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  THE PASSING OF THE SPEAR

  When morani reach the ripe old age of 30, they are expected to get married. They shave off their beautiful long braids and become tribal elders. Each elder can marry as many wives as he can afford, but each wife has a family who expects a gift of cattle, and each wife gets her own hut. Once a warrior has settled down and become an elder, he takes on a new responsibility: teaching the next generation of young men the ways of the morani.

  Before he was a movie star, Sylvester Stallone worked as a lion cage cleaner.

  GAMES RULE!

  Here are two more games to teach your friends.

  FLASHLIGHT TAG

  Number of Players: The more, the merrier

  Object of the Game: To tag everyone with the beam from a flashlight

  How to Play: This is a great game to play at night in a large backyard or playground. It’s just like regular tag, but instead of using your hand to tag someone, you use a beam of light.

  One person becomes “It” and gets the flashlight. He counts to 100 while everyone else runs and hides. Armed with the flashlight, It searches for the others. When It spots one of the hiding players, he tags them with the beam of the flashlight and calls out her name. Tagged players must go to jail and stay there until everyone has been tagged. (The first one tagged becomes It in the next game.) Two important rules to remember: 1) Once the game begins, the flashlight must be on all the time, and 2) the “Not-Its” can change their hiding places whenever they please.

  MURDER IN THE DARK

  Number of Players: Six or more

  Object of the Game: To discover the murderer

  How To Play: Play this game at night in a dark room. But before you turn out the lights, you need a pencil and several slips of paper—one for each player. On one piece of paper, write “Murderer.” On another, write “Detective.” Label the rest “Suspect.” One player shuffles the slips and gives one to each player. Important: Don’t tell anyone else who you are! Now someone counts to three, turns off the lights, and the game begins.

  People have been playing board games for more than 4,000 years.

  The Murderer has to find the other players in the dark. When he finds one, he taps her on the shoulder. When a Suspect gets tapped on the shoulder, she falls to the ground and makes dying noises (screaming is good). If the Detective is tapped, she says, “Detective is dead.” Now, turn the lights back on. All the “dead” suspects and the Murderer play dead. The Detective then surveys the bodies and accuses whomever she thinks is the Murderer. If the Detective guesses right, she wins; if she guesses wrong, the Murderer wins.

  Now collect the slips and start over!

  The U.S. Mint prints $696 million every day.

  DUMBERER CROOKS

  Just when you think they can’t get any dumber, they do.

  BANK BLOOPER

  A man walked into a Bank of America branch in San Francisco and wrote on a deposit slip:

  This is a stickkup.

  Put all you muny in this bag.

  While he waited to give his note to the teller, he began to worry. What if someone had seen him write the note? They might call the police! He got so scared that he left Bank of America and went to the Wells Fargo bank across the street.

  He handed the note to a teller at Wells Fargo who determined from his spelling errors that the robber was not very bright. She told him she couldn’t accept his stick-up note because it was written on a Bank of America deposit slip. He would either have to fill out a Wells Fargo deposit slip or go back to Bank of America. Looking defeated, the man said OK and left.

  The Wells Fargo teller called the police, who arrested the robber a few minutes later at the Bank of America, where he was waiting in line.

  Ninety-nine percent of all forms of life that have ever existed on Earth are now extinct.

  SHOE

  Willie Shoemaker rode horses. He also won races…lots of them. Some people think he’s the best jockey—maybe even the best athlete—who ever lived.

  SULTAN OF THE SADDLE

  In the world of American horse racing, the Kentucky Derby, the Belmont Stakes, and the Preakness are considered the hardest races to win. That’s why Willie “Shoe” Shoemaker is considered the greatest jockey of all time—he won the Kentucky Derby four times, the Belmont Stakes five times, and the Preakness twice. But that’s not all:

  • Six times he rode six winners in a single day.

  • Over his career, he won 8,833 races and more than $100 million.

  • He was the first jockey to win a $1 million prize.

  AND HE’S OFF!

  When Willie Lee Shoemaker was born on August 19, 1931, he weighed only two and a half pounds. He was so small that his grandmother used a shoebox as a cradle and set him next to the oven to keep him warm.

  Most jockeys are short and light, so the horse won’t be slowed down by having to carry any more weight than is absolutely necessary. Shoe’s small size led him to horse racing—but it was his iron will that made him a winner. When he was 16, he got his first job working with racehorses at a ranch in California. The boss fired him because he thought Shoe didn’t have the talent to become a top rider, but Shoe wasn’t discouraged. He kept riding.

  The sea horse is the only fish that can grab things with its tail.

  The next year he won his first race, and once he started winning, he never stopped. At 18, he tied for the national championship. In 1951, the year he turned 20, he was horse racing’s biggest money winner. At 21, he set a record for most races won in a year (485)—a record which remained unbroken for 20 years.

  SOFT HANDS

  In the pint-size world of jockeys, Shoe was a half-pint. He was only 4 feet, 11 inches tall, yet there wasn’t a rider he faced that he didn’t beat at one time or another over his 42-year career. What made him so good?

  According to his fellow jockeys, Shoe had “soft hands”—a riding term for a jockey with a sure but gentle feel for the reins. “Willie takes such light hold of a horse,” said Hall of Fame jockey Eddie Arcaro, “that he could probably ride with silk threads for reins.”

  Shoe had his own idea. “The big thing is to relax. Most jocks don’t do that. They’re tense. I think my relaxation gets across to the horse and makes him want to run. If I were asked to give advice to young riders, the first thing I’d tell them is ‘Never get in a hurry.’”

  THE AGONY…

  Even a winner has bad days and makes mistakes. In 1957 Shoemaker made one of the most famous blunders in horse racing history. He was riding a horse named Gallant Man. They were winning, coming down the home stretch with a comfortable lead. Then, just before the finish line, Shoe stood up in the stirrups, thinking he’d won the race. But he hadn’t—he’d misjudged the finish line. Less than a second later, another horse swept past him to the real finish line. After a screwup like that, everyone thought Shoe was washed up.

  The prize money in a horse race is called the “purse.”

  …AND THE THRILL OF VICTORY

  But he wasn’t. Willie Shoemaker kept on racing…and kept on winning.

  In 1986 he was 54 years old and near the end of his career. That season he rode a horse at the Kentucky Derby, a long shot named Ferdinand. The starting bell rang. The horses took off, Ferdinand running in last place. But Shoe didn’t panic—he calmly worked the horse through the crowd until he got close to the leaders. Then he saw a hole open up between the horses and let Ferdinand run. The big horse surged ahead to win the race by two and a half horse lengths.

  AN INSPIRATION TO THE END

  In 1990, at the age of 58, Shoe finally retired. The following year a terrible car crash left him paralyzed from the neck down. Did he give up? Never. Although confined to a wheelchair, he went back to the track and continued to train the horses he loved. He passed away quietly in his sleep in 2003.

  Muhammad Ali once appeared in a Superman comic book. He knocked out Supermany to save Earth from aliens with mind-control powers.

  BODY OF W
ATER

  We take our vitamins. We eat our veggies. But are we ignoring the most important health food of all?

  WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE

  You are about 66% water. It’s in every part of your body. In fact, water makes up:

  • 83% of your blood

  • 75% of your brain

  • 73% of your muscle tissue

  • 25% of your body fat

  • 22% of your bones

  • 2% of the enamel on your teeth

  In other words, water is essential—you just can’t live without it. People can survive up to a month without food, but no one will make it more than five to seven days without water. Here’s what water does for you:

  • Carries food and oxygen throughout your body.

  • Moves body waste away from your cells.

  • Cushions joints.

  • Protects body organs and tissues.

  DRINK UP!

  On average, your body uses as much as 10 cups of water each day through perspiration (sweating), respiration (breathing), and elimination (peeing and pooping). That means you need to drink the equivalent amount of water every day, just to keep up. You need even more if it’s extremely hot or cold outside, because your body uses it to regulate your temperature.

  If you’re playing a pickup game of basketball, climbing trees, or just running around the yard, keep a water bottle handy because strenuous exercise or work makes you sweat even more. The same thing goes for when you’re sick.

  WATER TIPS

  Your water can come in the form of juice, other beverages, and soup—almost anything that’s mostly liquid. Here are ways to make sure you get enough fluids on a daily basis:

  • Don’t wait until you’re thirsty to drink because thirst is a sign that you’re already dehydrated.

  • Add a glass of water or juice to each meal.

  • Take a water bottle to school. Drink the whole thing before lunch, refill it, and drink it all again before you go home.

  • Bring water with you wherever you go—the movies, soccer practice, or hanging out with your friends.

  • Drink water instead of soda.

  • Be prepared! Drinking more water will make you healthier…but it will also make you have to go to the bathroom more often!

  All the water on Earth would fit into a 700-mile cube.

  THE JOLLY ROGER

  What’s so “jolly” about a black flag with a skull and crossbones on it? And who’s “Roger”?

  THE ORIGIN OF THE PIRATE FLAG

  • One story says that the flag (commonly known as the “Jolly Roger”) started out as a signal that a plague-infected ship flew to warn other ships to keep away. This black warning flag often had a white cross on it, which in time turned into a skull-and-bones. Pirates first used it to keep other ships from bothering them. Later it became their battle flag.

  • Another version of this flag had an hourglass on it, to warn ships under attack that their time to surrender was limited.

  • Some pirates ran up a red flag when they wanted another ship to surrender. The red flag meant, “Give up now and you’ll live. If you resist, we’ll kill you all.” This red flag was called joli rouge, which means “pretty red” in French. Some historians say the term joli rouge evolved into Jolly Roger and the flag eventually became black.

  • Others believe the name Jolly Roger came from notorious pirates in the Indian Ocean. The common term for an Asian pirate was Ali Raja, meaning “king of the sea.” Imagine a pirate with several pints of rum in his belly yelling, “Ali Raja!” That might well have sounded like “Jolly Roger.”

  The 20th century lasted about 25 seconds longer than the 19th century.

  WORD WIZARD

  Harry Potter’s creator—J.K. Rowling—speaks for herself.

  “People have said the humor [in the Harry Potter books] is very adult, but I think they underestimate children. It annoys me that people think you have to dumb down for children.”

  “Read as much as you can. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary. And it’s fun!”

  “There is a lot of comedy in magic, and magic going wrong.”

  “The purest joy was when I knew my book was going to be a book—a real book you could see on the shelf of a bookshop.”

  “I’ve never managed to keep a journal longer than two weeks. I get bored with my life. I prefer inventing things.”

  “I don’t feel I need to write for adults before I’m a ‘serious’ writer. For me, the idea always comes before I consider an audience. In truth, I never consider the audience for whom I’m writing. I just write what I want to write.”

  “I think it’s important for children to know that adults, too, have problems.”

  “Always have a vivid imagination, for you never know when you might need it.”

  On average, people in Ireland drink the most milk and people in Mexico drink the most cola.

  VOLCANO!

  What’s the difference between an egg and the Earth? An egg is a blob of goo covered by a thin shell. And the Earth is a blob of HOT goo covered by a thin shell.

  HOT ENOUGH FOR YOU?

  The hot goo below the Earth’s surface is called magma—layers and layers of molten rock and hot gases extending 3,600 miles down, oozing and stewing in raging heat. Some of the magma is liquid, but pressure keeps most of it slightly more solid, like tar. And all of it is amazingly hot.

  Thirty miles down, the magma is about 2,000°F. Where the magma meets the air and oceans, it cools and hardens into the Earth’s rocky crust. That’s where we live. It’s 3 to 50 miles thick, and strong enough to support oceans, mountains, and skyscrapers. And, most of the time, the crust’s rocky thickness protects us from all that powerful heat down there. Most of the time.

  RISING UP

  Sometimes, however, there’s a hole in the crust that lets melted rock and hot gases escape. What do we call that hole? A volcano, of course. No one knows the exact number of volcanoes in the world. Most are under the oceans. About 550 volcanoes on land have erupted during human history, and there are always about 15 to 20 volcanoes erupting somewhere in the world at any given time.

  When magma comes out of a volcano, it’s called lava. It’s usually red hot, still about 2,000° F. (more than four times hotter than the highest temperature of the average kitchen oven). Sometimes it flows out slowly; other times hot gases blow lava, rocks, and cinders out in an explosive eruption.

  Ostrich eggshells are so hard that a 250-pound man can stand on one without breaking it.

  THE ERUPTION OF PARICUTÍN

  In all of human history, there’s only one volcano that humans have seen starting brand new out of the ground. It was near Paricutín (par-ee-koo-TEEN), a farming village in Mexico, in 1943.

  Twelve-year-old Simón Jimenez saw it happen. He said it was a very still day when suddenly the quiet was shattered by a big earthquake and weird clunking, bubbling noises from under the ground. He later described it as sounding like a giant trying to clear his throat. Cracks zigzagged across the fields, and it felt to Simón like the rocks beneath him were breaking apart and sliding into a bottomless pit.

  He saw a monstrous cloud of black smoke in the distance. Houses must be burning, he thought. Then, when the hot, black cinders started falling from the sky, everybody began to run and the news quickly spread through the town: Houses weren’t burning—the smoke and cinders were roaring up from a hole in the cornfields. The village of Paricutín had turned into a volcano!

  The eruption lasted for an amazing nine years! By the time it was finished, the entire village was destroyed and where the cornfield used to, be there was mountain—a volcanic cone 1,300 feet high.

  Something to think about: Would a fly without wings be called a walk?

  LORD OF THE HOBBITS

  J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973) wrote some of the best-loved books of all time: The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. So where on Earth did he get the idea f
or Middle-earth?

  THE STORY BEGINS

  One hot summer afternoon in the 1930s, a middle-aged professor sat at his desk at Oxford University in England. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was grading a stack of student exams when he came upon a blank page. Without thinking, Tolkien wrote down the first words that came to mind: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” He didn’t know what a hobbit was. “Names always generate a story in my mind,” he said later. “I thought I’d better find out what hobbits were like.”

  SHIRE INSPIRATION

  Although he wasn’t aware of it at the time, J.R.R. Tolkien had actually begun to define the imaginary world of hobbits many years before. Born in South Africa, he’d moved to England with his family when he was four. For a time they lived in the West Midlands, a beautiful place of gentle rolling hills, small farms, and quiet country life. It was this setting that he re-created as the land of the hobbits in his famous books.

  Icelanders read more books per person than any other people in the world.

  ELVISHLY SPEAKING

  At an early age, Tolkien had displayed a remarkable gift for languages. As a teenager, he spoke a made-up language called Animalic, which substitutes animal names for words. In Animalic, for instance, the phrase, “Dog nightingale woodpecker forty” means “You are an ass.” By the time Tolkien entered Oxford University, he’d already mastered Latin and Greek, so he turned his attention to Norse and Germanic languages…and discovered a wonderland of ancient poems and stories.

  It was an old poem from Finland—the Kalevala—that had the most influence on Tolkien. He was so captivated by the ancient Finnish language that it became the inspiration for the Elvish language he invented for the elves in his books.