Bathroom Readers' Institute's Blog, page 43

Ask a Question, Get an Answer: It’s March, We’re Mad, We Must Have March Madness

March 14 was “International Ask a Question Day,” and over on our Facebook page, we invited our readers to, well, ask a question and be entered in a giveaway. The response was overwhelming—hundreds of you BRI stalwarts posed a trivia conundrum. Unfortunately, we can’t answer all of them and not everyone can be a winner, but we did pick five of the most intriguing one…which we’re going to answer here. One of our winning questions comes from reader Donald L., who asked…  

How did “March Madness” get started?

While college football has tried a number of systems to determine a champion each year amidst its slew of contractually-obligated and historically significant bowl games, the NCAA basketball champions have been decided since 1939 in a clear and direct way: a huge post-season tournament. Today it’s nicknamed “March Madness,” because that’s when it takes place and it’s a lot of fun.

 

1939: The First Men’s Basketball Tournament

In 1939, the first men’s basketball tournament was held. Eight teams, all winners of their conferences, were invited to attend. In the final game, the University of Oregon defeated Ohio State 46 to 33. In 1951, the field started expanding…and expanding…and expanding. These days the tournament consists of 68 teams—a handful of teams “play in” for four spots, and the teams play games in a single elimination format, going from 64 to 32 to the “sweet 16” to the “elite 8” to the “Final Four,” then just two teams that play for the national title.

The Bracket

Apart from the actual on-court basketball action, one of the most important parts of March Madness is filling out “the bracket.” After the teams are announced and given their seedings, millions carefully take that bracket of squads and predict who will win every game, down to the final game. Generally, this will lead to some gambling, or at least a pool or a contest at work with the most accurate bracket at the end of March Madness winning a prize. The first person to popularize amateur “bracketology”: a Staten Island bar owner named Jody Haggerty, of Jody’s Club Forest. In 1977, he offered his customers a chance to predict the winners. Entry fee: $10, and with 88 people competing, the winner got all of the money, or $880. Over the years, the pot grew…and the concept of the contest spread around the country. The tournament is now one of the most heavily gambled-on sports events in the world—last year alone, $10.4 billion worth of bets were placed.

The Story of the phrase “March Madness.”

So that’s the story of March Madness, but here’s the story of the phrase “March Madness.” From the 1930s onward, the phrase was used to describe the Illinois boys high school basketball tournament. Ex-Chicago, Illinois, sports reporter Brent Musburger picked up the phrase, and while calling NCAA tournament games in 1982, used the phrase on the air. It stuck.

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Awwww, Interesting Facts About Puppies!

Who’s a good blog entry full of facts about puppies and dogs? These are! Yes they are!

Puppies at Birth

Puppies are born without teeth, sight, and hearing. (Those come at about two weeks old.) Nor can they regulate body temperature or know how to expel body waste. The first sense they develop is touch, which explains why puppies love to cuddle both other dogs and humans. Puppies open their not-quite-fully-formed eyes on around day 10 of their life. All puppies have blue-gray eyes when they’re born, but it changes into the permanent color (usually brown) at around 10 weeks.

Sleeping and Eating

In its first week of life, a puppy sends a total of 22 hours sleeping, on average. The other two hours are primarily spent feeding.

Teeth

While humans will grow 20 “baby teeth” and 32 “adult teeth,” dogs have way more. A puppy will grow 28 lil’ chompers, which will give way to 42 fully-grown dog teeth.

Weight

By about five months old, a puppy reaches half of their fully mature weight. (They pack on the rest by their first birthday.)

Puppies Names

No need to give them a long or interesting name. They only listen to and ultimately recognize the first syllable of the word by which you’ve chosen to address them.

Learning the Rules

They learn how to obey humans very quickly. A 2007 study showed that puppies as young as six weeks old understood that a person pointing their finger at a cup meant that there was food in that cup.

Why are They So Cute?

What’s the science behind why us people think puppies are so cute? It’s due to a concept called baby schema. Puppies share certain features with baby humans that subliminally, and on a deep-seated level, make us like them. Those traits include big eyes, heads too big for their often chubby bodies, and their soft skin (or hair).

Whelp (aka Puppy)

Kitten, the diminutive form of cat, is an obvious evolution. But how did “puppy” come to mean “young dog”? In the 15th century, the French word poupée meant “toy” or “doll.” By the late 16th century, the name for a cute fake thing came to be associated with a real fake thing—young dogs. (Before that, the most common English-language word for a newborn dog was “whelp.”)

Miacis

If puppies are young dogs, then the most puppyish of all dogs would be the first ancestor of today’s dogs. That would be the Miacis, a creature that lived about 40 million years ago. It resembles a weasel, and it’s the common ancestor of not just all dogs, but wolves, raccoons, and even bears.

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One-Hit-Wonders Who Became Composers

Say you’re a musician and you work and toil for years and finally score a big hit song…but then you can’t ever manage another one. How to pay the bills? Write musical scores for film and television.

Jay Ferguson

Jay Ferguson is a double one-hit wonder. In 1968, his rock band spirit scored its only top 30 hit with the song “I Got a Line on You.” He eventually left the band and in 1978 scored his only solo hit, the soft rock classic “Thunder Island.” After six poor-selling albums and a string of minor and non-hit singles, Ferguson opted to try his hand and writing pop and rock scores and theme songs for the screen. Ferguson wrote the score for A Nightmare on Elm Street 5, and he currently makes all the music for CBS’s crime drama NCIS: Los Angeles. Ferguson’s best known TV tune: the jaunty theme song to the American version of The Office.

Adam Schlesinger

Schlesinger wrote and played catchy, Beatles-esque pop rock in cult favorite bands like Ivy and Fountains of Wayne. The latter scored its one and only hit in 2003 with “Stacy’s Mom.” Concurrently to his rock career, Schlesinger wrote music for movies, earning an Academy Award nomination for writing the theme song from That Thing You Do! in 1996. He currently co-writes most of the music and lyrics for CW’s musical comedy series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. For his work there, Schlesinger has been nominated for three Emmy Awards.

Walter Murphy

In 1976, Murphy single-handedly started a brief music fad: classical disco. His song “A Fifth of Beethoven” rearranged Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and set it to a disco beat. It topped the charts, and Murphy created other classically-inspired disco hits, like “Rhapsody in Blue” and “Mostly Mozart.” When disco died, so did Murphy’s pop career. He wrote commercial jingles for a while before moving into TV composing. Along with writing some songs for a rock music-themed episode of The A-Team in 1985, Murphy is best known as the composer of the many original, big band-style and show tunes for Fox’s long-running animated series, Family Guy. When Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane made the movie Ted, he asked Murphy to write a song with him called “Everybody Needs a Best Friend.” For that, Murphy received an Oscar nomination.

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True Tales of Great Poets!

We are celebrating poetry with these fascinating and interesting stories about some poetic titans of the English language.

Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer only published one work in his life, and he didn’t even finish it before he died, but fortunately that one work was The Canterbury Tales, the first work of narrative poetry in the English language and one of the first works of literature in English at all. He almost didn’t make it to the point where he wrote The Canterbury Tales between 1387 and 1400. In 1360, during the Hundred Years’ War, Chaucer was traveling through France, where he was kidnapped by the enemy. King Edward III paid the equivalent of $300,000 for his return.

John Milton

The English Civil War ended in 1651 with a temporary elimination of the monarchy, and Oliver Cromwell appointed Lord Protector. Poet and scholar John Milton, a loyal Cromwell follower, was named Minister of Foreign Languages. When Cromwell’s iron-fisted rule was forcibly ended with his beheading and the monarchy restored, Milton was arrested for being part of the hated Cromwell government. He was released in 1660 and essentially placed on house arrest at his country estate. There he had plenty of time to work on Paradise Lost, an epic English poem about the biblical fall of man, regarded as one of the finest works in the English language.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In 1797, poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge took a lot of opium, fell asleep and had a vivid dream about Xanadu, the paradise-like palace of Mongol emperor Kubla Khan. When he woke up, he furiously wrote down everything he saw in his extremely detailed dream…until a knock on his door made him completely lose his train of thought. Nevertheless, he still wrote a poem called “Kubla Khan,” which Coleridge believed was second-rate compare to what could have been.

William Blake

1780s poet William Blake might claim the status as history’s first comic book artist. He wrote and published his own poems, but he put his experience as an engraver and illustration to use, and accompanied his written works with art he made himself.

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Going Solo…And Going Nowhere Fast

How can you be a rock superstar and a one-hit-wonder at the same time? When you leave your successful group for a solo career…and it doesn’t work out.

Nick Lachey

There was a slew of “boy bands” in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. The one teeny bopper from the era who is still a major force in music today: Justin Timberlake from ’NSYNC. Lots of singers from lots of other groups made a go of it, including Nick Lachey from 98 Degrees. He stayed in the spotlight for a while because of his marriage to pop singer Jessica Simpson, documented on a hit reality show called Newlyweds. They divorced after four years together in 2006, the same year Lachey released a ballad that might have been about the dissolution of the marriage called “What’s Left of Me.” It hit #6 on the pop chart…the first and last big hit for Lachey.

Tom Cochrane

Cochrane was and is a superstar in his native Canada as part of the popular rock band Red Rider. They had a string of minor hits in the U.S. in the early ‘80s like “Human Race” and “Lunatic Fringe.” He took a break from the group for a solo career, and by himself, he had the biggest American hit of his career: “Life is a Highway,” which hit #6 and is still a staple of classic rock radio. It’s still the only hit single (in America) for Cochrane.

Frida

ABBA is one of the most successful groups in the history of pop music. Their chirpy, catchy songs made them the second-best-selling worldwide group of all time (after the Beatles), and two members went on to write successful musicals like Chess and Mamma Mia!, which is built around ABBA hits like “Dancing Queen” and “Take a Chance on Me.” One of the group’s two female singers, Anni-Frid Lyndstad, also known as Frida, looked to have a huge solo career in front of her when ABBA split in the early ‘80s. But oddly, she’s only had one breakout song: The ABBA-esque 1982 top 20 hit “I Know There’s Something Going On.”

Daryl Hall

Hall has one of the most soulful and instantly recognizable voices in music. As the dominant half of the duo Hall and Oates, he wrote, sang, and played keyboards on a ton of well-known hits like “Maneater,” “Private Eyes,” “Rich Girl,” and “Sara Smile.” Usually all his partner, John Oates, did was play a little guitar and sang backup. That’s why it’s surprising that went Hall dropped Oates completely, he wasn’t all that successful. His first and only solo hit was “Dreamtime,” a top 5 hit in 1986.

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7 Interesting Facts About Pandas

Here is a celebration of one of the world’s most adorable, fascinating, and endangered creatures.

Size

In pictures and in videos—spending an afternoon in a panda wormhole on YouTube is a fine way to waste a few hours—pandas look like they’re about the size of a stuffed teddy bear, or a dog. They’re actually much larger. A year-old giant panda usually weighs about 100 pounds and is about five feet long (or tall). At full maturity, a panda can reach 350 pounds and a length of six feet.

Color

Giant pandas are famously black and white, but their color scheme is not so black and white. When they’re born, they’re not only blind, but they’re not yet covered in fur. They’re just fleshy and pink. After a few weeks, their hair starts to grow into that familiar black and white pattern. (Every once in a while, the rare panda develops brown and white fur.)

Eating Habits

Not a bad way to spend the day: the average panda spends about 14 hours out of every 24 hours eating. They love bamboo, which has few nutrients, but a lot of, uh, passable material. This means they might eat as much as 60-80 pounds of the green stuff every day…and then they excrete as much as 80 percent of it.

Favorite Foods

Other panda favorites: flowers, vines, fish, honey, carrots, and even mice.

Best Time for a Visit

If you want to visit a panda in a zoo, try to go in August—that’s when panda babies are almost always born. They have a gestation period of three to five months, which means breeding time is March through May. (However, pandas are a little shy when it comes to mating. Zookeepers have been known to get pandas in the mood by showing them videos of, well, other pandas mating.)

Red Pandas

Red pandas aren’t bears—they’re related to raccoons. Giant pandas are bears, but unlike their ursine cousins, they don’t hibernate.

Heavy Metal

According to panda experts, giant pandas really like the taste of metals. Specifically, they like to lick copper and iron bowls. People who study pandas in the wild, as well as panda handlers, have created panda popsicles in the summer—fruit and juice frozen in a metal dish.

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4 Unfortunate Sleep Disorders

How did you sleep last night? Let’s take a moment to reflect on the importance of sleep, the science of sleep…and all of the many ways that sleep doesn’t come so easily for a lot of people.

Exploding Head Syndrome

This hyperbolically named condition affects sleepers right as they’re falling asleep or who have just fallen asleep. They jerk awake because of extremely loud sounds that “explode” in the head—slamming doors, gunshots, or, you know, explosions. However, they’re not real, merely auditory hallucinations that are sometimes coupled with bright flashes of light (which are also created by the brain).

Kleine-Levin Syndrome

Just about everybody could use (or just wants) a few extra hours of sleep every now and then. The extreme version of that is Kleine-Levin Syndrome. This condition, also known as “Sleeping Beauty Syndrome” affects primarily young men in their teen years and it manifests as the powerful need to sleep for up to 23 hours a day for up to three weeks at a time.

R.E.M. Sleep Behavior Disorder

While the brain dreams during sleep, the body mostly understands that what’s playing out in dreamland isn’t going on in reality. In other words, the body remains still while the brain dreams. But not for those with R.E.M. (Rapid Eye Movement) Sleep Behavior disorder. The body reacts physically to dreams, including yelling, punching, thrashing, and even jumping out of bed and running around the room.

Non-24-Hour Sleep-Wake Syndrome

If you’re like most people, you have an internal, natural “body clock” that reflects the patterns of the 24-hour day. That means you’re awake when it’s light out, and asleep when it’s dark. People with this rare syndrome—which affects the blind more often than the sighted—have a non-traditional body clock. Instead of being on a 24-hour cycle, the patient might be on a 72-hour cycle, which means they’re awake for 48 hours straight…and then sleep for the next 24 hours.

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I Just Want to Be Rich…More So

This doesn’t take away from their talent or cast doubt on if they deserve fame, but it’s certainly interesting that some celebrities got off to a good start early on—they were already wealthy before they became famous.

Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift is the most successful pop star on the planet right now—to the tune of a net worth of nearly $300 million. That’s more money than most of us will ever see, but amazingly, it’s not nearly as much as the fortune Swift’s father controls. Scott Swift once worked as a financial adviser and senior VP for the investment firm Merrill Lynch. He managed assets and traded his way to $450 million.

Adam Levine

Adam Levine has lived a charmed life. He’s the lead singer of the hugely successful Maroon 5, he stars on the hit TV show The Voice, and in 2013, People named him its “Sexiest Man Alive.” Levine also comes from money. His father is Fred Levine, founder of the department store chain M. Frederic. (The “Fred” is short for “Frederic.)

Richard Simon

Simon and Schuster is one of the biggest and most successful names in book publishing. The “Simon” refers to Richard Simon, a former piano salesman who teamed up with Max Schuster to start a publishing company in 1924. About twenty years later, Simon and his wife, civil rights activist Andrea Heinemann Simon, had a daughter: Carly Simon, who went on to be a fairly successful singer-songwriter.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus

Thanks mostly to endless reruns of her 1990s TV series, Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus is set for life, financially. She’s earned about $200m from the show…which she doesn’t even need. Her later father was Gérard Louis-Dreyfus, who ran the oil and gasoline divisions of the Louis-Dreyfus Company, a French company started by his great-grandfather. All told, Julia Louis-Dreyfus has a family fortune worth about $3 billion.

Chevy Chase

There’s a reason why Chevy Chase so convincingly played a smarmy blue blood in 1980’s Caddyshack: He is one. His real name: Cornelius Crane Chase. That’s the same Crane as in the Crane that makes plumbing equipment and bathroom fixtures. Chase’s family fortune totals about $50 million.

Kate Mara and Rooney Mara

Acting sisters Kate Mara (The Martian, House of Cards) and Rooney Mara (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) have both found major success in Hollywood. They both opted to act instead of trying out the family business: pro football. Their maternal great-grandfather Art Rooney founded the Pittsburgh Steelers back in the 1930s. Their paternal great-grandfather put the New York Giants together in the 1920s. Rooney family net worth: $1 billion.

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So Long, Stephen Hawking

Sad news: Stephen Hawking, quite possibly the greatest scientist of our time and the smartest person on Earth has passed away at age 76. He’s been a public figure and popularizer of science for decades, but there’s still a lot about him that most people didn’t know.

Field of Study

Hawking was a “scientist” to many, but what were his specific disciplines? He was a cosmologist, a theoretical physicist, a professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge for 30 years, and a master at quantum theory, thermodynamics, and information theory, among others. His stature is likely due to the fact that he combined so many different fields to unlock truths about the universe.

The Big Bang and the Black Hole

Some of Hawking’s most famous and early work concerned the application of the theory of general relativity on black holes. What does that mean? It means he put out a paper that convincingly laid out an argument that the universe started like the collapse of a black hole, but backward, a.k.a. “the Big Bang.”

Also, Hawking developed a lot of what we now know about black holes, such as how they can only get bigger, not smaller.

Hefty and Dry Wit

Hawking was brilliant, of course, but he also had a hefty and dry wit. He appeared as himself on The Big Bang Theory, The Simpsons, and Futurama several times. Also, the title of his book, A Brief History of Time—a book that literally attempts to describe the science behind existence—is a very subtle but very good joke.

A Brief History of Time

Another fact about A Brief History of Time: Its time on the bestseller lists was hardly brief. It didn’t leave the U.K.’s Sunday Times bestseller list for five years. All told, it sold more than 10 million copies, which made it the most popular popular science book of all time.

The Disease

Hawking employed the use of a wheelchair for 50 years, and since the ‘80s, a voice synthesizer. That’s because at the age of 21, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. At the time, doctors told him he wouldn’t live to see his 25th birthday. He certainly beat the odds, living to the robust old age of 76. Doctors attribute his longevity to extremely good medical care—a respirator and feeding tube, as well as the unique biology of his particular case of ALS.

IQ Score?

Just how smart was Hawking, exactly? He didn’t know, and he didn’t care. Hawking never had his IQ tested. “I have no idea,” he once said. “People who boast about their IQ are losers.”

Interview

Here is one of the last interviews with Stephen Hawking, by the legendary Neil deGrasse Tyson.

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Only in Ireland

As the world prepares to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day—and all things Irish—here’s a look at some of the things that can only be found on the Emerald Isle.

Halloween as a National Holiday?

Think Halloween is a big deal in the U.S.? It’s bigger in Ireland. It’s the only place in the world where Halloween is an official national holiday—kids get the day off of school. (Halloween originated in Ireland as a celebration called Samhain.) Also, there are fireworks displays.

Windmills

Windmills turn counter-clockwise everywhere in the world…except for in Ireland, where they turn clockwise.

Henry Ford and Sons

The Ford Motor Company, one of the biggest and oldest car manufacturers in the world, uses that name across the globe. But not in Ireland. There, it’s called Henry Ford and Sons. Why? Henry Ford wanted to open a branch in Ireland, but his board of directors vetoed him. So, he did it anyway…under a different corporate name.

National Emblem

Ireland is the only country in the world whose national emblem is a musical instrument. Ireland’s symbol: the medieval Irish harp.

Guaranteed Meeting with the President

The leaders of only one country on Earth have guaranteed annual meeting with the U.S. president: Ireland. (In advance of the 2009 Irish-American summit, First Lady Michelle Obama asked the water in the White House fountain to be dyed green.)

Red-Headed Donors

A company called Cryos operates a worldwide operation of what we’re going to call fertility services, providing a biological substance that helps people become pregnant. Different countries want different donor material. Ireland, for example, is the only place in the world that Cryos has significant demand for red-headed donors.

Snakes

Legend says that St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland. It’s not true—because there are no snakes native to Ireland. It’s an island, so it’s hard for snakes to get there, and then thrive there.

Left-Wing

Since gaining independence in 1919, Ireland has operated on a parliamentary system of government. They’ve never had a left-wing party in control, the only country in the European Union with that distinction.

Bogs

Only two countries in the world have bogs: Scotland…and Ireland.

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