Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader Read Online Free PDF Page B

and medicine.
    Be Sure to See... the Prostate Warmer, which plugs into a light socket and “stimulates the abdominal brain,” and the Nemectron Machine, which “normalizes” breasts through the application of metal rings of various sizes.
    THE CORAL CASTLE
    Location: Homestead, Florida
    Background: Edward Leedskalnin was a young man when his 16-year-old fiance, Agnes Scuffs, ended their engagement. Leedskalnin spent the next 20 years carving a massive memorial castle to Agnes out of coral, using tools he made from junked auto parts. By the time he died in 1951, Leedskalnin (who weighed approximately 100 lbs.) had quarried, carved and positioned more than 1,100 tons of coral rock for the castle. Some of the blocks weighed more than 25 tons—but because Leedskalnin worked alone, in secret, and usually at night, nobody knows how he managed to position the blocks in place. He never explained, other than to say, “I know how the pyramids were built.”
    Be Sure to See... a coral sundial that tells time, a throne for Agnes that rocks, and a heart-shaped table that made it into Ripley’s Believe it or Not as the world’s biggest valentine.
    Note: Leedskalnin’s ex-fiance Agnes Scuffs was still alive in 1992. She had never visited the castle.
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    BONUS DESTINATION: O’Donnell, Texas, hometown of Dan Blocker, who played Hoss on TV’s Bonanza.
    Be Sure to See... The Dan Blocker Memorial Head. When Blocker made it big, the town fathers had a likeness of his head, carved in granite, installed on a stand in the town square.
     
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    Food fact: Only 3% of Americans prefer their hot dogs plain.
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IF YOU LIKE “IKE”
    Here are a few thoughts from former president Dwight D. Eisenhower.
    “There is one thing about being a president—nobody can tell you when to sit down.”
    “Farming looks mighty easy when your plough is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the cornfield.”
    “You do not lead by hitting people over the head—that’s assault, not leadership.”
    “When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it.”
    (On Vietnam): “We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.”
    “Politics should be the part-time profession of every citizen.”
    “Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.”
    “Do not needlessly endanger your lives...until I give you the signal.”
    “The middle of the road is all of the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters.”
    “There are no easy matters that come to you as president. If they are easy, they are settled at a lower level.”
    “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
    “An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.”
    “There is no amount of military force that can possibly give you real security. You wouldn’t have that amount in the first place, unless you felt there was a similar amount that could threaten you, somewhere else in the world.”
     
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    The American goldfinch’s nest is so thick-walled it will hold water and as a result, their nestlings sometimes drown during rainstorms.
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IT’S JUST SERENDIPITY...
    The word “serendipity” means “making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident.” It was coined by the English writer Horace Walpole, who took it from the title of an old fairy tale , The 3 Princes of Serendip. The heroes in the story are always “making discoveries they are not in quest of.” For example, it’s just serendipity...
    T HAT BUBBLE GUM IS PINK
    Background: In the 1920s, the Fleer Company of Philadelphia wanted to develop a bubble gum that didn’t stick to people’s faces. A 23-year-old employee, Walter Diemer, took the challenge. He started experimenting with different mixtures, and