Uncle John’s Facts to Annoy Your Teacher Bathroom Reader for Kids Only! (19 page)

FACT?
Your hair and fingernails keep growing after you die.

WRONG!
Shortly after death, the human body begins to dry out, especially the skin. This causes it to shrivel and shrink away from the hair and nails, making them look like they’re still growing…which they’re not.

FACT?
The Wright brothers flew the first aircraft.

WRONG!
In 1904, Wilbur and Orville Wright flew the first aircraft that was capable of being controlled by a human pilot. Gliders and manned kites—which can technically be called “aircraft”—had been flown by dozens of other people over the previous two decades.

FACT?
One dog year is equivalent to seven human years.

WRONG!
This started as a way to compare a dog’s life span (about 14 years) with a human lifespan (about 80 years): 14 x 7 = 98. According to researchers today, there is no mathematical correlation between human and dog ages. Based on maturity level, a one-year-old dog is similar to a 15-year-old human; a four-year-old dog is like a 32-year-old human; and a 15-year-old dog is like a 76-year-old human.

A top ping-pong player can hit a ball as fast as 70 mph.

Before PlayStation and cell phones, kids had to make do with these toys. We bet you’ll recognize them.

R
UBIK’S CUBE

If there was one toy that could make a kid in the 1980s happy, sad, and frustrated all in the space of a few minutes, it was the Rubik’s Cube. Invented by Hungarian sculptor Erno Rubik, the three-inch cube hooked almost anyone who picked it up. At first, people just wanted to realign the colored squares, but then came the competitions, as solvers raced to outdo each other. In 2008, Erik Akkersdijk from the Netherlands set a record for solving the cube: it took him 7.08 seconds. That same year, 96 people in California set a record for the most people solving the cube at once. There’s even a blindfolded competition, in which contestants get to study the cube before their eyes are covered: Ville Sepannen from Finland holds the current record for that: 42.01 seconds.

Ten animals that have been to outerspace: Dog, chimp, bullfrog, cat, tortoise bee, cricket, spider, fish, worm.

THE HULA HOOP

This toy has been around for centuries—even the ancient Greeks twirled hoops around their waists for fun. But in the late 1950s, the hula hoop was rediscovered by two Americans, Richard Knerr and Arthur “Spud” Melin, who marketed it to kids. Suddenly, hula hooping was a hit, and some people were very good at it: in 1976, eight-year-old Mary Jane Freeze won a hula hoop contest by “hooping” for 10 hours and 47 minutes.

MR. POTATO HEAD

In the 1940s, New York toy inventor George Lerner came up with a brilliant idea: he crafted small eyes, noses, mouths, and ears out of plastic and made dolls for his little sisters by sticking those features onto various vegetables. The potato seemed to work best.

Lerner’s sisters loved the potato dolls so much that, in 1949, he tried to sell the concept to several toy companies. They all turned him down—the Great Depression and World War II had ended just a few years before, and many people believed that using vegetables to make toys was wasteful.

Finally, in 1951, Lerner convinced a cereal manufacturer to use the plastic pieces as prizes in its cereal boxes. A year later, the toy company Hasbro decided to sell complete sets of facial features as a toy. It worked: Hasbro sold a million of the toys in the first year, and Mr. Potato Head became a favorite of American children. (The plastic potato body was first included in 1964.)

Here’s another classroom mystery. See if you can figure it out. (The answer is on
page 243
.)

M
r. Patterson was at the blackboard, giving his fifth-grade class a lesson about punctuation. While he was writing on the chalkboard, a gooey spitball hit him in the back of the head.

“Whoa!” said Mr. Patterson, and he turned around to face the class.

He scanned the room and then figured that the culprit had to be sitting in the back row where he (or she) would have the least chance of being seen. Billy, Mark, Melissa, and Danny were sitting back there. And just as Mr. Patterson was about to question the four, Melissa wrote something on a piece of paper, folded it, and raised her hand.

“Yes, Melissa?” said Mr. Patterson. “May I go to the restroom?” she asked. “Uh, sure,” he said.

On her way out, Melissa slid the folded note onto Mr. Patterson’s desk. He quietly picked it up and turned to face the blackboard again. He unfolded the note and read it. It said: “?! I saw him throw it!”

George Lucas’s inspiration for Chewbacca in
Star Wars
: His dog, Indiana.

Mr. Patterson turned back to the class. “Okay,” he said. “I know who the culprit is.”

How did Mr. Patterson know who threw the spitball?

*      *      *

AMERICA’S STINGIEST WOMAN

Hetty Green, the heiress to a whaling-business fortune, was the richest woman in 19th-century America. During her life, she was worth about $100 million (around $17 billion today), but she spent very little. She lived in tiny rented rooms, never turned on the heat or used hot water, ate meat pies that cost about 15 cents each, and bought new clothes only when her old ones wore out.

In 1902, Green moved from her home in Vermont to Hoboken, New Jersey, so she could more closely manage her money, which was invested in New York’s stock markets. She went to see her stockbrokers every day and quizzed them about her earnings. Because she always wore black and lost her temper if she thought she wasn’t making enough money, her bankers gave her the nickname “the Witch of Wall Street.” After she died in 1916, her two children, Ned and Sylvia, inherited her fortune, but they didn’t inherit her stinginess. Ned loved science and spent most of his money financing various experiments. Sylvia died in 1951 and left $800 million to charity.

In 2004, so much gas built up inside a decomposing whale in Taiwan that it exploded.

Uncle John thinks that animals are our best friends. (Porter the Wonder Dog even has his own ring tone on Uncle John’s cell phone.) But this town seems to have gone a little too far.

G
OING TO THE DOGS

Sunol is a tiny California suburb, about 40 miles southeast of San Francisco where nothing much ever happens. But in 1981, when faced with two (human) candidates that most residents didn’t like, townspeople put Sunol on the map when they elected a Labrador retriever named Bosco as their new mayor.

Bosco’s career in politics started one day when two friends were arguing about which one of them could get more votes if they ran for mayor. A third man offered the opinion that his dog, Bosco, could get more votes than either of them. Then, to prove his point, he nominated Bosco for the job.

THE CAMPAIGN TAIL

For several weeks, Bosco campaigned all over town. His stance: He didn’t “drink, smoke, or chase women” (he sometimes did chase cars), and he stood for “a bone in every dish, a cat in every tree, and many more fire hydrants.” On election day, he won…by a landslide.

Bosco remained the town’s mayor for 13 years. It was mostly an honorary title—Sunol had a town council that conducted its business. But the dog did have some “official” duties, including leading the annual Halloween parade. He also rested on a blanket outside a local pub. When a patron had too much to drink, Bosco went for a walk with him until he’d cleared his head.

In 1998, Burger King announced it had created a Left-Handed Whopper It was all a hoax, but thousands of people came in to order one anyway.

But the dog’s political career wasn’t without controversy. In 1989, a newspaper in communist China ran a story attacking the United States and saying that Bosco was an example of how free elections were a failure. The people of Sunol disagreed, of course. They called Bosco “a symbol of democracy and freedom” and said that he represented “individualism and community pride.” He even made an appearance at a pro-democracy rally in San Francisco.

LIGHTS OUT

Bosco died in 1994, but Sunol residents didn’t want to just let him fade from memory. So they had a bronze statue built in his honor. Today, Mayor Bosco sits forever on his haunches, a kerchief around his neck, keeping watch over the town square.

Ever run to the bathroom only to find your older sister in there doing her hair—for hours? That’s annoying, but imagine if you had to use an outhouse.

W
HEN YOU GOTTA GO

Before the days of indoor plumbing, most houses and schools had outhouses—small sheds where people went to the bathroom. An average outhouse was about four feet wide by seven feet tall, and contained a wooden bench with two holes (a large one for adults and a small one for kids) built over a deep pit. Most were simple wooden structures that weren’t fixed to the ground. That’s because when the outhouse pit filled up, people just covered it with dirt, dug a new pit a few yards away, and moved the structure.

OVER THE MOON

Most outhouses didn’t have windows, so people usually carved special holes on the door to let in a little light and air. The shape most associated with an outhouse door is a crescent moon, though no one seems sure why that is. One common explanation says that, in the old days, when most people couldn’t read, they needed a way to distinguish the women’s outhouse from the men’s, if there were two. Men’s outhouses usually had a star on them, and women’s usually had a crescent moon. And because women tended to take better care of their outhouses, more of those survived.