It’s a weird, weird world

Okay, I haven’t give y’all any trivia lately, partly because it frequently bores me, and also because I don’t want to bore y’all.  But, I came across some interesting tidbits in my trusty bathroom reader, and I wanted to share:

• On September 12, the Great Hurricane of 1938 devastated the New England states. That morning a man in West Hampton Beach received a barometer in the mail. The needle was stuck on “hurricane.” Disgusted, and thinking it was defective, he marched back to the Post Office and mailed the instrument back to the store from which he had purchased it. When he returned, his home was gone.
• Doctors in a Mexican hospital were in the midst of open-heart surgery when a frog fell out of an overhead lamp and landed on the patient.
• Despite 18 years working at a Florida fishing camp, Freddie Padgett was so terrified of water that he wore a life jacket to bed on stormy nights. Friends made fun of him, until a twister sucked him out of his RV while he was sleeping and dropped him into Lake Harney over a mile away. He suffered broken ribs and other injuries, but authorities say the life jacket probably saved his life.

–Uncle John’s Absolutely Absorbing Bathroom Reader

 

Nobel rumors…

I found some interesting tidbits about the man behind the Nobel Peace prize. Y’all might already know this, but if you didn’t…

Alfred Nobel, Swedish inventor of dynamite, blasting caps, smokeless gunpowder,and many other explosion-related items, suffered from mistaken identity. On April 13, 1888, Nobel awoke in Paris, opened a newspaper,and was astonished to read his own obituary. but it was actually his brother Ludwig who’d died; the newspaper had goofed.

As a result of the mistake, Nobel was given the rare gift of a chance to see how he would be remembered…and he didn’t like what he saw. As David Zacks writes in An Underground Education:

Alfred was shocked to see himself portrayed as the Merchant of Death, the man responsible for escalating the arms race…[even though] he had made high-powered explosives much easier to use and was proud of how this power had been unleashed to mine precious minerals and to build roads, railways, and canals.

The obituary painted him as a “bellicose monster” whose discoveries “had boosted the bloody art of war from bullets and bayonets to long-range explosives in less than 24 years.”

Determined to change his image and redeem the family name, Nobel hatched a shrewd plan. He used his wealth to create prizes in several areas – including peace. (Sort of like “the Exxon award for environmental safety…[or] the John F. Kennedy award for marital fidelity,” Zack says). It was successful spin control. Today, the Nobel Prizes are the most prestigious in the world…and few of us connect their creator the “the art of killing.”

Uncle John’s Absolutely Absorbing Bathroom Reader

 

They’re probably pretty healthy, too

The state with the highest percentage of people who walk to work: Alaska

Uncle John’s Absolutely Absorbing Bathroom Reader

 

The oldest capital city in the U.S. is New Mexico’s Santa Fe (1609-10).

 Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Plunges into History Again

 

Real People

From Uncle John’s Third Bathroom Reader comes three examples of the real people who inspired famous songs:

1. Bad, Bad Leroy Brown, by Jim Croce                         Jim Croce met the man who inspired “Leroy Brown” while stationed at Fort Dix Army base.  They were both going to school to be telephone linemen.  “He stayed there about a week and one evening he turned around and said he was really fed up and tired.  He went AWOL, and then came back at the end of the month to get his paycheck.  They put handcuffs on him and took him away.  Just to listen to him talk and see how ‘bad’ he was, I knew someday I was gonna write a song about him,” says Croce.
2. The Sultans of Swing, by Dire Straits                         The Sultans of Swing was a jazz band that Mark Knopfler happened to see at a pub one night.  “They did a couple of requests.  I asked them for ‘Creole Love Call’, and it was great.  There are loads of bands like that.  They’re postmen, accountants, milkmen, draftsmen, teachers.  They just get together Sunday lunchtimes, nighttimes, and they play traditional jazz.  It’s funny, because they play this New Orleans music note-for-note…in Greenwich, England.”
3. Peggy Sue, by Buddy Holly                                         This was Holly’s first solo record, and one of the most famous “girl-name” records in rock history.  But although Buddy made Peggy Sue famous, she wasn’t in love with him-she was Cricket drummer Jerry Allison’s girlfriend.  Later Jerry & Peggy Sue tied the knot, and Buddy celebrated with “Peggy Sue Got Married”.  He was dead by the time they divorced.

 

Body parts

• your brain weighs around 3 pounds.  All but 10 oz. is water.
• It takes 200,000 frowns to make a permanent wrinkle.
• while you’re resting, the air you breathe passes through your nose at about 4 miles per hour.  At this rate, you breathe over 400 gallons of air every hour.
• bone is about 4 times stronger than steel.  It can endure 24,000 pounds of pressure per sq. inch.
• the average adult has about 18 sq. feet of skin.
• the average man shrinks a little more than one inch between the ages of 30 and 70. In the same period of time, the average woman shrinks two inches.
• to say one word, you use over 70 muscles.
• your brain uses less power than a 100-watt bulb.
• women have a more developed sense of smell than men do.

-Uncle John’s Third Bathroom Reader

 

Primetime Proverbs

“God don’t make no mistakes – that’s how he got to be God.”     -Archie Bunker, All in the Family

“Well, I certainly don’t believe God’s a woman, because if He were, men would be the ones walking around wearing high heels, taking Midol, and having their upper lips waxed.”         -Julia Sugarbaker, Designing Women

Archie Bunker:  “All the pictures I ever seen, God is white.”  

George Jefferson:   “Maybe you were looking at the negatives.”     -All in the Family

 

Holy Mackerel, Batperson!

A tuna can swim 100 miles a day.

Uncle John’s Third Bathroom Reader 

 

Quotable Quotes

Buckminster Fuller, was considered one of the most original thinkers of the 20th century:

• “Faith is much better than belief.  Belief is when someone else does the thinking”
• “Either war is obsolete or men are”
• “God to me…is a verb, not a noun, proper or improper”
• “The end move in politics is to pick up a gun”
• “I am a passenger on the spaceship Earth”
• “We are not going to be able to operate our spaceship Earth successfully, nor for much longer, unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common.  It has to be everybody or nobody”

This guy seems like a pretty forward thinker to me.  It would be interesting to hear what he would make of the current state of affairs.

Uncle John’s Third Bathroom Reader

 

Trash in…trash out

“This is the ‘Jerry Springer Show’…There is no such thing as class!”          -Jerry Springer

“That man is so repugnant.  All of these satanic murderers are.”          –Geraldo Rivera, discussing Charles Manson

“Nobody differentiates between one show and another.  It’s all of us in the same trash can.”          –Sally Jesse Raphael

“I’d rather be called sleazy than to be identified as intelligent”          -Phil Donahue

“Wow! This story is beyond dysfunctional!”          -Ricki Lake

Uncle John’s Absolutely Absorbing Bathroom Reader