Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wise Up! by Bathroom Readers’ Institute Read Free Book Online Page B

Louisiana was named for King Louis XIV of France.
    Shortest place name in the United States: Y, Alaska.
    Portland, Oregon, got its name in a coin toss…tails, and it would have been Boston, Oregon.
    Marfa, Texas, took its name from a character in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov . The town was used as a locale for the movie Giant and other films.
    In 1916, Berlin, Ontario, changed its name to Kitchener due to anti-German sentiment during World War I.
    Whiskeytown, California, got its name when donkeys lost their footing on a local trail and spilled a load of whiskey into a nearby ravine.

Legal Roots
    Around 2100 BC, the Sumerians were the first to write down official legal codes. Their first law: a ban against witchcraft.
    Red hand—which means being caught “red handed,” or with blood on your hands—is a Scottish legal term that dates to 1432.
    Historians believe that the American 12-person jury system came from the Vikings, who used committees of 12 “law men” to hear crimes.
    The first U.S. Supreme Court case: West v. Barnes , tried in 1791. The court upheld a law saying a plaintiff had to file his case in person in Washington, D.C., to get a hearing.
    Louisiana still refers to the Napoleonic Code in its state law.
    American police officers were first required to read suspects their Miranda rights in 1966, but those rights are required only if the police want to interrogate someone they’ve detained. Police can arrest and hold people without issuing a Miranda warning, as long as they don’t subject the person to questioning.
    Until President John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963, it wasn’t a federal crime to assassinate the president.

The Noble Nobel
    First Nobel Peace Prize winner: Jean Henri Dunant, founder of the Swiss Red Cross (1901).
    Wangari Maathai of Kenya was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize (2004).
    John Enders cultivated polio in a test tube, and in 1954, he—not Jonas Salk—got a Nobel Prize for his work.
    Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., at age 35, was the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
    António Egas Moniz won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for developing the lobotomy (1949).
    There is no Nobel Prize for mathematics.
    Pearl S. Buck was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1938.
    To date, there are no female Nobel laureates in economics.
    Winston Churchill won a Nobel Prize—not for peace, but for literature.
    Marie Curie was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes.

Facts About the Famous
    At last count, Ozzy Osbourne has been in rehab 14 times.
    Princess Diana’s favorite band was Duran Duran.
    For the band Emerson, Lake, and Palmer’s 1977 tour, they took 63 roadies…including a karate instructor.
    On waking from a diabetic coma, Jerry Garcia’s first words were, “I’m not Beethoven.”
    Angus Young of AC/DC performed in a gorilla suit before settling on his schoolboy look.
    Merle Haggard was born in a converted train car.
    Mark Twain called the accordion the “stomach Steinway.”
    Jimi Hendrix played a comb and wax paper “kazoo” on his 1968 recording of “Crosstown Traffic.”
    Vincent van Gogh’s self-portrait shows a bandaged right ear—he painted a mirror image. (He actually cut off the left one.)
    Steven Tyler of Aerosmith insists that no one call him Steve.
    Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac estimates that he spent $8 million on cocaine.
    Vivien Leigh hated kissing Clark Gable while filming Gone With the Wind . She said he had bad breath.
    Tom Cruise writes with his right hand, but does almost everything else left-handed.
    In 1966, singer Joan Baez sued cartoonist Al Capp for parodying her in one of his comic strips. She lost.
    Al Capone’s business card said that he was a used furniture dealer.

Circus, Circus
    The flying trapeze was invented in late 19th-century France by Jules Léotard, namesake of the leotard.
    Diameter of a standard circus ring: 42 feet…the size needed for a horse to circle comfortably