Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (8 page)

In more than 100 years of organized horse racing, only 11 horses have ever won the Triple Crown. The most impressive winner: Secretariat in 1973. While the horse’s first two wins were definitive, they weren’t phenomenal. In both the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes, Secretariat won by just two lengths both times—about 16 feet. For the third and final leg, the Belmont Stakes, it looked at first as if the race might actually end in a close, dramatic finish, as Secretariat and a horse named Sham were neck and neck out of the gates and around the first stretch. Then Secretariat pulled ahead…and kept pulling ahead…and kept pulling ahead. Ultimately, the horse won in a record 2 minutes and 24 seconds, ahead of Sham by a still-unmatched 31 lengths. Put another way, by the time Secretariat had finished the race, Sham was only two-thirds of the way done.

On March 2, 1962, the Philadelphia Warriors beat the New York Knicks 169–147, the largest combined point total in NBA history up to that point. But the most remarkable achievement belonged entirely to Warriors center Wilt Chamberlain. While he routinely scored more than 60 points in a game and held the single-game individual player record of 78 points, this night would be special. When Chamberlain reached 80 points in the second half, a hush overtook the Warriors’ Hershey Sports Arena. Sensing a record-breaking night, his teammates decided to let Chamberlain carry the game, feeding him the ball whenever they could. Result: Of Philadelphia’s 169 points, Chamberlain scored 100—the first, and so far only, time a player has made it to triple digits.

In a 2001 World Cup qualifying game against Tonga, Australia set a team record for most goals scored in a game, winning 22–0. Just
two days later, the team broke its own record, playing American Samoa, at the time the lowest-ranked team in the world, at #203. Not surprisingly, Australia won the match. What is surprising is the final score: 31–0, the biggest blowout ever in a game sanctioned by FIFA, soccer’s international governing body. Striker Archie Thompson scored 13 goals, the most ever scored by a single player in a game, shattering the mark of 10 by Sofus Nielsen of Denmark in the 1912 Olympics.

Hockey teams usually score between one and three goals per game. But in a 2008 qualifying match to determine which European teams would compete in the 2010 Winter Olympics, the women’s hockey team from Slovakia proved that they belonged on the world’s top athletic stage. They also proved that their competitor, the team from Bulgaria, did not. The Slovakians took 139 shots on goal, about seven times as many as in an average NHL game. What’s uncommon was their rate of success: They scored 82 times. That’s an average of one goal every 44 seconds. And while they dominated on offense, Slovakia’s defense was equally astonishing. The Bulgarians didn’t manage to score a single goal. Final score: 82–0.

By 2000, four years after turning professional, Tiger Woods had already established himself as one of the best golfers of all time. In that year, he became the first golfer to win all four major PGA tournaments in a single 12-month period. The Masters, the British Open, and the PGA Championship were solid wins for Woods. But at the U.S. Open, it wasn’t even close. After day two of the four-day tournament, he held a six-stroke lead—a record. After the third day, he led by 10—another record. His final score on day four: 272, or 12 strokes under par, destroying the previous record of finishing eight strokes under. He wasn’t just well under par, he was way ahead of the competition. Ernie Els and Miguel Angel Jimenez tied for second place at three strokes
over
par, meaning Woods beat them by 15 strokes. That, too, was a record, topping the 138-year-old record for the largest margin of victory in
any
major golf tournament.

“Why do people say, ‘It’s always the last place you look’? Of course it is. Why would you keep looking after you’ve found it?”

—
Billy Connolly

 

“If 95% of accidents happen within the home, where do homeless people go to have 95% of their accidents?”

—
Strange de Jim

 

“What’s the deal with lampshades? If it’s a lamp, why do you want shade?”

—
Jerry Seinfeld

 

“Why are they called stairs inside but steps outside?”

—
Peter Kay

 

“How come the dove gets to be the peace symbol? How about the pillow? It has more feathers than the dove, and it doesn’t have that dangerous beak.”

—
Jack Handey

 

“Why do people say, ‘It was more fun than a barrel of monkeys’? Have you ever
smelled
a barrel of monkeys?”

—
Steve Bluestein

 

“Did you ever notice that people who say they don’t care what other people think are usually desperate to have people think they don’t care what people think?”

—
George Carlin

 

“Did you know that the male sea horse has the baby? Why don’t they just call that one the female?”

—
Jim Gaffigan

 

“What’s the shelf life of a shelf?”

—
Jason Love

 

“Opening a can of worms? Do worms even come in cans?”

—
Ellen DeGeneres

 

“Why do men have nipples? They’re like plastic fruit.”

—
Carol Leifer

 

“At what age is it appropriate to tell a highway it’s adopted?”

—
Zach Galifianakis

 

“Ever notice the first thing you see at an airport is a big sign that says ‘TERMINAL’? Have a nice flight.”

—
Lewis Grizzard

Baobab trees are native only to Australia, Madagascar, and Africa. The African species is the largest and is found in dry savannah land in much of the sub-Saharan region of the continent. They’re known for their massive trunks and their odd appearance: They’re often called “upside-down trees” because they look more like bulbous cylinders topped by a mass of tangled roots than typical trees. (Several African legends tell stories of how God became angry at the baobab trees, and pulled them up and jammed them back into the ground upside down.) There are many famous baobabs, the largest and best-known being the “Big Baobab” in Limpopo Province, South Africa. It’s only about 72 feet tall, but its trunk is more than 150 feet around. It takes 45 people holding hands to circle it. And…you can buy a beer inside it. In 1990 Doug and Heather van Heerden purchased the farm where the tree stands, cleared the detritus from the hollows in the tree’s base…and built a pub inside it. Its ceiling is more than 12’ high, and it easily seats 15 people—though on one occasion 54 people crammed in for a party. Carbon dating indicates that the tree is around 6,000 years old.

Located near the northeastern South African city of Pretoria is the
Wonderboom
, or “Miracle Tree,” Nature Reserve. (
Wonder
means “miracle” and
boom
means “tree” in Afrikaans.) The park is built around a wild fig tree that is believed to be more than 1,000 years old—and is considered a freak of nature. Why? First, this particular species of wild fig normally grows to about 30 feet in height. The Wonderboom is 70 feet tall. Secondly, over its long life some of its branches have drooped to the ground and sprouted new roots, from which new trunks sprouted. Those trees then grew
new branches that later drooped to the ground and spawned more trunks. The Wonderboom now has 13 distinct daughter trunks around the original—and the tree’s massive canopy now covers an area of about 170 feet by 170 feet, about ⅔ of an acre. Local legend says that the size of the tree is due to the fact that it grew on a spot where a great tribal leader was buried long ago.

Unfortunately, this is the story of an amazing tree that no longer exists. It was a small acacia tree, called the most isolated tree in the world. It was located on a caravan route in a vast, empty swath of the Sahara Desert in Niger known as the
Ténéré
(“desert” in the language of the nomadic Tuareg people), and there wasn’t another tree within 120 miles in any direction. Dubbed
L’arbre de Ténéré
in French, or “the Tree of Ténéré,” it was the last survivor of the dense forest that thrived in the region thousands of years ago, before the changing climate turned it into a desert. The tree was just 10 feet tall (about five feet up, it split into two branches, giving it a distinctive Y shape), topped by a tangle of thin branches. But it was legendary to desert nomads and other travelers in the region, who could spot it from miles away and probably wondered how the tree could survive in such a spot. In 1938 the French military decided to dig a well near the tree—and found that its roots were drawing water from a source more than 130 feet below the surface. The little tree came to a tragic end in 1973 when a Libyan truck driver on the caravan route did the improbable: He hit the only tree in a region larger than the state of Michigan. The dead tree was taken to the Niger National Museum in the capital of Niamey, where it remains today. An unknown artist erected a metal sculpture made of pipes and auto parts at the desert site, in honor of the lonely Tree of Ténéré.

Literary giants Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis both died on the same day, but their passings didn’t receive much press. Why? It was November 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

•
The official neckware of Arizona
is the bolo tie.

 

•
The official possum of Georgia
is Pogo, the possum from Walt Kelly’s long-running comic strip of the same name.

 

•
The official state beverage of Indiana
is water. (In Nebraska, it’s Kool-Aid.)

 

•
The official state meal of Oklahoma
is barbecue pork, chicken-fried steak, fried okra, squash, cornbread, biscuits, corn, sausage and gravy, grits, black-eyed peas, strawberries, and pecan pie.

 

•
The official exercise of Maryland
is walking. (Maryland’s official sport: jousting.)

 

•
The official children’s book of Massachusetts
is Robert McCloskey’s
Make Way for Ducklings
(1941)
.
In 2003 a third-grade class from Canton pushed it through the state legislature as a class project. The official children’s book author of Massachusetts, however, is Dr. Seuss.

 

•
The official cartoon character of Oklahoma
is Gusty, a raindrop-headed figure drawn nightly on the weather maps on a Tulsa news broadcast by weatherman Don Woods.

 

•
The official vehicle of Texas
is the chuck wagon.

 

•
The state beverage of Alabama
is Clyde May’s Conecuh Ridge Alabama Style Whiskey. (The state game bird of Alabama is the wild turkey, not to be confused with Wild Turkey, a beverage distilled in nearby Kentucky.)

 

•
The official state rock song of Washington
is “Louie Louie.”

 

•
The official dinosaur of the District of Columbia
is the Capitalsaurus. Paleontologists still aren’t sure it’s actually a separate species—it’s more likely some type of tyrannosaurus—but it’s okay if the Capitalsaurus isn’t real, because D.C. isn’t really a state.