Cory Hahn could have been a professional baseball player right out of high school. In 2010, at Mater Dei High in Santa Ana, California, he had a .411 batting average and also pitched a 14-1 record. He was also named “Mr. Baseball,” as the state’s best high school player of the year.

But Hahn skipped going pro in favor of a college education, a lifelong goal. He attended Arizona State, and joined the baseball team there. Tragically, in just his second game with the team in 2011, he collided with the second basemen while trying to steal second base and suffered a spinal injury that left him paralyzed from the waist down.

That was the end of Hahn’s baseball career, but not the end of his baseball story. In early June, Major League Baseball had its annual player draft. With the 1,020^th overall pick, in the 34^th round, the Arizona Diamondbacks drafted Hahn. It’s significant not just for the Arizona connection, but because Hahn wore #34 at Arizona State. And while it may have been a nice gesture, it wasn’t an empty gesture. Diamondbacks president Derrick Hall promised Hahn a job in the team’s front office or as a talent scout, should he want it, upon his graduation.

Week #3: At the Library

QUESTION: If you were stuck in a library,
what section of would you spend the most time in and why?

Answer the question in the comments section of this post to be entered to win a book of your choice from the Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader library. Answers must be posted by June 19, 2013, midnight PST to be eligible to win. A winner will be announced on Friday, June 21, 2013. Open to US residents, 18 year + only.

Need a little inspiration? Read all about one of the nation’s most famous libraries from Uncle John’s Plunges into History Again.

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LET THERE BE LIBRARIES

Andrew Carnegie was no saint—just ask anyone who worked for him. But he was considered the patron saint of libraries.

Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish immigrant whose family moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, when he was 13. His first job was as a bobbin boy, a kid who handles spindles in a cotton factory. Then, he got a job as a messenger, and next, he started working his way up at the Pennsylvania Railroad. As he got older and his talent with money became apparent, his mother mortgaged her house to provide him with some seed money for investments. Andrew parlayed his stake into a small fortune. He started his steel business, and in 1901, sold it to J. P. Morgan for $480 million (390 million euros).

SHREWD, BUT NO SCROOGE

Carnegie was always a big believer in charity. In 1889, he wrote an essay called “The Gospel of Wealth,” in which he proposed that it was the responsibility of the wealthy to share their fortunes for the betterment of the people. But he didn’t just believe in throwing money into the wind, either. So, in his later days, he pondered how he could do some good without wasting his money. A childhood mentor, wealthy retiree Colonel Anderson, provided his inspiration.

Colonel Anderson owned hundreds of books. He let neighborhood kids browse his shelves on Saturday afternoons, take books home, and come back for more—just like a library. That was how Carnegie got his childhood education, and he was ever grateful.

CHECK THIS OUT

Carnegie built Pittsburgh a grand library in 1899. One library might have been philanthropic enough for most men, but Carnegie was a library-building machine—2,509 in all. He built them in every state in the United States except Rhode Island. He built them in the United Kingdom too, including his hometown of Dunfermline, Scotland. He built them in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia—even Fiji.

By the time of his death, Andrew Carnegie had given away 90 percent of his fortune. And his name didn’t appear above the entrance of any of his libraries. Instead, there was the simple inscription: “Let There Be Light.”

There were several Harry Potter fans. Although, we have to admit, our favorite was:

Probably Harry Potter (although its not a kids book, really) only cuz I love the fact that I could turn my hubby into a toad

We hope her hubby doesn’t read our blog.

Here are some of our other favorites:

I would trade places with Christopher Robin so I could finally fix Eeyore’s tail!!

Charlie Bucket from “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” by Roald Dahl. To have the experience and joy of touring the factory. To meet WILLY WONKA! And then become his Heir!!!!!!! A true dream … a dream of dreams…. ahhhhh.. IF ONLY.

Curious George. That way, I can do pretty much whatever I want and just excuse it as “Hey, I’m a monkey, what do you expect?”

Fantastic Mr. Fox, since he basically gets free food for the rest of his life.

I would like to be Marco from And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street by Dr. Seuss. It is still one of my favorite stories. It reminds me of the imagination I had as a child. I love reading it to my kids now and seeing the jaws drop slightly, knowing that they will soon be on the lookout for strange happenings at everyday places.

And, last but not least:

Eragon, because dragon.

Have a great weekend everyone.

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Our Father’s Day Sale is almost over. 30% off the entire store and FREE shipping on order of $35 and more till June 16! Also, make sure to enter our June is Bathroom Reading Month giveaway for a chance to win the entire in-print library of Uncle John’s Bathroom Readers.

Four lorikeets have been coming to our veranda the last few days. We give them apple slices – they make a big mess eating them up.

Here are two of them, surrounded by described mess:

They all look pretty much the same, but while two of them will grab apple right out of your hand (and sit in your lap to eat it, if you let them, as we’ve happily learned in the past), two of them seemed very shy and skittery.

Just found out why: one just started doing the upchuck feeding thing into the mouth of another one.

Two of those lorikeets, while as big as mom and pops, are babies!

P.S. Baby lorikeets sound like LOTR ringwraiths.

P.P.S To see a funny lorikeet video my Aussie buddy Hans took, go to our FaceBook page.

Here’s what happened. E.T. the movie was released in June 1982. The tender story of a lonely boy befriended by a lost alien creature was an unexpectedly massive hit, spending its first six weeks at #1 at the box office. It was late July by the time Atari, the most popular video game brand in the world at the time, secured the rights to make an E.T. video game. However, the company gave designer Howard Warshaw just six weeks to create the product, so it could be on store shelves by Christmas. End result: a terrible, nonsensical game, even by early 1980s standards. Bearing little resemblance to the movie, players had to control a thing that sort of looked like E.T. as it collected pieces of a phone to “phone home.” E.T. mostly fell in holes, or encountered one of the game’s many bugs.

But Atari was banking on the E.T. brand, and manufactured millions more E.T. cartridges than there were game consoles in existence to play them on. The company believed that the availability of an E.T. video game would lead customers to purchase an Atari console if they didn’t already have one. It didn’t work. Atari lost $356 million from 1982 to 1983 and was left with warehouses full of unsold (or returned) E.T. cartridges. It’s become the subject of what sounds like an urban legend. Dozens of semi-trucks reportedly emptied an Atari warehouse in El Paso, Texas and drove the contents to the New Mexico desert, where they smashed it to bits, buried it, and covering it all in concrete.

Atari has never made a statement on the matter; the only real evidence that the big dump actually took place is that in September 1983, a newspaper in Alamogordo, New Mexico, reported the influx of Atari trucks. But did it all really happen? A Canadian documentary crew is about to find out. In May, the Alamogordo City Council granted Fuel Industries, a film production company out of Ottawa, the right to sift through and dig up whatever they like at the landfill just outside of town where the unsold E.T. video games were supposedly crushed and dumped. The crew’s expressed purpose: to find all those millions of copies of E.T. The intent: To prove (or disprove) the urban legend once and for all.

Look for the documentary in 2014…unless the film industry collapses, Atari-style.

Greek yogurt is made by vigorously straining regular yogurt—that’s why it’s so thick and liquid-free. In fact, it takes four ounces of milk to ultimately result in just one ounce of Greek yogurt. The liquid that’s removed is called acid whey, or sour whey, and consists of water, along with lactose (milk sugar), some proteins, and yogurt cultures. Sounds organic and harmless, right? Wrong. It’s apparently so toxic and disruptive to living things that it’s illegal to dump it. If it gets into waterways, the cultures and proteins absorb so much oxygen that it kills fish.

So if they can’t dump it—as some producers have been doing—what else can they do with it? They’re selling it back to dairy farmers. It’s blended into feed and fertilizer…and fed back to the same kind of dairy cows that made the milk that made the yogurt that made the acid whey.

(Image source: Flickr/nemuneko.jc)

• Natalie Portman: Psychology (Harvard)
• Rapper Lil’ Wayne: Psychology (University of Phoenix)
• Will Ferrell: Sports Broadcasting (USC)
• Ken Jeong (The Hangover, Community): Medicine (He’s an M.D.—he went to the University of North Carolina)
• Gene Simmons of KISS: Education. (Richmond College) Pre-fame, he taught elementary school in New York City.
• Ashley Judd: French (University of Kentucky)
• Michael Jordan: Geography (University of North Carolina)
• Dolph Lundgren: Chemical Engineering (Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden)
• “Weird Al” Yankovic: Architecture (Cal Poly)
• Kenny Chesney: Advertising (East Tennessee State)
• NBA star David Robinson: Math (U.S. Naval Academy)
• Ray Manzarek of the Doors: Economics (DePaul University)
• Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat): History (Cambridge University)
• Tiger Woods: Economics (Stanford)
• Eva Longoria: Kinesiology (Texas A&M)
• Lisa Kudrow: Psychobiology (Vassar). Kudrow’s father was a research scientist studying headaches, and she worked on his staff for nearly a decade before pursuing acting.
• Steve Martin: Philosophy (Cal State University, Long Beach)
• Mira Sorvino: East Asian Studies (Harvard)
• Barry Bonds: Criminology (Arizona State University)

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Our Father’s Day Sale is in full swing. 30% off the entire store and FREE shipping on order of $35 and more. Also, make sure to enter our June is Bathroom Reading Month giveaway for a chance to win the entire in-print library of Uncle John’s Bathroom Readers.

Week #2: In a Kids Book

QUESTION: If you could trade places with any character from a children’s story,
whom would you pick and why?

Answer the question in the comments section of this post to be entered to win a book of your choice from the Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader library. Answers must be posted by June 12, 2013, midnight PST to be eligible to win. A winner will be announced on Friday, June 14, 2013. Open to US residents only.

To inspire you, here is an article from Uncle John’s Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader about some of the very first children’s books ever written.

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CHILDREN’S BOOKS

Walk into any bookstore today and you’ll find walls full of books written specifically for kids. But a few hundred years ago it wasn’t like that—there were actually very few. Here are the first children’s books ever written.

THE COLLOQUY

Possibly the earliest example of literature made specifically for children, The Colloquy was written and distributed in England around A.D. 1005 by a Benedictine monk named Aelfric. At the time, the Benedictines were trying to use education to help Europe emerge from centuries of social decline, and this playful textbook was meant to teach kids about both careers and Latin grammar. The book is written in the form of dialogue between a teacher and several pupils (colloquy means “dialogue” in Latin), the pupils taking on the roles of several professions. An example:

Teacher: How did you dare to cut the boar’s throat?

Hunter: My dogs drove him towards me, and I stood against him and suddenly slew him.

Teacher: You must have been very brave indeed.

Hunter: A hunter must be very brave, since all kinds of beasts lurk in the woods.

THE DISTICHS OF CATO

This collection of witty proverbs for adults was written in Rome by Dionysius Cato around A.D. 300. Rediscovered in Europe in the 1200s, it was translated into many languages and used to teach children grammar and morals. Distich means “couplet,” which was the form of the writing. Example: “Be stupid when the time or situation demands / To fake stupidity is at times the highest prudence.” The Distichs of Cato remained one of the most popular Latin textbooks for several centuries—and even made its way to the American colonies, where it was published by Benjamin Franklin in 1735.

THE BOOK OF THE KNIGHT OF THE TOWER

In 1371 French aristocrat Geoffroy IV de la Tour Landry wrote this collection of fables to teach his two daughters proper behavior in royal society. The moral of one story: Do not have sex with a knight, because you might get pregnant, and then your father would have to drown you in a well in the dark and the knight would be “flayed alive.” The Book of the Knight of the Tower was translated into German and English and was very popular for two decades.

A TOKEN FOR CHILDREN

The 1600s were the height of the extremely conservative and religious Puritan movement in England. How did adults teach kids to fear hell? Pastor James Janeway’s A Token for Children: An Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children, published in 1671. It’s a collection of stories about kids (some as young as two) who commit sins, see the error of their ways, become pious, and then die. But because they repented, their deaths are accompanied by beautiful lights and the singing of angels. For the next two centuries, A Token for Children was one of the most popular children’s books in England and the American colonies.

TOMMY THUMB’S PRETTY SONG BOOK

By the mid-1700s, attitudes toward children were changing—they were allowed to be what we think of as kids for the first time. Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, written by “M. Cooper” in 1744, was an early fun book, and is said to be the first published collection of nursery rhymes, many of them still familiar, including “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” and “Hickory Dickory Dock.” Only one copy of Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book exists today—in the British Museum in London.

A LITTLE PRETTY POCKET BOOK

First released in 1744, English author and publisher John Newbery’s A Pretty Little Pocket Book: Intended for the Instruction and Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly consisted of illustrations, rhymes, and instructions for various games. An example, titled “Base-Ball”: “The Ball once struck off / Away flies the Boy / To the next destin’d Post / And then Home with Joy.” Newberry was the first publisher to market literature just for kids, emphasizing education through entertainment. To honor Newbery for essentially creating modern children’s literature, the American Library Association’s award for the best children’s book of the year is named the Newbery Medal.

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Our Father’s Day Sale is in full swing. 30% off the entire store and FREE shipping on order of $35 and more. Also, make sure to enter our June is Bathroom Reading Month giveaway for a chance to win the entire in-print library of Uncle John’s Bathroom Readers.

I thought you might be entertained to hear: I am a high school teacher, and my bathroom pass is a copy of the 23rd Reader with a big post-it on the front- “Bathroom Pass- so at least I can learn something while I’m out of class.”

The kids were seriously weirded out at first, but they have come to love it!!! It helps me limit the number of kids out of the room and they’re learning the coolest things when they least expect it!!!!

She added:

I LOVE the way it has really got them learning the greatest little tidbits!!! I have some of my favorite pages bookmarked, too, so they have somewhere to start!! A good dozen of them are obsessed with the book now and flip through it when it’s not ‘in use’ ;);)

There is just no way to express how happy this makes us. You have made our day – and our decade – Erin! Thank you so much!

Oh yeah: We got Erin to send a pic:

So awesome.

P.S. Erin added: “Now if y’all could just work on an edition with an anti-microbial cover, I’d bet set!!!!!” We’re on it!

P.P.S. We’re sending Erin a brand new Bathroom Reader – so her students will be up to date!

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Looking for a Father’s Day gift? Look no further. Our Father’s Day Sale is in full swing. 30% off the entire store and FREE shipping on order of $35 and more. Go directly to our store.

Okay, so these aren’t real traditions, but yes, Virginia, Donald Duck Day is a real thing. It occurs every June 9. Why that date? Because that’s Donald Duck’s “birthday”—that’s the day of the release of the foul-mouthed fowl’s first animated short, Walt Disney’s “The Wise Little Hen,” in 1934. That means this year is Donald’s 79^th birthday.

Over the course of his many years in the entertainment business, the ill-tempered duck has appeared in countless comic books, films, TV shows, cartoons, and video games. Donald has also been a launching point for other popular Disney characters, such as his uncle Scrooge McDuck, his newphers Huey, Dewey, and Louie, and his girlfriend, Daisy Duck. While Donald isn’t as popular as he used to be (his last appearance in a theatrical film was 1999’s Fantasia 2000), he’s still beloved in Europe. In Scandinavia, his comic book is still the top seller after decades, routinely outselling Spider-Man and Superman books. At one point, one out of every four Norwegians read each issue.

Last year, Yahoo! News celebrated Donald Duck Day with a list of some of Donald’s weirder appearances. Or you can go back to where it all started and watch “The Wise Little Hen” right here.

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Our Father’s Day Sale is in full swing. 30% off the entire store and FREE shipping on order of $35 and more. Also, make sure to enter our June is Bathroom Reading Month giveaway for a chance to win the entire in-print library of Uncle John’s Bathroom Readers.