Free Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader by Bathroom Readers’ Institute

does a chronometer measure?
    Bonus Questions:
    1. Which of the following is moving faster: a ship traveling at 40 knots, or a car traveling 46 miles per hour?
    2. What’s the common name for the part of your body where the ulnar nerve rests against the medial condyle of the humerus?
    3. If you buy a dog for $40, sell it for $50, buy it back for $60, and sell it again for $70, how much money have you made or lost?
    4. Selenography is the name for the scientific study of what?
    5. It’s 50° Fahrenheit outside. Within two degrees, what will the reading be on a metric (Celsius) thermometer?
    GENERAL KNOWLEDGE
    Tossup Question: A pair of aces and a pair of eights are known as the “dead man’s hand” in poker. Who was holding this hand when he died?
    Bonus Questions:
    1. Where are the Islands of Langerhans located?
    2. The wife of a duke is called a duchess. The wife of a count is called a countess. What is the wife of an earl called?
    3. An algophobe is afraid of what?
    4. Coracles, galleons, caravels, and triremes are all types of what?
    5. If you had a Musca domestica in your house, would you 1) eat it, 2) kill it, or 3) tell it to clean your house?
Ready for more? Turn to page 303 for another round of G.E. College Bowl.
A turtle’s shell is sensitive enough to feel a twig brush across it.

LIFE’S A GAMBLE
We’ll give you 5 to 1 odds that even if you’re a regular gambler, you don’t know the origins of these games .
    B LACKJACK
    Description: Players add up the numbers on the cards they are dealt and try to get as close to 21 points without going over. Face cards count as 10; aces count as 11 or 1.
    History: Originally called vingt-et-un , or “twenty-one,” blackjack is believed to have been invented in France in the early 1700s. Today it’s one of the most popular casino card games in the world, but it took a while to catch on. A casino in Evansville, Indiana, introduced it to the United States in 1910. The only way gambling houses could get poker players to give the game a try was by awarding bonus payouts for valuable hands. The biggest payout of all, $10 for every $1 bet, went to the player who held the ace of spades and either of the black jacks. The name that resulted— blackjack —lasted a lot longer than the bonus payouts did.
    KENO
    Description: A game similar to Bingo, except that players get to pick their own numbers instead of being stuck with the ones printed on their bingo card. After a player picks several numbers, the house randomly picks 20 numbers between 1 and 80; if the house picks most or all of the player’s numbers, the player wins a payout. Many state lotteries operate along similar lines.
    History: This game was invented in China during the Han Dynasty (202 B.C. to 220 A.D.), reportedly when a city came under siege and had to raise money for the army to defend it. Why burden people with an extra tax when you can get them to contribute voluntarily? So officials devised a lottery system instead, one in which 20 out of a possible 120 Chinese characters were chosen at random. Players selected 10 characters of their own, and prizes went to anyone who had at least 5 matching characters. The game saved the city and became popular over so large an area that homing pigeons were used to send messages to people telling them whether they’d won or lost. That’s how the Chinese version of the game became known as Pok Kop Piu , or “White Pigeon Ticket.”
America’s oldest candy brand:
    The American version of the game dates back to 1928, when some Chinese men asked a Butte, Montana, bar owner named Joseph Lyden to organize a game of White Pigeon Ticket for them. Lyden dropped the Chinese characters in favor of numbers and renamed the game Keno (from a French game called quine , which means “five winning numbers”). He’s also the guy who brought the game to Las Vegas after casino gambling was legalized in 1931.
    SLOT MACHINES
    Description: You don’t know what a slot machine is?
    History: