centre Square Plaza. (Shouldn’t it be in Wash-ington?)

  • In 1940 four French teenagers found a cave with wall paintings that dated back to the Upper Paleolithic Era—between 30,000 and 10,000 B.C.

  • In a 2004 poll to find “The Greatest Dutch Person,” Rembrandt and Van Gogh came in 8th and 9th respectively—right behind Anne Frank.

  THE SEVEN WONDERS OF THE ANCIENT

  WORLD

  • The Great Pyramid is the oldest wonder, and the only one still standing. It was built as a tomb for Pharaoh Khufu, probably in 2680 B.C. It is made of 2,300,000 blocks of stone—the average weight of each block is 2.5 tons.

  • The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Persian king Nebuchadnezzar II built the gardens for his wife in 600 B.C. in what is now Iraq. On top of 75-foot-tall columns were terraces covered with trees, flowering plants, fountains, pools, and mechanical waterfalls.

  • The Statue of Zeus at Olympia. The Greeks built this 40-foot-hi
gh statue of gold, jewels, and ivory to impress visitors to the ancient Olympics. Built in A.D. 450, it was destroyed in a fire in A.D. 462.

  • The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, Turkey, was built in 550 B.C. to honor the goddess of the hunt. It was destroyed in 356 B.C., then rebuilt—and then destroyed again in A.D. 262. Some of its columns survived and are now in the British Museum in London.

  • The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus was erected in Bodium, Turkey, by Queen Artemisia in memory of her husband, King Mausolus, who died in 353 B.C. All that’s left of it today is the foundation, some statues (in the British Museum), and the word “mausoleum,” which has come to mean a large above-ground tomb.

  • The Colossus at Rhodes was a 105-foot-tall bronze statue of the sun god Helios, overlooking the harbor of the Greek island of Rhodes. Completed in 280 B.C., it was destroyed during an earthquake around 224 B.C. Though no one knows exactly what the statue looked like, some historians think Helios wore the same headdress as the Statue of Liberty.

  • The Pharos of Alexandria was a working lighthouse for 1,500 years until it was destroyed by an earthquake in the 14th century A.D. It was about 400 feet tall, the height of a 40-story skyscraper. Some deep-sea divers think they’ve found the ruins of the lighthouse, and there are plans to reconstruct it.

  ON SAFARI

  • When Europeans first saw these tall animals, they thought they were a cross between the spotted leopard and the camel, so they called them…cameleopards. We call them giraffes.

  • Reebok named their shoe brand after a type of African gazelle.

  • Do ostriches really bury their heads in the sand? No. They do lower their heads to fight, and will lower their heads and necks to hide…but only if they’re sitting on a nest.

  • A lion’s mane protects him during fights with other lions.