Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wise Up! Read Online Free PDF

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    Denzel Washington’s son John David used to be a running back for the NFL’s St. Louis Rams.
    Al Pacino’s grandparents were natives of Corleone, Sicily.
    Warren Beatty turned down the role of Bill in the Kill Bill movies. He thought they were too violent. (The part went to David Carradine instead.)
    Sean Connery competed in 1953’s Mr. Universe pageant. He placed third in the “tall man’s” category.
    Will Smith met his wife Jada Pinkett Smith when she auditioned to be his girlfriend on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. (She didn’t get the part.)

The Planets
    Each pole of Uranus is dark for 42 years at a time.
    The ancient Sumerians were the first to record sightings of the planet Mercury, in about 3000 BC.
    Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is 25,000 miles wide.
    At last count, there were more than 300 known planets outside of our solar system.
    There are rocks on Mars named Scooby-Doo, Yogi Bear, and Gumby.
    Saturn’s rings are made of chunks of ice, ranging from dust- to house-sized.
    It’s estimated that about half a ton of Martian material falls to Earth each year.
    Because of Saturn’s tilt and the thinness of its rings, every 14 years the rings seem to disappear.
    In 1989, Voyager 2 (the only spacecraft to visit Neptune) discovered a unique cloud pattern that circles the planet extremely fast. Its name: the Scooter.
    On Venus, the sun rises in the west.

To the Extreme
    Most expensive MP3 player: The gold-and-gem-encrusted Douglas J. Presidential costs $44,000. It comes with 1GB of memory, and a “personal escort” will hand-deliver it to your house.
    Most expensive concert ticket ever: $1,530. (Front row at Barbra Streisand’s 2000 Australia tour.)
    Floyd Rood hit a golf ball across the continental United States. (It took him 114,737 strokes.)
    Eating champion Mort Hurst once ate 16 double-decker Moon Pies in 10 minutes, and 38 eggs in 29 seconds.
    The record for hula-hooping the most hoops simultaneously: 100, held by Kareena Oates.
    Jerry Rice has the most career touchdowns in Super Bowl history: eight.
    Roger Staubach holds the career record for the most Super Bowl fumbles; he dropped the ball five times.
    Students at England’s Stockport College built an 896-pound fully operational yo-yo. Diameter: 10 feet 5 inches. It was launched off a crane at a height of 189 feet.
    Elaine Davidson of Edinburgh, Scotland, has a world-record 720 body piercings.
    World record bubblegum bubble: 23" in diameter, blown by Susan Montgomery Williams.
    The pogo-stick jumping world record: 41 hours.
    Basketball player with the most points scored in his career: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, with 38,387.
    World’s oldest restaurant: Casa Botín in Spain. It’s been in operation since 1725.

Water
    There are almost 800 different brands of bottled water available for sale in the United States.
    According to some experts, the world’s best-tasting tap water is in Los Angeles.
    Every day, the sun’s heat evaporates about a trillion tons of water.
    With just one gulp of air, a beaver can swim up to half a mile underwater.
    Each day, the United States uses 134 billion gallons of water to irrigate crops.
    Sunlight can penetrate clear ocean water to a depth of 240 feet.
    Eighty percent of a baby’s body weight at birth is water.
    In the ancient Egyptian language, the word nile means “water.”
    Beethoven often dipped his head in cold water before he began composing.
    All sturgeon caught in British waters are legally the property of the queen.
    If all the ice in Antarctica melted, sea levels would rise by about 200 feet.
    An average golf course uses about 6,000 gallons of water per day. Some desert courses use a million gallons.
    It’s recommended that we consume eight cups of water a day, but people can actually drink up to three gallons (or 48 cups).
    By the time you feel thirsty, you’ve already lost 1 percent of the water in your body.
    An average water droplet contains 100 quintillion molecules of water.

Names
    Booker T.