Uncle John’s Facts to Annoy Your Teacher Bathroom Reader for Kids Only! (24 page)

Time it takes the average adult to read 250 to 300 words: One minute.

That first day, the women made only 100 doughnuts, but they were soon making and serving doughnuts 24 hours a day, frying them up in several helmets. And they made huge batches—their standard recipe called for eight eggs and 18 cups of flour, and the doughnuts were fried in five pounds of lard.

HOMECOMING

After the war, the troops came home and wanted more doughnuts. So a man named Adolph Levitt answered their doughnut obsession—he invented a machine for mass-producing them in 1920. It went on display at the 1934 World’s Fair in Chicago, where the doughnut was hailed there as a “hit food.” Next came the doughnut shops: Krispy Kreme started selling them in 1937, and Dunkin’ Donuts opened in 1950.

Today, more than 10 billion are sold every year in the United States and Canada. But as people pay more attention to their diets, many have begun worrying that doughnuts are unhealthy. Those with a sweet tooth need not fear too much. An average doughnut has about 300 calories; an average bagel with cream cheese has 450. So as long as you don’t overdo it, go ahead!

In China, it’s considered rude to suck on your chopsticks.

Some people say that you won’t get anywhere in this world without years of hard work. But these kids prove that when you really love something, success can come early.

S
TOKED!

John John Florence rode on his first surfboard when he was six months old. Okay…his dad was with him, but by the time he was five, he was surfing alone at Hawaii’s Bonzai Pipeline, one of the most dangerous surfing spots in the world. In the winter, waves there can swell up to 30 feet high. In 2005, when he was just 13 years old, John John qualified for the Triple Crown of Surfing, a three-part competition that many people consider the sport’s most prestigious professional event. John John was the youngest person ever to compete in the contest, and even though he didn’t get past the first round, he did score higher than some pros twice his age.

Surfing isn’t John John’s only hobby, though. He’s also a skilled skateboarder and snowboarder who has competed for the title of “Ultimate Boarder,” a surfing/skateboarding/snowboarding competition in Santa Barbara, California.

GUITAR HERO

Tallan Latz (known as T-Man) likes to ride his bike and play sports like other kids, but he’d rather be inside his Wisconsin home, wearing cool black shades and practicing his electric guitar. At nine years old, T-Man is the youngest professional blues guitarist in the world today, and his riffs are so good that he’s jammed with rock legend Jackson Browne and played at Chicago’s famous House of Blues. All that didn’t come easy, though. He’s been playing the electric guitar since he was four and practices for two to three hours every day. But T-Man says it’s all worth it: “I just love to play the guitar. It’s my favorite feeling.”

About 70 percent of Earth is covered with water but only 1 percent of the water is drinkable.

A REAL MASTERPIECE

When Akiane Kramarik turned 14 in 2008, she’d already been a professional painter for seven years. She made her first drawing—of an angel—when she was four and gave it to her mom as a present. When she was seven, she painted a self-portrait and sold it for $10,000!

Akiane is homeschooled in Idaho so she can spend most of her days painting. But as much as she loves art, there’s even more she wants to accomplish. She especially wants to help people living in poverty in Lithuania, where her parents grew up. She says, “They need help with food and medicine, and a free hospital. I really want to build a free hospital for them.” Good luck, Akiane!

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Misnamed:
Greenland is mostly snow and ice. Iceland is mostly green.

Don’t let your mom throw away your stuff—you never know what might become a “collectible.”

A
CTION FIGURE

In 2002, an original 1963 G.I. Joe was sold to the Geppi Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. Price: $200,000.

YO-YO

In 1974, President Richard Nixon autographed a yo-yo for country music star Roy Acuff. After Acuff died in 1992, the yo-yo sold at an auction for $16,000.

BARBIE DOLL

In 2003, an original 1959 Barbie doll (still in the box) sold for $25,427.

BASEBALL CARD

The rarest card—only six perfect copies exist—is known as the 1909 Honus Wagner “T206.” Why is it so rare? Wagner, a Hall of Famer who played mostly for the Pittsburgh Pirates, was strongly opposed to cigarette smoking, and he had the card canceled because it was manufactured by a tobacco company. In 2007, one of the cards sold at an auction for $2.8 million.

Panda car: British slang for a police car (because it’s black and white).

COMIC BOOK

The most ever paid for a comic book was for a 1938
Action Comics
#1
.
The issue contained the first-ever appearance of Superman. Price: $317,200. (The owner, who’d had the comic since he was nine, bought it for 35 cents in the 1950s.)

PEZ DISPENSER

PEZ manufactured two dispensers shaped like astronauts to be sold at the 1982 World’s Fair. They later scrapped the idea. In 2006, one of the two prototypes sold on eBay for $32,000.

CANDY

A single brown M&M that had been on a 2004 space-flight sold for $1,500.

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SLICE IT THICK

In 1946, the
New York Times
heralded a “new style in peanut butter,” telling readers that “instead of scooping peanut butter out of a jar to spread on crackers and bread, [they] might soon be slicing it from a brick, much as we now do cheese.” Alas, the innovation, from scientists at Georgia State College, never caught on.

Abraham Lincoln’s favorite book to carry around:
Joe Miller’s Joke Book
.

These jobs are dirty, but somebody’s got to do them. And hey—who knows, maybe you’ll find your calling.

D
OG BREATH SNIFFERS

Some people make a living by putting their noses in front of a dog’s mouth and smelling. Then they grade the smelliness of the dog’s breath on a scale of 0 to 10 and put it into categories like sweaty, salty, musty, fungal, or decaying. After the first round of sniffing, the dog gets a fresh-breath treat or some food, and the sniffer tries again. The dog sniffer’s job is to test how well the treats or different types of dog food change (and hopefully improve) the smell of the dog’s breath.

Unlike most cats, the spotted ocelot loves to swim.

PEOPLE SNIFFER

If you have a good nose but don’t like the idea of smelling dog breath, you can always use your sniffing skills to smell human breath instead. Breath odor evaluators smell nasty morning breath, garlic breath, coffee breath, and other stenches and rate them on a scale from 1 to 9 (with 1 being the stinkiest). Then the evaluator smells and rates the breath again after the person has used products like mints, gum, or mouthwash, which is how the manufacturers test the effectiveness of their products.

DEAD BODY PREPARERS

A
diener
, from the German word for “servant,” prepares corpses for autopsies and for doctors who study the effects of deadly diseases on human bodies. Dieners cut up dead bodies and remove their organs so that the doctors can weigh and examine them. People in this line of work wear scrubs, an apron, gloves, surgical boots, hair-nets, goggles, and masks to protect them from the blood, guts, and smells of the dead bodies.

PORTABLE TOILET CLEANERS

Portable toilets aren’t much fun to use, but imagine if you had to clean them for a living. Most workers clean 10 to 60 of them a day. Of course, how many they can clean in a day depends on how dirty the toilet is. How do they do it? They pick up stray toilet paper and wash down the floor and walls using a high-pressure hose. Then they use a tank and vacuum wand to suck up all the waste. It’s a dirty job, but the pay isn’t bad: portable toilet cleaners can make up to $50,000 a year.

Number of candy canes made in the United States every year: About 1.76 billion.

POOPER SCOOPERS

Want an outside job on an exotic island in the fresh air? Get a job collecting guano (or, bird poop) off the coast of Peru. Why would anyone do that? Companies use the guano to make fertilizer. Dung collectors wake up at 3:30, grab a shovel and pickax, and spend the next 12 hours hacking away at hardened seabird poop on rock-hard soil.

After scraping up the dung, they collect it, sift and filter it through a piece of wire mesh, bag it, and pile the bags onto barges. The barges then carry the precious cargo to the mainland.

It’s a dirty job. Most workers go barefoot, so their feet and legs are coated with a layer of poop by the end of the day. And some wear handkerchiefs to avoid breathing in dung dust.

In a year, a work crew usually collects about 15,000 tons of precious bird poop, which brings in a lot of money. A ton of Peruvian guano can sell for up to $500.

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WORLD’S SMALLEST WINGED INSECT

The Tanzanian parasitic wasp is just 0.2 millimeter… about the same size as a housefly’s eye.

“Gitch” is Canadian slang for underwear.