Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (10 page)

“It may be that all games are silly—but then, so are humans.”

—Robert Lynd

Christmas Presence

According to a central European folk tale, a child born on Christmas will become either a lawyer or a thief.

In his will, Robert Louis Stevenson left his November birthday to a friend who'd been born on Christmas…and wasn't happy about it.

A week before Christmas in 1958, a tape recorder inside a satellite played a “peace on earth, good will toward men” message from President Dwight Eisenhower. It was the first voice broadcast from space.

The first text message was sent December 3, 1992. The message: “Merry Christmas.”

Each year during the Christmas season, more than half a million packages and letters come through the Santa Claus, Indiana, post office.

Despite having plenty of spruce and pine, Alaska imports most of its Christmas trees from Minnesota, Washington, and Oregon.

Technically, Christmas trees are edible…but they taste terrible.

For Christianity's first 200 years, its leaders believed it was sinful to celebrate Jesus's birthday because, in the Bible, the only birthday celebrations were for to Roman kings: Herod, during whose reign John the Baptist was beheaded, and the pharaoh who imprisoned Joseph (who wore the coat of many colors).

In 1643 the Puritans had the same thought. They declared Christmas carols, holly, plum pudding, and even holiday church services illegal.

Although the Puritan laws were officially repealed in 1681, New England leaders continued their war against Christmas for nearly two centuries, arresting merrymakers and discouraging public displays, decorations, and taking the day off from work. Until Christmas was made a federal holiday in 1870, Boston public schools remained open on December 25 and punished kids who didn't show up.

Four Facts About Bagpipes

1. SCOTLAND DIDN'T INVENT THEM.

Long before bagpipes reached Scotland, much of Europe, southwestern Asia, and northern Africa were already playing early versions of the instrument. In fact, many historians believe that it was a form of the bagpipe that the Roman emperor Nero famously played, not a fiddle as is commonly reported.

Bagpipes probably arrived on the English Isles sometime after AD 43 during Rome's 400-year occupation. But it wasn't until the late 13th century that they began to appear regularly in British art. Finally in the 14th century,
The Canturbury Tales
cemented the bagpipe's place in literature, describing a virtuoso this way: “A baggepype wel coude he blowe and sowne, / And ther-with-al he broghte us out of towne.”

It was the Scots who made bagpipes famous worldwide, however. And in the late 20th century, electronic versions of the instrument appeared, shaped and played like the regular kind but with synthesized tones, no air, and no reeds.

2. BAGPIPES DON'T PLAY WELL WITH OTHERS.

There are a few reasons that bagpipers don't typically appear in jazz, country, or rock groups. First, bagpipes are made for outdoor use, so they're loud and not easily modulated to quieter tones. Second, they are hard to tune. But probably the biggest problem is that bagpipes are tuned to different tones than the notes of pianos, violins, guitars, horns, woodwinds…well, everything, actually. For example, an A on any other instrument is 440 hz (vibrations per second). But what is called an A on a bagpipe is anything between 476 to 480 hz, a tone between B-flat and B on any other instrument. As a result, when traditionally tuned bagpipes play with other instruments, the result sounds like horns in a traffic jam, only not quite so musical.

It's possible to modify a bagpipe to something close to the modern
scale, but not with great accuracy, meaning that any accompanying instrument has to try to tune to the bagpipe. That's reasonably doable with brass and woodwinds, harder with stringed instruments, prohibitively time-consuming with pianos and electronic keyboards, and impossible with pipe organs, xylophones, and vibes. Also, any arrangements must avoid the bagpipe's high G: it won't be tuned right, no matter what you do.

3. A BAGPIPE DOESN'T PLAY THAT WELL BY ITSELF, EITHER.

If you're reasonably skilled on a modern Western musical instrument, you can play almost any song. That's because they all offer the 13 notes on the modern Western scale, tuned to the white and black keys on a piano: C, C sharp, D, D sharp, E, F, F sharp, G, G sharp, A, A sharp, B, and C. But that's not true of a bagpipe. It will play only two of the black-key notes (C sharp and F sharp) and
won't
play two of the white-key notes (C and F). Traditional bagpipes also have a note that doesn't appear on any other Western instrument: a high G that is halfway between G and G sharp.

4. ORIGINAL BAGPIPES AREN'T VEGETARIAN.

What's the bagpipe's bag made of? Today, it's usually something like Gore-Tex, but traditionally, players used the skin of whatever goat, sheep, pig, cow, or dog happened to be available.

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THE GREAT CHEESE RACE

In a tradition that is about 500 years old, an annual “race the cheese” event takes place in Gloucestershire in the United Kingdom. Competitors in the Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake race a seven-to nine-pound wheel of Double Gloucester cheese (which is given a one-second head start) down a steep hill. The cheese usually wins, reaching speeds of up to 70 mph, so the first human to cross the finish line wins the race.

Byway or the Highway

The busiest stretch of highway in the United States is Interstate 405 from Los Angeles to Santa Ana, California.

Despite having no contiguous neighbors, Hawaii has more miles of “interstate highways” than Alaska, which has none.

Indiana has more miles of interstate highway per square mile than any other state.

Broadway doesn't just stop at the edge of New York City. It continues 150 miles to Albany. (Its official name is Highway 9.)

97 percent of the world's redwoods grow along the “Redwood Highway”—Highway 101 from Mendocino County in California to the Oregon border.

Despite higher speed limits, fatality rates on German autobahns are lower than on U.S. interstates.

Those yellow plastic impact barrels filled with sand or water that appear along highways are called Fitch barriers, named after race car driver John Fitch, who invented them.

Among highway engineers, raised reflective plastic disks and squares that mark off highway lanes are called “Botts' dots” to honor Elbert Botts, the California Department of Transportation chemist who created them.

Built in 1922, Oregon's Columbia River Highway was America's first designed for sightseeing along the way.

The font used on interstate signs is officially called FHWA Series Font, but known informally as Highway Gothic.

In 1938 Route 66 became the first American highway to be fully paved.

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In traditional Hawaiian burials, bodies are wrapped in banana leaves.

Facebook Follies

For most people, Facebook is a fun way to keep in touch with family and friends or track down people they wish they hadn't lost touch with. For others, it brings disaster.

      
• In 2009 Lynn France of Ohio searched Facebook for the name of a woman she thought was having an affair with her husband. To her surprise, she found 200 recent wedding photos of her husband (dressed as Prince Charming) getting married to the woman (dressed as Sleeping Beauty) on the grounds of Walt Disney World.

      
• Arizona podcaster Israel Hyman admitted in 2009 that he shouldn't have tweeted the details of his vacation in the Midwest to his Twitter followers. While he was gone, he lost thousands of dollars worth of video equipment after burglars crawled in through a dog door at his home.

      
• In 2009 a 19-year-old broke into a house in Pennsylvania, but was caught after the victim discovered that he'd used her computer to log into Facebook and hadn't signed out. (The same year, a 27-year-old man in South Carolina robbed a bank of $3,924, but couldn't help bragging about it on MySpace: “On tha run for robbin a bank Love all of yall.” He was arrested nine days later.)

      
• In 2010 Keri McMullen posted her plans for a night out on Facebook. Minutes after she left the house, two men broke into her home in New Albany, Indiana, and took $10,000 worth of computers and other valuables. But they left behind the hidden video cameras that recorded the whole thing. McMullen posted the video on Facebook and quickly ID'ed the culprits: One of her 500 “Facebook friends” recognized one of the men as another of McMullen's “friends,” an old acquaintance better forgotten.

Creepy Suicide Stats

Most likely day for suicides: Wednesday. Least likely day: Thursday.

Since the Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937, more than 1,600 people have jumped off it.

Approximate odds of surviving a plunge from the Golden Gate Bridge: 1 in 500.

American men are four times more likely to kill themselves than American women, but women have the most suicide attempts.

Each year, about 30 people attempt to commit suicide with BB guns. They usually fail since the odds of dying from a BB gun wound are very low.

According to a 20-year study of suicides in Memphis, Tennessee, 29 percent of people who commit suicide have alcohol in their systems.

Writers are 2.6 times more likely to kill themselves than nonwriters.

Only about 1 in 5 people who commit suicide leave a note.

The ten states with the lowest suicide rates have coastlines on an ocean or Great Lake.

China is the only country where female suicides outnumber those of men.

Suttee is the 1,600-year-old tradition in India of widows being expected to throw themselves onto the burning funeral pyres of their husbands. Although outlawed in 1829, the practice still occasionally surfaces in rural areas, in which social coercion—and sometimes forceable action—continues the practice.

Suicides by gun outnumber all other methods combined.

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A 1911 Canadian silver dollar is worth more than $1 million today.

Just One Word, Son…Plastics!

It costs one cent to make a plastic grocery bag.

Worldwide, people use more than 500 billion plastic shopping bags each year.

Every year, manufacturers make enough plastic wrap to cover the entire state of Texas.

The first 100 percent synthetic material ever created was Bakelite, a plastic invented in 1907. Still used for some electronics, Bakelite ended up in a variety of early 20th-century objects: toys, pipe stems, sax mouthpieces, radios, cameras, clocks, billiard balls, chess pieces, and mah-jongg tiles.

Henry Ford funded research into making plastic car parts from plants. His experimental gardens included rows of soybeans and marijuana, from which he made a few prototype plastic car bodies before World War II shut down his research. By the war's end, it became clear that petroleum-based plastics were easier and cheaper to make than plant-based ones. However, the cost of oil has recently spurred manufacturers to start working with plant-based plastics again.

Australia started using plastic currency in 1988 and completely switched over in 1996. Printed on hard-to-tear material like that used for FedEx envelopes, it resembles paper, but is difficult to counterfeit and lasts four times longer. Since then, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Bermuda, Romania, Vietnam, and many others have gone plastic as well.

Eye See You

The human eye can see about 10 million shades of color, including 100 different shades of gray.

Scientists believe that every blue-eyed person is descended from a single common ancestor.

Humans' eyes reach full size before puberty, and humans' retinas are fully grown by the age of four or five.

Some people can hear their eyeballs moving.

The photographic effect called “red eye” is most visible in people with blue eyes because of a melanin deficiency: The tissue behind the backs of their eyes is lighter colored and therefore reflects more light.

Arctic hares have black eyelashes that protect their eyes from the sun, like sunglasses.

Light a match in the dark. If it's a clear night without city lights or a moon, another person could see it from 50 miles away.

Beavers have a set of transparent eyelids to protect their eyes underwater.

Not every animal has two eyes—honeybees have five, and the box jellyfish has 24.

The tokay gecko uses its tongue to clean its eyes.

Frogs close their eyes when they swallow because their eyelids push their big round eyes backward, forcing struggling bugs into their throat.

Yellow stands out to the human eye more than any other color on the spectrum.

According to
Guinness World Records
, in 2006 Dong Changsheng of China pulled a 3,300-pound car 33 feet…using his lower eyelids.