Listverse.com's Astounding Bathroom Reader: Loads of Top Ten Lists About Dolphin Superpowers, Deadly Competitions, Pranks Gone Wrong and Much More Incredible Trivia
By Jamie Frater
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About this ebook
Delving into the shocking side of pop culture, science, and history, Listverse.com’s Epic Book of Mind-Boggling Top 10 Lists offers a wealth of fascinating reading with over 200 lists and more than 2,000 interesting facts. Movie buffs will be surprised by the list of crazy movie plots that actually happened in real life and the top-ten films that accurately predicted the future. Celebrity gawkers will do a double take at the list of famous people with secret physical deformities as well as the numerous celebs who have killed someone. Music fans will be set straight by the list of rock ‘n’ roll urban legends that never happened, and literary buffs will cringe at the greatest writers who had crippling drug addictions. List after amazing list will keep readers enthralled, revealing the many entertaining aspects of this wonderful world: strange Civil War weapons, stupid criminals who were captured after butt-dialed the police, bizarre things you can buy from vending machines, and even sex toys with ridiculously ancient origins.
Jamie Frater
Jamie Frater was born in Naenae, a suburb of Lower Hutt, New Zealand, in 1974. He studied postgraduate music at the Royal College of Music in London, after which, due to an insatiable desire to share fascinating, obscure, and bizarre facts, he created listverse.com where he presents a new top ten list every day. He has been a guest speaker on numerous national radio and television stations in the United States and Great Britain. Jamie now writes full-time for his California-based website from his home.
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Listverse.com's Astounding Bathroom Reader - Jamie Frater
10 Obscure and Interesting Facts about Asia
By Andrew Handley
10 UNIVERSAL BIRTHDAY
Fact: Vietnamese New Year Is Everybody’s Birthday
Vietnamese New Year, or Tet, occurs annually sometime in late winter and lasts for several days. It begins on the first day of the Lunar calendar, which is usually sometime in early February or late January.
Among many other Tet traditions, the new year is also considered a birthday celebration. Along with Koreans, Vietnamese measure age by the number of Lunar new years they have lived through, so a baby will officially turn one on his first Tet, even if he was only born a few days before the event takes place.
9 THAILAND’S WATER GUN FESTIVAL
Speaking of New Years traditions, the Thai New Year is celebrated from the 13th through the 15th of April. Known as the Songkran festival, which is Thai for astrological passage,
the main attraction is being sprayed in the face by a mixture of water and flour or talc powder.
Originally the celebration had spiritual connotations—water was poured over statues of Buddhas, and then people would collect the water that dripped off and pour it over their loved ones for good luck. These days, it’s just a free-for-all with water guns for sale on every corner and people standing beside the streets down anybody who passes.
8 LARGEST SHOPPING MALL
Fact: The World’s Largest Shopping Mall Is A Ghost Town
In 2005, Chinese billionaire Alex Hu Guirong began building the world’s largest shopping mall in Dongguan, China. At seven million square feet, the New South China Mall had room for up to 2,350 shops—not to mention the full-size indoor roller coaster, the 1.3 mile long canal (complete with gondolas), and the 82 foot replica of the Arc de Triomphe.
There was only one problem—nobody wanted to put a store in it. From 2005 until the present, only about one percent of the mall has ever been used—ever. The other 6,930,300 square feet just is gathering dust under cloth covers, and the only people who really work there are the security guards who keep squatters away.
There are a few reasons why the mall flopped so hard, and one of them is the location—Dongguan only has a population of 10 million, most of them poor-ish factory workers, and it can take a few hours to even get there.
7 MERRY CHRISTMAS
Fact: North Koreans Celebrate Their Own Version Of Christmas
In North Korea, the citizens don’t celebrate Christmas. Christmas is still a thing in North Korea, it’s just closer to an act of war than a celebration. So instead of embarking on Christmas festivities, North Koreans will instead celebrate the birth of Kim Jong Il’s mother, who was born on December 24th.
The North Korean government has a long history of keeping a tight hold over the religious groups within their borders—they famously tortured a woman in 2002 for smuggling Christians out of the country. Since then they have continued to demonize and censor as much Western influence as possible—including placing a series of patriotic holidays around Christmas. Besides the birth of Kim Jong’s mother, North Koreans celebrate Constitution Day
on December 27th, and on New Years they hold marches to the view resting place of Kim Il Sung’s (the guy who started the Korean War) embalmed body.
6 CHINA ONLY HAS ONE TIME ZONE
China is roughly 3,200 miles (5,200 km) wide, which is large enough to cover about 5 separate time zones (the U.S. has 4). Despite that, China has had only one national time zone since the Chinese Civil War in 1949.
The reason for doing it that way was mostly political—China is a big freaking place, and after 20 years of civil war the People’s Republic of China wanted to give everybody a sense of unity. Unfortunately, that meant that while Beijing was seeing the sun rise at 6 AM, western areas like Xinjiang wouldn’t see dawn for two more hours.
This system is still in place today, although Xinjiang has put their foot down and created their own unofficial time zone, which is two hours behind China Standard Time. The Chinese government doesn’t recognize it.
5 IT’S ILLEGAL TO BE FAT IN JAPAN
Japan is currently considered the skinniest industrialized nation in the world, and there’s a very good reason for that—it’s against the law to be fat. Japanese law dictates that a male over the age of 40 can’t have a waistline larger than 33.5 inches (85 cm). Women are given a little more leeway with 35.4 inches (90 cm).
Why? The official reasoning is that, well, slim people are healthier, and it’s an effort to combat high cholesterol and high blood pressure. People who are over the legal waist size have to go through counseling and government-approved diets, and companies who have a large number of overweight employees have to pay a fine, which goes towards healthcare for seniors.
4 WORLD POPULATION
Fact: China and India Are A Third Of The World’s Population
It’s well known that China has a large population, but the actual size of it is staggering. The Sichuan province alone has a population larger than Greece, Portugal, Holland, Guatemala, Austria, Malaysia, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada combined—and it’s only the fourth largest province in the country.
In fact, India and China combined make up more than a third of the world’s entire population—2.5 billion people as of 2012. And all those people fit into an area barely larger than the United States.
3 BABY TOSSING FOR GOOD LUCK
At a shrine in the mountains of Solapur, India, newborns are brought to partake in a ritual that is supposed to provide the child with good luck, courage, and health. Babies are carried to the top of a 50 foot tower and then dropped off the edge—into a stretched sheet held by monks at the bottom of the tower.
This Muslim tradition has been practiced for over 500 years, and it’s still happening today. While a lot of people are horrified at the ritual, the Musti villagers claim that there has never been an injury. You can watch a clip of it here.
2 WATCH THOSE HANDS
Fact: Indians Eat With The Right Hand, Wipe With The Left
One of the most interesting customs in India is that they will only eat with their right hand. The reason is that after you use the toilet you don’t use toilet paper – you cup some water in your left hand and use it to wipe up. Aside from hotels or restaurants that cater to Westerners, it’s actually hard to find a bathroom that even has toilet paper in the entire country—why would you use paper when you have a perfectly good left hand, right?
In addition to eating, it’s considered insulting to do just about anything else with your left hand, such as handing over money or using it to shake hands in greeting.
1 CHINESE CHILDREN
Fact: Chinese Children Are Named After Events
In 1992, China put in its application to host the 2000 Olympics. That same year, 680 Chinese people named their newborns Aoyun, which translates directly to Olympic Games.
More than 4,000 people went on to give that name to their children over the next 15 years, with another big surge when it was announced that China would host in 2008. But it’s not overly strange for Chinese parents to name their children after events or political movements.
This is only one technique for naming children in China—there are many others—but according to the Chinese registry, other common names are as diverse as Defend China
or Build the Nation.
Some children are even named simply Space Travel,
which is awesome, and almost 300,000 Civilisations
are currently living in the country. For comparison, that would be like an American naming their son America
or Obama for President.
10 Greatest Syndicated Comic Strips In American History
By FlameHorse
10 KRAZY KAT
Krazy Kat was written and drawn by George Herriman, and ran in the papers from 1913 to 1944. It was the primary influence on Chuck Jones’s Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons. Herriman set it in his native Coconino County, Arizona, where there is a lot of sagebrush desert, but also a lot of beautiful green scenery with mountains and lakes.
The standard comedy of the strip is good old fashioned slapstick, but it has an air of surrealism about it that lends a timeless quality. You might consider it simple by today’s standards, but it was an influence on the majority of cartoonists who followed it.
There are three main characters: Krazy Kat, Ignatz Mouse, and Offissa Bull Pup. Krazy is in love with Ignatz, but Ignatz hates Krazy and is constantly dreaming up more and more complicated plans to throw bricks at Krazy. Krazy is so in love, or so dumb, that s/he thinks Ignatz’s brick-throwing means that Ignatz is in love with him/her.
But before we start throwing out pronouns, keep in mind that Herriman alternates between referring to Krazy as a male or female. This was deliberate. Herriman once explained that Krazy is something like a sprite, or an elf, and has no gender. In several strips, Herriman jokes about the ambiguity. Ignatz Mouse is more or less male, but it never really matters. Krazy speaks in a very weird mixture of dialects, from English to Yiddish.
Bull Pup is definitely male, and always after Ignatz for throwing bricks at Krazy. By the end of the strip, Herriman decided that Krazy and Ignatz were meant for each other and Ignatz started scheming with Krazy to defeat Pup.
The comic even ventures into the surreal
at times, as there are multiple strips in which Krazy is reading the strip the audience is also reading. Weird. And never dull.
9 LIBERTY MEADOWS
Frank Cho syndicated Liberty Meadows from 1997 through 2001. He also published it as a stand-alone comic book until 2004 and again in 2006. This comic fought with its syndicates more than most others since those newspapers require G-rated material. PG at most. They ban bad words, scantily-clad characters, and sex—and Liberty Meadows indulges diabetically in all three.
The humor is more or less the same as the old Looney Tunes shorts: fast-paced and ridiculously slapstick, with the characters beating each other with a variety of hilarious weapons. The stories follow various anthropomorphic animals rehabilitating at Liberty Meadows Animal Hospital under the care of the two head vets, Frank and Brandy. A common source of comedy is that Frank is in love with Brandy, but doesn’t have the nerve to ask her out.
Cho is well known for a lot of work besides this strip, and