Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (25 page)

Cat Haters

IVAN THE TERRIBLE

Claim to fame:
Czar of Russia from 1547 to 1584

Sixteenth-century Russian czar Ivan IV Vasilyevich (“the Terrible”), was known for his rage-filled outbursts, including one in which he killed his eldest son. In childhood, the story goes, he liked to toss cats off of high balconies and out windows, simply for sport.

AMBROSE BIERCE

Claim to fame:
Author and satirist

Ambrose Bierce's
The Devil's Dictionary
defines “cat” as “a soft indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle.”

NOAH WEBSTER

Claim to fame:
Word enthusiast and dictionary writer

Webster was a closet cat hater. No stories exist of him kicking a cat, but an entry in his second dictionary belies a deep-seated mistrust. Ascribing wicked intentions to normal cat behavior, he defined “cat” thusly: “The domestic cat is a deceitful animal and when enraged extremely spiteful.”

SIR WALTER SCOTT

Claim to fame:
18th and 19th century novelist and poet

In Sir Walter Scott's defense, he ended life as a cat lover, but he wasn't always that way. He wrote, “The greatest advance of age which I have yet found is liking a cat, an animal which I detested, and becoming fond of a garden, an art which I despised.”

DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

Claim to fame:
Five-star General and 34th U.S. president

Dwight Eisenhower hated cats so much, he ordered that any cat found wandering onto his Gettysburg farm be shot on the spot.

GEORGES LOUIS LECLERC DE BUFFON

Claim to fame:
18th-century naturalist

Leclerc de Buffon had a special place in his heart for many animals, but he seemed to believe the cat held some sort of deliberately evil intent. He wrote that felines had “an innate malice and perverse disposition which increases as they grow up” and that they “easily assume the habits of society, but never acquire its manners.”

PIERRE DE RONSARD

Claim to fame:
16th-century French poet

Pierre de Ronsard may be the poet laureate of cat haters. As evidence, all we need to do is point to a translation of the poet's own words:

There is no man now living anywhere

Who hates cats with a deeper hate than I;

I hate their eyes, their heads, the way they stare
,

And when I see one come, I turn and fly
.

*
  
*
  
*

ROCKET SCIENCE

By the early 1800s, rockets were all the rage, and Italian tinkerer Claude Ruggieri turned his attention toward creating a rocket that could launch people into the air. The rockets of the time were too small by themselves, but Ruggieri imagined a “rocket necklace”—clusters of rockets attached to a metal chamber that all went off at the same time. In 1806 in Paris, Ruggieri launched a sheep 600 feet into the air and landed it safely using a parachute. But then he went too far: When the French government learned that Ruggieri was planning to send up a small child next, it immediately stopped his experiments.

The Witches of Stalingrad

IT HAPPENED ONE DARK NIGHT…

Imagine you're a German soldier, fighting your way deep into the Soviet Union during the summer of 1942. During the time you're not actually on the front lines, you feel pretty safe and get a chance to rest, let down your guard, even sleep a full night without constant vigilance. After all, the Soviet army is retreating fast, and you're just 19 miles from Moscow.

Still, you can't relax completely. There have been whispered rumors of
nachthexen
, “night witches” who fly silently after dark and drop bombs into previously safe areas, destroying military targets and fraying nerves. You don't completely believe it, but like a lot of rumors, you wonder if there's likely some grain of a truth.

Then, while on guard duty one night, you hear a rustling sound above, almost like wind through a broomstick. Before you can investigate, the darkness lights up with a blinding flash and a deafening explosion. The Night Witches have struck again!

TOIL AND TROUBLE

By 1942, the Soviet armed forces were reeling. Millions of men had been killed defending their homeland, often with antique rifles and inadequate defenses. Three million more had been taken prisoner. What to do? Well, there were always the women. Already working in fields and factories, some Soviet women were recruited as pilots, mechanics, navigators, and officers of a new all-female unit, the 588th Night Bomber Regiment. They were assigned to hit specific German military targets and to scare its forces with unpredictable, random attacks.

Some in the Soviet air force was resistant to the idea. The “bomber” planes that the women were given to do the job seemed absurdly inadequate: obsolete biplanes made in 1928 of wood and
canvas and designed for crop dusting and training. Each plane could carry only two 220-pound bombs. And they were slow—with a top speed of 97 mph—and so flammable that they could ignite if hit by flares or tracer bullets. The planes' tiny engines were also noisy and tended to stall easily, requiring the pilot to climb out and turn the propeller by hand to get it started again. And because they flew so low, the women weren't issued parachutes, which just added weight and wouldn't open in time anyway. And radios? Forget about it. The women navigated in the dark using a map, penlight, compass, and stopwatch to figure out where they were.

WITCHY WOMEN

The female flyers, all between the ages of 17 and 26, turned most of these serious drawbacks into virtues. Their top speed was slower than the stall speed of German fighters, so if the female pilots maneuvered into sudden dives or tight turns, the little planes were hard to shoot down. Their low-altitude and wood-and-canvas construction also didn't normally make a blip on radar. And the women's skill at restarting their planes' noisy little engines inspired the best tactic they could use against German antiaircraft defenses: The women would increase altitude until they came close to their well-defended targets, and then cut their engines and glide, making little noise beyond a light rustling until they released their payload. As the bombs exploded, the pilot would restart the engine and hightail it out of there, just barely above the Germans on the ground. And so the “Night Witches” became a nickname that the 588th borrowed proudly from their enemy.

BURN THE WITCH!

German fighter pilots mostly gave up trying to catch the Night Witches, but ground troops redoubled their efforts. The flimsy Russian planes often came back riddled with bullets from ground fire. (After a particularly harrowing raid, one pilot counted 42 new bullet holes in her plane.) The Germans also developed a new tactic, setting up a circle of hidden antiaircraft guns and spotlights around likely targets. Knowing that the Witches flew in two-plane formations, the spotlight operators tracked them across the sky while the antiaircraft guns ripped the flimsy aircraft into pieces.

In response, the 588th added a third plane behind the other two. As soon as the spotlights hit the first planes, they'd pretend to give up on bombing the target, splitting off in opposite directions while the spotlight operators scrambled to follow them. Meanwhile, the third plane glided in to deliver its load. At the next two targets, they'd switch places until all three planes had dropped their bombs.

From 1942 until the war's end in 1945, the 40 two-person crews flew more than 30,000 missions, sometimes as many as 18 in a single night. By the end of the war, they'd dropped 23,000 tons of bombs. Twenty-three of the Witches earned the Hero of the Soviet Union medal (the highest honor available), and about 30 died in combat.

*
  
*
  
*

HISTORY'S DEADLIEST VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS

1.
Mount Tambora, Indonesia

When: April 1815

Killed: 90,000

2.
Krakatoa, Indonesia

When: August 1883

Killed: 36,000

3.
Mount Pelée, Martinique

When: May 1902

Killed: 30,000

4.
Nevado del Ruiz, Colombia

When: November 1985

Killed: 25,000

Whales…

…have earwax.

…have a blowhole instead of nostrils.

…suck in about 525 gallons of air with each breath.

…have tails that move up and down; fish tails move from side to side.

…are the biggest creatures in the ocean, but most feed on some of the smallest: plankton.

…usually have single births, and pregnancy lasts anywhere from 9 to 16 months.

…are protected by the U.S. government. Bothering a whale in American waters nets a federal fine of $10,000.

…sing songs. The songs of blue whales can last as long as 30 minutes and can travel more than 100 miles.

…have no vocal cords. They probably sing their songs by circulating air through the tubes and chambers of their respiratory system.

The Piano Is My Forte

Originally, the piano was called the pianoforte, before people shortened its name. (
Forte
means “play loudly” in Italian.)

Italian harpsichord maker Bartolomeo Cristofori built the first piano sometime before 1700.

When Johann Sebastian Bach first heard a piano around 1726, he didn't like it. But by 1747, Bach was playing one, composing with it, and selling pianos to fellow musicians.

Some early pianos reversed which keys were white and black, making the sharps and flats white, and the main keys black.

Modern pianos have 18 more keys than the pianos used by Beethoven.

A piano's total string tension can exceed 20 tons.

Sting wrote the Police hit song “Every Breath You Take” on Noel Coward's piano.

Pounding the keys of a piano can knock it out of tune.

The Write Stuff

The best-selling fiction author of all time is William Shakespeare. #2: Agatha Christie.

Writer Lewis Carroll coined the word “chortle.” It means a cross between a chuckle and a snort.

It took author J. R. R. Tolkien 12 years to write the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Author Norman Mailer claimed to have invented thumb wrestling.

Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald was born Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. The name was meant as a tribute to his second cousin three times removed, who was the composer of “The Star Spangled Banner.”

What did the initials in e. e. cummings's name stand for? “Edward Estlin.” (Or “edward estlin,” if you prefer.)

In 1901 author Jack London ran for mayor of Oakland, California, on the Socialist ticket. He got just 245 votes and beat only the Prohibitionist candidate (60 votes).

After almost being killed by a minivan in 1999, author Stephen King bought the vehicle and beat it with a baseball bat.

Dr. Seuss didn't become a real doctor until 1955 when Dartmouth University gave him an honorary degree.

Louisa May Alcott was on a committee that banned
Huckleberry Finn
from the Concord Library in Massachusetts. Of the book and its famous author, she said, “If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses, he had best stop writing for them.”

*
  
*
  
*

By the time actor Steve McQueen died, he had collected 210 motorcycles.

The Average…

…American
walks about 2.5 miles a day. (The health community recommends doubling that.)

…person's cholesterol level
in China: 127. In America: 200.

…Hell's Angels biker
will ride about 20,000 miles this year.

…person
speaks about 165 words per minute.

…American worker
admits to wasting two hours of work time on the Internet each day.

…American CEO
earns more in one workday than the average worker earns all year.

…woman
spends one week per year looking in mirrors.

…American
used five gallons of water a day in 1900. In 2013: 100 gallons.

…person
has a vocabulary of 20,000 words.

…woman
apologizes 5.2 times per day; man, 3.6 times a day.

…person
takes 32 seconds to pull out of a parking space.

…adult
is exposed to 100 chemicals a day…just by using personal care products.

…American
eats twice as much protein as the human body needs.

…Facebook user
has 130 “friends.”

Pipe Up