Uncle John’s Did You Know? by Bathroom Readers’ Institute Read Free Book Online

The ancient Greeks considered the number 1 to be both odd and even. They regarded the number 3 as the first odd number.
    • The word “hiccup” appears exactly once in the works of Shakespeare.
    • Only one U.S. president has had the astrological sign Gemini: George H.W. Bush.
    • The first Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in 1901 to Jean Henri Dunant, founder of the Red Cross.
    • One human being out of five (on the entire planet) is a Chinese farmer.
    • Creepy fact: You can fit 1,815 standard-size graves into one acre of land.
    • Nottingham, England, was the first city to have braille signs in its shopping malls.
    • The average Haitian spends one minute per year making international phone calls.

REPTILES
    • Iguanas can stay underwater for nearly 30 minutes.
    • Crocodiles dig underground burrows in extremely hot weather…and can live in them for several months without eating or drinking.
    • All reptiles are vertebrates, meaning they have a backbone. And except for snakes and a few lizards, they all have four legs.
    • Snakes don’t have ears like other animals, but they have inner ears that sense ground vibrations.
    • Reptiles don’t perspire, and they don’t have any sweat glands in their skin.
    • The brain of a reptile accounts for less than 1% of its body mass.
    • How do they pull their heads and legs inside their shells? Turtles are the only animals whose hips and shoulders are inside their rib cages.
    • Some lizards have a “third eye,” a tiny, light-sensitive, transparent structure on top of the head that helps them regulate how long they stay in the sun.
    • Snakes have no eyelids; transparent eye “caps” protect their eyes.
    • We’ve all got one: The lowest part of your brain stem is called the “reptilian brain.” It’s the part of your brain that controls survival instincts.

IF YOU SAY SO
    How hard can it be to learn Japanese? All the kids in Japan do it. Here are a few words to get you started .
    • Pika means “flash of light” in Japanese, and chu is the squeak of a mouse. So the Pókemon name Pikachu literally means “flashing mouse squeak.”
    • First-grade students in Japan are called pika-pika ichi nen sei , or “shiny first graders.”
    • Rice is so popular in Japan that the words for breakfast, lunch, and dinner literally translate as “morning rice,” “noon rice,” and “evening rice.”
    • Some Japanese animal sounds: Pig: buu-buu . Dog: wan-wan . Frog: kero-kero . Rooster: ko ke kokkou .
    • In Japanese, kara means “empty.” So karate means “empty hand” (no weapon) and karaoke means “empty orchestra” (no voice).
    • The Japanese love to shorten phrases, especially foreign ones. “Remote control” is rimokon (pronounced ree-mo-cone). “Schwarzenegger” is Shuwa-chan . And “Brad Pitt” is Burapi (that seems longer, but the Japanese pronunciation of his full name has five syllables).
    • The Japanese word for “meow” is nyan-nyan . So the catlike Pókemon, Meowth, is called Nyasu in Japan.
    • We say “two peas in a pod” to describe two nearly identical things. In Japanese, it’s “two cucumbers.”

BASEBALL
TEAM NAMES
    • “Mets” is short for “Metropolitans,” taken from the team’s corporate name, The New York Metropolitan Baseball Club, Inc.
    • Not so “innocent,” after all: The Pittsburgh Pirates were called the Innocents until 1891, when the team “stole” second baseman Lou Bierbauer from the Philadelphia Athletics. Bierbauer’s former fans started calling the team the Pirates, and it stuck.
    • In the 1890s, Cleveland’s team was called the Spiders. One of their players, Louis Sockalexis, was a Native American, so fans started calling the team the “Indians.” The name was officially changed in 1913.
    • At first the Astros were called the Colt .45s, but when Houston got its new NASA Space Center in 1965, Astros seemed more appropriate.
    • The Minnesota Twins are named after the “twin