Evan Valentine, Stay-at-Home Dad

• Albert Einstein's last words were spoken in German. Since the attending nurse did not know the language, we'll never know what he said.
• A termite can live thirty years.
• A snail takes 115 days to travel a mile.
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was the result of a Robert Louis Stevenson dream. Stevenson claimed that he was able to dream plots for his stories whenever he felt like it.
• Teddy Roosevelt had four sons. Three of them were killed serving their country during wartime.
• A giraffe can kill a lion with one kick.
• Pablo Picasso's real name was Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad.
• An electric eel will short-circuit itself if it is put into salt water.
• The face of comic book hero Captain Marvel was modeled after Fred MacMurray.
• English writer Ben Johnson was buried standing up in Westminster Abbey because he couldn't afford normal grave space.
• Octavio Guillen and Adriana Martinez were married in Mexico city in 1969 after a world record engagement of 67 years.
• Oh! Susanna earned composer Stephen Collins Foster the grand sum of fifty dollars.
• C.W. Post introduced coupons in 1895 when he offered one cent off to kick off sales for his new cereal, Grape Nuts.
• There were no significant historical accomplishments during the Millard Fillmore administration. He did, however, negotiate a deal with Peru over the use of guano--bird droppings.
• A duck frequently swims while sleeping.
• The Statue of Liberty's pedestal was more expensive than Lady Liberty herself.
• Tooth decay is the most widespread noncontagious disease in the world.
• According to an old English time unit, one moment is 90 seconds.
• The average office chair on wheels travels about eight miles per year.

• An ant has five noses.
• The T.I.D. often found on a doctor's prescription stands for "ter in die," a Latin term meaning "three times a day."
• The home team must provide a referee with 24 footballs for each National Football League game.
• In colonial Boston, schoolteachers earned about seven cents a day.
• Giraffes can not swim.
• The real name of television's Mr. Ed was Bamboo Harvester.
• Jim Hogg, the governor of Texas from 1891 to 1895, named his only daughter Ima Hogg.
• Actor Stewart Granger was born James Stewart.
• Cats can't taste sweet things.
• The Bank of America was originally called The Bank of Italy.
• Lloyd Copeland is credited with the initial development of the microwave oven. His granddaughter is Linda Ronstadt.
• An adult's skin weighs approximately six pounds.
• Only right-handed players can play polo according to the U.S. Polo Association. To date, only 3 players on the world circuit are left-handed.
• France's King Louis XIV bathed only once a year.
• Jimi Hendrix was working on the song The Story of Life the night he died.
• Most surveys say that the least-liked vegetable is the turnip.
• Most snakes can go without eating for a whole year.
• Tombstones were first placed on plots over the dead so that the deceased could not come out and harm the living.
• Hockey is called shinny in Scotland.
• There are 88 keys on a piano--52 white and 36 black.

• As you may have guessed, giraffes are very susceptible to throat infections.
• The Mormon Tabernacle Church in Salt Lake City was built without any nails.
• In tennis, the term "love," meaning zero, comes from the French l'oeuf which is an egg, as in goose egg.
• Zachary Taylor never voted in a presidential election--not even his own.
• The odds against a flipped coin coming up with the same side showing ten times in a row are 1,023 to 1.
• Abraham Lincoln was carrying Confederate money when he was assassinated.
• The shell is 12% of the weight of the entire egg.
• The biggest playing field in sports? A polo field: 12.4 acres.
• Liberace once used the stage name Walter Busterkeys.
• Paul Revere took his midnight ride on a horse named Brown Beauty.
• In China, the day a child is born it is considered one year old.
• An armadillo can be housebroken.
• Rudyard Kipling would write only with black ink.
• In many species of birds, the eyes weigh more than the brain.
• The P.F. in P.F. Flyers stands for Posture Foundation.
• Before 1859, baseball umpires sat behind home plate in rocking chairs.
• The term "senator" comes from the Latin "senex" which means "old man."
• Insects can shiver.
• Until 1869, the master's degree was an honorary award.
• In days of long ago, when railroad men patronized brothels, they left their red lamps outside--such was the derivation of the red light district.
• A bee uses 22 muscles to sting someone.
• The stopwatch seen on television's 60 Minutes is made by Heuer.

• Jimmy Carter has flat feet. He rolled his arches over a Coke bottle every day until they were sufficiently curved to pass his physical for the Naval Academy.
• Adolph Hitler was Time Magazine's Man of the Year for 1938.
• Frankie Avalon held his nose while singing Dee Dee Dinah, his first hit song.
• American naval hero John Paul Jones wound up his career as an admiral in the Russian navy.
• George Washington was scared to death that he would be buried alive. Just before he died, he demanded that his body be kept above ground fo ra few days in the event he might come to.
• Diane Keaton won an Oscar for her film portrayal of Annie Hall. Her real last name is Hall.
• Balboa, the discoverer of the Pacific Ocean, was falsely accused of treason and beheaded in 1517.
• The grandfather of Charles Lindbergh changed the family's last name. If he hadn't, our high-flying hero would have been known as Charles Manson.
• "Utopia" is an ancient Greek word meaning "nowhere."
• When statues of horseback-riding heroes are constructed, the horse's position signifies how the hero died. A statue showing the horse with two hooves raised indicates the hero died in battle; one hoof raised, he died of battle wounds; and if all four hooves are on the ground, the hero died naturally.
• Casanova journeyed with a custom-made portable bath--for two, of course.
• In Washington, D.C., no building can be constructed taller than the Capitol (288 feet).
• U.S. Presidents Grant, Taft, Hoover and Eisenhower never held any other elective office.
• In the 18th century, a trapper could sell the deerskin of a buck for a dollar--hence the term buck.
• A dime has 118 ridges around it.
• Elephants are taught to like peanuts. They eat no peanuts in the wild.
• The ridges on corduroy are called wales.
• Fish can become seasick if kept on board a ship.

• William Shakespeare has no living descendants.
• Honey is used in antifreeze mixes.
• Jon Brower Minnoch had a peak weight of 1,400 pounds, the heaviest on record. His weight loss of 920 pounds is also the most weight loss on record.
• Black-eyed peas are not peas. They are beans.
• Catgut string does not come from a cat. It is from a sheep's intestines.
• The Douglas Fir is not a fir. It is a pine tree.
• The Pennsylvania Dutch are not Dutch. They are German.
• The silkworm is not a worm. It is a caterpillar.
• St. Patrick was not Irish. He was born in Britain.
• The pineapple is a berry.
• A peanut is not a nut. It is a legume.
• A banana tree is not a tree. It is an herb.
• Mark Twain served in the Confederate Army for all of one week. Then he deserted.
• Table tennis balls have been clocked at speeds over 105 miles per hour.
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the first American to have plumbing installed in his home (1840).
• Pigs can run a 7½ minute mile.
• Meet The Press is the longest running show in television broadcast history. It has been on the air since November 20, 1947.
• An inch-thick rope of spider's silk can withstand up to 148,000 pounds of tension.

• Alaska's coastline is longer than that of all the U.S. coastal states combined.
• The tip of a whip makes a cracking noise because it moves faster than the speed of sound, and therefore creates a miniature sonic boom.
• The only domestic animal not mentioned in the Bible is the cat.
• The average person swallows 295 times while eating a meal.
• Circadian dysrhythmia is the official term for jet lag.
• The male mosquito does not bit--only the female does.
• Your left hand does 56 percent of the typing.
• Martin Van Buren was the first U.S. born citizen to become president.
• Until 1936, it was against the law in New York to wear topless bathing suits--for both men and women.
• An adult has 206 bones. A newborn has 300.
• The number of left-handed men is double that of left-handed women.
• Your tongue is the only muscle in your body that is attached at only one end.
• Honeybees and turtles are deaf.
• Calvin Coolidge's will was one sentence long.
• Babies up to seven months old can breathe and swallow at the same time.
• You have to count all the way to one thousand before the letter "a" is used in spelling a number.
• A world class high jumper could clear the bar at almost fifty feet on the moon.
• Seals have been known to swim for as long as eight months and 6,000 miles without touching land.
• An ant's sense of smell is comparable to a dog's.

• In ancient China, doctors received their fees only if their patients were kept healthy. If their health failed, the doctor sometimes paid the patient.
• One scrambled ostrich egg can feed six people.
• Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.
• The honey bee is the only bee that dies after stinging.
• The only mammal that can fly is the bat.
• Maine is the only state in the U.S. which has only one syllable.
• The bee is the only insect that produces food which is eaten by man.
• The great horned owl is the only animal that will eat a skunk.
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is the only American to have a bust at Westminster Abbey in London.
• The kiwi is the only bird that has nostrils at the end of its bill.
• For unknown reasons, the oak tree is struck more than any other by lightning.
• Ray Charles dropped his last name, Robinson, in order to avoid confusion with boxing great Sugar Ray Robinson (whose real name was Walker Smith).
• The roller coaster was invented in Russia in the 17th century.
• A peacock is a male. The female is called a peahen.
• The man who created Wonder Woman was William Moulton Marston, a psychologist who also invented the polygraph.
• A flamingo can only eat when its head is upside down.
• African elephants stay on their feet for 30 or 40 years.
• Robert E. Lee's shoe size was 4½.
• After Wyatt Earp retired as marshal of Tombstone, Arizona, he moved to San Fransisco and became a boxing referee.
• In an average lifetime, the human body produces more than 6200 gallons of saliva.

• One of the reasons rats are used as the primary animals for "animal testing" is that they can not vomit.
• There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.
• In 1915, a telephone call from New York to San Fransisco cost $20.70 for the first three minutes.
• At 90 degrees(F) below zero, your breath will freeze in midair and fall to the ground.
• Queen Anne (1665-1714) outlived all of her seventeen children.
• Until August 7, 1953, Congress forgot to vote on a resolution to admit Ohion into the Union.
• A squirrel lives about nine years.
• In 1885, The Home Insurance Company of Chicago was the tallest building in the world. The skyscraper was nine stories tall.
• In 1944, Fidel Castro was voted Cuba's best schoolboy athlete (he was a lefthanded pitcher).
• Reykjavík, Iceland, is warmer than Chicago in the winter.
• An ostrich's intestinal tract is up to 45 feet long.
• 7'1" basketball great Wilt Chamberlain was the son of 5'8" parents.
• Pigs can become alcoholics.
• The word taxi is spelled the same in English, German, French, Swedish and Portuguese.
• The Mulberry Garden was once a center of prostitution in London. It is now the site of Buckingham Palace.
• Official studies have found that righthanded people tend to scratch with their left hands and vice-versa.
• The average American eats 286 eggs per year.
• The national anthem of Greece has 158 verses.

When discussing the "most famous movie scene ever," several famous scenes come to mind: the opening scene of Alien, the last scene in Planet of the Apes, HAL disobeying Dave, the T-Rex chasing Jeff Goldblum and company, and Moses parting the Red Sea in 1956's The Ten Commandments. There is one scene, however, that has been remade hundreds of times on film: the brutal shower scene in Psycho. This scene is referenced in everything from mocking comedy films to children's cartoons. The music is instantly recognizable (and often imitated) and still makes me uncomfortable just hearing it. Here are some facts about the famous shower scene, lifted from the pages of my Uncle John's Bathroom Reader: 4Ply Edition (©1988, 1989, 1990, 1991).

• There are approximately 65 edits in this 45 second scene.
• Although there's practically no graphic violence in the scene, it has literally scared some people out of taking showers--including Janet Leigh (the actress portraying the protagonist who is stabbed to death in the scene), who says in her autobiography that she refuses to take them anymore.
• Alfred Hitchcock later claimed he made the film as a joke.
• It took seven days to shoot the 45 second scene.
• The blood washing down the drain was actually chocolate sauce.
• Only one shot in the entire shower scene montage shows a knife entering the body and no blood is seen in that shot.
• Some shots use as little as eight frames of film (at 24fps, that's only 1/3 of a second).
• Anthony Perkins (as Norman Bates) did not actually act in the scene. He was on Broadway at the time of the shooting, starring in a play; a stand-in filled in as "Mom."
• Mixed-up priorities: According to Hitchcock, studio executives were more concerned about having a toilet flushing onscreen than they were about the implicit violence.
• Janet Leigh refused to let her daughter (actress Jamie Lee Curtis) watch the movie as a child when it appeared on TV.
• Hitchcock got the movie past censors by first submitting a script with many more horrible scenes, knowing that by allowing them to be cut he would get more leverage on the others (a tactic often used today).

Janet Leigh on the Shower Scene:

"What I was to wear in the shower scene gave the wardrove supervisor migraines. I had to appear nude, without being nude. She and I pored over striptease magazines, hoping one of their costumes would be the answer.... There was an impressive display of pinwheels, feathers, sequins, etc., but nothing suitable for our needs. Finally, the supervisor came up with a simple solution: flesh-colored moleskin.... So each morning for seven shooting days and seventy-one setups, we covered my private parts, and we were in business.

"For sundry reasons, we had to do [the scene] over and over. At long last a take was near completion without a mishap. Abruptly I felt something strange happening around my breasts. The steam from the hot water had melted the adhesive on the moleskin, and I sensed the napped cotton fabric peeling away from my skin. What do to?...I opted for immodesty...and made the correct judgment. That was the printed take."

(By the way, I highly recommend the Uncle John's Bathroom Reader series for articles and facts about anything and everything).