Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids Read Online Free Page A

typical, you’ll use about 68,000 gallons of water and spend five to seven weeks of your life brushing your teeth.
    A person’s teeth are home to nearly 11,000 million bacteria per quarter inch.
    Dentists say that grazing is worse for your teeth than eating regular meals. Eating of any kind—whether a meal or a snack—activates the cavity-causing bacteria in your mouth for 20 minutes or more. So the fewer times you eat, the better off your teeth will be.
    Archaeologists have found ancient mummies with metal braces on their teeth.
    Odontophobia is the fear of dental treatment.
    Every year, hundreds of people swallow their false teeth.
    At one time, denture makers added uranium to false teeth to give them a “healthy” glow.
    One in 10 men grind their teeth while sleeping.
    The Catholic patron saint of dentists is Saint Apollonia—an angry mob knocked out all of her teeth when she wouldn’t renounce her faith.
    Russian czar Peter the Great loved playing dentist, especially extracting teeth.
    Actor James Dean had two false front teeth. For fun, he liked to drop them into his glass while drinking.
    One of Isaac Newton’s teeth was auctioned in 1816 for $3,633 ($35,700 today).
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    The Catholic Saint Brigid of Ireland was sainted in part because she performed the miracle of turning water into beer.

Our Daily Bread
    The Chillicothe Baking Company (Missouri) was the first to sell bread packaged and sliced (1928).
    During the Middle Ages, people often used stale bread as plates.
    The yeasts that make bread rise are similar to the yeasts that grow between your toes.
    Yeast grows fast. Under ideal conditions, 200 grams will grow into 150 tons in just five days, enough to make a million loaves of bread.
    Some San Francisco bakers still make sourdough bread from dough started in 1849. But despite San Francisco’s association with sourdough bread, Oakland, just across the San Francisco Bay, produces more sourdough bread than any other city in the world.
    New Yorkers eat more Wonder Bread per capita than do residents of any other U.S. city.
    The word pumpernickel means “devil’s fart” in German. It got its name in the 15th century when the bread was especially coarse, foul-smelling, hard to eat, and typically produced a lot of flatulence in the people who ate it.
    Farmers in Kansas harvest enough wheat each year to make 36 billion loaves of bread.
    Gallup poll results: 49 percent of Americans don’t know that white bread is made from wheat.
    Bread changes color and flavor when toasted due to a complex chemical reaction called the “Maillard reaction,” after Louis-Camille Maillard, who first analyzed the effect in 1912.
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    GOT A DOLLAR?
    Dollar bills typically wear out after about 18 months of circulation. Other denominations don’t get as much day-to-day use, so they tend to last longer.

Hating Shakespeare
    â€œWith the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. The intensity of my impatience with him occasionally reaches such a pitch, that it would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.”
    â€”George Bernard Shaw
    â€œShakespeare never has six lines together without a fault. Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion.”
    â€”Samuel Johnson
    â€œI have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.”
    â€”Charles Darwin
    â€œShakespeare’s name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down. He has no invention as to stories, none whatever. He took all his plots from old novels, and threw their stories into a dramatic shape, at as little expense of thought as you or I could turn his plays back again into prose tales.”
    â€”Lord