Free Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Extraordinary Book of Facts: And Bizarre Information by Bathroom Readers' Hysterical Society Page A

cat’s litter box was frozen solid. She tried ashes, but wound up with paw prints all over the house. Sawdust didn’t work, either. As it happened, her neighbors, the Lowes, sold a product called fuller’s earth, a kiln-dried clay that was used to soak up oil and grease spills in factories. Ed Lowe, their 27-year-old son, had been looking for a new market for the stuff—he’d tried unsuccessfully to sell it to local farmers as nesting material for chickens. On the spur of the moment, he convinced Draper that this stuff would make great cat litter. He really had noidea if it would . . . but it did! He sensed the sales potential, put some fuller’s earth in paper bags and labeled it Kitty Litter with a grease pen. Then he drove around, trying to sell it. (Actually, he gave it away at first to get people to try it.) Once people tried it, they invariably came back for more.
    SLOT MACHINES
    Other types of gambling machines date back as far as the 1890s, but the first one to really catch on was a vending machine for chewing gum introduced by the Mills Novelty Company in 1910. Their machine dispensed three flavors of gum—cherry, orange, and plum—depending on which fruits appeared on three randomly spinning wheels. If three bars reading “1910 Fruit Gum” appeared in a row, the machine gave extra gum; if a lemon appeared, it gave no gum at all (which is why lemon came to mean something unsatisfactory or defective.) You can’t get gum in a slot machine anymore—the 1910 Fruit Gum machine was so popular that the company converted them to cash payouts—but the same fruit symbols are still used in slot machines today.
    PLASTIC WRAP
    Invented by accident in 1933, when Ralph Wiley, a researcher at Dow Chemical, was washing his lab equipment at the end of the day and found that a thin plastic film coating the inside of one vial wasn’t coming off. The stuff was polyvinylidene chloride, and after further experimentation, Wiley found that the stuff was clingy, resisted chemicals, and was impervious to air and water. It was so tough, in fact, that he wanted to call it eonite, after an imaginary indestructible substance in the Little Orphan Annie comic strip. Dow decided to call it Saran Wrap instead.
    WATER BEDS
    The direct ancestor of the modern water bed was invented in 1853 by Dr. William Hooper of Portsmouth, England, who saw the beds as a medical device that could be used to treat bedridden patients suffering from bedsores, as well as burn victims, and arthritis and rheumatism sufferers. His water bed wasn’t much more than a rubber hot water bottle big enough to sleep on. It wasn’t until 1967 that San Francisco design student Charles Hall made an improved model out of vinyl and added an electric heater to keep the bed warm all the time.

What’s on TV?
     
    Thirty thousand Hawaiians signed a petition to change Maui’s name to Gilligan’s Island.
    There was so little dialogue in the original Mission Impossible TV show that Peter Graves, the star, once fell asleep in the middle of a scene and no one noticed.
    In a 1990 preschool poll, Mister Rogers was first choice for president of the United States.
    Johnny Carson once sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door. Ed McMahon sold kitchen utensils.
    Desi Arnaz’s mother was one of the heirs to the Bacardi Rum fortune.
    Ted Danson once appeared in a TV commercial as a package of lemon chiffon pie mix.
    Ads for Super Bowl 2006 hit a record high of $2.4 million for 30 seconds.
    According to Sesame Street , Kermit the Frog is left-handed.
    Cheers has the most Emmy nominations—117—for a TV program.
    Britain is the biggest market for illegally downloaded TV shows in the world, followed by Australia.
    Oscar the Grouch has a pet—a worm named Slimey.
    First TV show to win an Emmy for Outstanding Drama: Pulitzer Prize Playhouse , in 1950.
    Only about a third of Gilligan’s Island episodes are about getting off the island.
    In a typical year, 14,030 answers are questioned on