The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in
the World
By A.J. Jacobs
"I'll have to rip you more assholes than an abalone."
- Abalones are a type of snail with five assholes.
The residents of Luxembourg are the biggest boozers in the world.
Baldness is rare in Asians and Native Americans.
At his request, a New York newspaper printed P.T. Barnum's obituary in advance so that he might enjoy it.
Bearbaiting was a popular form of entertainment in 16th-century England. A bear was tied to a stake, and trained
dogs were set upon it. Other variations included a bull tied to a stake and a pony with an ape tied to his back.
Berserkers were savage Norse soldiers from the middle ages who, it is said, went into battle naked. Hence "going
berserk." So to truly go berserk, you should take off your pants.
Early birth control techniques were quite creative, ranging from the delicious (using honey as a spermicide) to the
aerobic (jumping backward seven time after coitus).
Scientists believe Jesus was actually born between 4 and 6 B.C. The Bible talks about Jesus' birth coinciding with
the Star of Bethlehem, which wasn't a star at all, but an astronomical phenomenon. It was either a nova that
occurred in 5 B.C. or the combined light of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, which all nearly lined up in 6 B.C.
Caravaggio was a great, groundbreaking, prolific 17th-century painter- and also a complete jackass. He got in
trouble for tossing a plate of artichokes at a waiter's face. He was arrested for throwing stones at the Roman
Guards. And during a brawl over the score of a tennis match, he killed a man. After the murder, Caravaggio fled
to Rome, hopped from city to city, was arrested, escaped jail, was attacked at the door to an inn, and pleaded for
clemency from the pope- all the while continuing to paint his great, dark religious paintings. Finally, Caravaggio
died of pneumonia- just three days before a document granting him clemency arrived from Rome.
Dick Cheney dropped out of Yale- or was kicked out; it's not clear- and finished at the University of Wyoming. Do
the Democrats know about this? Seems like they could have made a bigger deal out of it.
Chess strategy: develop knights before bishops and you should voluntarily surrender the center. Anticipate
enemy threats and try to form an overall goal- like a kingside attack- that coordinates the forces.
There is a squid that uses a fourth arm to deliver its sperm cells.
Children's Crusade: About thirty thousand kids- led by a French shepherd boy- set out to conquer the Holy Land
from the Muslims by love instead of force. They never made it, instead falling victim to disreputable merchants,
with most being sold into slavery in North Africa.
In the early 1840s, it became fashionable to hold parties where guests would inhale nitrous oxide out of bladders.
In other words, Whip-it parties!
Lightning goes up. To be technical, it does go down first- there's an initial bolt called the "leader" that zips from
the cloud to the ground. But the bright part, the part that flashes, is the "return stroke," which goes from the
ground back to the cloud.
Couvade is a custom wherein the father goes to bed during the birth of his child and simulates the symptoms of
childbirth. He pretends to undergo painful labor, just like the baby's mother. In fact, the mother sometimes gets
to her feet hours after giving birth and waits on the father. Couvade's social function, says the Britannica, is to
emphasize the role of the father in reproduction. It was most recently practiced in the early 20th century in the
Basque country.
Baseball is based on the British game of rounders- a less genteel version of the game, where you could get the
runner out by beaning him with the ball.
A Russian nobleman patented a coffin that allowed the corpse- if he regained consciousness after burial- to
summon help by ringing a bell.
Descartes argues that he was attracted to cross-eyed women because, as a child, he loved a cross-eyed
playmate. He says that as soon as he realized the origin of his fetish, he was freed from it and could, once again,
love women with normally spaced eyeballs. This insight, says the Britannica, "was the basis for Descartes'
defense of free will and of the mind's ability to control the body."
Dogs have a third eyelid to protect the eyeball from irritants, which seems like a damn good idea.
The days are getting longer because of the drag on the earth. Half a billion years ago there were only twenty
hours in a day.
Ecstasy was patented as an appetite suppressant by Merck in the 1920s.
If a stranger says he was born any day between October 4 and October 15, 1582, he's lying. There were no such
dates. That's when the Western world switched to the Gregorian calendar, and they skipped those ten days.
Never happened.
Alexander the Great's body was returned from Babylon to Macedonia in a cask of honey. And when British
admiral Lord Nelson's body was shipped back to England from Trafalgar, it was pickled in Brandy. The Egyptian
mummifiers’ system consisted of: 1) Remove the brain and intestines, wash in palm wine, and place in vases. 2)
Fill body cavity with perfumes. 3) Stitch incisions and place body in potassium nitrate for seventy days. 4)
Remove, wash, and wrap in cotton bandages. Enjoy.
"Facial feedback" is when your brain senses that your facial muscles are in a happy position, so the brain figures,
Hey, I must be happy.
There are four ways of coping with anger: 1) Confrontative coping ("stood my ground and fought"), 2) Distancing
("didn't let it get to me"), 3) Planful problem solving ("changed or grew as a person"), 4) Positive reappraisal.
Studies show that the first two methods- confrontation and distancing- just make people more upset. The second
two- planful problem solving and positive reappraisal- make them happier.
The most historic encyclopedia is Diderot's Encyclopedie, which made its debut in Paris in August of 1751.
Editors were jailed, the volumes themselves were locked up in the Bastille alongside murderers and madmen, and
police scoured Paris in search of manuscripts to burn. The Encyclopedie- written by the intellectual rock stars of
the day, including Voltaire and Rousseau- went out of its way to squash myths and needle the clergy, even
featuring a quasi-flattering write-up of atheism. Later at a dinner, King Louis XV got into a squabble with his
guests about the correct composition of gunpowder. The solution: they dispatched someone to track down a
copy of the illegal Encyclopedie. After that, according to Voltaire, the king grudgingly tolerated the pesky volumes.
The first Britannica was opinionated and eccentric, defining suicide as "an act of cowardice disguised as heroism,"
prescribing almond oil and tobacco smoke blown up the anus for excessive gas, and recommending cold baths for
melancholy, madness, and the bites of mad dogs. Also, it said that cats often pretend to sleep when "in reality
they are meditating mischief," and that cat mothers "devour their offspring."
In the 1980 Britannica, in the section on John Adam's retirement, it says he spent his old age "enjoying his
tankard of hard cider each morning before breakfast" and "rejoicing at the size of his manure pile."
Though the eleventh edition is widely popular and many think it was the best, it was also racist as hell. "The
negro would appear to stand on a lower evolutionary plane than the white man, and to be more closely related to
the highest anthropoids." Haitians are "ignorant and lazy" and the natives of the Philippines are "physical
weaklings... with large clumsy feet"
Friedrich Engels was the ultimate limousine liberal. During the day, he was an effective German businessman,
crunching his numbers and closing his deals. But after hours, Engels wrote spittle-emitting articles against the
evils of capitalism. He also found time to learn twenty-four languages. Without his allowance, Marx may not have
had time to formulate his revolutionary theories.
Ethical relativism says that there is no such thing as absolute morals.
In pre-British India, a man's widow was burned alongside his corpse.
Etruscans sometimes wrote boustrophedon style, in which the direction of writing alternates with each line.
Zero on the Fahrenheit scale was set as the temperature of an equal ice-salt mixture. Very convenient.
The first image successfully broadcast in the history of American television was the dollar sign. How appropriate.
Rabbits are a symbol of fertility. The Easter bunny was imported from pagan rituals and did not actually have
much interaction with Jesus.
A country's jurisdiction extends to three miles from its coast. This came about because a cannon's range was
about three nautical miles.
Assortive mating is when you pick a mate who is similar to you.
Gandhi went through a phase of adolescent rebellion, marked by secret atheism, petty thefts, furtive smoking
and- most shocking of all for a boy born in a Vaishnava family- meat eating.
The faster you read (to an extent), the greater your comprehension. If you read slowly, your brain gets bored.
At the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln was not the main speaker that day, speaking for only two minutes. The big
attraction was a two-hour speech by Edward Everett, a former Massachusetts congressman and the president of
Harvard, who was considered the greatest orator of his day. Two hours versus two minutes, doesn't seem fair.
A blue moon is caused by the dust in the air following a forest fire.
In the Ems telegram of 1870, Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck edited the report of a diplomatic meeting to
purposely offend the French and start the Franco-Prussian War.
The grateful dead folktale goes like this: A traveler finds a corpse of a man who was denied burial because he
had too many unpaid debts. The nice traveler pays for a burial, and goes on his way. Sometime later, the spirit
of the corpse appears to the traveler in the form of an animal and saves him from some danger. Finally, the
animal reveals himself to the traveler to be the grateful spirit of the dead man and offers him two free tickets to
Red Rock and some really awesome hash brownies.
Card games all fall into one of two categories: those based on rank (such as bridge) and those based on
combinations (such as poker).
Cereals come in only four varieties: flaked, puffed, shredded, and granular.
The first true frat was Kappa Alpha, begun at Union College in 1825.
Marginal utility theory says that customers differ in the amount of satisfaction they derive from each unit of
commodity. When a man with only seven slices of bread gets offered another slice, the one extra slice gives him
a lot of happiness. But if a man has a couple hundred slices of bread- enough to keep him waist deep in
sandwiches for months- another slice of bread won't send his spirits soaring. Though it verges on common sense
that money means more to those who don't have it, it's a good thing to think about the next time your leaving a tip.
Erik the Red was banished from Iceland in 982 A.D. for manslaughter. He called his new home Greenland in
order to entice more people to join him there.
Gymnasium: the literal Greek translation is "school for naked exercise."
The haboob is a hot wind in the Sahara Desert that stirs up huge quantities of sand. The sand forms a dense
wall that can reach a height of three thousand feet.
John Hanson is sometimes referred to as the first president of the United States, thanks to his role as president of
the Continental Congress in 1781.
William Henry Harrison campaigned by passing out free hard cider to voters. The man basically bought his way
into the presidency with booze.
Over the centuries, cultures have put bands on various parts of the skull to squeeze it into an hourglass shape.
Humans have gone to town on their own teeth, chipping them, putting pegs in them, blackening them, carving
relief designs into them. The Mayan Indians considered crossed eyes beautiful, and induced the condition by
hanging an object between the baby's eyes. The tongue has had a rough time, getting slashed (some Australian
tribes) and having a cord of thorns pulled through it (the Aztecs). Labia have been elongated. Necks have been
stretched like a mound of pasta dough (the Padaung women wear a fifteen-inch brass neck ring that pulls four
vertebrae into the neck).
Female blue whales are the largest recorded animal, weighing in at two hundred tons, with a heart of fifteen
hundred pounds.
Heroin was first developed by the Bayer Company. That'll whisk your headache away faster than a couple of
dozen aspirin.
Ben Hogan's exceptional will enabled him to play winning golf after an automobile accident in which he was injured
so severely that he was not expected to walk again.
The great Greek orator Demosthenes suffered from a speech defect- he stammered and had terrible
pronunciation- but he overcame it by speaking with pebbles in his mouth.
John Fielding- one of the founders of the London police- was blind and could identify three thousand thieves by
their voices. Sort of a primitive but effective fingerprinting system.
Francis Ford Coppola got interested in directing when he was laid up with polio and put on puppet shows for
himself.
Hollywood was founded by a man named Horace Wilcox, "a prohibitionist who envisioned it a community based on
his sober religious principles.”
In the 18th century, some hoop skirts were an astounding eighteen feet wide.
Hummingbirds beat their wings up to eighty times a second, which is astounding. But even more astounding: they
are extremely territorial, and have been known to chase off crows, hawks, and even humans.
John George II, the ruler of Saxony in the 17th century, killed an astonishing total of 42,649 red deer. "He refused
the crown of Bohemia not for political reasons but because Bohemia stags were smaller than Saxon ones"- and
he erected a fence between Saxony and Bohemia to keep out those stunted Bohemia mammals.
General knowledge rarely comes in handy in crosswords. You need to know nouns of about four letters with a
high percentage of vowels.
Humans are composed of seventy-five trillion cells, they are 60% water by weight, are bipedal mammals (a
distinction unique to humans. Kangaroos don't count because their tail acts as a third leg), and have about a
hundred thousand hairs on their head that grow at a rate of a half inch per month.
The ancients believed in "maternal impressions," which means that the baby's personality is affected by
experiences the woman goes through while pregnant (this is why Eskimo mothers eat ducks' wings while carrying;
they hope to make their babies good paddlers). Aristotle endorsed the theory of telegony, which says that an
infant's inborn traits come not only from his biological father, but also other males who mated with the mother in
the past.
Ben Franklin endorsed the turkey as the national bird because he considered the eagle cowardly.
The origin of the phrase "dog days of summer" derives from the ancient belief that the Dog Star, Sirius, gives off
heat of a second sun, so when it's rising it causes the weather to be particularly hot.
The queen bee has sex only once in her life, but stores the sperm in a pouch for use throughout the next five
years.
Irony: the French horn is from Germany. The Great Dane has no connection to Denmark. Cold-blooded animals
often have warmer blood than warm-blooded animals. Softwood is often harder than hardwood. A cold is not
caused by the cold. Death Valley is teeming with life. Starfish are not fish. The electric eel is not an eel.
"I feel as emasculated as a crab after an encounter with a barnacle."
- barnacles consume crab testes
The 1905 college football season was so violent, no fewer than eighteen players died from injuries on the field.
Teddy Roosevelt called a presidential commission to investigate. From that came the legalization of the forward
pass.
Jesse James, the greatest robber of the Wild West, died in 1882 when a gang member shot him in the back while
he was at home adjusting a picture.
Peter Bales, a 16th century Brit who was famous for his microscopic writing, produced a Bible the size of a walnut.
Blondin, a tightrope walker in the 1800s, tiptoed across Niagara Falls, stopping in the middle to make and eat an
omelet.
Samuel Langley finished a heavier-than-air machine nine days before the Wright Brothers. When he launched it
from a catapult, it got snagged and crashed into the Potomac River; if not, many think he would have gone down
in history as the first.
Elisha Gray filed papers with the patent office on February 14, 1876, for his telephone device- just a couple of
hours after Alexander Graham Bell filed his.
Mormons were the first settlers in Las Vegas.
High IQs "are strongly associated with the 35-yard dash and balancing on one foot."
Liar paradox: If the sentence, "This sentence is not true" is true, then it is not true, and if it is not true, then it is
true.
Roman households often had a barber on staff. They would offer haircuts to guests.
Louis the XIV tried to ban biological weapons. An Italian chemist came to him with plans for the first bacteriological
weapon. He refused it and paid the chemist an annual salary to keep the bioweapon a secret from the world.
LSD can be absorbed readily from any mucosal surface, even from the ear.
Why is the sky blue? Because dust in the atmosphere scatters the smaller blue rays of the sun.
Lucky Luciano was a native of Sicily who moved to New York City as a kid in 1906. Lucky was a precocious little
menace, already mugging and extorting at the impressive age of ten. In his teens and twenties, he broadened his
skill set to include bootlegging, prostitution, narcotics- classic mafia stuff. He earned his nickname, Lucky, both by
evading arrest and for winning at games of craps. Not to mention his luck at being the one Mafiosi to live through
one of those notoriously unpleasant "one-way rides." In October of 1929, Luciano was "abducted by four men in
a car, beaten, stabbed repeatedly with an ice pick, had his throat slit from ear to ear, and was left for dead on
Staten Island." After shaking that off, Luciano killed his boss Joe Masseria at a Coney Island restaurant, and by
the early thirties, he had been promoted to capo di tutti capi. The fun ended in 1936. Luciano was busted for his
brothel and call girl empire, and was sentenced to prison for up to fifty years. Still, he continued to rule from
prison. In 1942, the luxury liner Normandie blew up in New York harbor as it was getting converted for military use
for WW2. Sabotage was suspected. The allies needed New York harbor to be safe, since key provisions were
shipped through there. So navy intelligence made the trek to Luciano's prison cell and asked his help. Luciano-
who still controlled the waterfront and the longshoremen's union- gave the orders. Sabotage on the docks
ended. As a reward for his war efforts, Luciano's sentence was commuted, and he was deported to Italy, where
he kept himself busy with drug trafficking and smuggling aliens to America. He died of a heart attack in 1962.
Abe Lincoln was the only president to hold a patent- it's for a device that lifts boats over levees.
Elephant copulation lasts twenty seconds.
Golf balls have dimples in order to create turbulence around the ball, which reduces the drag as it flies through
the air.
The opposite of deja vu is called jamais vu, which is a false unfamiliarity with a situation.
Memorization is a business where the rich get richer. The more you know about a topic, the more you'll be able to
remember.
A French scientist defined the meter as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator.
There is a master kilogram made of platinum-iridium in a town called Sevres.
In a letter Einstein wrote to his wife to save his doomed marriage he wrote: "You will make sure that I get my three
meals a day in my room. You are neither to expect intimacy nor to reproach me in any way."
Einstein refused to celebrate birthdays. As he explained: "It is a known fact that I was born, and that is enough."
The speed of light is the same for every observer, and since the speed of light can never change, time must
change. Relativity says time slows down as you go faster.
Mime started in Greco-Roman times. The usual mime plot centered principally on scenes of adultery and other
vice. Evidence exists that acts of adultery were actually performed on the mime stage during the Roman Empire.
Also, execution scenes with convicted criminals in place of actors are on record.
American-to-British translation: Our ladybug is their ladybird. Lumber in Britain refers to old furniture. What we
call english in billiards, they call side. A surgeon in Britain is called Mr., as the honorific Dr is reserved for
physicians. Aluminum in Britain is called aluminium.
The Magnus effect is what causes tennis balls with topspin to dive downward. It's actually a special case of
Bernoulli's Theorem which we can thank for keeping airplanes aloft, and has to do with a greater pressure on top
of the ball than under it.
When Mozart was thirteen, he heard the secret chorus of the Sistine Choir and copied it out from memory.
Mussolini, also known as Il Duce, grew up poor, his family crowded into two rooms on the second floor of a small,
dilapidated palazzo in the town of Predappio. His dad was a blacksmith, who spent most of his money on his
mistress. The meals eaten by his children were meager. An angry young man, Mussolini spent his youth getting
into trouble and stabbing fellow students at his high school with a penknife. He went on to marry the daughter of
his father's hated mistress. He went on to oppress millions and later had his own mistress. She was Jewish.
The cuckoo is what is called an aggressive mimic. The female cuckoo surreptitiously lays her eggs in the nests of
other species- who are fooled because the cuckoo eggs look like their own eggs- where the eggs will hatch the
baby cuckoos, which proceed to murder their adoptive brothers and sisters by pushing the other eggs out of the
nest.
The wrasse, a cleaner fish that does a little dance to tell the big fish it's time for some dental work. And the big
fish relaxes, opens its mouth, and lets the wrasse eat its leftovers.
The Napoleonic Wars were so expensive, that England started the first income tax to pay for them.
Napoleon sold the western half of the United States to Jefferson for less than three cents an acre.
After the age of twenty, humans lose 50,000 brain cells a day to atrophy.
Isaac Newton's revelation came during a six-year self-imposed exile from British society. It was 1678, and he had
just suffered the first of his nervous breakdowns, which caused him to lock himself away in his home. Yes, Newton
was a complete nut job, the angriest and nastiest scientist in history. He had "pronounced psychotic tendencies."
Among his many feuds was one with philosopher John Locke, to whom he sent strange, paranoid letters accusing
Locke of trying to "entangle him with women." Newton also hated the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz. The two were in battle over who had invented calculus, and toward the end of his life, Newton expended
an enormous amount of energy discrediting Leibniz- even after Leibniz died. "Almost any paper on any subject
from those years is apt to be interrupted by a furious paragraph against the German philosopher... In the end,
only Newton's death ended his wrath." During his seclusion, Newton became obsessed with occult works about
alchemy and magic treatises, many of them in what was called the hermetic tradition, even copying these texts by
hand. These occult books talked about substances having mysterious sympathies and antipathies toward one
another, forces that could affect something even without touching it. The occult forces inspired him to envision
forces of attraction and repulsion that worked at a distance, a breakthrough that eventually led to his theory of
universal gravity.
Waves break when the wave depth equals 1.3 times the wave height.
Utilitarians believe in the greatest good for the greatest number of people, while deontologists believe in personal
rights.
Chou was the king of China in the 12th century B.C. To please his concubine, he built a lake of wine and forced
naked men and women to chase one another around it. Also, he strung the forest with human flesh.
"Jack and Jill" is actually an extended allegory about taxes. The jack and jill were two form of measurement in
early England. When Charles I scaled down the jack (originally two ounces) so as to collect higher sales tax, the
jill, which was by definition twice the size of the jack, was automatically reduced, hence "came tumbling after."
In the past, hatters often became ill because they used mercury salts to make felt out of rabbit fur. The mercury
poisoning led to mental deterioration known as erythrism. Hence the phrase "mad as a hatter."
One of the causes of the Opium Wars was a crusading Chinese official who dumped confiscated opium into the
ocean to try to squash the drug trade. The opium dumping- just like the Boston Tea Party before it- really
angered the Brits, who were making lots of money from the opium trade. So England started a war with China.
The Siberian boreal forest makes up about one fifth of the world's forested area.
Orgasms can be experienced from infancy.
Oysters can change sex according to the temperature of the water.
Before Satchel Paige's major league career- which began when he was surprisingly old, in his late forties- he
barnstormed the country, traveling as many as thirty thousand miles a year, pitching for any team willing to meet
his price. Any team at all. He played for various teams in the Negro League, Central America, the Caribbean,
and South America, and "wearing a false red beard, he also played for the bearded House of David team." The
House of David baseball team was made up of members of a Michigan-based apocalyptic cult who all wore long
beards. A baseball-loving cult with excessive facial hair.
Today, Thomas Paine is a beloved Revolutionary War hero; back then, the majority thought him a scoundrel. His
Common Sense series was a huge hit- the first sold 500,000 copies; a later one was read by George Washington
at Valley Forge and launched the phrase "These are the times that try men's souls." Paine refused to take profits
on it so that cheap editions could be sold. Paine wrote a defense of the French Revolution. His ideas were solid-
relief for the poor, pensions for the aged, public works for the unemployed, a progressive income tax. But in
England, where he was living at the time, it got him charged with treason. Things worsened when he wrote
another pamphlet attacking organized religion. Though he made clear in the pamphlet that he was a deist and
believed in the Supreme Being, he still got charged as an atheist. And that's how he died- broke, drunk, and
seen as an infidel.
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the same day- July 4, 1826, fifty years after the founding of the
country.
It's believed that the ancient Egyptians used geese as guard animals.
During the 9th century, Pope Stephen VI hated his predecessor Pope Formosus' policies so much, he had his
corpse exhumed, propped up on a throne, and put on trial. Shockingly, Formosus lost. As punishment, his
fingers were cut off and his corpse was thrown into the Tiber River.
There is a Burmese judicial practice called "ordeal by divination," in which two parties are given candles of equal
size that are lit simultaneously; the owner of the candle that lasts longer wins the case.
The medieval practice of "appeal by corpse" allowed the dead body to point out the murderer.
Phryne was a famous prostitute in ancient Greece. She was on trial for blasphemy, a capital offense. Things
looked bleak so she tore her dress and "displayed her bosom, which so moved the jury that they acquitted her."
This may have resulted because jury duty lasted an entire year in ancient Greece.
Like his teacher Socrates, Plato said that men already had all the knowledge of the world; they just need to have
it drawn out of them.
Edgar Allen Poe married his cousin when she was thirteen.
The modern marathon gets its distance- 26 miles and 385 yards- because the British Olympic committee in 1908
wanted it to go from Windsor Castle to the Royal Box in London Stadium.
Pythagoras was the inventor of the perfectly rational geometric theorem that bears his name. He was also a
complete and total wacko. He founded a religious brotherhood in ancient Greece- and by religious brotherhood I
mean fringe cult. Members of the brotherhood were told to "refrain from speaking about the holy, wear white
clothes, observe sexual purity, not touch beans, and so forth." Pythagoras also had a complex set of beliefs
about the spiritual qualities of mathematics and the holy attributes of certain numbers. The brothers allegedly
drowned one of their members because he pointed out the existence of irrational numbers, which didn't jibe with
the Pythagorean worldview.
The gay movement stole the word "queer" and took all its power away from the seething homophobes.
A journalist came up with the term "Impressionism" as a jeer, but Monet and his pals stole it as their own.
Raccoons wash their food before eating it.
Strawberries, blackberries, and raspberries are not actually berries. They are aggregate fruits. On the other
hand, bananas, oranges, and pumpkins are berries. Botanically speaking, a berry requires a single ovary with
lots of seeds.
The bandicoot male has a two-tipped penis, and the female a double-slotted vagina, so they can have a little orgy
without sending out invitations.
You need only three rambunctious people to legally qualify as a riot.
In 1856, the French government sent Robert-Houdin to Algeria to combat the influence of the mystical dervishes
by duplicating their feats. I like the idea of magicians being called into war service.
Lichen is part fungus, part algae, and all-American. George Washington's starving troops ate lichen off the rocks
at Valley Forge. Lichen saved our country. If it weren't for lichen- or more specifically rock tripe, a type of lichen-
we'd all be playing cricket.
The inventor of steer wrestling was an African-American cowboy named Bill Pickett. He would tussle a steer to the
ground and bite the steer's upper lip in a "bulldog grip."
Max Schmeling was an Aryan boxer who was Hitler's champion in the ring, the Great Nazi Hope. He gained fame
for his bout with Joe Louis in 1936. Before the fight he studied slow-motion films of Louis and found a weakness-
Louis always dropped his guard after delivering a series of left jabs. Thanks to that information, Schmeling
knocked Louis out. By the time of the rematch in 1938, Joe fixed his bad habit and flattened Schmeling- dealing a
nice blow to Arian propaganda. Schmeling was "openly associated with Jews," had a trainer who was Jewish, and
shielded two Jewish boys in his Berlin apartment during Kristallnacht. His refusal to abandon Jewish friends got
him in trouble with the Nazi regime. They assigned him to the dangerous parachute forces. Later in life,
Schmeling gave financial aid to the widow of his former nemesis, Joe Louis.
In 1906, the modern world's greatest play write, George Bernard Shaw, sat for a nude photo in the pose of
Rodin's thinker.
All sorts of people have used their dreams to help them in their work. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote "Kubla
Khan" after composing it in his dream (he had fallen asleep reading about the Mongol conqueror). Robert Louis
Stevenson, author of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, said that his writing was helped by "little people" in his dreams. A
German chemist figured out the structure of benzene by dreaming of a snake with its tail in its mouth.
Snails can actually jump quite rapidly, by a violent flexing of their foot.
In the Spanish-American War, "Spain declared war on the United States on April 24, followed by a US declaration
of war on the 25th, which was made retroactive to April 21."
The Pastry War was an epic clash between Mexico and France that began when a French pastry cook living in
Mexico City claimed that Mexican army officers had damaged his restaurant.
The War of Jenkin's Ear- between England and Spain- started because a British sailor named Jenkins claimed his
ear was cut off by the Spanish coast guard. He even presented the remains to Parliament.
The Pig War, between the British and the Americans in 1859 in the San Juan Islands occurred over a marauding
British pig in an American potato patch.
The Beer War happened in 15th century Germany over a beer tax.
The Boston Pilgrims won baseball's first World Series in 1903
The melody to the Star-Spangled Banner was taken from a British drinking song. Which is odd, since Key wrote it
during the War of 1812 against...the British.
"Stuttering tends to appear when a child's parents anxiously overreact to normal pauses and repetition, which
may also explain the tendency of the stutterer to be an only child or to have no siblings close in age."
The Taiping Rebellion was a Chinese upheaval in the mid-19th century that "took an estimated 20,000,000 lives."
It occurred about the same time as the American Civil War, which was horrible and bloody- and took less than
700,000 lives. About 4% of the Taiping total. The rebellion started with Hung Hsiu Chuan, a peasant from a small
town in southern China. His early life was a disappointment- he took the Confucian civil service exam several
times, but failed repeatedly. After his third failure, he suffered a breakdown, and experienced a vision in which he
saw an old man with a golden beard, who told him the world was overrun with evil demons and presented him with
a sword. After the fourth failure, Hung found a book that was written by a missionary, basically a Chinese-
language Christianity for Dummies. He read the book and decided that the golden-bearded man in his vision was
God, and he was the new Jesus Christ. Hung didn't have the best grasp of Christianity- he ignored the kindness
and humility of the Christian God and instead focused on his vengefulness- but that didn't stop him from declaring
himself Heavenly King. He demanded an equal distribution of land, the abolition of gambling, prostitution, and
opium smoking, and an end to the repressive Manchu rulers. He started out with hundreds, then thousands of
followers. As the rebels passed through the countryside, whole towns and villages joined them, till their ranks
swelled to more than a million. Hung took Nanking and made the city his capital. In 1860, the Taiping troops
failed to take Shanghai. One of the leaders in the anti-Taiping forces was a fearsome and ruthless man named
General Tso. In 1862 Nanking was surrounded and it fell in 1864.
In the 19th century, theaters featured a genre called "the racing drama," where live horses galloped on treadmills
set into the stage floor. The chariot race from Ben Hur was staged in this way in 1899.
The IQ test is defective because it tests only one type of intelligence- analytical intelligence (the ability to solve
problems). It neglects creative intelligence (the ability to come up with new problems) and practical intelligence
(the skill of incorporating solutions into real life).
Crystallized intelligence is the accumulation of knowledge, which is considered less valuable than fluid
intelligence, which is the ability of people to mentally adapt to the situation and remain flexible when reasoning
and problem solving. Most modern theorists agree flexibility is a major key to intelligence.
In ancient civilizations- Greek, Sumerian, Roman, and so forth- daylight was divided into twelve hours. Thus,
depending on the season, the length of an hour oscillated between about forty-five and seventy-five present-day
minutes.
Ambergris is a foul smelling substance found in whale intestines that, when dry, takes on a sweet aroma, and is
used in spices and perfumes.
As a young man, Thomas Jefferson studied fifteen hours a day, practiced violin for three, and spent the remaining
six eating or sleeping.
The Tunguska event was an "enormous aerial explosion that, on June 30, 1908, flattened approximately five
hundred thousand acres of pine forest near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, central Siberia, in Russia. The
energy of the explosion was equivalent to that of ten to fifteen megatons of TNT. Uncertain evidence of various
kinds suggests that the explosion was perhaps caused by a comet fragment colliding with the Earth."
Mark Twain submitted the very first typewritten manuscript to a publisher.
Chicago got the nickname "Windy City," not because of the wind, but because the early Chicago politicians were
full of wind, as in hot air.
The first University was in Bologna, Italy in the 11th century.
Dalmatian dogs and humans have strangely similar urine. They're the only two mammals to produce uric acid.
The ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica stated: "The few thinkers of America born south of the Mason
and Dixon line are outnumbered by those belonging to the single State of Massachusetts."
Freud said that pyromania and bed-wetting are linked.
Spiders sometimes eat their webs when they're done with them.
The White House was originally called the President's Palace.
Teddy Roosevelt renovated the second floor of the White House to make room for his "children's exotic pets,
which included raccoons, snakes, a badger, and a bear."
Victoria Woodhull was an amazing woman- the first female stockbroker and the first woman to run for president,
among other things. Born in Ohio in 1838, she spent her childhood traveling with her family's fortune telling
business. Woodhull drifted further into fringe causes. She began publishing a reform magazine that advocated
communal living, free love, equal rights, and women's suffrage. She pleaded for women's right to vote before
congress as well.
Franklin Yang founded the American Philosophical Society when he was twenty-one, started the first insurance
company in our country, discredited a quack named Franz Mesmer who allegedly put people in trances (hence
the word "mesmerize"). On the other hand, Franklin did satisfy his libido with "low women."
The Swiss do not have a monopoly on yodeling. The pygmies and the Australian Aborigines are also proficient
yodelers.
During WW2, Londoners ate the fish out of their city's zoo.