Free Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids by Bathroom Readers’ Institute Page B

“Maryland, My Maryland,” is sung to the tune of “O Tannenbaum.”
    ARKANSAS: Arkansas claims two state songs, one state anthem, and one state historical song, “The Arkansas Traveler,” written in the mid-1800s by Colonel Sanford Faulkner. In the 20th century, a state committee rewrote the lyrics to make them less offensive: the original was about a bumpkin fiddle player who wouldn’t fix his leaky roof. Few people know either set of lyrics, but many know the melody—it’s the kids’ song “I’m Bringing Home a Baby Bumblebee.”
    LOUISIANA: One of Louisiana’s official state songs is “Give Me Louisiana.” The other is “You Are My Sunshine,” a song long associated with Governor Jimmie Davis, who led the state from 1944 to 1948 and again from 1960 to 1964. Also a popular singer, Davis is the only governor of any state who has been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. And he may be the only governor-songwriter who took credit for a song he didn’t actually write. Depending on who’s telling the story, Davis either bought the music rights for $35 or just plain stole the uncopyrighted song from Oliver Hood (the mandolin player who wrote it) and credited himself as the songwriter.
    GEORGIA: Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia on My Mind” makes sense as Georgia’s state song…though the lyrics have always been open to interpretation and could be about the state or about a woman by that name. In 1979, almost 20 years after Georgia native Ray Charles made the song famous, the state legislature claimed it as its own, and Charles performed it on the legislative floor.
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    WHY BLUE FOR BOYS?
    A century ago, babies of both genders wore white most often. Otherwise, though, pink symbolized boys and blue (long associated with the Virgin Mary) girls. After World War I, America’s clothing industry began pushing those gender-specific colors, perhaps to make handing down baby clothes more complicated than buying new ones. Said a trade publication in 1918, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”
    But then in the 1940s, the fashion industry abruptly reversed course and changed that tradition, in part because it was pushing pink as a way for women to reclaim their femininity as they moved out of wartime factories and fields. From then on, blue became a “boy” color and pink a “girl” color.

The Great 88
    88 is considered a doubly lucky number in China because the Mandarin word for eight sounds like the word for “wealth.”
    The International Astronomical Union recognizes 88 constellations in the sky.
    Oldsmobile began using the Rocket 88 high-compression engine in 1949, giving the brand a cooler image. Ike Turner even recorded a rock tribute to the engine in 1951: “Rocket 88.”
    88 is the only number between 11 and 101 that reads the same forward, backward, upside-down, in the mirror…and even in the mirror upside-down.
    Eighty-Eight is the name of a town in Kentucky, named when the postmaster checked his pocket change and found 88¢.
    88,000 barrels of oil per hour is the maximum capacity of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.
    88 years is the amount of time that White Sox fans had to wait between winning the World Series in 1916 and 2004.

You Dirty Louse!
    Anteaters, armadillos, bats, and platypuses are the only land mammals that don’t get lice.
    Westerners mostly consider lice to be more an annoyance than a danger, but the bugs carry lots of diseases, including trench fever, relapsing fever, and typhus, which have killed millions around the world. One victim of lice-passed typhus was diarist Anne Frank, who picked up the disease in a crowded concentration camp and