Uncle John's Impossible Questions & Astounding Answers

By Bathroom Readers' Institute

Take a quiz while you take a whiz!
 
Test your smarts and then stump your friends with this collection of diabolical questions and answers that could only come from the trivia masters at the Bathroom Readers’ Institute. Sure, everyone knows the Pilgrims sailed to the New World on the Mayflower, but how many people know what that ship smelled like? And it’s a somewhat-known fact that Gene Roddenberry wrote lyrics to the Star Trek theme song, but few people know why he wrote them. Do you? Learn the answer to both of these conundrums—and hundreds more—and expand your knowledge on a wide array of topics including science, history, politics, sports, entertainment, language, and more. The questions may seem impossible, but the answers are just a page away!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781607106760

Bathroom Readers' Institute

The Bathroom Readers' Institute is a tight-knit group of loyal and skilled writers, researchers, and editors who have been working as a team for years. The BRI understands the habits of a very special market—Throne Sitters—and devotes itself to providing amazing facts and conversation pieces.

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ORIGINS

Everything has to begin somewhere. So let’s get started!

Say That Ten Times Fast

When Kleinkinderbeschäftigungsanstalt didn’t catch on, its inventor changed its name to…what?

Family Affair

Al, Alf, Charles, Henry, and John are better known by their last name. What is it?

Say That Ten Times Fast

German educator Friedrich Froebel changed it to Kindergarten, which means children’s garden. His original term, Kleinkinderbeschäftigungsanstalt, meant institute of care, playing, and activity for small children. The idea dates to 1837, when Froebel opened the first Kindergarten in Germany as a way to prepare children for later grades. Froebel believed young kids learned faster if they participated in educational activities, so his innovative curriculum combined artwork and play with formal instruction. Froebel’s idea was so good that his children’s gardens are still going strong today.

Family Affair

Ringling. The five original Ringling brothers—Al, Alf, Charles, Henry, and John—formed a traveling performance troupe in 1884 and were soon outgrossing all the other small circuses in the midwestern United States. Advertising themselves as Ringling Bros. United Monster Shows, Great Double Circus, Royal European Menagerie, Museum, Caravan, and Congress of Trained Animals, they became so successful that in 1907 they bought out their biggest competitor—Barnum & Bailey—to create what they called the Greatest Show on Earth. There were seven Ringling brothers in all—the five who founded the circus, and two who joined later, Gus and Otto. (They also had a sister named Ida.)

Cash Cows

What well-known maker of fun stuff began as the Schwarzschild & Sulzberger meat-packing company? (And what does it have to do with Tom Hanks?)

Ahead of Her Time

19th-century stage actress Sarah Bernhardt popularized what women’s fashion item? (And what does it have to do with Harrison Ford?)

Cash Cows

In 1915 an executive named Thomas E. Wilson was tasked by a division of Schwarzschild & Sulzberger, a meat-packing company, to solve a problem: Find a way to sell useless byproducts from their slaughterhouses (lips, intestines, and so on) that couldn’t be made into sausage or pet food. When Wilson arrived, the plant was already using sheep intestines to make surgical sutures and violin strings, but the excess animal parts were piling up. So what did he do to turn it around? He focused on sporting goods and changed the name to Wilson. His first big contract: the Chicago Cubs.

Wilson Sporting Goods has since changed hands several times. In 2000 the company achieved Hollywood immortality when one of its volleyballs co-starred alongside Tom Hanks in Cast Away.

Ahead of Her Time

The divine Sarah, as Bernhardt was called, had an acting career that spanned from 1862 to 1922. Her worldwide celebrity and silver voice turned everything she touched into gold—including the creased, brimmed hat she wore in the 1882 French play Fédora. Through the 1920s, the fedora hat was a staple of women’s fashion; it became popular with men in the 1930s.

In 1981 Harrison Ford gave the fedora new life as the hat of choice for Nazi-fighting archaeologists.

Das Boots

Two brothers.

Two Nazis.

Two rival shoe companies.

Who were the brothers?

And what were their shoes?

Das Boots

Not long after World War I, two cobbler brothers, Adolf and Rudolf Dassler, started Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik (Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory) in the town of Herzogenaurach, Bavaria. In 1933 the brothers joined Hitler’s Nazi party. Of the two, Rudolph, who went by Rudi, was the more ardent Nazi, and a rift began to form between them. When World War II broke out, Rudi joined the military, while Adolf, who went by Adi, stayed behind to manufacture boots and weapons for the German army.

After the war, tensions between the brothers grew worse. Rudi was arrested by American occupation forces, and he believed that Adi had reported him as a member of the SS. Adi denied it, but after Rudi was released, he quit the company and opened his own shoe factory across town.

Adi Dassler combined his first and last names to name his shoe company adidas (all lowercase); Rudi did the same and named his company Ruda (later changed to Puma). The brothers never spoke again, and their bitter rivalry split the town into competing factions separated by the Aurach River. Said one local resident: You’d always tend to look at the shoes a person is wearing before you strike up a conversation.

Footnote: Although the Dassler brothers were Nazis, they provided running shoes for African-American track star Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics. Owens won four gold medals that year…and put the Dasslers on the map as expert athletic shoemakers.

It’s Watching You Right Now

A California man named David Hampton was unimpressed with the Tamagotchi. You can’t pet it, he complained. So he invented his own version, which ended up getting banned from the National Security Agency’s headquarters. What did he invent?

Toy Story

What fictional version of a real toy—first released in 1938—suddenly became popular in 1983?

It’s Watching You Right Now

Hampton invented the Furby, an interactive toy robot that’s part owl, part penguin, and part cat. Released in 1998, Furbies became the biggest toy fad of the new millennium; millions were sold.

Hampton, a lifelong tinkerer, got the idea for an interactive toy at the 1997 International Toy Fair, where he played with a Tamagotchi, a digital pet from Japan that existed only on a small LCD screen. The Tamagotchi’s key feature: It would die if you didn’t feed it. But Hampton sensed that kids wanted more than a screen to play with, so he created the Furby. When you turned the toy on, it spoke only Furbish, a language invented by Hampton. But as you kept talking to it, it learned preprogrammed English words.

The Furby also recorded your voice and played it back at random…which is why it was banned by the National Security Agency. What’s the use of a bugproof room in a spy agency if there’s a Furby sitting there, recording everything you’re saying, ready to blab state secrets to the highest Russian bidder?

Toy Story

The Daisy company started selling Red Ryder BB guns in 1938, but never a carbine-action, 200-shot Range Model air rifle with a compass in the stock and a thing which tells time! Yet that’s how A Christmas Story author Jean Shepherd remembered the rifle he had when he was a kid, so Daisy built one especially for the 1983 movie adaptation.

Figure It Out

What board game was designed to pass time during World War II air raids?

Figure It Out

Colonel Mustard could answer this question, but he’s otherwise occupied in the ballroom with a lead pipe. The game, of course, is Clue.

During World War II, England was under constant threat of German attacks. Hiding in cellars for hours during air raids was both terrifying and boring. So, looking for a way to pass the time, Anthony Pratt, a Birmingham, England, law clerk, created a mystery game called Murder. He later patented the game, which proved to be such a big hit that Parker Brothers released it in the United States as Clue. Waddingtons, a gaming company from Leeds, England, released it in the U.K. as Cluedo (a play on clue and ludo, Latin for I play).

Pratt’s original design called for 10 suspects, one of whom would be designated at random as the murder victim. The published board game featured six suspects and a perpetual murder victim (Mr. Black in England, Mr. Boddy in the U.S.); the publishers eliminated Mr. Brown, Mr. Gold, Miss Grey, and Mrs. Silver, and changed Nurse White and Colonel Yellow to Miss White and Colonel Mustard. They also streamlined the number of weapons, eliminating the bomb, syringe, poison, fireplace poker, Pratt’s ax and—with a nod to the Irish—the shillelagh (a type of cudgel, or club). More than 100 million Clue games have sold.

Dirty Young Man

At what magazine did Hugh Hefner work while he raised the money to start Playboy?

Mystery Meat

Which clothing line got its name from a McDonald’s billboard?

Dirty Young Man

Children’s Activities. Hefner served as the magazine’s circulation manager while he raised money to start his sophisticated men’s magazine that would feature journalism, fiction, and nude women. Working title: Stag Party. (Hefner changed the name because another magazine—Stag—had threatened to sue.) Along with the cash he earned at Children’s Activities, Hefner took out a loan to start Playboy (putting up his furniture as collateral) and borrowed the rest from his mom. In December 1953, working from his Chicago apartment, Hefner put all $8,000 into printing the first edition of Playboy. The first cover girl: Marilyn Monroe.

Mystery Meat

See if you can GUESS the answer. In 1977 four French brothers—Armand, Georges, Maurice, and Paul Marciano—moved to California to make their fortune in fashion. Their first label, Marilyn Designer Jeans, sold poorly despite the pop-culture reference, so the Marcianos started searching for a new name. While driving to work one day, Georges saw a McDonald’s billboard. Displayed on it was a picture of a hamburger along with seven words, the first in all capital letters: GUESS what’s in the new Big Mac! So they named their new line of jeans GUESS. (On a side note: Did McDonald’s really think it was a good idea to make customers GUESS what’s in their food?)

Screen Gem

What does the gaming term check mean in Japanese? And what does it have to do with Chuck E. Cheese?

Screen Gem

The Japanese word for check is atari. It comes from a chess-like game called Go—one of the oldest board games in the world. An American computer engineer (and big fan of Go) named Nolan Bushnell decided to create a new generation of games.

In 1972 Bushnell and his partner Ted Dabney released the first commercially available coin-operated arcade game: Computer Space. (It was modeled after the pioneering 1962 video game Spacewar!, which had made its way to only a few college campuses.) But Computer Space didn’t really catch on, either—the directions were too complicated. So Bushnell and Dabney came up with a table-tennis video game that didn’t require directions. They called it PONG. It’s so simple, said Bushnell, that any drunk in any bar could play it. And millions of drunks did just that. However, few of them could pronounce the company’s name—Syzygy (although it might have been fun to hear them try). Besides, Syzygy (from the Latin for conjunction) was also being used by a hippie candlemaking company. Needing a new name for the company, Bushnell borrowed his favorite word from his favorite game…and Atari was born.

What does this have to do with Chuck E. Cheese, the pizza restaurant chain that features that creepy animatronic mouse band? In 1977 Bushnell invented that, too.

Low-Tar Education

What private school was named after a brand of cigarettes?

Go West, Young Man

What sad news sent a 35-year-old man named John B. Stetson on a journey that would lead him to invent the cowboy hat?

Low-Tar Education

Waldorf Schools. In 1919 Emil Molt, the German manufacturer of the popular Waldorf cigarette brand, hired educational theorist Rudolf Steiner to create a new school for his factory workers’ children. Today, there are 998 Waldorf Schools in 60 countries.

Interestingly, nearly everything named Waldorf has a common ancestor: The cigarettes were named after New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, which in turn was named after its founder, William Waldorf Astor. Astor, in turn, got his middle name from his grandfather’s birthplace—Waldorf, Germany.

Go West, Young Man

In 1865 Stetson was diagnosed with tuberculosis—his doctor gave him only six months to live. Longing to see the Wild West