Uncle John’s Impossible Questions & Astounding Answers Read Online Free PDF Page B

ever win an Academy Award? Who is the shortest?

What a Hunk
    In 1940 the Division of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California selected a male model (a student who posed for sculptors) as having the “most nearly perfect male figure.” Who was this dashing young man?

     
Quack-Up
    Yuri Gagarin—the Russian cosmonaut, who, on April 12, 1961, became the first human being to go into space. About an hour and a half after Gagarin blasted off on his one-orbit trip around Earth, his Vostok capsule re-entered the atmosphere. He ejected and then parachuted down onto a field in a remote region of southern Russia, where a farmer and her daughter saw the strange man in an orange jumpsuit fall out of the sky. As they started to run away, Gagarin shouted, “I am a friend, comrades, a friend!”
    The girl turned around and asked, “Can it be that you have come from outer space?”
    “As a matter of fact, I have!” Gagarin replied. Then he asked to use a phone so he could call Moscow and get someone to come out and pick him up.
Upstairs, Downstairs
    Six-foot-five-inch Tim Robbins is the tallest. He won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the 2003 drama Mystic River . Measuring 3'5", the shortest Oscar winner was Shirley Temple, who won a special Academy Award in 1934 at the age of six. Temple later went into politics, serving as a foreign ambassador for Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, and the first Bush.
What a Hunk
    That hunky student was Ronald Reagan, who went on to costar with a chimpanzee in Bedtime for Bonzo .
     
Trendsetter
    1920s silent film star Mae Murray accidentally dropped something…and started a national craze. What did she drop?

     
Trendsetter
    Her doughnut. Murray was an early Hollywood sex symbol known as “the girl with the bee-stung lips.” She’s also known as the first person to dunk a doughnut into a cup of coffee. It happened one day in 1925. Murray, who’d recently starred in The Merry Widow , was eating in a New York City deli when she accidentally dropped her doughnut into her cup of joe. A hush fell over the table. Murray wasn’t fazed, though. Surprising everyone, she extracted the soggy pastry and actually took a bite out of it! Then she raved about how delicious it was.
    Word of Murray’s happy accident quickly spread throughout the entertainment community. Over the next few years, anybody who was anybody was dunking their doughnuts. Groucho Marx dunked his in Duck Soup . Clark Gable taught Claudette Colbert how to dunk hers in It Happened One Night . There was even a “National Dunking Association” with such esteemed members as Red Skelton, Jimmy Durante, Pearl Buck, and a young comedian named Johnny Carson. Dunking doughnuts became such a part of popular culture that it inspired the fast-food chain, Dunkin’ Donuts, which opened its doors in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1950.
    Whatever happened to Mae Murray? She’d probably be more popular today had she not angered movie mogul Louis B. Mayer by quitting MGM in 1927. He had her blacklisted from the other studios, and she appeared in only three more films. (Doughnuts, however, appear in millions of coffee cups every day.)

DOWN THE HATCH
    Now we tempt your palate with a few culinary delights, along with a few culinary disasters you wouldn’t feed your dog. First up—two questions about beer .
Pewter to the People
    Why do German beer steins come with hinged lids?

Measure for Measure
    How many pints in a firkin?

     
Pewter to the People
    To keep the flies out. In the Middle Ages, Germany experienced several massive fly swarms at the same time Europe was suffering from the “Black Death,” in which millions of people were killed by the bubonic plague. Believing the flies were responsible for the disease, German rulers passed a law that all food and drink containers be fitted with a hinged lid. Although the law didn’t stop the plague—which was actually caused by fleas that hopped from rats to humans—it did mark the