Trivia for the Toilet: Double Duty

By Fall River Press

You Don't Say!
Discover the mother lode of trivia with this quirky collection of crap! Trivia for the Toilet: Double Duty offers up more than 250 odd-but-true facts and strange happenings, including:
• The Green Bay Packers' season ticket waiting list is so long that if you joined today, it would take you 955 years to make it to the top.
• Polar bears' hair is not actually white; it's transparent.
• One in every five people has dropped their cell phone in the toilet.
• Each human being has a unique tongue print.
With a wide range of subjects spanning history, movies, music, space, sports, nature, the human body, and more, Trivia for the Toilet: Double Duty is the perfect book to ponder when duty calls.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fall River Press
• Release date: Oct 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781435164789

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Cover Design by Gavin Motnyk

Illustrations by Alexis Seabrook

Dedication

For Lindsay

While scientists have found many reasons for a cat to purr (contentment, wanting something, even being anxious or distressed), they have had trouble discovering exactly how a cat purrs, because they don’t seem to have a particular body part designed for that purpose. What scientists do know, however, is that big cats in the animal kingdom can either purr or roar; smaller cats such as pumas and cheetahs purr, while bigger cats like lions, tigers, and leopards roar. The difference is a more elastic throat, which allows for the loud noise that the stiffer throats of smaller cats can’t produce.

Most Americans dream of making it big, so how about this for fame? The entirety of the Americas is named after one guy: Amerigo Vespucci. Vespucci, a man of questionable repute, was a pickle seller, jewel dealer, explorer, and later, the chief navigator of Spain in the 1500s; this meant that he got to travel around looking for new land for Spain to claim. He was also the first person to realize (and publicize) the fact that the land Christopher Columbus had discovered in 1492 was a New World and not part of the West Indies, as Columbus had assumed. The name of this new land was a Latinization of Vespucci’s first name. To go from selling pickles to having continents named after you is quite the American dream, indeed!

Eating asparagus will make your pee smell funny . . . for some people. It turns out, due to biology, some people don’t produce the odor, and others don’t smell the odor! Scientists studied the phenomenon so they could try to figure out which gene variant causes the differences, but perhaps their most noteworthy conclusion was that 8 percent of the people they studied couldn’t produce the characteristic weird odor after eating the vegetable, while 6 percent couldn’t smell it—and these participants often didn’t overlap. But the most puzzling question might be: whom did they get to smell pee all day?

The deepest expanse of the ocean is called the Challenger Deep, and it sits in the Mariana Trench, off the coast of the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific Ocean. At 36,070 feet (6.83 miles), it’s deeper than Mount Everest is high, and because the sun’s rays don’t reach it, the Challenger Deep contains no plant life, and no animal life larger than the occasional sea cucumber or tiny shrimp. Although several unmanned vessels have explored the floor of the Challenger Deep, only three men have ever reached the bottom: explorers Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh in a Swiss-built submarine in 1960, and the director James Cameron, who used his considerable wealth after the success of his film Titanic to take a deep-sea voyage like no other.

Many of the words we have today come from military origins, because the stories of wars were some of the first stories that were ever written. One you might not expect is loophole, which is a narrow legal opening in the tax code or another law that someone can exploit in order to get around paying (or doing something illegal). Loophole has been around since the mid-fifteenth century, when it originally meant a narrow slit in the wall that surrounded a castle. The openings were used for archers to stick their arrows through and fire at the enemy. So while the castle was protected, someone from the outside might still be able to slip a weapon through one of the loopholes, and get away with something.

Like many amazing inventions, potato chips were originally a joke. In 1853, a restaurant in Saratoga Springs, New York, called Moon’s Lake House, served French-fried potatoes, which have origins in France and Belgium, and were popularized after Thomas Jefferson requested potatoes served in the French manner for a White House dinner. The potatoes that Jefferson referred to were more like today’s home fries: soft, thick cuts of potatoes to be eaten with a fork. But one night, at Moon’s Lake House, chef George Crum became annoyed when a diner kept sending back the potatoes, complaining they weren’t thin enough. Crum decided to cut them so thin they couldn’t be eaten with a fork. He cooked them until they were brown and crispy. Instead of being irritated, however, the guest loved the potatoes, and soon more people were asking for the potato chips. With the invention of the mechanical potato peeler in the 1920s, the snack took off, and soon Herman Lay was selling them all over America.

The world’s biggest dog ever was a Great Dane named Giant George, who lived in Tucson, Arizona. Even though George was born as the runt of his litter, he grew to be a whopping 245 pounds and almost 31⁄2 feet tall, and he could reach more than 7 feet high when on his hind legs. Although Giant George is credited as being the largest dog that ever lived, he didn’t have the longest tail: That award goes to a Belgian dog named Keon, whose tail is an amazing 21⁄2 feet long.

For humans, some things just seem natural—like throwing a ball at a bunch of neatly organized objects. Perhaps that’s why bowling has been around for almost 5,000 years, assuming that artifacts found in an Egyptian burial site are indeed crude bowling instruments, as archaeologists believe. What we do know is that in 1366, King Edward III made bowling illegal in order to get his men to practice their archery skills instead. Not surprisingly, bowling has taken many different forms since then, with both the amount and type of items one knocks over changing over the years. It was not until the American Bowling Congress was born in 1895, that most American bowlers were playing the ten-pin version of bowling we know today.

It turns out that beer doesn’t actually make you popular and attractive. In 1991, Richard Overton sued the Anheuser-Busch corporation for false and misleading advertising that caused emotional distress, mental injury, and financial loss. He said that Budweiser beer was unsuccessful at facilitating the scenic tropical settings [and] beautiful women and men engaged in endless and unrestricted merriment that it portrayed in its commercials. Overton later said that he brought the lawsuit just to bring attention to the company’s advertising methods, but the $10,000 suit caused quite a stir at the time before it was ultimately thrown out of court.

It’s called 55 Cancri e, and it’s a rocky planet orbiting a fellow star in the Milky Way. It shows no sign of intelligent life, and humans could never live in its atmosphere, but it’s especially fascinating to astrologists for one simple reason: Up to one-third of it may be composed of pure diamond. Because of the planet’s measurements and carbon-rich atmosphere, scientists theorize that instead of having a layer of water right under its surface like Earth does, 55 Cancri e might have a layer made entirely of diamond.

One of the most beloved teams in the NFL, the Green Bay Packers have a waiting list of more than 86,000 fans who want season tickets—and fewer than 100 people bow out each season. That means that if you join the list now, you’ll have to wait 955 years to become one of the lucky few with Packers season tickets!

The longest word in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, which is an obscure medical term for a lung disease caused by coal dust. However, don’t get too excited when you throw it around with doctors. The word was