Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Extraordinary Book of Facts: And Bizarre Information (32 page)

Ten body parts have three-letter names: eye, hip, arm, leg, ear, toe, jaw, rib, lip, gum.

Only 33 percent of patients admitted to emergency rooms for heart attacks have actually had one.

The first open-heart surgery was performed in 1893.

The most common disease in the world: tooth decay.

Stuffing a cat’s tail up your nose will cure a nosebleed.

It’s bad luck to see three butterflies on one leaf at the same time.

Carrying a badger’s tooth brings good luck, especially at gambling.

To make a sleeping woman talk, put a frog’s tongue on her heart.

Pictures of an elephant bring good luck, but only if they face a door.

Although it’s only about 0.00012 inch in diameter, a spider’s silk is stronger than steel of equal diameter. It is more elastic than nylon, more difficult to break than rubber, and is bacteria and fungi resistant. These qualities explain why at one time web was used to pack wounds—to help mend them and stop bleeding.

Spiders have up to six types of spinning glands, each producing a different type of silk. For instance, the cylindrical gland produces silk used for egg sacs (males often lack this) and the aciniform gland produces silk used for wrapping prey. Some spiders have glands that produce very fine silk. They comb and tease the fine strands until it’s like Velcro—tiny loops and hooks that entrap insect feet.

Silk is extruded through special pores called spinneretes which consist of different sized “spigots.” Silk starts out as a liquid. As the liquid silk contacts the air, it hardens. The spider may need different silk for different purposes. By changing how fast the liquid is extruded or by using a different silk gland, it can control the strength and quality of the silk.

Why doesn’t a spider get stuck on its own web? The spider weaves in nonsticky silk strands and only walks on those. Also, spiders have a special oil on their legs that keeps them from sticking.

The spider is a hunter and its web is a snare, designed to hold its prey. So the design of its web and the place where the spider builds it depend on the kind of insects it is trying to catch.

Male spiders of some species use vibrations to communicate to the female. They strum the female’s web and must send just the right vibration to convince the female that they are mates . . . and not dinner.

The students at the first Montessori school were the underprivileged preschoolers of Rome’s slums.

Schoolhouses were traditionally painted red because it was the cheapest color available.

The first chalkboard was used in a school in 1714.

Dartmouth was the last Ivy League college to go coed. It held out until 1972.

In 2004, for the first time in its history, Harvard admitted more women than men to its freshman class.

Every year Harvard University denies admission to an estimated 80 percent of the high school valedictorians who apply.

Thirty-five percent of American students don’t like to go to school.

Sixty-one percent of American students find school boring.

Of all the students in the world, Americans spend more school time in physical education: 12 percent. France and New Zealand are next, with 11 percent.

The average American spends 15.2 years of his or her life at school. Norwegians spend the longest of any country: 16.9 years.

The most common school colors in the United States are white and blue.

A quarter of America’s college students hold full-time jobs.

Three out of four college students expect to become millionaires.

On average, college grads earn $1.4 million in their lifetime. Grad school grads: $3 million.

In July 1981 Japanese factory worker Kenji Urada became “the first known fatality caused by a robot.”

Australia has a robot that shears sheep. Japan has one that makes sushi.

As of 2005 there were more cell phones in the United Kingdom than people.

There are more telephones than people in Washington, D.C.

The first e-mail was sent over the Internet in 1972.

Grace Hopper coined the term
computer bug
when a moth shorted out her computer.

The world’s highest public telephone booth is on the Siachen Glacier in India.

In 1997 about one third of American homes had computers. In 2005 it was two thirds.

A $100,000 computer 20 years ago computed about as much as a $10 chip can today.

Finland is the only nation in the world that has more cell phones than regular phones.

Worldwide an estimated 85 percent of all phone calls are conducted in the English language.

The distress signal before SOS: CQD—“Come quick danger.”

In Saudi Arabia there are solar-powered pay phones in the desert.

In 1995, personal computers outsold televisions in the United States, and the number of e-mail messages exceeded stamped letters.

On an average weekday, people in New York City make 36 million phone calls.

About half the world’s telephones are in the United States.

More than 40 states have Shakespeare theater companies and/or annual festivals honoring the Bard.

Second most-published playwright in history, after Shakespeare: Neil Simon.

During his lifetime, Shakespeare’s last name was spelled 83 different ways.

William Shakespeare earned about $40 a year from his writing.

Shakespeare’s son’s name was Hamnet, just one letter away from
Hamlet
.

Shakespeare’s love sonnet “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day . . .” was written to a young man.

Hamlet
has been made into more films than any other Shakespeare play: 49.

There are no known images of Shakespeare.

Not one of the characters in Shakespeare’s plays smokes.

Longest word used by Shakespeare: honorificabilitudinitatibus. It means “with honor.” James Joyce also used it in
Ulysses
.

London’s Globe Theatre burned to the ground in 1613 during a performance of
King Henry VIII
, the last play Shakespeare wrote.

William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes died on the same day in 1616.

The total number of original books that have been published: 65 billion.

Number of books in print in 1948: 78,000. In 2005: more than 1.8 million.

The Library of Congress has 530 miles of bookshelves.

One out of every four books sold in the United States is a mystery or suspense novel.

The average American adult can read between 150 and 200 words a minute.

Americans bought $23.7 billion worth of books in 2004.

The average American household has 15 cookbooks.

In the last five years 70 percent of adult Americans have not been in a bookstore.

The average dictionary contains entries for 278,000 words.

First nationwide best-selling book in the United States: the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.

Top-selling comic book of all time:
X-Men #1
: 8.1 million copies.

One third of high school graduates never read another book.

Twenty percent of all publications sold in Japan are comic books.

The CliffsNotes edition of
The Scarlet Letter
outsells Nathaniel Hawthorne’s book three to one.

Seventy percent of books published do not earn back their advance.

Women buy 55 percent of the fiction sold.

The first American cookbook,
The Compleat Housewife
, was published in 1746.

Men gamblers bet more money when they bring their wives.

Men without hair on their chest are more likely to get cirrhosis of the liver than men with hair.

Forty-eight percent of men believe balding has a negative effect on business and social relationships.

Eighty-five percent of obscene phone calls are made by males.

Most common plastic surgery performed on American men: liposuction.

If a man’s tie is too tight, his vision gets worse.

If the average male never shaved, his beard would be 13 feet long the day he dies.

The average American man has $27 in his wallet right now.

Forty-three percent of single American men say they didn’t go on a date in 2001.

The average single man is one inch shorter than the average married man.

If you’re an average American male, you’ll spend 2,965 hours shaving in your lifetime.

Most married men sleep on the right side of the bed. Divorced men often switch to the left.

When you adjust for the weight difference, men are stronger than horses.

In 1898 all cheerleaders were male. Today 3 percent are.

Nineteen percent of men say they wouldn’t mind being stupid, “as long as they had a perfect body.”

Fear of the number 13 originated in Norse mythology. Aegir summoned 12 gods to a banquet in Valhalla. Guest number 13 showed up uninvited: Loki, god of evil.

Another possible connection comes from Christianity. Jesus and the 12 apostles dined together at the Last Supper, Judas, Christ’s betrayer, being the 13th.

Predating the Christians, the Turks hated the number 13 so much that it was almost expunged from their vocabulary.

The Romans associated the number 13 with death and misfortune. There were 12 months in a year and 12 hours in a day (according to the Roman clock), so 13 was seen as a violation of the natural cycle.

For ancient Egyptians, 13 represented the final rung of the ladder by which the soul reached eternity.

Even before that, at religious feasts in ancient Babylon, 13 people were selected to represent the gods. At the end of the ceremony, the 13th “god” was put to death.

Thirteen is the number of members in a witch’s coven.

According to
The Encyclopedia of Superstitions
, if 13 people gather in a room, one will die within a year. In 1798,
Gentleman’s Magazine
explained the superstition by saying: “It seems to be founded on calculations adhered to by insurance offices.”

The 13th card in the tarot deck is the skeleton—Death.

On the other hand, consider the ill-fated
Apollo 13
lunar mission, which left the launchpad at 13:13 hours on April 13 . . . and then exploded, almost killing the entire crew.

ICE CREAM SODAS

In 1874 soda-fountain operator Robert M. Green sold a drink he made out of sweet cream, syrup, and carbonated soda water. One day he ran out of cream . . . so he used vanilla ice cream instead.

ESKIMO PIES

Christian Nelson owned a candy and ice cream store in Onawa, Iowa. One day in 1920 a kid came into the store and ordered a candy bar . . . and then changed his mind and asked for an ice-cream sandwich . . . and then changed his mind again and asked for a marshmallow nut bar. Nelson wondered why there wasn’t any one candy-and-ice-cream bar to satisfy all of the kid’s cravings—and then decided to make one himself: a vanilla bar coated with a chocolate shell. Once he figured out how to make the chocolate stick to the ice cream, he had to think of a name for his product. At a dinner party someone suggested
Eskimo
, because it sounded cold. But other people thought it sounded too exotic—so Nelson added the word
pie
.

SUNDAES

In the 1890s many religious leaders objected to people drinking ice cream sodas on Sunday. It was too frivolous. When “blue laws” were passed prohibiting the sale of the sodas, ice-cream parlor owners created the “Sunday,” which was only sold on the Sabbath; it contained all of the ingredients of a soda except the soda water. A few years later the dish was being sold all week, so the name was changed to sundae.