Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wise Up! by Bathroom Readers’ Institute

was called the sackbut.
    What are the qanun, nay, mijwiz, buzuq, and daff? They’re all Middle Eastern musical instruments.
    What instrument has a head, a flange, a tension hoop, and an armrest? The banjo.
    A concert harp has 47 strings.
    The heckelphone, musette, and piffaro are all rare members of the oboe family.
    Saxophones, invented in 1840, did not become popular until the rise of jazz in the 1920s.

BIG Business
    First company to earn $1 billion in one year: General Motors, in 1955.
    Largest industry in Nashville: health care, at $18.3 billion annually. Music is second, at $6.1 billion.
    Worldwide, enough Coca-Cola is consumed every year to fill 3.5 million bathtubs.
    The Ford Motor Company was the first to offer a rebate…$50 cash back on a new Model T.
    Nabisco produces about 16 billion Oreo cookies a year at its Chicago factory alone.
    Pop-Tarts are the most popular product made by Kellogg’s, with more than two billion sold each year.
    Number of Starbucks in Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport as of 2009: 15.
    Pizza Hut uses 525 million pounds of tomatoes every year.
    Popular items at McDonald’s in India: the Maharaja Mac and the McAloo Tikki.
    There are more than 300 different types of fast-food chains in the United States.
    Mississippi’s largest industry is catfish; 150,000 tons are produced each year.
    Wal-Mart’s annual income is nearly equal to that of Russia.
    Loch Ness Monster tourism adds $40 million a year to Scotland’s economy.
    The busiest Pizza Hut in the world is in Paris, France.
    Fantasy sports is a $3.5-billion-a-year industry in the United States.

Say It in Quotes
    Thomas Jefferson read in seven languages and made it a rule “never to read translations where I can read the original.”
    Harry S. Truman didn’t think much of polls. He once said, “I wonder how far Moses would have gotten if he’d taken a poll in Egypt?”
    George W. Bush said, “I never dreamed about being president…when I was growing up, I wanted to be Willie Mays.”
    During World War II, sauerkraut was renamed “liberty cabbage.”
    When told that General Ulysses S. Grant drank too much whiskey, President Abraham Lincoln reportedly replied, “Find out the name of the brand so I can give it to my other generals.”
    Andrew Jackson once described the presidency as “dignified slavery.”
    The phrase “weapons of mass destruction” was coined in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War in reference to air bombing.
    Thomas Jefferson said that, over a 50-year period, the sun “never caught him in bed.”
    There is no record of Patrick Henry actually saying, “Give me liberty or give me death.”
    In 1988, former baseball player Bill “Spaceman” Lee ran for president. Slogan: “No guns. No butter. Both can kill.”
    “No two men can differ on a principle of trigonometry,” said Thomas Jefferson.
    Harry S. Truman on religious differences: “It has caused more wars and feuds than money.”
    Morphine addiction became known as the “soldier’s disease” after the Civil War.

Kid Stats
    On average, kids touch their mouths with their hands once every three minutes.
    Fifty-four percent of American kids ride the bus to school.
    Sixty-five percent of children have an imaginary friend before the age of seven.
    Eighty-four percent of American children read with their parents every day.
    U.S. parents spend about 38 minutes a week in “meaningful conversation” with their kids.
    Sixty-three percent of American teenagers have their own cell phone.
    A typical American kid spends 18 percent of his or her day in front of a TV or computer screen.
    Sixty-one percent of American parents of children over eight do not establish TV-watching rules.
    Seventy-one percent of kids who play Internet games say the virtual worlds they visit online are “very important” to them.

Hair It Is
    The ancient Assyrians cut their hair into the shape of a pyramid.
    What does author Bram Stoker’s title character in Dracula have that