The ancient Sumerians were the first to record sightings of the planet Mercury, in about 3000 BC.
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is 25,000 miles wide.
At last count, there were more than 300 known planets outside of our solar system.
There are rocks on Mars named Scooby-Doo, Yogi Bear, and Gumby.
Saturn’s rings are made of chunks of ice, ranging from dust- to house-sized.
It’s estimated that about half a ton of Martian material falls to Earth each year.
Because of Saturn’s tilt and the thinness of its rings, every 14 years the rings seem to disappear.
In 1989, Voyager 2 (the only spacecraft to visit Neptune) discovered a unique cloud pattern that circles the planet extremely fast. Its name: the Scooter.
On Venus, the sun rises in the west.
To the Extreme
Most expensive MP3 player: The gold-and-gem-encrusted Douglas J. Presidential costs $44,000. It comes with 1GB of memory, and a “personal escort” will hand-deliver it to your house.
Most expensive concert ticket ever: $1,530. (Front row at Barbra Streisand’s 2000 Australia tour.)
Floyd Rood hit a golf ball across the continental United States. (It took him 114,737 strokes.)
Eating champion Mort Hurst once ate 16 double-decker Moon Pies in 10 minutes, and 38 eggs in 29 seconds.
The record for hula-hooping the most hoops simultaneously: 100, held by Kareena Oates.
Jerry Rice has the most career touchdowns in Super Bowl history: eight.
Roger Staubach holds the career record for the most Super Bowl fumbles; he dropped the ball five times.
Students at England’s Stockport College built an 896-pound fully operational yo-yo. Diameter: 10 feet 5 inches. It was launched off a crane at a height of 189 feet.
Elaine Davidson of Edinburgh, Scotland, has a world-record 720 body piercings.
World record bubblegum bubble: 23" in diameter, blown by Susan Montgomery Williams.
The pogo-stick jumping world record: 41 hours.
Basketball player with the most points scored in his career: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, with 38,387.
World’s oldest restaurant: Casa Botín in Spain. It’s been in operation since 1725.
Water
There are almost 800 different brands of bottled water available for sale in the United States.
According to some experts, the world’s best-tasting tap water is in Los Angeles.
Every day, the sun’s heat evaporates about a trillion tons of water.
With just one gulp of air, a beaver can swim up to half a mile underwater.
Each day, the United States uses 134 billion gallons of water to irrigate crops.
Sunlight can penetrate clear ocean water to a depth of 240 feet.
Eighty percent of a baby’s body weight at birth is water.
In the ancient Egyptian language, the word nile means “water.”
Beethoven often dipped his head in cold water before he began composing.
All sturgeon caught in British waters are legally the property of the queen.
If all the ice in Antarctica melted, sea levels would rise by about 200 feet.
An average golf course uses about 6,000 gallons of water per day. Some desert courses use a million gallons.
It’s recommended that we consume eight cups of water a day, but people can actually drink up to three gallons (or 48 cups).
By the time you feel thirsty, you’ve already lost 1 percent of the water in your body.
An average water droplet contains 100 quintillion molecules of water.
Names
Booker T. Washington’s middle name was Taliaferro, which he pronounced “Tolliver.”
The “S” in Ulysses S. Grant didn’t stand for anything; his real name was Hiram Ulysses Grant.
France had kings named Charles the Fat, Charles the Bold, Charles the Simple, and Charles the Well-Served.
Queen Elizabeth’s last name is Mountbatten-Windsor.
Soprano Maria Callas was christened Maria Anna Sofia Cecilia Kalogeropoulou.
Boxer Sugar Ray Leonard’s full name: Ray Charles Leonard. (He was named after singer Ray Charles.)
Malcolm X’s last name is symbolic of the African names his ancestors lost to slavery.
Before his victory at Hastings, William the Conqueror was called “William the Bastard.”
Robert McNamara, U.S. secretary of defense in the 1960s, had a strange middle name: Strange.
Dance, Dance, Dance
Justin Timberlake once won a “Dance Like the New Kids on the Block” contest.
Bobby Pickett titled his song “Monster Mash” to cash in on the 1960s Mashed Potato dance craze.
A 1909 song called “Uncle Josh in Society” was the first whose lyrics contained the term “jazz.” In the song, it referred to a type of dancing known as ragtime.
World record: in August 1983, Peter Stewart of England disco-danced for 408 hours.
“Dance floor dehydration syndrome” (DFDS) can be fatal.
Tap dancing is derived from Irish clogging.
Athlete Jim Thorpe was a national ballroom dance champion.
In his youth, King Louis XIV of France was an avid ballet dancer.
State dance of South Carolina: the shag.
Inventions
Guitarist Les Paul invented the multitrack recording. The first song to use it was his “How High the Moon” (1951).
Henry Ford, father of the Model T, is also the father of the charcoal briquet.
Englishman Sir Humphry Davy created the technology for the lightbulb in 1800, more than 70 years before Thomas Edison did.
Eli Whitney came up with the idea for interchangeable parts to fill a large army order for muskets in 1797.
Jerry Lewis invented and patented a video monitor system in 1956; it’s still used throughout the film industry today.
Thomas Edison at first thought his phonograph was “a mere toy, which has no commercial value.”
Jacques Cousteau invented the Aqualung (scuba-diving gear) while fighting with the French Resistance in World War II.
Leonardo da Vinci invented an alarm clock that woke him by rubbing his feet.
In 1891, Samuel O’Reilly used a Thomas Edison invention (the electric pen) as a model for the first electric tattoo machine.
Film star and racing enthusiast Steve McQueen patented a type of bucket seat in 1969.
Benjamin Franklin is credited with the invention of the odometer.
Thomas Jefferson invented the dumbwaiter, swivel chair, and lamp heater.
Wilhelm Maybach got the idea for the carburetor after observing a perfume pump spray.
Underwear
Pro golfer Gary McCord split his pants open at the 1984 Memphis Classic—and had no underwear on.
The first boxer shorts appeared in the 1920s as part of the costume for boxers, whose footwork in the ring benefited from the loose shorts.
Lisa Zobian-Lindahl and Hilda Miller of Vermont invented the sports bra in 1978. It was was called the Jogbra.
Michael Jordan always wore the shorts of his North Carolina uniform under his Chicago Bulls uniform.
According to one study, 25 percent of women in Arkansas keep a spare pair of panties in their car’s glove compartment.
Average number of days a German man goes without washing his underwear: seven.
A pair of nylons is made from a single filament four miles long, knitted into 3 million loops.
King Tut was buried with 145 pairs of loincloth underwear.
What do Scottish men wear under their kilts? Traditionally, nothing at all.
According to manufacturers, the average bra size today is 36C. In 1980, it was 34B.
Surveys say: about two-thirds of American men prefer boxers to briefs.
Harpo Marx and George Burns enjoyed golfing together in their underwear.
Large-scale production of the modern bra didn’t begin until the 1930s, when it began to replace the
corset. But bralike undergarments have been around since 1400 BC.
Questionable Behavior
At any point in time, 0.7 percent of the world’s population is drunk.
About 1,500 New York residents are bitten every year…by other New Yorkers.
Americans bet $6 billion a year at Internet gambling sites.
Percentage of high-school seniors in 1970 who smoked: 18.4. In 2008: 10 percent.
Two-thirds of Americans say they regularly use the “f-word.”
Up to 98 percent of college students have admitted to cheating in school at least once.
Experts say it’s harder to tell a convincing lie to someone you find sexually attractive.
According to researchers, the number of public apologies issued by famous figures in the United States doubled between 1990 and 2002.
Odds that one of your party guests will peek into your medicine cabinet: 40 percent.
That’s the Size of It
How big is home plate on a baseball diamond? It’s five-sided: 17" x 8 ½" x 12" x 12" x 8 ½"
A cloud measuring one cubic mile weighs about 3.5 million pounds.
The Slinky toy was made of an 87-foot piece of wire, 3" in diameter and 2" high.
Actual dimensions of a record: a 12" disk (LP) is 11.89", and a 7" disk (45 rpm) is 6.89".
An NFL field is 360 feet long (including end zones) by 160 feet wide.
Diameter of the wire in a standard paper clip: about 0.04".
Average length of a coat hanger when straightened: 44".
There are exactly 216 noodles in every can of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup.
Average depth of a golf ball dimple: 0.01".
Fattest newspaper ever printed: The New York Times, October 17, 1965, at 946 pages. It weighed 7 ½ pounds.
The average iceberg weighs 20 million tons.
A standard CD is 4.7" in diameter.
A baby grand piano is 5'11" long. Professional grand: 6'. Concert grand: 8'11" or longer.
Plymouth Rock weighs about four tons.
At liftoff, a space shuttle weighs about 4.5 million pounds.
The first Band-Aids ever made were 2½" wide…and 18" long.
If you had $1 million in $100 bills, they would weigh 20.41 pounds.
Simons Say
“If your lifeguard duties were as good as your singing, a lot of people would be drowning.”
—Simon Cowell, American Idol judge
“Discussing personal things in front of an audience creates a release; people recognize something from their own lives. Humor is the optimism, the release.”
—Simon Amstell, comedian
“The whole point in forming a band: Girls. Absolutely gorgeous girls.”
—Simon Le Bon, lead singer of Duran Duran
“Judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.”
—Simón Bolívar
“What I want to do and what I do are two separate things. If we all went around doing what we wanted all the time, there’d be chaos.”
—Simon Birch, from the film Simon Birch
“I used to lie in bed in my flat and imagine what would happen if there was a zombie attack.”
—Simon Pegg, British writer and actor
“I miss meat pies. They don’t have them in L.A. Actually, all I think about the whole time I’m in America is what I’m missing out on in Australia.”
—Simon Baker, actor
“Violence is like a weed—it does not die even in the greatest drought.”
—Simon Wiesenthal
“I think I have a superior brain and an inferior stature, if you really want to get brutal about it.”
—Paul Simon
“I remember being onstage once when I didn’t have fear: I got so scared I didn’t have fear that it brought on an anxiety attack.”
—Carly Simon
Celebrity Contracts
Van Halen created the famous “M&M rider” clause (which prohibited brown M&Ms backstage) to test whether concert promoters had read the entire contract.
Per his contract, Oakland A’s relief pitcher Rollie Fingers got $300 extra in 1973 for growing the longest mustache on his team, and $100 more to pay for mustache wax.
Diana Ross once had a contract that said no one backstage was allowed to make eye contact with her.
Fox Television forbids actor Dan Castellaneta from doing his Homer Simpson voice in public.
Bollywood actor Shahid Kapoor had to spend several months under house arrest in 2009. Why? His contract stipulated that he couldn’t go out in public and reveal his “tough-guy” look for a movie he was filming.
In 1987, Charlie Kerfeld signed a contract to pitch for the Houston Astros…with two stipulations: he wanted to be paid a salary of $110,037.37 (to honor his #37 jersey), and he wanted 37 boxes of orange Jell-O.
Pollution
The average car releases one pound of pollutants for every 25 miles it drives. But…
…A midsize car in the 1960s emitted 20 times more pollution than a brand-new midsize car emits today.
Colorado has traffic cones with sensors that can measure the amount of air pollution cars give off.
It takes just one gallon of used motor oil to pollute a million gallons of fresh water—an entire year’s supply of drinking water for 50 people.
A house produces twice as many polluting greenhouse gases as the average car.
The Amazon rain forest produces more than 20 percent of the world’s oxygen.
Tasmania, an island state off the coast of Australia, has the world’s cleanest air.
Bad news: indoor pollution can be 25 times more toxic than outdoor pollution. Worse news: most people spend nearly 90 percent of their time inside.
In just one Coastal Cleanup Day, beach lovers collected 338,876 cigarette butts from California beaches.
According to the World Health Organization, the air in Cairo, Egypt, is so polluted that breathing it is like smoking 20 cigarettes a day.
Every month, Americans throw away enough aluminum cans to rebuild every commercial airplane in the country.
Disposable diapers take up about 1 percent of the space in U.S. landfills, and require at least 250 years to decompose.
Americans use more than 2 million plastic bottles an hour.
Canadian Firsts
First person to walk across Canada: John Hugh Gillis, in 1906. It took him nine months to walk from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Vancouver, British Columbia.
Martin Frobisher, an English explorer, held Canada’s first Thanksgiving in 1578 to celebrate surviving the long trip from England to Newfoundland.
Canada received the world’s first transatlantic wireless message. In 1901, using a kite as an antenna, an operator in Cornwall, England, sent a message to inventor Guglielmo Marconi in Newfoundland.
In 1922, 14-year-old Leonard Thompson of Toronto was the first person to be treated successfully for diabetes. His doctors, Frederick Banting and Charles Best, invented insulin the year before.
Auyuittuq National Park in Nunavut is the oldest park in the world to lie inside the Arctic Circle.
First city in North America to be put on the UNESCO World Heritage list: Quebec City.
World’s first surviving (and only identical female) quintuplets: Annette, Cecile, Emilie, Marie, and Yvonne Dionne, born in Ontario in 1934.
Patron Saint Of…
Mad Dogs…Domingo of Silos
Dumbness…Drogo
Editors…John Bosco
Blackbirds…Kevin of Glendalough
Country girls…Germaine Cousin
Air crews…Joseph of Cupertino
Arm pain…Amalburga
Eczema…Anthony the Abbot
Holy wafer bakers…Honorius of Amiens
Button makers…Louis IX
Children learning to talk…Zeno of Verona
Disappointing children…Louise de Marillac
Dentists…Apollonia
Murderers…Caedw
alla
Relief from pestilence…Roch
Grave diggers…Barbara
Wandering musicians…Julian the Hospitaller
Hairdressers…Cosmas
Race relations…Martin de Porres
Lions…Mark the Apostle
Old maids…Catherine of Alexandria
School principals…John Baptist de La Salle
Rope braiders…Paul the Apostle
Unjustly lost lawsuits…Nicholas of Myra
Actresses…Pelagia the Penitent (The Beardless Hermit)
Welcome to California
California boasts the highest (Mount Whitney) and lowest (Death Valley) points in the contiguous United States.
The state’s vineyards produce more than 17 million gallons of wine a year.
About 8 percent of all Californians are vegetarians.
Raisin capital of the world: Fresno. Date capital of the world: Coachella Valley.
More than 1,200 people have committed suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.
In the town of Pacific Grove, near Monterey, you can be fined $500 for “molesting” butterflies.
Many of California’s redwoods are more than 2,000 years old.
During the gold rush (1848–52), California’s population grew from 14,000 to more than 200,000.
Hearst Castle in San Simeon has the most expensive swimming pool in the world—its 1 million tiles are all inlaid with gold.
World’s largest outdoor ampitheatre: the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.
Willow Creek calls itself the “Bigfoot Capital,” and claims more Bigfoot sightings than anywhere else in the United States.
California’s economy ranks 10th in the world.
In 1947, the Castroville Fair’s first Artichoke Queen was a young Marilyn Monroe.
California’s largest state park (and the second largest in the United States) is the 600,000-acre Anza-Borrego Desert, 90 miles east of San Diego.
The world’s first movie theater opened in Los Angeles in 1902.
That’s Rich
Billionaire Warren Buffett once paid $100,000 to caddy for Tiger Woods in a charity event.
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wise Up! Page 5