Uncle John's Top Secret Bathroom Reader for Kids Only! Read online

  FOR THE BIRDS!

  Gerben Hoeksma of Holland believes that if everybody ate what he eats, world hunger would end. We’d all be healthier, too. What does he eat? Pigeon food—dried grains, peas, and seeds. It’s all he’s eaten for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for eleven years. He gets it at the pet store. “Since I started eating pigeon food,” he says, “I’ve never felt so good.”

  DOES YOUR MAYOR TALK TO ALIENS?

  Elcio Berti, mayor of Bocaiuva do Sul, Brazil, recently announced that he had scheduled a UFO landing during a local soccer game (he claims he’s in regular contact with aliens). Did the spaceship come? No—the mayor changed his mind. At the last minute he contacted the aliens and told them to stay away. Why? “I was worried they might abduct one of the players.”

  The largest recorded snowflake was 8 inches wide.

  WHERE’S THE POTTY?

  More ways to ask life’s most pressing question.

  Afrikaans: Waar is die toilet?

  Japanese: Toire wa doko desu ka?

  Turkish: Banyo nerede?

  Dutch: Waar is het toilet?

  Norwegian: Hvor er toalettet?

  Tagalog: Asan ang banyo?

  Polish: Gdzie jest toaleta?

  Danish: Hvor er toilettet?

  Hindi: Aapkaa snanghar kahan hai?

  Russian: Gde zdes tualet?

  Spanish: Donde está el baño?

  German: Wo ist die Toilette?

  Arabic: Ain alhamaam?

  Swedish: Men var finns toaletterna?

  Hebrew: Eifo hásherutim?

  Yiddish: Vu iz der bodtsimer?

  Martian:

  The ancient Incas protected bats just to harvest their guano (poop)—it makes great fertilizer.

  NAME THAT TUNE!

  Pop quiz: What’s the best-known song in the English-speaking world?

  GOOD MORNING TO YOU

  In 1893 Mildred Hill wrote a little tune for her kindergarten class in Louisville, Kentucky. Her sister, Patty Hill, added some lyrics, and they had a song for teachers to sing to their students to welcome them to class. They called it “Good Morning to All,” and it went like this:

  Good morning to you,

  Good morning to you,

  Good morning dear children,

  Good morning to all.

  “Good Morning to All” was published in a songbook called Song Stories for Kindergarten and became a modest success.

  IT’S A HIT!

  When the songbook was reprinted in 1924, someone (to this day no one knows exactly who) changed the words “Good morning” to “Happy birthday.” Result: The new version quickly became a favorite at birthday parties all over America.

  The Hill sisters didn’t mind that very few people knew they’d written the song—they were just happy to know that people everywhere enjoyed it. But then it began to appear in popular movies and Broadway plays. Not only that, singers recorded hit versions of it, earning huge amounts of money and not sharing any of it with the song’s composers. So in 1935 Patty Hill went to court to reclaim the rights to “Happy Birthday to You.”

  Hi Mom!

  BIRTHDAY MONEY

  She won the case easily and ever since then, whenever “Happy Birthday to You” is sung in a movie, on the stage, on radio, or on television, a sum of money—called a royalty—is paid to the owners of the song. (Don’t worry—you don’t have to pay if you sing it at a birthday party. That’s free.)

  Many movies and plays have birthday scenes with cakes and candles, but since it can cost thousands of dollars to use “Happy Birthday to You,” actors rarely sing the Hill sisters’ song. Instead, they usually sing a tune created especially for that scene.

  MAKE A WISH

  The Hill sisters have passed away, but their song lives on. Today “Happy Birthday to You” is owned by Warner Communications—and it still earns more than $2 million every year. That’s an amazing amount of money for a simple tune made up of only six notes and six different words!

  AND SPEAKING OF BIRTHDAYS…

  • Birthday cakes have been around for only 200 years. They started in Germany, where coins and rings were baked into the cake as surprise presents.

  The world’s largest birthday cake was baked in Fort Payne, Alabama. It weighed 128,238 pounds.

  • Birthday cards started in England 100 years ago. Today an estimated two billion birthday cards are mailed in the United States every year.

  • Birthday parties were originally held for protection. It was thought that people were most vulnerable to attack by evil spirits on their birthdays, so family members and friends gathered around to keep them safe.

  • The most expensive birthday party yet was given by the sultan of Brunei (a rich state on the island of Borneo) on July 13, 1996. It cost $27.2 million—mostly because Michael Jackson charged $16 million to perform at it.

  THE CLASSIC VARIATION

  (Everybody sing!)

  Happy birthday to you,

  You belong in a zoo.

  You look like a monkey,

  And you smell like one, too!

  * * *

  Cheeta the Chimpanzee

  played Tarzan’s movie companion in the 1930s and 1940s, but he’s famous for something else, too: At 72 years old, the Guinness Book of World Records has officially named him “World’s Oldest Chimp.” Happy Birthday, Cheeta!

  Saturn has 31 moons.

  FIRST LADIES

  Women—and girls—haven’t always had the opportunities they have today. Here’s a list of some important female firsts.

  First Female Parachutist (1798): Daredevil Jeanne-Genevieve Garnerin dazzled a crowd in Paris when she leapt from a hot-air balloon and parachuted to the ground.

  First Woman Awarded a Patent (1809): Mary Kies was granted a patent for inventing a method of weaving straw with silk for hatmaking.

  First Female Doctor (1849): Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States. Today more than 20% of doctors and 40% of medical students are female.

  First Female U.S. Medal of Honor Winner (1865): Dr. Mary E. Walker received the medal for her work as a surgeon during the Civil War. She is still the only woman to have received this greatest of American military honors.

  First Female Lawyer (1869): When Arabella Mansfield passed the Iowa bar exam, she became the first female lawyer in America. (She did it without ever attending law school.)

  Self-made man: President Andrew Johnson was an expert tailor. He made his own clothes while in office.

  First Female Film Director (1896): Alice Guy Blache made her first film only two years after Thomas Edison first demonstrated the Kinetoscope in Paris. Her short feature was titled La Fée aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy). She went on to make more than 300 films in her career.

  First Woman to Win a Nobel Prize (1903): Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre, won the Nobel Prize for physics for their work on radioactivity. Curie also received a Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1911, making her the only person—male or female—to win two Nobel Prizes.

  First Female Pilot (1908): Thérèse Peltier of France took the controls of a Voisin biplane to become the first woman to fly a plane by herself.

  First Female Police Officer (1910): Alice Stebbins Wells joined the Los Angeles police force.

  First Female Veterinarians (1910): Elinor McGrath and Florence Kimball both graduated from veterinary school that year. Their practices were unusual because they worked only with pets (most vets at the time were horse and cattle doctors).

  First Woman in Congress (1917): Jeanette Rankin was elected to Congress from Montana. One of her first acts was to introduce a law that gave women citizenship independent of their husbands.

  First Women to Win the Pulitzer Prize (1921): The Pulitzer is the highest award for writing in the United States. A double winner! Edith Wharton won the prize for fiction for her book The Age of Innocence. That same year, Zona Gale became the first woman to win a Pulitzer for drama, for her play Miss Lulu Bett.


  First Female Prime Minister Worldwide (1960): Sirimavo Bandaranaike became Sri Lanka’s prime minister in 1960: She served three separate terms.

  First Women in Space (1963 and 1983): Valentina Tereshkova rode into space aboard the Soviet ship Vostok 6 in 1963. Sally Ride became the first American female astronaut when she orbited Earth aboard the space shuttle Challenger in 1983.

  First Woman to Reach the Top of Mount Everest (1975): Junko Tabei of Japan successfully climbed the world’s highest mountain in 1975.

  First Female Secretary of State (1997): Madeleine Albright became secretary of state, the highest-ranking position ever held by a woman in the United States…so far.

  Without looking, which pages of a book have even numbers: the left or right? (You peeked!)

  ODE TO A FART

  This one is a real gas!

  A fart can be quiet, A fart can be loud, Some leave a powerful, Poisonous cloud.

  A fart can be short, Or a fart can be long. Farts have been known To sound like a song.

  A fart can create A most curious medley. A fart can be harmless, Or silent but deadly.

  From wide-open prairies To small elevators, A fart will find all of us Sooner or later.

  So be not afraid Of the invisible gas, For always remember, That farts, too, shall pass.

  Gas fact: Cockroaches fart every 15 minutes.

  LOST CONTINENT

  You can lose your wallet. You can lose your mind. But Uncle John wants to know—how in the world can you lose an entire continent?

  THE LEGEND OF ATLANTIS

  About 12,000 years ago—so the story goes—the noble civilization of Atlantis arose on an island continent in the Atlantic Ocean. Wise in the ways of science and the arts, its people ruled all the lands around them. The Atlanteans were so superior to the other civilizations of the day that they seemed to be superhuman, almost godlike creatures. They and their beautiful kingdom dazzled the world.

  Then came a great catastrophe. A violent earthquake struck, followed by a huge tidal wave that swept across the land and destroyed Atlantis. The island, along with its temples and monuments, sank into the sea and was never seen again.

  A PHILOSOPHER’S TALE

  All we know of Atlantis comes from a few references in two short books, Timaeus and Critias, written by the Greek philosopher Plato around 355 B.C. Many historians think Plato was just making up a story to make a point about what happens when good governments go bad. Others disagree—they say Plato goes into far more detail than necessary for a cautionary tale. He gives very specific information about Atlantis, such as the layout of the city and its network of great canals. According to Plato, Atlantis was destroyed 9,000 years before his time.

  Deepest ocean: the Mariana Trench, in the Pacific Ocean is 36,201 feet deep.

  Plato called his story a “genuine history” within “the realm of fact.” But was it? That question has haunted people’s imagination ever since. Thousands of books have been written about Atlantis. Hundreds of expeditions have combed every corner of the globe, searching for traces of the fabled lost continent—yet no proof of its existence has ever been found.

  WHERE IN THE WORLD

  So, if Atlantis was a real place, where would it have been? Plato said it was located on an island “west of the Pillars of Hercules.” The Pillars of Hercules is an ancient name for the rocky outcroppings at the east end of the Strait of Gibraltar, a narrow channel of water dividing Europe from Africa and connecting the Mediterranean Sea with the Atlantic Ocean. In ancient times, the Pillars of Hercules were considered by Mediterranean peoples to be the edge of the known world. Few ships ventured beyond them.

  Lying due west of the Pillars of Hercules are the Azores Islands. Early Atlantis seekers assumed these lonely islands were all that was left of the mountain peaks of Atlantis. But geological surveys of the Atlantic Ocean floor show that it is covered with a very thick layer of mud that took millions of years to accumulate. There’s no sign of a sunken island.

  Yellow fever: Mosquitoes are more attracted to people who have recently eaten bananas.

  ANOTHER THEORY

  If Atlantis isn’t in the Atlantic Ocean, then where?

  In 1909 a history professor named K. T. Frost came up with one of the likeliest possibilities. Instead of going west from ancient Greece, Professor Frost suggested, go east. And what if Atlantis was destroyed not 9,000 years but only 900 years before Plato’s time? Making these two changes to the story puts Atlantis in a place that was very well-known to the ancient Greeks: the island of Crete, 60 miles southeast of the mainland.

  Today Crete is part of Greece, but it was once home to the Minoan Empire, a great civilization that ruled the Mediterranean for hundreds of years before the Greeks did. The Minoans were far more sophisticated than their Greek neighbors. They had great palaces filled with beautiful paintings, a highly organized government, and a powerful navy. Their code of laws even gave women the same legal status as men, something that is taken for granted in many cultures today, but which was uncommon 3,000 years ago.

  Then, at its very height, the Minoan civilization vanished almost overnight.

  Thar She Blows!

  To this day no one knows for sure what happened, but we do know of one natural disaster that might explain a lot. About 70 miles from Crete lies the island of Thera. It’s actually several small islands ringing a central lagoon, but 3,500 years ago it was all one big island with a volcano at its center. Around the year 1500 B.C.—almost 900 years before Plato’s time—it blew up.

  A junk is a sailing ship commonly seen in China, Indonesia, and India.

  Ash thrown up into the atmosphere would have blackened the skies for days, and the sound of the explosion heard thousands of miles away. But the most lethal effect of the eruption would have been the tidal wave it created. Probably over 100 feet tall, the wave would have swept more than a mile inland and drowned the Minoan cities before anyone had a chance to escape. The powerful Minoan navy would have been sunk in minutes and the great island empire completely destroyed.

  GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

  Assuming Plato really did make mistakes in his dates and his directions, the Minoan theory is the most accepted one proposed about the fate of Atlantis.

  But there are other theories. One says that the great city was indeed in the Atlantic Ocean, but much farther away—off the coast of Florida in the area known today as the Bermuda Triangle. Others put the lost continent back in the Mediterranean, near the island of Cyprus. And the most extreme theory places Atlantis in the South China Sea off the coast of Vietnam.

  Some 2,500 years and 25,000 books later, the debate rages on with no end in sight. The only clear truth about the lost continent is that very few stories have held such a lasting grip on the human imagination as has Atlantis.

  The first helicopter flight (1907) lasted 20 seconds and was just a foot off the ground.

  SNOT RAGS

  What did people use before Kleenex?

  ON THE NOSE

  Handkerchiefs first appeared more than 2,000 years ago in Rome. These early hankies—called sudaria—were used mostly to wipe sweat from a person’s face or hands. They were made of linen, which was expensive at the time, so only the very rich could afford them.

  But as linen making spread across Europe, more and more people began carrying handkerchiefs. The first recorded mention of using a cloth to blow one’s nose dates from 300 A.D. Before that the preferred method was what’s known as a farmer’s blow: press a finger against one nostril to close it, and blow hard through the other. The handkerchief made it possible to keep a clear nose and be polite about it.

  By the 1300s, many people carried hankies, often tucked inside their sleeves. Great time and expense were spent creating lace and embroidered handkerchiefs so beautiful that people didn’t want to use them as snot rags—so many folks just used their sleeves.

  King Francis I of France found the habit disgusting, so in the 1500s, he decreed that buttons wer
e to be sewn on men’s coat sleeves to remind them to use their handkerchiefs for blowing their noses. The buttons turned into a fashion statement that continues today.

  What? Bees don’t have ears.

  MONSTER MATCH

  Do you know a chupacabra from a banshee? Take this quiz to see if you can match the monster’s name with its description.

  1. If you hear the scream of this nasty Irish demon in the middle of the night, it means that someone will die…soon!

  a) Banshee b) Methuselah c) Gremlin

  2. This one-eyed giant from Greece likes to eat everything, including people. Fortunately, he’s really stupid, so it’s easy to get away from him.

  a) Chupacabra b) Ganesh c) Cyclops

  3. This evil spirit from the Middle East robs graves and lives off the flesh of the dead.

  a) Gideon b) Ghoul c) Gruyère

  4. This half-human, half-monster from Arabia likes to hide in brass lamps. Rub the lamp three times and you’ll get three wishes.

  a) Borg b) Pan c) Jinn

  5. Its name means “knocking ghost” in German. It loves to break dishes, turn lights on and off, and send furniture crashing across the room.

  a) Poltergeist b) Yeti c) Mr. Tidball

  Folk remedy: A Bible under your pillow will keep you from having nightmares.

  6. A corpse that’s been brought back to life by voodoo magic or witchcraft, this monster comes from the West Indies and walks the Earth in a robotlike trance.

  a) Mummy b) Zombie c) Brainiac

  7. This bloodsucker from Transylvania always avoids the light of day. He’ll live forever unless a wooden stake is driven through his heart.