Uncle John’s Facts to Annoy Your Teacher Bathroom Reader for Kids Only! Read Online Free PDF Page B

ventriloquist’s second trick is to alter his speech to mask difficult sounds. Most letter sounds are easy. Hold your mouth slightly open and recite the alphabet. Most of the letters require no or minimal use of your lips. The ones that you do have to move your lips to pronounce are B, F, M, P, Q, V, and W. So what’s a budding ventriloquist to do? You can’t just avoid those letters altogether.
    The whale shark is the world’s largest fish (up to 50 feet long).
    FAKE OUT
    Try these substitutions:
    •For “B,” say “geh,” which comes from the back of your throat instead of your lips. For example, instead of “bottle,” you’d say “gottle.”
    •For “F” and “V,” take a tip from Daffy Duck. Replace either sound with “th.” In other words, things aren’t “very fantastic,” they’re “thery thantastic.”
    •“M” is easy, just use an “N” sound. If your dummy calls you a “moron,” don’t be offended—he actually said “noron.”
    •“P” can be tricky. “P” or “puh” is replaced by a “kuh” or “kluh” from the back of your throat. Example: “They pay you to write these jokes?” would become “They kay you to write these jokes?”
    •A “Q” is really made up of two different sounds: the “cuh” and the “oo.” For ventriloquism, mash the two sounds together to make a lipless “koo” sound, as in “koo-iet” for “quiet.”
    •The “wuh” of a “W” can be covered up with an “ooo” or “oh,” as in “oo-ut’s going on?”
    Now all you need is kuh-ractice!
    Six U.S. cities claim to be the world’s “popcorn capital.”

LET ME OUTTA HERE!
    Papillon—which means “butterfly” in French—was the nickname of a man named Henri Charrière. It’s also the title of his book and of a movie based on his story of life in prison and daring escape. But how much of his tale is actually true ?
    H ENRI’S STORY
    In 1931, 25-year-old Frenchman Henri Charrière was convicted of murder and given a life sentence of hard labor. In those days, France sent its convicted criminals to French Guiana, a small territory that sits on the north coast of South America. Most of the cells in the prison were reserved for violent criminals, and Charrière certainly qualified. (Fellow prisoners called him “Papillon” or “Papi” because he had a tattoo of a butterfly on his chest.) He always swore that he wasn’t guilty, and vowed to escape the unjust punishment no matter the cost.
    ON THE RUN
    As soon as he arrived, Charrière started plotting his escape. The first time, he knocked out a guard in the prison’s hospital and made it all the way to Colombia. But he was caught and imprisoned there.
    Small world: Actors Christina Ricci and Macaulay Culkin went to elementary school together.
    Before he could be sent back to French Guiana, he used a hacksaw to cut through the bars of his cell. (He’d bought the saw secretly from some men who sneaked it into the Colombian prison.) That time, he managed to live on the run for a few months before he was recaptured. Then it was back to French Guiana and two years of solitary confinement as punishment.

    DEVIL’S ISLAND
    Eventually, Charrière ended up at the most isolated prison in French Guiana. Called Devil’s Island, this brutal prison was just offshore, and prisoners there were beaten and poorly fed. Deadly diseases like malaria were rampant, and the jungle around the prison was filled with fire ants and other dangerous creatures. From 1852 (when the prison opened) until 1946 (when it closed), about 80,000 prisoners died on Devil’s Island.
    But still, Charrière tried to escape. He made a raft from coconut shells and, one night, jumped from a cliff into the ocean. Floating on his raft, he managed to get to land and, with the help of strangers, traveled all the way to Venezuela. The authorities there captured him, but refused to return him to Devil’s Island. According to them, it was too violent a place. So in