Uncle John’s Facts to Annoy Your Teacher Bathroom Reader for Kids Only! (5 page)

Johnny Depp used to suffer from coulrophobia—fear of clowns.

BEFORE THEY WERE FAMOUS

These celebrities also had odd jobs in their younger days:

•
Whoopi Goldberg was a bricklayer, funeral makeup artist, and garbage collector.

•
Pink cleaned toilets at McDonald’s.

•
Barack Obama scooped ice cream at Baskin-Robbins.

•
Colin Ferrell taught line dancing in Ireland.

•
Hugh Jackman worked as a clown. (He didn’t have it so bad, though—he often made $50 per hour.)

•
Ellen DeGeneres dried cars at a car wash.

Year of the first television broadcast in the United States: 1928.

If teachers really wanted students to look forward to quizzes, they’d ask questions that test our knowledge of important things…like cartoon characters. (Answers are on
page 241
.)

1
.
These days, I have a good life in Hawaii (even though swimming was hard for me to learn), but I had to dodge a whole bunch of aliens to stay on earth.

2
.
Gary kept me up all night with his meowing, and then Patrick told me we couldn’t be friends anymore because I was so crabby from lack of sleep that I ate all of his kelp fries. (I’ll apologize after a nap.)

3
.
My dad got fired again today. Mr. Spacely is so rude! But Mom is sure things will be all right again tomorrow. (Psst…Astro says hi.)

4
.
I have trouble choosing my wishes, but I do my best! It’s hard to follow all the instructions in “Da Rules.”

5
.
Hiiiigh-Ya! Fighting Tai Lung made me so hungry that I ate all of the noodles in Dad’s cart.

6
.
We’ve got a great idea for next summer vacation…if only Candace will keep her big mouth shut!

7
.
I’m the forgotten middle child, and much smarter than the rest of my family. Only my saxophone keeps me sane.

8
.
I love to go on adventures, but wish my cousin Angelica would leave me alone.

In France, students are not allowed to bring a lunch to school but they get a two-hour lunch break in the cafeteria.

This town’s squirmy population keeps a whole lot of people in business.

T
HE WORMS CRAWL IN…

Wiscasset, Maine, is known for two things: It’s a summer tourist town often called “Maine’s prettiest village” because of its historic homes and buildings. It’s also famous for its worms.

Wiscasset was originally a shipbuilding town, but in the 1920s, that business started moving to larger cities in the Northeast. That left many people with no jobs. But fortunately, the town had another resource that put people back to work.

THE WORMS CRAWL OUT…

Billions of worms—most notably, fat bloodworms and sandworms—lived in mucky marshes along the coast. At first, residents of Wiscasset considered them to be a nuisance because bloodworms sting and sandworms pinch…painfully.

But by 1930, so many people were out of work and looking for a new way to make money that they began to see the worms differently. Sport fishermen all over New England needed worms for bait, and they’d pay twice as much per dozen for the juicy worms from Wiscasset than for skinnier worms from other places.

So men around town pulled on rubber hip boots and trudged out into the mud to dig up the worms. On a good day, they could bring in as many as 1,000, and in 1937, the total harvest was about 2.5 million.

GOLD IN THEM THAR WORMS!

Today, men and women in Wiscasset are still in the worming business. And it’s not a bad job. Wormers work just four or five hours a day. They have to get to the marshes during low tide, when the water doesn’t cover up the worms. And their season lasts only from April to October.

The state’s worm population has decreased since the 1930s—because of all the harvesting—but people can still dig up 300 to 500 worms a day. They generally make 15 cents for each sandworm and 25 cents per bloodworm. (The bloodworms are bigger, longer, and juicier…all the better for luring fish.) So if you really like digging around in muck (and who doesn’t?), then you too can head to Maine and get your hands dirty.

Bart Simpson’s middle name is Jo-Jo.

Ever wonder how your teacher would do in
a 19th-century schoolroom? Here’s the way
most teachers lived in the “good old days.”

•
In the early 1800s, schoolteachers were almost all male. But that changed when school boards realized that women were willing to work for less money than men. In 1849, the Littleton, Massachusetts, school committee wrote: “It seems…very poor policy to pay a man $20 or $22 a month for teaching children the ABCs, when a female could do the work more successfully at one third of the price.”

•
Teachers hardly ever had their own homes. Most lived with the families of their students. This room and board was part of the teacher’s pay.

•
A teacher’s moral character was considered very important. An 1872 set of rules from New Hampshire said, “Any teacher who smokes, uses liquor in any form, [or] frequents pool or public halls…will give good reason to suspect his worth, intention, integrity, and honesty.”

•
Female teachers had to remain unmarried. In the 19th century, the San Francisco Board of Education said it would fire “any female teacher who may commit the crime of marriage.”

•
Teachers dealt with 19th-century “emergencies,” too.
Around 1890, a teacher in California described one problem in a letter to her family: “There are many openings in the walls of our school that admit birds, lizards, mice, and snakes. During one lesson, a snake appeared, sticking his tongue out at us. I disposed of him amidst great applause.”

Dr. Seuss’s
The Cat in the Hat
contains just 220 words.

•
Teachers in the 19th century were allowed to punish their students physically…and they did. An 1860 set of rules for students spelled out the punishments:

Children who are caught writing with their left hand:
1 ruler rap on the knuckles.

Talking in class:
1 whack with a rod.

Chewing tobacco or spitting:
7 whacks.

*      *      *

KEEP YOUR LIPS TO YOURSELF, PLEASE

In February 2009, the Warrington Bank train station in northwest England erected an unfriendly sign: a silhouette of a man and woman puckered up, with a slash through it…no kissing! According to station authorities, the ban was necessary because many commuters took too long kissing their loved ones hello and good-bye—it made the platform crowded. But when word of the ban reached the managers at London’s High Wycombe train station, they retaliated with their own sign, proclaiming “Kissing is welcome here! We would never dream of banning kissing!”

Ants are found on all continents except Antarctica?

About a century ago, two young girls from England walked out of the forest with an amazing story: fairies were real, they said…and they could prove it.

T
HE CASE OF THE FAIRY PHOTOS

One day in 1917, two cousins—16-year-old Elsie Wright and 10-year-old Frances Griffiths—came home from a walk in the woods. The girls had been playing near a stream on Elsie’s parents’ property, and Frances had slipped into the water. Her shoes and stockings were wet. Polly Wright, Elsie’s mother, was angry when she saw the girls; she’d told them to stay away from the stream. But just as she was about to scold them, Elsie and Frances told an incredible tale: they’d gone to the stream, the girls explained, because they’d met a group of fairies in the woods and had been playing with them. And to prove it, the pair borrowed a camera and rushed back into the forest to take a photo.

GNOME SWEET GNOME

The next day, Elsie’s father Arthur developed the picture. In it, Frances posed behind a small mound of dirt while several small creatures that appeared to be fairies danced on branches in front of her. A few months later, the girls went back to the woods and came home with more pictures: Elsie playing with a gnome, a fairy leaping toward Frances, a fairy handing Elsie a flower, and one photo of a group of fairies dancing alone. Arthur developed all the pictures. Despite the girls’ insistence that they were real (Elsie even described the gnome’s wings as “more mothlike than the fairies’”), he considered them child’s play, put them in a drawer, and forgot about them.

World’s longest tunnel: Japan’s Seikan Tunnel, at 33.5 miles.

MOTHER KNOWS BEST

Elsie’s mother, though, didn’t forget. Polly Wright was a member of the Theosophist Society, a group that believed in the existence of elves, gnomes, and fairies. At a society meeting two years later, Polly told the group the girls’ fairy tale and showed everyone the old photos.

The head of the Theosophist Society was a man named Edward Gardner. After examining the photos, he declared them real and…people just believed him. Suddenly, adults all over England were talking about the pictures and the girls’ encounter with the fairies.

ENTER SIR ARTHUR

One of the people most excited about the photos was writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. By 1920, he was already famous for his Sherlock Holmes mysteries. He was also well known for his interest in Spiritualism, a religion whose followers believe in the supernatural, especially ghosts. So the fairy photos grabbed his attention.

Doyle never questioned the girls’ sincerity, but he did initially question the photos. He showed them to various “fairy experts” (Spiritualists who specialized in identifying fairies). Some of them considered the pictures to be fakes, but others felt they were genuine. Edward Gardner even went to the girls’ home with his own camera and asked them to take more pictures to “prove” they’d been right all along. The girls ventured into the woods and returned with more photos of their fairy friends.

Are you a gymnosophist? That means someone who contemplates philosophy—while naked.

Doyle used the original pictures in a magazine article and then, in 1921, wrote a book about the girls and the fairies. Controversy soon exploded on both sides of the fairy fence: Some people were convinced the girls had faked the photos, but they couldn’t prove how. Others were sure the pictures were authentic. Either way, the debate continued for many years. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930. The girls grew up, married, had children of their own, and eventually became grandmothers. And through the decades, Elsie and Frances stuck to their story.