First gold rap album (with 500,000 sold): Run-D.M.C., by Run-D.M.C. (1984).
The first record to feature a Moog synthesizer was Cosmic Sounds by the Zodiac, released by Elektra Records in 1967.
First rap LP with an “Explicit Lyrics” warning label: 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty as They Wanna Be (1989).
First song to feature electric guitar distortion: “Don’t Worry,” by Marty Robbins (1961). It was an accident—the amplifier malfunctioned.
Electric Lady Studios was the first recording studio owned by a major artist—Jimi Hendrix.
The first Fender electric guitar was the 1950 Esquire. Only about 60 were released under that name.
It’s True
Ulysses S. Grant suffered from intense migraines that were sometimes mistaken for bouts of drunkenness.
Few photos of Crazy Horse exist because he did not allow his picture to be taken.
After Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd planned to do an album that used household objects as instruments. They never released the record, but did record some sounds and used them in their 1975 album Wish You Were Here.
Albert Einstein never learned how to drive.
Basketball star Wilt Chamberlain had a superstition about always wearing a rubber band around his wrist.
Reverend Jesse Jackson’s PUSH organization launched a campaign against disco music in the 1970s.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was secretly a chain smoker.
Luciano Pavarotti kept a bent nail in his pocket for luck when he was onstage.
Regardless of subject, Roman statesman Cato was said to end all of his speeches with “Carthage must be destroyed.”
Albert Einstein slept 10 hours a night.
Favorite game of champion swimmer Michael Phelps: Tiger Woods’s PGA Tour golf game on Nintendo Wii.
Patsy Cline didn’t like “Walkin’ After Midnight,” saying it was “just a lil’ old pop song.” (It went to #2 on the country music charts.)
A Swiss doctor once claimed to have invented a camera that could identify aliens posing as humans.
Animal Comparisons
Monkeys have tails; apes do not.
Humans and elephants are the only species that recognize and react emotionally to the bones of their own kind.
Caterpillars have more muscles (4,000) than humans (about 640).
There are twice as many kangaroos as people in Australia.
The blond Mangalitza pig has thick fleece like a sheep’s.
A dolphin’s closest relative on land: the hippopotamus.
From a University of Michigan study: a dog’s memory span is five minutes; a cat’s is 16 hours.
What do turkeys and turtles have in common? Both have light and dark meat.
Cows have 35,000 taste buds. Pigs have 19,000. Humans have 10,000.
Spaces & Places
The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) was founded in London in 1844.
Donald Duck’s “official” address: 1313 Webfoot Walk, Duckburg, Calisota.
The Vienna Philharmonic, founded in 1842, has had only “guest” conductors since 1860.
Tin Pan Alley was a real place: West 28th Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue in New York, where songwriters and music publishers worked.
The Dallas-based “alternative groove funk band” Frognot got their name from a Texas town.
One of Disneyland’s original attractions: the “Bathroom of Tomorrow.”
The flashing light on top of L.A.’s Capitol Records Tower spells out “Hollywood” in Morse code.
Each copy of the band Black Oak Arkansas’ first album (1971) came with a deed to one square inch of land in Arkansas.
There are 142 staircases at Hogwarts of Harry Potter fame.
In 1835, Madame Tussaud established her first wax museum on London’s Baker Street.
In the 1960s Batman TV series, the distance from the Bat Cave to Gotham City was 14 miles.
Nashville nicknames: Music City, USA; Cashville; Nashvegas; and Titan Town.
The Port of Houston ships and receives more foreign freight than any other U.S. port.
First Top-40 radio station: WTIX in New Orleans.
Warriors
During World War I, Charles de Gaulle was wounded several times and was a prisoner of war for three years.
Mickey Marcus is the only soldier buried at West Point who died fighting under a foreign flag. He was a military advisor to Israel in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
Adam Swarner of New York was the first Union soldier to die at the prison camp in Andersonville, Georgia.
Before the Civil War began, General Robert E. Lee was offered command of both the Union and Confederate armies.
Baron von Steuben, a Prussian, drilled George Washington’s troops at Valley Forge.
Lew Wallace, best-selling author of Ben-Hur, was also a Civil War general and U.S. senator.
The architect of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, was a graduate of Harvard.
Wal-Mart’s founder, Sam Walton, was an army spy during World War II.
While crossing the Gobi desert, Genghis Khan’s troops survived by drinking their horses’ blood.
After the American Revolution, John Paul Jones served in the Russian navy.
Between the Red River Rebellion (1869–70) and the North-West Rebellion (1885), the two insurrections he led against Canada’s government, Louis Riel (who founded the province of Manitoba) was a teacher in Montana.
To prevent warfare among families, sultans in the Ottoman Empire had the right to kill their brothers.
To the Moon
First man-made object to reach the Moon: Luna 2, an unmanned Soviet spacecraft, in 1959.
Earth is 0.02°F hotter during a full moon.
According to astronauts’ notes, moon dust smells like exploded firecrackers.
The Royal and Ancient Golf Club’s rules committee chastised Alan Shepard for not “replacing his divot” on the Moon.
The last astronaut to walk on the Moon was Eugene Cernan, in 1972.
In 1609, Galileo was the first to discover that the surface of the Moon was pitted, not smooth.
Every song title on the soundtrack to An American Werewolf in London has the word “moon” in it.
In 1969, Pan-Am began accepting reservations for flights to the Moon. (The airline went out of business in 1991.)
Seven lunar craters were named for the astronauts on the Challenger shuttle.
Many small lunar and Martian craters are named after small towns on Earth.
The Apollo 11 astronaut who didn’t walk on the Moon: Michael Collins.
The Moon is 2,140 miles in diameter. That’s less than the width of the continental United States.
The study of the Moon is called selenology, after Selene, the Greek goddess of the Moon.
Distance from Earth to the Moon: about 238,855 miles.
Nautical Notes
“Ahoy!” was once a Viking battle cry.
For more than 400 years, pirates were hanged at the Execution Dock in London, on the north bank of the Thames. Today a pub called the Captain Kidd overlooks the original site of the gallows.
In London, in 1700, “frigate” was naval slang for “woman”—specifically a shady one.
Captain James Cook tried to prevent scurvy by feeding his men sauerkraut. It often worked.
In the 1700s, to ease overcrowding in the jails, English convicts were imprisoned in the hulls of old warships moored on the Thames.
“Flotsam” is what floats on the ocean, and “jetsam” is what gets tossed overboard from a ship.
In 1912, the New York Giants and New York Yankees played a charity baseball game to raise money for Titanic survivors.
Columbus took his son Diego along on his fourth trip to the New World.
The ironclad Union ship Monitor, which sailed during the Civil War, was the first ship to have a flush toilet.
Sea shanties such as “Drunken Sailor” were the only songs the B
ritish Royal Navy allowed on ships during the 1800s.
The Titanic was running at only 22 knots (about 25 mph) when it hit the iceberg.
What sets the 1908 Olympics apart from all the others? It was the only time that motorized watersports were featured as Olympic events.
Baseball Humor
“It is well to remember that a Martian observing his first baseball game would be quite correct in concluding that the last two words of the national anthem are: PLAY BALL!”
—Herbert H. Paper
“I knew when my career was over. In 1965, my baseball card came out with no picture.”
—Bob Uecker
“Things could be worse. Suppose your errors were counted and published every day, like those of a baseball player.”
—Unknown
“The place was always cold, and I got the feeling that the fans would have enjoyed baseball more if it had been played with a hockey puck.”
—Andre Dawson, on playing in Montreal
“The doctors X-rayed my head and found nothing.”
—Dizzy Dean
“What does a mama bear on the pill have in common with the World Series? No Cubs.”
—Harry Caray
“I believe in the Church of Baseball. I tried all the major religions and most of the minor ones. I’ve worshiped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms, and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball. When I learned that, I gave Jesus a chance.”
—Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon), Bull Durham, 1988
“Hating the New York Yankees is as American as apple pie, unwed mothers, and cheating on your income tax.”
—Mike Royko
“Why do we sing ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’ when we’re already there?”
—George Carlin
Parks Great & Small
Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas is nicknamed “the American Spa.”
Independence National Historical Park covers 45 acres in downtown Philadelphia.
Hovenweep, as in Hovenweep National Monument on the Colorado-Utah border, means “deserted valley.”
The world’s smallest park: Mill Ends Park in Portland, Oregon, at 452 inches.
First national lakeshore: Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore on Lake Superior.
A 2.5-acre section of New York’s Central Park is called Strawberry Fields in honor of John Lennon.
Women’s Rights National Historical Park is at Seneca Falls in upstate New York.
The Nez Perce National Historic Park, which celebrates the heritage of the Nez Perce Indians, is made up of 38 different sites spread over four states: Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and Montana.
5 Turning Points: WWII
1. BATTLE FOR THE HAGUE. On May 10, 1940, the Germans invaded the Netherlands, hoping to accomplish two things: 1) capture The Hague, a town in western Holland where most of the country’s government was located, and 2) take the country’s Queen Wilhemina prisoner. But the Dutch resistance was stronger than Adolf Hitler had anticipated, and by the evening of May 10, they’d forced the Germans to retreat. The Battle for the Hague lasted only one day, but it demoralized German troops and was one of the few early battles that the Nazis lost.
2. THE SOVIET UNION SWITCHES SIDES. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the Soviet Union was one of its allies. Hitler and Joseph Stalin had signed a nonaggression pact, but in early 1940, Hitler started planning Operation Barbarossa, a large-scale invasion of the Soviet Union. He launched it the following year—almost 4 million Germans faced more than 3 million Soviets in the largest military operation in history.
Between June and December 1941, the Germans struggled to take control of Moscow. They never succeeded. Instead, over the next three years, the Soviets managed to push the Germans all the way back to Berlin. The Soviet Union also became a key ally of the United States and Great Britain, and Germany, whose army found itself fighting in the east and west, couldn’t win a two-front war.
3. GUADALCANAL CAMPAIGN. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Americans had to scramble to come up with a response. They launched the Doolittle Raid in early 1942 in an attempt to show the Japanese that their homeland was vulnerable to attack, but that did little to affect the Japanese
militarily. For the most part, the Americans and their allies remained on the defensive. That changed in August 1942, when Allied soldiers landed on the Japanese-controlled island of Guadalcanal in the Pacific Ocean and launched the first major attack against Japan.
After six months of fighting, only about 7,000 Allied troops had been killed…compared to more than 30,000 Japanese soldiers. Japan finally retreated from Guadalcanal on February 9, 1943, and the Allies’ victory gave them their first strategic advantage in the Pacific.
4. THE P-51 MUSTANG. Many military strategists during World War II believed that whoever had the advantage in the air would win the war. But in the early days, the Germans controlled the skies. Allied fighter planes had barely enough power to fly from air bases in England to the German border. That meant they weren’t able to do much to protect the bombers that were attacking Berlin and other cities. German fighters just waited for the Allied bombers to arrive and then decimated them.
That’s where the P-51 Mustang came in. Introduced in 1942, this long-range fighter was lighter and faster than previous planes, and went farther on a tank of gas. So it could accompany the bombers on long raids and provide adequate support. Suddenly, the Allies were as much of a threat in the air as the Germans were.
5. THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE. Officially called the “Ardennes Offensive,” this was the last major German effort to stop the Allied advance in Europe. Between December 16, 1944, and January 25, 1945, more than 500,000 German troops fought 800,000 British and American soldiers for control of the Ardennes Forest in Belgium. Despite freezing temperatures, low supplies, and a delay in the arrival of fresh troops, the Allies held their ground and eventually were victorious. In the end, the German air force was nearly destroyed, seriously weakening its military overall.
And the “bulge” in the battle’s name? That refers to the humplike shape the Allied line took on as the Germans tried to hem them in on two sides.
A Dog’s Life
The three most popular dog breeds in the United States: Labrador retriever, golden retriever, and German shepherd.
The average city dog lives three years longer than the average country dog.
A dog can recognize its own urine markings a year after making them.
Dogs have fewer than 2,000 taste buds. (Humans have about 9,000.)
There are 41 references to dogs in the Bible…and most of them are negative.
The five most popular dog commands in the United States: sit, shake, roll over, speak, and lie down.
Scientists have discovered that dogs can “smell” the presence of autism and epilepsy in humans.
Who’s the most famous cairn terrier? Toto from The Wizard of Oz.
A painting from 79 BC, showing a guide dog leading a blind man, was found in the ruins of Pompeii.
A guide dog’s career typically lasts 8 to 10 years.
One in four British vets say they’ve treated a drunk dog.
Two dogs survived the sinking of the Titanic: a Pekingese and a Pomeranian.
The St. Bernard was named for Bernard of Menthon, a medieval monk who built way stations for travelers in the Alps.
A dog’s normal body temperature is between 101°F and 102°F.
Alexander Graham Bell tried to teach his dog how to talk.
More Celebrity Gossip
Dean Martin’s vanity license plate was DRUNKY.
J. Edgar Hoover fired FBI agents whose palms were sweaty when they shook hands.
In the 1600s, French women wore high heels to show that they were too rich to walk.
Twenty-five percent of the people at sporting events believe their presence affects the outcome o
f the game.
Theodore Roosevelt craved attention. It was said he wanted to be “the bride at every wedding…and the corpse at every funeral.”
Former heavyweight boxing champion George Foreman has five sons—all named George.
Artist Paul Cézanne taught his parrot to say “Cézanne is a great painter.”
Golfer Chi Chi Rodriguez once made his caddie carry him across a river.
Ivan the Terrible blinded Russia’s best architect so he couldn’t build nicer buildings for other people.
Pro golfer Archie Compston had a second caddie just for his tobacco and pipes.
Vanilla Ice once said, “You can write a book on each of my thoughts.”
John Adams—by his own admission—was “puffy, vain, conceited.”
Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee once had a Starbucks in his home.
Arnold Schwarzenegger turned down The Incredible Hulk TV series because he thought he was too good-looking for the part.
Peculiar Places
McMurdo Station in Antarctica (population: 200) has its own ATM.
Sitka, Alaska, was once part of the Russian empire.
Germany and Italy were united as modern countries in the 1800s.
The towns of Greenwich and Norwich were once ancient salt mines in England. (The Anglo-Saxon word for “saltworks” is wich.)
Until 1832, the town of Old Sarum in southern England had two members in Britain’s parliament, but nobody lived there. (The land was owned by 11 people who all lived elsewhere.)
The original Guinness Brewery in Dublin, Ireland, has a 6,000-year lease.
Official state rock ’n’ roll song of Ohio: “Hang on Sloopy,” by the McCoys.
World’s steepest street: Baldwin Street in Dunedin, New Zealand, with a 38 percent incline.
The State of Michigan has designated Aretha Franklin’s voice a natural resource.
Music Notes
Circus music commonly used to introduce clowns: “Entrance of the Gladiators.”
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wise Up! Page 24