Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (34 page)

The ancient trade routes spread goods far and wide: seafood and decorative shells from coastal tribes, copper from Michigan, furs from Canada, gold from Mexico, mica from the Appalachians, and obsidian from the Rockies often traveled hundreds or thousands of miles from their points of origin.

One commodity often traded from the Pacific Northwest was candlefish. They had so much body fat that they could be dried and burned like candles. The trading route from the area became known as the Grease Trail because it was slippery with fish fat.

Land routes were common, but rivers were the most popular trade routes, whether traders traveled via dugout canoes or on paths along the shore.

When there were no rivers to follow, prehistoric paths were often created by “nature's bulldozers”—massive herds of bison that migrated along the same routes each year. The animals found the path of least resistance, eating, trampling and knocking down underbrush, bypassing swamps and obstacles, and finding the easiest ways over mountains.

Some paths were used to transport warriors. The Seneca Trail, which stretches from what's now Alabama to New York State, linked so many warring villages that some tribes called it
Athawominee
(“path where they go armed”). The British translated that as the “War Path,” and that's where the phrase “on the warpath” comes from.

Many of today's streets, roads, highways, and interstates were laid down over existing Native American trails. For example, the route called the Wickquasgeck Trail is now one of the most famous streets in the world: New York City's Broadway.

Ads Nauseum

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.”

—John Wanamaker

“Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.”

—Sinclair Lewis

“I have always believed that writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes.”

—Philip Dusenberry

“The incessant witless repetition of advertisers' moron-fodder has become so much a part of life that if we are not careful, we forget to be insulted by it.”

—The
London Times
(1886)

“If advertisers spent the same amount of money on improving their products as they do on advertising, then they wouldn't have to advertise them.”

—Will Rogers

“Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.”

—Stephen Leacock

“I do not read advertisements—I would spend all my time wanting things.”

—Franz Kafka

“Advertising nourishes the consuming power of men. It sets up before a man the goal of a better home, better clothing, better food for himself and his family. It spurs individual exertion and greater production.”

—Sir Winston Churchill

“Man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard. When I retire from Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motor bicycles, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon. How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship?”

—David Ogilvy

Words and Language

Joseph Stalin banned crossword puzzles in the USSR for being “bourgeois” and “degenerate.”

The words
alcohol, algebra, lute
, and
magazine
all come from Arabic.

The “F-word” was first printed in English in 1475.

In nearly every language, the word for “mother” begins with the “m” sound.

In Japan, the number 4 is considered unlucky because it sounds like the Japanese word for death.

The only English word with three consecutive sets of double letters: bookkeeper.

The longest English surname without hyphens is Featherstonehaugh. (It's pronounced “Fanshaw.”)

Illibilli, in Sudan, is the world's longest palindromic place name. Second longest: Nigeria's Uburubu.

The shortest English word to contain the letters A, B, C, D, E, and F is
feedback
.

The only English word that contains the letters X, Y, and Z in order is
hydroxyzine
.

The German language has words to describe 30 different types of kisses.

The only words in English containing the letters “uu” are
vacuum, residuum
, and
continuum
.

Assuming you don't leave your touch-typing position, the longest English word you can type with the left hand only is
stewardesses
.

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DID YOU KNOW?

Halloween began in Ireland as a harvest festival named Samhain, which was also a night when the dead came back to earth for a day.

Urine Analysis

When ancient Greek physicians discovered that urine is sterile, they began using it as an antiseptic on wounds. It worked so well that the Romans later used concentrated urine as a toothpaste and dental rinse.

All the human urine produced worldwide in one day would take about 2 ½ hours to flow over Niagara Falls.

Human urine is 98 percent water and 2 percent sodium, calcium, urea, phosphates, and ammonium.

Frank Lloyd Wright designed a building for Florida Southern University, which he allowed students to help build for a break on tuition. He also let the students help age its copper into a nice green patina by having them pour their urine over it.

The male strawberry poison dart frog keeps its mate hydrated and warm by peeing on them.

The 16th-century insult
pissant
comes from “piss ants,” a large wood ant, so called because its anthills smelled like urine.

Researchers in Singapore have created a battery powered by urine. It's about the size of a credit card, and a drop of urine produces 1.5 volts for 90 minutes.

When General George S. Patton reached Germany's Rhine River during World War II, he showed his contempt for the country by peeing in the water.

Tiger pee supposedly smells a lot like buttered popcorn.

Only 20 percent of people admit to having peed in a public swimming pool, but 93 percent of surfers admit to having peed in their wetsuits at least once.

In French, dandelions are called
pissenlit
, which means “pee in bed.”

Alkaptonuria is a rare genetic disorder that causes urine to turn black.

The biggest draw at the Harlekin Toilet Museum of Modern Arse (yes, that's the real name) in Wiesbaden, Germany, is a urinal with Adolf Hitler's face painted inside the bowl.

Love to Laugh!

Laughing heartily for 10 to 15 minutes a day will burn about four pounds of fat in a year.

Studies show that up to 80 percent of adult laughter is unconnected to any joke or funny situation. More often, it's an expression of embarrassment, alarm, discomfort, tension, confusion, or anxiety.

The people most likely to laugh at slapstick humor are children, the brain-damaged, and men.

The French equivalent to “lol” in text messages is “mdr,” short for
mort de rire
—“died of laughter.”

Supposedly, the ancient Greek painter Zeuxis laughed himself to death while looking at his own painting.

The first person to use the phrase “laugh it off” in print was William Shakespeare.

Apes laugh when they're tickled.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa

In the 1980s, the tower was leaning at an angle of 5.5 degrees and the speed of tilt was accelerating. Earlier attempts to fix the tilt had made things worse, but work in the 1990s actually decreased the tilt to a manageable 3.99 degrees. Even better, the tower stopped moving for the first time in its history.

Work began in 1173, but it was another 200 years before the tower was finished…and the last bell wasn't installed until 1655.

The tower leans because one side is built on spongy sand. Part of the foundation began sinking as it was being built, and it only got worse with time.

It's still not clear who designed the tower. (Maybe the architect didn't want to take credit for it?)

The Tower of Pisa is slightly banana-shaped because the builders slanted the upper stories to try to counteract the structure's tilt.

There are 296 steps on the tower's taller side, and 294 on the shorter side.

The tower has no safety rails.

According to Galileo's secretary, the astronomer used the tower to drop objects of different masses to prove they would fall at the same speed, regardless of weight or density.

Buzzzzzz!

The record number of bee stings a person has received in one day and survived is 2,443.

Before 2010, it was illegal to raise bees in New York City because they were classified as a species that was “naturally inclined to do harm.”

New beekeepers typically buy honeybees in two- or three-pound boxes. Honeybees don't weigh very much, so a three-pound box contains 6,000 to 9,000 bees.

What was the profession of Edmund Hillary, the first person to climb Mount Everest? Beekeeper.

Largest bee: Wallace's giant bee (
Chalicodoma pluto
). Females can be up to 1.5 inches long. The smallest bee is Australia's
Trigona minima
, sometimes called the dwarf bee. It's stingless and the size of a pinhead.

Bees fly at about 12 mph.

A honeybee can visit up to 2,000 flowers in a day.

Honeybees can be trained to sniff out explosives.

Researchers have monitored bees by attaching tiny bar codes to them.

The Honey Nut Cheerios bee is named BuzzBee.

A honeybee's stinger is finer than the tip of a needle.

Bears don't raid beehives for honey—they're after the larvae. But they'll eat the honey, too.

Honeybees have remained unchanged for 20 million years.

Besides lovers, St. Valentine is the patron saint of beekeepers, epileptics, and plagues.

Elephants are so afraid of honeybees that you can keep the animals out of a field by stringing it with beehives every 32 feet or so.

Most popular official state insect: the honeybee (17 states). The monarch butterfly is #2, with seven states.

Discovered in Dreams

DREAMER:
Otto Loewi

DREAM:
Two live frogs with their hearts exposed

RESULT:
Figured out that chemicals communicate nerve impulses to the body's organs

In the early 20th century, there was a lot of debate about whether nerve impulses were communicated to the organs via electrical or chemical messages. Loewi believed it was chemical but couldn't prove it. Then, one night in 1921, he dreamed of an experiment that would settle the issue. When he woke up, he feverishly scribbled notes but in the morning discovered that his notes were unreadable and he couldn't remember what he had dreamed. Luckily, he had the same dream the next night. It was a gruesome experiment on the still-beating hearts of two frogs. Loewi followed the procedures in the dream: he slowed the heart of one frog using electrical stimuli and collected the chemical secretions that resulted. Then he injected the secretions into the other frog's heart, and it slowed too, proving that chemicals were how the nervous system communicated with a body's organs. Loewi won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1936.

DREAMER:
Elias Howe

DREAM:
Being boiled by cannibals who danced brandishing spears with a hole near the tips

RESULT:
The sewing machine

American inventor and former textile-mill worker Elias Howe couldn't quite figure out how to make sewn stitches interlock so that seams didn't pull apart. But in the 1840s, he had a dream about being boiled alive by cannibals who danced while brandishing spears with holes near the tips.

In the dream, the cannibals moved their spears up and down in a rhythmic way. He thought and thought about it, and then one day, inspiration struck: instead of using a standard sewing needle with a hole at the dull end, he needed to use a thread near the
sharp
tip
. That kind of needle could pull a loop of thread through the cloth where it could meet on the other side a moving part that would anchor it with a second thread. It was just the breakthrough Howe was looking for and allowed him to make the sewing machine possible.

DREAMER:
Mary Shelley

DREAM:
A mad scientist creating life in laboratory

RESULT:
Frankenstein

In 1816, challenged to write a ghost story to amuse fellow guests housebound during a storm, 19-year-old Mary Shelley lay in bed half asleep. She later wrote, “With shut eyes, but acute mental vision, I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.” The next morning, she got up and began writing what became the book
Frankenstein
.