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Inception is one of those rare movies that has gotten rave reviews from nearly everyone who has seen it, critics and the public alike (it’s currently 87% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes). If you haven’t seen it yet, don’t worry – there’s a spoiler warning if you scroll down. Just don’t read past that point if you don’t want to know anything until you see it for yourself!
Inception was originally written as a horror film about dream-stealers. It developed over a period of nine to ten years, and somewhere during that time it evolved into more of a heist movie.
Christopher Nolan tried to work with Leonardo DiCaprio for years, but Inception was the first script of his that DiCaprio was really interested in.
When Nolan first started writing the movie, he was influenced by The Matrix, Dark City and The Thirteenth Floor, movies that were supposed to make you wonder how real the world around you really is.
Without Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, there would have been no Inception. Although Nolan had the basic idea ready in 2001, he felt he needed more experience making large-scale films. Once he had proved himself with the smash success of the Batman movies, he thought he was ready to pitch and make his own large-scale, big-budget idea.
Production took the cast and crew all over the world. Locations included Tokyo, London, Paris, Tangiers, L.A. and Canada.
Instead of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, it could have been James Franco playing Cobb’s right-hand-man Arthur. Franco had to drop out due to “scheduling conflicts.” One source reports that he was busy working on Your Highness, the sequel to Pineapple Express.
Despite the difficult and surreal subject matter, Christopher Nolan tried to limit the use of computer-generated effects as much as possible.
The guitar parts of the soundtrack were played by Johnny Marr, former guitarist of The Smiths.
Some critics said Nolan ripped off a 1961 French movie called Last Year at Marienbad, but Nolan says he didn’t see it until after Inception had wrapped.
According to Box Office Mojo, as of last week, Inception is the highest-grossing film ever in three categories: Crime Time, Heist/Cape, and Mindbender.
Ariadne, the character Ellen Page plays, was originally supposed to be played by Evan Rachel Wood. When she turned it down, Nolan considered Emily Blunt, Emma Roberts and Rachel McAdams before deciding on the Juno star.
This movie is proof that some child stars grow up to be wildly successful in their careers: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page and Lukas Haas were all working in the entertainment industry before they were 10.
In the movie, Saito owns an interesting set of barrel chairs. Those were originally designed for the famous Frank Lloyd Wright house, Fallingwater, but the owners of the house didn’t particularly care for them.
An Edith Piaf song – “Rien de rien” – is used in the movie. Because Marion Cotillard (Mal) played Ms. Piaf in La vie en rose in 2007, the song was nearly pulled because Christopher Nolan didn’t want viewers to think he was making an inside joke. Composer Hans Zimmer convinced him the song was too perfect to get rid of.
Many of the names in the movie have hidden (or not-so-hidden) meaning.
• Cillian Murphy’s character, Robert Fischer, Jr., is named after chess player Bobby Fischer.
• Maurice Fischer is named after M.C. (Maurits Cornelis) Escher.
• Eames is a reference to Charles and Ray Eames, a couple who designed furniture and architecture and made avant-garde films.
• The word “Cobb,” the last name of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, means “dream” in Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi.
• “Mal” is short for ‘Mallorie’ from the French word Malheur – misfortune. And of course, in lots of languages “mal” translates to something along the lines of “bad.”
• Ariadne is part of the Greek Minotaur myth. Legend has it she helped Theseus find his way out of the Minotaur’s maze by giving him a ball of red fleece.
• Yusuf is the Arabic form of Joseph. In the Bible, Joseph had the gift of dream interpretation.
There’s another reference to M.C. Escher in the movie – the “paradox staircase.” It’s an homage to Escher’s “The Infinite Staircase” or “Ascending and Descending.”
A long hotel corridor was constructed that actually rotated 360 degrees to create strange gravity effects. The hallway was originally only supposed to be 40 feet long but expanded to 100 feet as the action sequence was written to be more elaborate and in depth. Joseph Gordon-Levitt did all of his own stunts in the hallway, by the way, and spent time practicing in a “human hamster wheel.”
Ariadne’s tight bun hairstyle in some scenes is more for practical reasons than aesthetic ones: during the anti-gravity parts, filmmakers didn’t want to worry about how her hair should be reacting.
Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy have worked together three times in the past few years (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and Inception) and each time, Cillian Murphy has spent the majority of his time onscreen with a bag over his head. Hmm. Coincidence, I’m sure.
Want to know the future? You don’t need crystal ball or a time machine. Just examine your moles or your fingernails or your cats. Really.
Ailuromancy or felidomancy. Simply observe the way your cat moves or jumps to determine the future – especially weather. A black cat crossing your path being a bad omen is an old piece of ailuromancy. Did your cat lick her ears three times? Company must be on the way. Right ear? It’s a gentleman caller. Left ear? Expect a lady.
(Image credit: Flickr user fazen)
Rumpology. This is just what is sounds like – divination via the derriere. But take this one with a grain of salt – the only major backer of this method is Jackie Stallone, Sly’s mom and, by most accounts, a rather questionable “psychic.” Jackie says Rumpology works a lot like palm reading: the cracks, crevices, birth marks and dimples can reveal a lot about a person. According to one rumpologist, an apple-shaped butt “indicates someone who is charismatic, dynamic, very confident and often creative. A person who enjoys life.”
Uromancy. I bet if you think about the root word you can figure this one out. Yep… it’s fortune-telling based on your urine. Sure, your urine can definitely tell you a few things about your health – how well hydrated you are, for example. But uromancy is the interpretation of the bubbles in urine to reveal future events. If the bubbles are big and spaced far apart, expect good things. If they are small and close together, something terrible (death of a loved one or a serious illness) may be just around the corner.
Cromniomancy. Good news for gardeners – you can use your onions to see if you should prepare for bad news. One method is going to require that you build an altar, though: in the past, people separated from their loved ones could write their names on onions (one name per veggie) and then lay them on the altar to sprout. The faster the onion sprouted, the better health and happiness the person whose name was on the onion was experiencing. Woe to the person whose onion didn’t sprout. You can also use cromniomancy to answer yes or no inquiries: plant two onions, one with each answer on it. The one that sprouts first is the answer to your question.
(Image credit: Flickr user Darwin Bell)
Sternomancy This sounds like a cheap pick up line to be used at a bar, but Sternomancy is actually future-prediction by looking at someone’s chest. Back in yesteryear, the study was limited to markings and bumps on the chest, kind of similar to phrenology (the study of head shape and bumps to determine personality). But these days, men’s and women’s magazines have taken it upon themselves to twist sternomancy into personality prediction based on the size and shape of a woman’s breasts. Sternomancy doesn’t just apply to humans – the old tradition of breaking the wishbone at Thanksgiving is an old form of the practice.
Onychomancy. Believe it or not, your fingernails are very powerful. Fingernail clippings were once used in spells, healing rituals and superstitions. In fact, many of the superstitions are still floating around out there – Japanese girls are told that biting their fingernails will result in a difficult childbirth later on down the line. The white spots on your fingernails are supposed to be a sign of good fortune – a spot on thumb specifically means that a gift is about to be bestowed upon you. Greedy people are said to have crooked fingernails, and the half-moon shape (“lunula”) at the base of the nail indicates your lifeline – the bigger the lunula, the longer your life will last. Ever bend your nail back? Bad news: not only did it probably make you use a few choice words, it also means there’s a difficult time ahead of you and it could last for a couple of months.
Oomancy. Making an omelet? Give this a try first: separate the egg white, then drop into boiling water and see what shape the whites take. It’s kind of like reading tea leaves. Before you dismiss the idea, consider this: one of the girls involved in the Salem Witch Trial was playing this seemingly harmless game with her friends when she saw her egg whites take the shape of a coffin. Not long after, 24 deaths rocked the community.
(Image credit: Flickr user Luis M. Justino)
Moleosophy. And you thought those little bumps were just birthmarks. Nope, according to some, moles can indicate exactly what the future holds for you if you know how to read them just right. Actually, it doesn’t take too much imagination to figure out moleosophy – most of it is fairly straightforward. Mole on or near your bellybutton? You want kids. Mole on your butt? You’re lazy and not very ambitious. A mark on your back means you’re rather unreliable. Some aren’t quite as obvious, however – moles on the ears are considered lucky, a mole on the elbow indicates a love of travel and adventure, and a mole on your fingers means you’re dishonest.
Margaritomancy. I briefly thought this was something along the lines of reading tea leaves, but having something to do with margaritas. And I was totally prepared to go out and test the theory, purely in the name of research. But “margarita” is actually Latin for “pearl,” so Margaritomancy is actually the study of pearls to predict the future. Darn. Many years ago, a pearl would be thrown into a pot sitting in a fire and its reaction to the heat would determine a person’s guilt or innocence. If the pearl just sat there, the person was innocent. Any movement indicated guilt.
For me, part of the fun of going out to the movies is getting to enjoy some guilt-free junk food. There’s just something about watching an action-packed blockbuster with a tub of popcorn and some Junior Mints. The next time you’re sitting at the theater waiting for the show to start, you can share these bite-sized tidbits with your date. Hey, it might be better entertainment than the previews!
Milk Duds. It kind of sounds like something Linda Richman would say on Coffee Talk: “Milk Duds. They’re neither Milk, nor Duds. Discuss.” But the fact is, they’re both. The “Milk” comes from the high amount of milk used in the product when it was created in 1926, and “Dud” comes from the fact that the candies were meant to be perfectly round, similar to a malted milk ball. Rather than spend copious amounts of money and effort trying to get the candies more spherical, Hershey’s opted to call it a “Dud” instead and simply market it that way. And although there’s still milk in the product, there’s a bit less of it in the past few years since Hershey started using vegetable oil in some products to replicate the expensive cocoa butter used in milk chocolate.
Only slightly related: a lady who mistook her hearing aid for a Milk Dud.
(Image credit: I Am Inspired)
Junior Mints. These little bites of minty goodness were favorites of mine long before they plunged into the body cavity of a helpless surgery patient on Seinfeld. In a clever marketing ploy to tie the candy in with the movies, Junior Mints were named after Junior Miss, a show that was all the rage on Broadway at the time. These days, I’d say the namesake confection is much more well-known than the play, even though it eventually became a radio show starring Shirley Temple. Robert Welch, the inventor of the Junior Mint, also created the Sugar Daddy and Sugar Babies. I have nothing against Sugar Babies, but the Junior Mint is far superior, at least when it comes to pop culture: you can find references to the dark chocolate round in Seinfeld, Family Guy, Two and a Half Men, in Jimmy Buffett’s song “Fruitcakes,” in Hüsker Dü’s song “Eiffel Tower High,” in Augusten Burroughs’ book Possible Side Effects and in Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. Not too shabby for a mint.
Sour Patch Kids. The mere mention of Sour Patch Kids makes my mouth water. When the candy was invented in the ’70s, they were known as Mars Men and were sold as loose penny candy in stores. It wasn’t until Cabbage Patch Kid-mania hit in the ’80s that the pucker-inducing gummy was retooled to be shaped like dolls to capitalize on the craze. The first Sour Patch Kid on the package was modeled after the inventor’s son.
(Image credit: Flickr user dklimke)
Sno-Caps, Goobers and Raisinets. The Blumenthal Brother Chocolate Company of Philadelphia really knew how to make good movie theater candy. Goobers – chocolate-covered peanuts – came first in 1925. The success of taking a simple product and dunking it in milk chocolate inspired them to give raisins a shot, and thus Raisinets were born in 1927. Finally, sometime in the late ’20s, Sno-Caps followed under the name “Bob Whites.” The Blumenthal Brother Chocolate Company has long since disbanded – Sno-Caps, Goobers and Raisinets were all acquired by Nestle in 1984 – but their sugary legacy lives on. Bizarrely, Time magazine noted that “All the Blumenthals are excellent pinochle players,” so I guess they had that to fall back on if the whole candy thing didn’t work out.
Red Vines. I think most licorice lovers can be divided into two categories: those who love Red Vines and those who love Twizzlers. The American Licorice Company introduced Black Licorice Vines in 1914, and those did well enough that they were able to branch out into Raspberry Vines in 1920. They were renamed “Red Vines” in 1952. Despite being around for as long as Elizabeth II has ruled, Red Vines’ first television ad didn’t air until 2008. More fun trivia from the American Licorice Company: they created a licorice shoe for Charlie Chaplin to carve up for a meal in the 1925 movie The Gold Rush.
(Image credit: Flickr user Incase.)
Dots and Crows. If you need proof as to how popular these chewy gumdrops are, you need only look to the numbers: the Tootsie Company produces four billion Dots every year. But Tootsie didn’t own the company that invented Dots until 1972 – prior to that, Dots and their sister line, Crows, were a product of the Mason Company. In fact, you’ll occasionally hear some people continue to refer to them as “Mason Dots.” And there’s a nice story that Black Crows, the black licorice-flavored alternative to Dots, should have been called something else entirely. The story goes that the Mason Company informed their candy label printer that they were making a new candy called “Black Rose,” which the printer misheard as “Black Crows.” But Candy Professor nicely debunks this one with a 1911 trademark application from the Mason Company that clearly asks to protect “Black Crows,” not “Black Rose.”
(Image credit: Flickr user pmarkham)
What’s your favorite movie theater treat? Junior Mints are my choice for taste, but if I go that route I usually just have an empty box by the time previews are over. To make it through a whole movie, I like Gobstoppers.
It’s been 15 years since the first Toy Story came out. I have to say, I can’t think of many movies with great sequels, let alone movies that are still good by the time #3 rolls around. But from everything I’ve been hearing, Toy Story 3 is every bit as good as the original, if not better. Having an infant in the house makes it a bit challenging to get to the movies, so I haven’t seen it yet, but it’s definitely on my list as soon as I get the chance. In the meantime, let’s flashback to the movie that put the franchise on the map back in 1995.
You probably know it’s common practice for animators to act out a scene or movement to get an idea of how the action would really look. But those green plastic army men obviously don’t move in real life, so the animation team had to come up with a creative solution: they glued some sneakers to pieces of plywood and tried to walk using that.
An early version of the script portrayed Woody as a sarcastic jerk who was constantly berating and insulting his fellow toy box members. It just didn’t feel right, so writers went back to the drawing board and spent a week making Woody the nice guy we know today.
Barbie is in the movies now, of course, along with her on-again-off-again beau, Ken. But the first time around, Mattel passed on letting their iconic doll be featured in the movie. They claimed that they didn’t want Barbie to have a personality defined by a company; they wanted kids to provide the personality when they played with the dolls. Hmm. Considering all of the Barbie videos already out on the market, I call shenanigans on that one. After Toy Story was a confirmed hit, Mattel gave their approval for the sequels. Go figure.
Can you imagine Billy Crystal as the voice of Buzz Lightyear? It could have happened. Disney and Pixar were wooing Crystal, but Billy declined, feeling his voice just wan’t a good fit. “It’s the only regret I have in the business of something I passed on,” he has said. I’m sure Tim Allen is grateful. But no harm, no foul – Crystal went on to voice Mike in Monsters, Inc., which did pretty well at the box office too.
Any Far Side Neatoramanauts out there? If you’ve seen Toy Story, it’s likely you’ve already spotted this tribute to Gary Larson: it’s when the toy shark does a Woody impression, saying, “Look at me, I’m Woody! Howdy Howdy Howdy!” A Far Side strip from the early ’80s macabrely shows a vulture wearing a dead cowboy’s Stetson, declaring, “Hey everyone, look at me, I’m a cowboy! Howdy! Howdy! Howdy!” Check it out here.
Pixar is famous for their Easter eggs – fun little bits hidden in the movie for viewers to find. Here are just a few of them:
• All vehicles in the movie have license plate stickers that are dated November ’95, which is when the movie was first released.
• Woody gets trapped in a milk crate with a toolbox perched on top of it. The toolbox is labeled “Binford,” which is the company that sponsored Tim “The Toolman” Taylor’s show on Home Improvement, starring, of course, Tim Allen.
• Many of the Easter eggs won’t mean anything to you unless you worked on the film or are very familiar with the people who did. For instance, many of the “authors” of the books on Andy’s shelves are actually the names of people who worked on the movie. Even the character of Andy has meaning – his name comes from Brown University Professor Andries Van Dam, a computer animation guru who taught many Pixar employees. Similarly, the letter/number combo “A113″ is worked into all Pixar movies – this is the room number of the animation department at the California Institute for the Arts, where a lot of staffers went to school. In Toy Story, it’s on the license plate of Andy’s mom’s car.
Toy Story was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2005, the very first year it was eligible for inclusion. By contrast, Beauty and the Beast took 21 years to be inducted.
Buzz Lightyear is named after astronaut Buzz Aldrin, obviously. Buzz Aldrin seems to enjoy this fact, as he pulled a Buzz Lightyear action figure out to great applause during a speech at NASA. NASA likes him, too – on May 31, 2008, a Buzz accompanied the real-life astronauts of the space Shuttle Discovery on a mission. He docked with the International Space Station and became the first toy to walk on the moon.
(Image credit: NASA)
Woody is voiced by Tom Hanks, obviously, but in non-movie media, he is usually voiced by Jim Hanks – Tom’s brother.
Speaking of the pull-string cowboy, Andy’s once-favorite toy was named after Woody Strode, an actor who appeared in quite a few Westerns in the ’50s and ’60s. Woody the doll does have a last name, but it’s not Strode. Editor and director Lee Unkrich revealed on his Twitter that since the very first Toy Story, Woody’s last name has been “Pride.”
Congratulations to Neatorama author Stacy Conradt (Stacy Bee) and her husband, who welcomed their first child Lydia Louise into the world yesterday! Lydia weighed 6 pounds, 15 ounces and measured 20.5 inches long. Mother and baby are fine, and Lydia’s parents and grandparents are as proud as punch! You can see a couple more pictures at NeatoBambino.
Sure, they may be whacking people and laundering money in the evenings, but mobsters have to have something to fall back on… or at least a job that covers for their other activities. Here’s what a few of them did (or claimed they did).
Al Capone’s business card claimed he was a used furniture dealer. He used the “I’m just a secondhand furniture salesman” line for years and finally had business cards printed up to hand out to police and investigators. For a used furniture salesman, he was doing pretty well – his annual income often exceeded $100 million. For that kind of money, I think I might go open an antique store…
Louie Bagels, AKA Louis Daidone, a member of the Lucchese crime family, apparently once spent his days kneading dough and filling vats of cream cheese at Bagels by the Bay in Howard Beach, Queens. As you can probably deduce, that’s how Louis got his mobster nickname.
You might remember Frank Sheeran from the Jimmy Hoffa saga – one of the many theories floating around is that Sheeran was used to get Hoffa in the car that would take him to his death. Hoffa and Sheeran were good friends and it’s widely believed that Hoffa wouldn’t have put himself in harm’s way without a trusted ally along for the ride. Before Sheeran was rubbing elbows with the likes of Hoffa, he was making money as a trucker. It didn’t take long for him to discover that he could be making a lot more money by committing some crimes along the way, including murder.
Albert Anastasia was a pretty bad dude. He ran a gang of contract killers called Murder Inc., and was once the boss of the Gambino family. But that’s not what his business card would have you believe. According to his card, Umberto Anastasio (his name at birth) was simply a lowly mattress salesman at Convertible Mattress Corporation in Brooklyn, New York. Something tells me he couldn’t have given you much advice on Serta vs. Sealy, though.
William Daddano, Sr., AKA Willie Potatoes, actually did have a legit company, not just a phony business card. By night, Daddano may have been a top enforcer with the Chicago Outfit. But by day, he was busy running the West Suburban Scavenger Service, a Chicagoland garbage collection company.
Harry J. “Doc” Sagansky could have made his mother proud – he actually had a degree in dentistry from Tufts University. He opened a practice in a liquor store in the pre-Prohibition days (liquor, dentistry… they go hand-in-hand, don’t you think?), which is where he got his feet wet in the life of illegal crime. It started with illegal gambling, which he used to fund a couple of nightclubs and a loan agency. He was quite successful and never had to return to dentistry as his day job, but he did continue making donations to Tufts and to Beth Israel Hospital for the rest of his life. In fact, he died at Beth Israel in 1997.
Bugsy Siegel, of course, was pretty instrumental in the development of Las Vegas as we know it today. First he bought the El Cortez on Fremont Street and ended up selling it for a profit of $166,000. Then he used that money to “convince” the owner of the Flamingo, which was in the planning stages, to accept new partners. He basically took a controlling stake and closely oversaw final stages of construction, even though he really had no idea what he was doing. He spent way too much money and got angry with his construction foreman, who was a little worried that his mobster boss was going to off him if things didn’t shape up. Reportedly, Siegel told him, “Don’t worry, we only kill each other.” I’m not sure I would be too reassured by that, really. The hotel opened on December 26, 1946, but Bugsy’s “legit” job didn’t last long – he was shot to death on June 20, 1947.
Apparently used furniture was an inside joke among mobsters, because it seems to be chosen as a “profession” more than any other, perhaps thanks to Al Capone. Joey “Doves” Aiuppa managed Taylor & Company, which was supposedly a furniture manufacturer, but was really just a front for a company that made illegal slot machines. “Doves” got his nickname because of all the things he could have been busted for over the years, the crime that landed him in jail was smuggling doves across state lines. It’s illegal to have more than 24 doves on your person outside of hunting season (who knew?), but in 1962, Aiuppa was caught by FBI agents with 563 frozen doves in his car and went to jail for three months.
Joseph Massino, who was once the head of the Bonanno crime family, was a restauranteur. He owned CasaBlanca Restaurant and catering in Queens (as well as several other eateries) We know for sure that he arranged for meetings at CasaBlanca, but Time magazine will only say that Massino allegedly ran an operation that included extortion, loan sharking, illegal gambling, narcotics and murder from the kitschy restaurant.
And then there’s the Pizza Connection. It was a massive Mafia plot to sell and distribute heroin and the cover for the entire thing were a bunch of independently-owned pizza parlors. The main one was located in Queens and was called “Al Dentes.” It reminds me of Loverboy, that old Patrick Dempsey movie where women could order a gigolo by requesting “extra anchovies.” The case cost more than $50 million and made prosecution lawyer Rudy Giuliani a highly sought after attorney.
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With the new Alice in Wonderland making its debut recently, I thought it would be appropriate to revisit one of the old ones. It’s not the original – Alice has been made many, many times – but the Disney version is definitely one of the most well-known. Enjoy the trivia, and if you don’t, well… off with your head!
Walt Disney had already had some success with Alice in Wonderland. Combining live action and animation, Walt had a little girl named Virginia Davis star as Alice in a series of shorts called “The Alice Comedies.” From 1923 to 1927, Davis starred in 57 of these short films, including titles like “Alice’s Egg Plant,” “Alice Chops the Suey,” “Alice the Whaler” and “Alice Rattled by Rats.”
Based on this earlier success, Disney thought he might do a full-length live action-animation combo movie. When the movie was in its early stages, Mary Pickford did some color screen tests as Alice. By 1945, Disney thought he might like Ginger Rogers to star as the precocious little girl. This fell through, and by 1946, work had begun on an animated version that would have art design quite similar to the Tenniel illustrations from the original Lewis Carroll book. This version even get as far as storyboards, but Walt ended up hating it and had changed his mind back to a movie that would combine live action and animation. As you might have guessed, this idea also fell through, and by the late ‘40s, animation was started for the movie we know today.
If you love the bright colors and modern design of the movie, you have Mary Blair to thank. Blair’s distinct style can also be seen in Peter Pan, Song of the South and Cinderella. She is probably best known for art not in a movie, though – Blair is responsible for the design of the famous (or infamous) ride It’s a Small World. She also made a 90-foot mural for the Disney’s Contemporary Resort.
If you’ve read the book, you know that there were a large number of songs and poems written by Lewis Carroll that didn’t make it into the movie. But it wasn’t for lack of trying. Disney hired more than 30 songwriters to try to transform Carroll’s whimsical words to music, but it was simply impossible to cram them all into a 75-minute movie. Still, the movie boasts the most songs ever used in an animated Disney film. Because some of them are just snippets of songs, though, most people don’t really realize this.
Alice was supposed to sing a ballad called “Beyond the Laughing Sky” that would be somewhat similar to Dorothy’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in The Wizard of Oz. It wasn’t well-suited to Kathryn Beaumont’s (the voice of Alice) vocal range, though, and it seemed to drag the movie down a little. The lyrics were later changed and it was repurposed for Peter Pan under the name “Second Star to the Right.”
The movie was kind of a flop. It wasn’t a total disaster, but just like with any book-to-film adaptation, there were literary fans waiting to pounce on inaccuracies and omitted scenes they felt were vital. It wasn’t a big hit until the 1960s and ‘70s, when it became associated with drug culture. This wasn’t exactly how Walt pictured the film succeeding, but Disney eventually rolled with it – the company re-released the movie in 1974 and again in 1981.
Do the voices in the movie seem slightly familiar? If you watch a lot of Disney movies, there’s a good reason for that. Walt was loyal to his actors and would use them in multiple movies. Alice’s voice, Kathryn Beaumont, was also Wendy in Peter Pan and still provides the voices for both today (she has been featured in the Kingdom Hearts video games and in the rides at Disney Parks). Ed Wynn, the Mad Hatter, can also be seen in Mary Poppins as the giggly Uncle Albert and as the toymaker in Babes in Toyland. Sterling Holloway, the Cheshire Cat, might have found the most success with Disney, though: he was the voice of Winnie the Pooh, the voice of Roquefort in The AristoCats, Kaa in The Jungle Book, and had bit parts in Bambi, Dumbo, The Three Caballeros and Snow White.
The movie is actually a combination of two books – the original Alice in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass.
Alice was originally going to encounter the Jabberwocky as she does in the books, but that scene was cut (rumor has it the beast was too scary). If you pay close attention, though, you can catch a couple of references to the creature: the Cheshire Cat sings a stanza from the poem, and there’s also an appearance by the Mome Raths, which are mentioned in the Jabberwocky poem.
So are you looking forward to the new movie? Think it can’t possibly top the original? Or are you strictly a book purist?
There are ancient mysteries all over the world that have perplexed scientists, historians and archaeologists for ages: Stonehenge, the Pyramids and the Nazca Lines among them. They might not be as well known, but we have at least a couple of pretty intriguing mysteries of our own here in the U.S. Check out these two mind-bogglers – and be sure to let us know in the comments if you have any good theories as to what happened.
It’s hard to believe there was a city in the U.S. that outnumbered any other in population, that was larger than even London at one point, that served as the biggest urban center north of Mexico – and that lots of us have never even heard of.
It’s Cahokia, Illinois, about 15 minutes away from St. Louis, Missouri. It was inhabited for about 700 years and was home to up to 20,000 people when it peaked from 1050-1200. More than 120 “mounds” were built for ceremonial purposes and to provide a prestigious spot for temples and the homes of chiefs.
Lots of interesting things have been discovered in excavations at Cahokia over the years. It even had its own Stonehenge – in fact, maybe up to five of them. Dubbed “Woodhenge,” archaeologists think the early residents of Cahokia used red cedar posts stuck in deep pits to mark days and events. One of them has been reconstructed for tourists to the Cahokia area.
Other advancements found include a copper workshop and watchtowers.
A slightly more disturbing discovery was hundreds of skeletons, including a mass grave of more than 50 women who were about the same age. Another mass grave was found containing both men and women, some of whom where apparently buried alive. It’s believed that they were sacrificial victims.
All of these signs of thriving civilization have to make you wonder: what the heck happened? How does a city go from being one of the largest in the world to being practically nonexistent in less than 200 years? Well… we don’t really know. There are plenty of theories, from widespread disease to political collapse. But since the people who lived there left absolutely no written record, we have no idea what actually happened. We also don’t know who these early people were – although we know all about the French missionaries who settled in the area in 1699 and the monks who made the mounds their home in 1809, it’s still not known what Native American tribes might be descendants of those early people.
If you think it’s a little eerie that an entire city could slowly dwindle to nothingness like Cahokia did, consider that the Roanoke Colony of present-day North Carolina dwindled to nothingness seemingly overnight. More than 20 years before Jamestown was founded, the English Colony of Roanoke was set up with about 100 households. But the colony wasn’t thriving and leader Sir Richard Grenville shipped back to England with the promise of returning with more supplies to sustain the colony. When he came back, he discovered that the majority of the town had abandoned it, heading back to England with Sir Francis Drake when he offered to take them back with him after a brief visit.
In 1587, a second attempt was made to settle at Roanoke. Nearly 120 colonists settled in at the island and tried to establish friendly relations with the nearby tribe, but to no avail. The tribe had bad experiences with the original group of colonists and refused to meet with the new batch. After one of the settlers was killed while out hunting for crabs alone, the settlers began to fear for their lives and sent their governor back to England to ask for supplies and assistance. Due to various circumstances, Governor White didn’t make it back to Roanoke until three years later. When he finally did make it back, he discovered that the entire town was essentially gone – people, houses and all. Knowing that relations with the Native Americans in the area were pretty hostile, White told the colonists that they should leave him a sign if they had to relocate against their will or were under distress. The sign was supposed to be a Maltese cross carved on a certain tree. There was no Maltese cross on the tree, but there was something: the word “Croatoan” carved into what was left of the fort and “Cro” carved into a tree.
Governor White never found his Lost Colony, nor did any trace of them ever show up anywhere. But there’s no shortage of theories as to what may have happened to the settlers, but here are the five most popular:
What do you think happened at these two mysterious sites? Do you think we’ll ever know for sure?
Just when you think you’ve done everything right for Valentine’s Day – you’ve got the box of chocolates, the dozen red roses, the champagne – these guys come along and make your romantic efforts look like child’s play. Check out these historical romantic gestures – and try not to feel too bad about your Russell Stover’s. We can’t all be Nebuchadnezzar.
Yes, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World may have been created because Nebuchadnezzar II wanted to impress his wife. While some historians think the gardens only ever existed as a poetic creation on paper, others contend that the Chaldean King felt bad for his wife, Amytis of Media, because she missed her Persian homeland so much. As any doting husband would do, Nebuchadnezzar decided to embark upon a massive landscaping project using plants and trees that would remind her of Persia’s forested mountains. OK, he wasn’t exactly out there with a wheelbarrow himself, but what he had created sounds like it was pretty spectacular. Greek Historian Diodorus described it like this:
“The Garden was 100 feet (30 m) long by 100 ft wide and built up in tiers so that it resembled a theatre. Vaults had been constructed under the ascending terraces which carried the entire weight of the planted garden; the uppermost vault, which was seventy-five feet high, was the highest part of the garden, which, at this point, was on the same level as the city walls. The roofs of the vaults which supported the garden were constructed of stone beams some sixteen feet long, and over these were laid first a layer of reeds set in thick tar, then two courses of baked brick bonded by cement, and finally a covering of lead to prevent the moisture in the soil penetrating the roof. On top of this roof enough topsoil was heaped to allow the biggest trees to take root. The earth was leveled off and thickly planted with every kind of tree. And since the galleries projected one beyond the other, where they were sunlit, they contained conduits for the water which was raised by pumps in great abundance from the river, though no one outside could see it being done.”
Not bad, right? His romantic gesture must have worked, because Amytis stuck around.
You might not want to attempt this Valentine if your loved one is still living, lest they think you’re after their insurance policy. But Shah Jahan had good reason to create a massive tomb for his wife, Mumtaz Mahal – she had just died while giving birth to their 14th child. Shah Jahan was devastated. He immediately went into seclusion and was rumored to be considering abdicating the throne and turning to a solitary life as a religious recluse. Reports say that his hair went from having a few strands of grey hair to a full head of it, and that he wept so much his vision deteriorated. His family put up with it for a while, but eventually became frustrated with his constant grieving. “If he continued to abandon himself to his mourning, Mumtaz might think of giving up the joys of Paradise to come back to earth, this place of misery,” one of his honorary uncles wrote, “He should also consider the children she had left to his care.”
Ouch. Well, sometimes when you’re upset, you just need to throw your energies into something else – so that’s what Jahan did. Six months after she died, the foundation was laid for what would end up being one of the greatest architectural and artistic accomplishments in history. It took 22 years, about 20,000 workers and 32 million rupees or so to complete. Poet Sir Edwin Arnold referred to the Taj Mahal as, “Not a piece of architecture, as other buildings are, but the proud passions of an emperor’s love wrought in living stones.”
Both Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal have taken up final residence in the Taj Mahal.
Photo from PlasmaPool.
OK, Prince Edward VIII didn’t give his wife the throne, he gave it up for her. Prince Edward was in a relationship with a married American woman named Wallis Simpson when his father, King George V, suddenly passed away. In fact, Edward watched the public announcement of his father’s death (and, subsequently, Edward’s reign) from a window, accompanied by the married Simpson. Edward served as King for less than a year, with advisors repeatedly telling him that the public would never accept Wallis Simpson as queen for many reasons, including her two divorces and the fact that she was born in the United States. Edward suggested a morganatic marriage, meaning that although he would remain King, there was no way Wallis could ever become Queen. This suggestion was immediately shot down.
There was so much pressure on the couple that Simpson was just about ready to make a public announcement saying that she was ready and willing to give up the King, but Edward refused to allow it. On December 10, 1936, Edward signed the Instrument of Abdication, stating that he was willingly giving up all of his kingly duties. He issued a statement to the people of England, saying “”I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility, and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love.”
Simpson hadn’t divorced her husband yet and began proceedings immediately. The couple had to stay away from each other until the divorce was final; they finally reunited in May of 1937 and married a month later on June 3, 1937 – which would have been King George’s 72nd birthday.
Photo from the BBC.
We may not be at the top of the food chain, exactly, but we at least have our inanimate food conquered. Bread, veggies, milk – these things don’t pose a threat to our existence. At least, not usually. On at least a couple of occasions, some faulty (or just old) construction has resulted in freak accidents that caused a lot of death and injury. Here are the two most famous events.
If you’re going to go out, you might as well go out doing something you love. You hear that saying a lot, but I doubt even the most die-hard beer-drinker would have enjoyed drowning in 232,000 gallons of suds during the London Beer Flood.
The year was 1814, and a very old vat at Meux’s Brewery containing 135,000 gallons of fermenting porter finally decided to give in to old age. One of the metal hoops surrounding the vat snapped; the resulting noise was heard up to five miles away. As if that much on and as if that wasn’t bad enough, it knocked over a bunch of other vats, causing a grand total of nearly 1.25 million liters of beer to spill out onto Tottenham Court Road and other surrounding streets. The gush was so massive and powerful that two houses were entirely destroyed. At a nearby pub – which had probably previously enjoyed their proximity to Meux’s Brewery – a wall caved in, killing a teenage girl who worked there. The Brewery was located in a poor part of town called St. Giles Rookery, which was a bunch of tenements and low income housing. Entire families lived in basements of these buildings, and when the beer suddenly rushed into through windows and walls, people were unable to get out and drowned. All in all, eight people were killed that day. Another person is said to have died from alcohol poisoning the following day.
People capitalized on the tragedy, though – many of the residents ran out to the streets with pots and pans to salvage whatever free alcohol they could get their hands on. And shockingly, some people took to exhibiting their dead friends and family for money. Obviously this was quite the freak accident and people outside of the area were curious. To raise a little money, enterprising citizens decided to show the corpses for a fee. The police had to put a stop to this practice when too many gawkers crowded into one house, which was structurally unsound from the flood. The floor collapsed, dumping the lot of them into a basement that was still half-full of beer.
Despite paying for the funerals of the drunkenly departed, the Meux Brewery was still sued for neglecting their equipment, especially when it came to light that an employee had previously alerted a boss to a crack in the vat that eventually erupted. However, the judge presiding over the trial declared the whole tragedy an Act of God, finding the company free of fault. Something tells me the ruling would be a little different today.
You think drowning in beer is bad? At least you could attempt to swim through the beer. Trying to fight through a sea of molasses would be all but futile.
And that’s exactly what happened in 1919, when a vat of the sticky stuff exploded at the Purity Distilling Company in Boston. The tank was 50 feet tall, 90 feet in diameter and held 2.3 million gallons of molasses. Much like the vat of beer in London, the tank just gave out. First-hand accounts from people in the area said the rivets popping out of the tank sounded like a machine gun being fired. And then came the wave – a solid, 15-foot-tall swath of molasses, 160 feet wide and moving at an astonishing 35 miles an hour. When you consider that molasses is the epitome of “slow,” 35 miles per hour is nearly unthinkable.
It happened at 12:30 p.m., just as a bunch of workers at the factory were taking lunch. They were among the largest group of fatalities, which also included two 10-year-old children and a 65-year-old woman who was just sitting on her porch when the entire house was smashed on top of her. Two entire blocks were practically flattened by the tsunami of syrupy sweetness – buildings in the immediate vicinity were completely knocked clear of their foundations and fell to rubble in a matter of seconds. When it settled, the molasses was waist deep, making it almost impossible for rescuers to wade through and try to save survivors.
Sadly, this disaster definitely could have been prevented. The tank was hastily constructed thanks to the increasing demand due to the war – back then, molasses was used in gunpowder. The foreman who oversaw the construction of the tank had no background and apparently couldn’t even read a blueprint, according to multiple sources. He was in such a hurry he didn’t even bother to test the tank for leaks with water when it was complete, as was standard practice. The vat was immediately filled with molasses, and you’d better believe it started leaking almost immediately. It leaked so much that neighborhood kids could stop by, fill up cans with syrup, and take it home to their mothers. In response to complaints about the leaky monstrosity, the company had the vat painted brown so the leaks wouldn’t be so noticeable. Pretty responsible, huh?
The company tried to make the public believe that the “sudden” explosion was the result of dynamite deliberately planted by anarchists, but the public didn’t believe it – and neither did the judge and jury. It took nearly six years of investigation, but the report found without a doubt that the company had been extremely negligent. U.S. Industrial Alcohol was ordered to pay the families of the 21 victims a total of $1 million. Boston smelled of molasses for decades afterward; some residents say it still permeates the air on the right day with the right wind.
Photo from http://edp.org/molasses.htm.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a staple in our household, which is funny, because I remember being quite scared of the steamroller scene near the end when I was a kid. Now that I’m older, I appreciate it more from standpoint of how much work it took to get such a groundbreaking movie made – and here are some of the inside details on exactly what it took to make that happen. For the record, I still find the steamroller scene a little creepy.
Like so many movies, this one was a book before it ever hit the screen. In this case, the book was named Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, by Gary K. Wolf. But the film doesn’t follow the book exactly. For instance, the book took place in present day – which was 1981 – not 1947.
And instead of famous animated cartoon characters making appearances, famous cartoon strip characters pop up to chat with Roger, including Dick Tracy. Most Toons like Tracy “spoke” in the book the only way they knew how – through word bubbles. Some became “bilingual” and could speak without balloons. The only line in the whole book that made it to the silver screen was spoken by Baby Herman – “I’ve got a 50-year-old lust and a three-year-old dinky.” In the book, though, Baby Herman was actually 50, not 36. The ending is a lot different too, but I won’t spoil that for you (Google will tell you pretty quickly, if you’re dying to know).
After the movie became a success in 1988, Wolf wrote a second book (though not necessarily a sequel) that fell more in line with the movie than with his original book. It’s called Who P-P-P-Plugged Roger Rabbit?
It’s probably music to the ears of Roger Rabbit fans: a prequel. According to the prequel, Roger grew up on a farm in the midwest and headed out to California to try to find his real mother. That’s how he falls in love with Jessica Krupnick (Jessica Rabbit has a much better ring to it, don’t you think?) and eventually meets not only his mother, but his father too – none other than Bugs Bunny.
The movie would have been a direct-to-video release. As of 1997, Michael Eisner was onboard for the prequel and commissioned a rewrite of the script; in 1998 some test footage was even shot. After estimations brought the cost of the movie to about $100 million, the idea was more or less shelved.
However, just last year, Robert Zemeckis said he was interested in doing the prequel and it’s rumored that the script is being worked on again. I guess we’ll see. I’d certainly go see it.
I did. Here are some other fun facts from the movie.
Although Roger and his cartoon pals have largely been abandoned at Disney, you can still find traces of them here and there. Be sure to keep your eyes peeled the next time you’re at Disney Hollywood Studios – if you look in the right place, you’ll find Eddie Valiant’s office, complete with the “hole” where Roger busted through the glass. There’s also a billboard for R.K. Maroon Studios.
Kathleen Turner famously provided Jessica Rabbit’s sultry voice, but Amy Irving – then Steven Spielberg’s wife – was her singing voice.
This was the last film Mel Blanc provided his famous voices for, including Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety Bird, Porky Pig and Sylvester the Cat – with one exception. He did provide Daffy’s voice one more time in 1988 before passing away in 1989.
The movie’s original budget was $29.9 million dollars – the most an animated movie had ever cost at the time. But the price tag could have been even more astronomical – Roger was slated to cost $50 million at first, but Disney refused to shell out that much and wouldn’t approve production until costs were slashed. Rumor has it that by the time production was finished, the budget had soared to around $70 million.
Despite the cavalcade of characters from across the cartoon universe, a few that Disney wanted are missing: Popeye and Olive Oyl, Tom and Jerry, Casper the Friendly Ghost and Deputy Dawg. They couldn’t secure the rights for these in time for the movie.
Before the final title was finally settled on, others that were considered included Murder in Toontown, Dead Toons Don’t Pay Bills, Trouble in Toontown and Eddie Goes to Toontown.
The book has a question mark after the title, but the movie doesn’t – ending a movie title with a question mark is considered bad luck in the industry, apparently. This hasn’t stopped Who’s Harry Crumb?; What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?; or Dude, Where’s My Car?. The principle does apply to What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and Who’s That Girl, however.
Warner Brothers would only allow the use of their toons if they got the same screen time as Disney’s toons. Thus, when you see Bugs, he’s usually with Mickey, and when you see Daffy, Donald is probably there too. Screencap from Obsessed with Film.
To make Judge Doom extra creepy, Robert Zemeckis had Christopher Lloyd refrain from blinking during his scenes. I’m tempted to watch just to see if I can catch him. Tim Curry auditioned for the role of Judge Doom, but he was so disturbingly sinister that Zemeckis, Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner all nixed him for fear that he would give children nightmares.
The inspiration for Jessica Rabbit was taken from a bunch of Hollywood glamour girls, including Lauren Bacall, Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth and Veronica Lake.
Zemeckis and Spielberg both really wanted Bill Murray for the role of Eddie Valiant, but Murray is notoriously hard to get a hold of, so it never happened. Murray has said that when he later found out that he was the number one choice for the role, he screamed out loud because he would have loved playing Eddie.
If you haven’t kept track of all of the animated cameos in the movie, here’s a list to watch for the next time you catch Roger on T.V.:
I like to think that I’ve picked up a lot of random trivia as a writer. I often blurt out trivia at really inappropriate moments in casual conversation. I like to think that I would rock on Jeopardy!, but I have taken the show’s sample audition quizzes before, and the fact is… I suck. However, if there’s ever a Jeopardy! category about Jeopardy!, I might just ace it… and now you can too.
1. The original name of the show was What’s the Question? After pitching it to the network brass, Merv Griffin decided to change the name to the catchier one we know today. The reason? One of the execs thought that the game was a great idea, but that the game needed more jeopardies. NBC ended up buying the show without even seeing a pilot.
2. The winner with the smallest amount of earnings at the end of the game managed to triumph over the other two contestants by keeping a mere dollar. On January 19, 1993, Air Force Lt. Col. Daryl Scott cleverly bid just enough to keep him afloat. The other contestants got the question wrong and lost everything. No one else has ever won by keeping a single George Washington. The answer? “His books ‘No Easy Walk to Freedom’ and ‘The Struggle is My Life’ were published during his imprisonment.” The question? “Who is Nelson Mandela.”
3. The infamous Final Jeopardy music has a name – it’s called “Time for Tony” and it was written by Merv Griffin as a lullaby for his son. If you’re familiar with the song, no doubt it’s not much of a lullaby to you – it serves more as a reminder that time is running out and you’d better hurry. It was tweaked a little bit and renamed “Think!” Over the years, Griffin estimated that royalties from the theme song earned him roughly $70 million.
4. The record for the largest one-day total ever belongs to Ken Jennings, of course. He’s the only contestant to surpass $52,000 in one day, and he surpassed it by a landslide with $75,000. Jennings actually holds 11 of the top 15 earnings spots. One of these top 15 spots was actually earned during Jeopardy! Kids Week by a 12-year-old from Virginia named Kunle Demuren, whose knowledge and quick buzzer finger earned him $49,000. Photo from Moore’s Lore.
5. Back in the pre-Trebek era when Art Fleming was the host, contestants could start the audition process by just giving the office in New York a call. They would pass preliminary tests over the phone and then set up a date and time to audition in person if the were eligible. Once they made it to the actual office, potential contestants went through a written test and a faux game. These days, the audition process often starts on the Internet during designated testing times. Sometimes a “Brain Bus” also roams the country and tests Ken Jennings-wannabes. If you think you have what it takes, one of the online testing periods is coming up soon – January 26-28 for adults.
6. In the show’s entire history, a three-way tie has only happened once. It happened fairly recently too – on March 16, 2007, every single contestant ended Final Jeopardy with $16,000. They all returned the following week to play again. You can see it happen here – Alex Trebek seems quite pleased.
7. “I Lost on Jeopardy” was released by Weird Al Yankovic in 1984. Original host Art Fleming has a cameo as himself and original announcer Don Pardo shows up to tell Yankovic all of the fabulous prizes he failed to win. The funny thing is, Weird Al was actually on Rock & Roll Jeopardy and lost to Gary Dell’Abate, better known as Howard Stern’s sidekick Baba Booey.
8. Julann Griffin, Merv’s wife, was integral to the development of the show. She helped him develop the unique answer-and-question format when they were on a plane ride to New York in the early ’60s. From 1964-1975, a piece Julann composed served as the theme to the show. It was called “Take Ten.”
9. If Alex Trebek seems a little condescending when he corrects players with wrong answers, as if he would know the answers himself even without his cheat sheet, well… he just might. Trebek is pretty brainy. Time magazine once asked him if there was an easy question that he ever didn’t know the answer to, and this was Trebek’s response:
We were doing some shows at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, and during the commercial breaks I’d go out and talk to the people in the audience. And a little boy stood up and asked, When was the Magna Carta signed? I said 1216. I was off by a year. I know a lot about the Magna Carta, but unfortunately I got the date wrong in front of 6,000 people.
He admits that he probably wouldn’t do too well if he actually had to participate on the show, though, due to his slow reflexes.
Read more of that interview at Time.
A couple of these are on my pet peeve list; I bet you find a couple that are on yours as well. Enjoy The Oatmeal’s humorous look at some of the most common (and annoying) spelling mistakes!
What do you get when you cross a pixel-y Italian plumber with some rapidly-falling tetrominoes? Tuper Tario Tros., of course. It’s like regular Mario, except you’ll encounter some obstacles that you’re going to need help surmounting. That’s when you’ll need to toggle to Tetris and use the shapes to help. Have fun!
Link via Geekologie.
You know the economy is rough when even Batman is facing foreclosure.
Super Not So Super takes a look at what Batman, Catwoman, Supergirl, Wonder Woman and the Flash do when they’re not busy fighting crime (or causing it, in Catwoman’s case). Apparently Wonder Woman does her own ironing.
Link via Geekologie.
We all know the tired old legends and facts – George Washington ‘fessed up to chopping down a cherry tree; Abraham Lincoln lived in a log cabin; JFK had an affair with Marilyn Monroe; Bill Clinton had some laundering issues with a Gap dress. But there’s more than meets the eye with the Presidents – here are a few lesser-known facts about each of them. And in case you’re wondering about the weird math, Grover Cleveland was President for non-consecutive terms (the only President to ever do so, actually), so he technically counts as Presidents #22 and #24.
1. George Washington indulged in luxuries such as leopard-skin blankets for all of his horses.
2. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day – July 4, 1826, which just so happened to be the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
3. Thomas Jefferson attributed his long life (he lived to the age of 83, which was pretty long in the tooth for the early 1800s) to his daily habit of cold foot baths.
4. James Madison is the shortest president to date, standing just 5’4”. His stature didn’t go unnoticed – John Quincy Adams’ wife once described him as “a very small man in his person with a very large head.”
5. James Monroe once chased William H. Crawford, his secretary of the treasury, out of the White House with a pair of red hot tongs from the fireplace. Crawford gave Monroe a list of people he wanted considered for “political patronage,” and when Monroe informed Crawford that his list was not needed or wanted, Crawford called the President “a damned infernal scoundrel.” When he brandished his cane at Monroe, Monroe went for the tongs.
6. John Quincy Adams didn’t have such a great relationship with his three sons. When one of them failed to make the top 10 in his class at Harvard, JQA wrote to him and said that he felt “Nothing but shame and sorrow in your presence.” That was his namesake, John, who later became an alcoholic, as did brother George. George later committed suicide.
7. Andrew Jackson was nearly assassinated. A man named Richard Lawrence decided that Jackson was the only thing keeping him from inheriting the British throne and tried to shoot him as Jackson was leaving the Capitol. The gun misfired. Lawrence came prepared with a backup gun, drew it, and fired again. It also misfired. Legend has it that about this time, Jackson started beating his would-be killer with his cane. Davy Crockett was one of the men who helped disarm Lawrence.
8. Martin Van Buren didn’t relish his days in the White House, to be sure. He once said, “As for the presidency, the two happiest days of my life were those of my entrance upon the office and my surrender of it.” It didn’t stop him for running for a second term (he didn’t achieve it).
9. William Henry Harrison. His death is the reason we have firm plans in place for the presidential succession. Harrison served just 31 days, 12 hours and 30 minutes of his presidency; he died of pneumonia and septicemia and was the first American President to die in office. At the time, no one was sure if the Vice President should become President or would merely be Acting President. It was decided that since Harrison’s VP John Tyler took the Oath of Office, he would retain the title for the duration of Harrison’s original term.
10. John Tyler married a girl 30 years his junior (Julia, pictured) and began courting her just three months after his wife’s death. His youngest daughter – the fifteenth Tyler child – was born when Tyler was 70.
11. James K. Polk never vacationed, kept long hours and was always all business. He accomplished much during his presidency, including a victory in the Mexican-American War, founding an independent treasury, opened the Naval Academy, issued the first postage stamps, opened the Smithsonian Museum and oversaw the groundbreaking for the Washington Monument, and expanded the United States further west. He also died just three months after leaving office – most historians agree that he basically worked himself to death.
12. Zachary Taylor was a big fan of chewing tobacco and had no problems with spitting his chaw juice out on the White House carpet if a suitable urn wasn’t available.
13. Millard Fillmore met Queen Victoria in 1855. She promptly declared that Fillmore was the handsomest man she had ever laid eyes upon. He was also the last member of the Whig Party to be President.
14. Franklin Pierce was a rather tragic figure. His first two sons died in childhood – one at birth and one at the age of four. Young deaths were not uncommon at the time, but it caused his wife to become a bit overprotective of their third and last son, Bennie. Two months before Pierce took office, he and his family were traveling in a train that derailed and then slid down an embankment. The only fatality? Eleven-year-old Bennie.
15. James Buchanan is the only president who never married. He was engaged once, but it ended pretty badly – her parents convinced her that Buchanan wasn’t good enough for her, so she broke it off. She then took ill and died soon after. Buchanan wrote a letter to her father and asked to be allowed to follow after her coffin at the funeral; her father had it returned to sender.
16. Abraham Lincoln was notoriously messy. Legend has it that his office was a terrible mess and that he kept an envelope in his desk that said, “When you can’t find it anywhere else, look into this.”
17. Andrew Johnson was a tailor and absolutely loved his job. In fact, when he was governor of Tennessee, he took time out of his busy schedule to custom make a suit for a local blacksmith.
18. Ulysses S. Grant’s grandson, Ulysses S. Grant III, graduated sixth in his class at West Point Academy in 1903. The best student that year? Douglas MacArthur.
19. Rutherford B. Hayes didn’t actually win the presidential election – he lost to Samuel Tilden by about 250,000 votes. But the vote tallying was a mess and a bunch of the electoral votes were in dispute, so the Electoral Commission was quickly formed to determine the outcome. They obviously found in favor of Hayes, leaving Tilden supporters to dub Rutherford “Rutherfraud,” “His Fraudulency” and “His Accidency.”
20. James A. Garfield was shot on July 2, 1881, but he didn’t die until September 19. Most historians agree that the doctors who poked and prodded and used rather strange and unsanitary measures to try to “save” him are probably the ones that actually killed him.
21. Chester A. Arthur was a clotheshorse and was the first president to hire someone to attend to his wardrobe. He reportedly had more than 80 pairs of pants.
22. Grover Cleveland had a secret operation to remove a tumor in his mouth while he was president. He boarded a yacht headed upstate as if it were a fun diversion, but while he was tucked away from the public eye, doctors removed the tumor from his upper palette. No one knew about the incident until 24 years later, when one of the doctors who performed the surgery finally spilled the beans. You can now visit the tumor at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, which has an exhibit dedicated to the event.
23. Benjamin Harrison was the last president to wear a beard.
24. William McKinley’s wife had epileptic seizures on a fairly regular basis. He responded to them by arranging his handkerchief over her head – the darkness seemed to help – and carrying on as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening.
25. Theodore Roosevelt was a big fan of food. He drank about a gallon of coffee a day and would sometimes eat a dozen hard-boiled eggs for breakfast.
26. William Howard Taft is the only man, thus far, to have been the leader of both the Executive and Judicial branches of government. He became Chief Justice eight years after his term as President ended and considered this the highlight of his career – “I do not remember that I was ever President,” he once said.
27. Woodrow Wilson was one of the few Presidents to endure dating while acting as Commander in Chief. His first wife died of Bright’s Disease in 1914, and by 1915 he was dating his would-be second wife, Edith Boling Galt. As you might expect, the media followed them around mercilessly and reported on their dates. The Washington Post once typoed that President Wilson “spent most of his time entering Ms. Galt.” Whoops. Since they meant to write “entertaining,” that entire newspaper was recalled. Wilson also signed off some of his letters to Galt as “Tiger.”
28. Warren G. Harding loved gambling and once lost an entire box of White House china in a game.
29. Calvin Coolidge’s son is probably the only fatality to occur at the White House because of the White House. He was playing a game of tennis with his older brother and developed a blister on his big toe. The blister became infected and Cal Jr. died of blood poisoning within days.
30. Herbert Hoover wrote a book called Fishing For Fun – And To Wash Your Soul. An excerpt: “Association with the placid ripples of the waves and the quiet chortle of the streams is soothing to our ‘het-up’ anxieties.”
31. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was driven around in a hand-me-down Cadillac that previously belonged to Al Capone. After Pearl Harbor, the Secret Service decided that the limo FDR was tooling around in wasn’t safe enough. Capone’s car was outfitted with a ton of armor since he was so commonly targeted, so it was deemed safe enough for Roosevelt.
32. Harry S Truman. The “S” in Harry S Truman doesn’t stand for anything. His parents argued over whether it should stand for “Shippe” or “Solomon,” his paternal and maternal grandparents respectively, and so it was just left as “S.”
33. Dwight D. Eisenhower desperately wanted to play professional baseball. Later in life, he said that “”not making the baseball team at West Point was one of the greatest disappointments of my life, maybe my greatest.”
34. John F. Kennedy’s 1935 yearbook named him “Most likely to become President.”
35. Lyndon B. Johnson. For two hours and eight minutes after JFK’s assassination, we had no President. LBJ was sworn in on Air Force One in Dallas at Love Field Airport; he is the only President to be sworn in on Texas soil. He was also the first President to be sworn in by a woman.
36. Richard Nixon always wore a coat and tie – even when he was at home by himself, according to one biography.
37. Gerald Ford is the only President who also had a modeling career. He was in Look magazine in 1939 and was on the cover of Cosmopolitan in 1942. He’s also the only President to ever tackle a future Heisman winner – when he played football for the University of Michigan Wolverines, he tackled University of Chicago running back Jay Berwanger, who won the first-ever Heisman Trophy the following year. 
38. Jimmy Carter is the only President to file an official report to detail a UFO sighting. He claimed he and several members of his Lion’s Club saw a UFO hovering about 900 yards away from them in Georgia in 1969.
39. Ronald Reagan was a notorious doodler and wasn’t immune to entertaining himself during “boring” meetings by doing such. Those are his scribbles to the left.
40. George H.W. Bush was awarded an honorary knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II in 1993. He’s just the third President to receive the honor – the other two were Eisenhower and Reagan.
41. Bill Clinton. There’s a statue of Clinton playing golf in Ballybunion, Ireland.
42. George W. Bush is the only U.S. President to have an MBA.
43. Barack Obama’s brother-in-law is the head men’s basketball coach at Oregon State University.
We think we live in such modern times, with fabulous inventions that make our lives easier and provide great convenience. But some of those inventions might not be as modern as we think. Take a look at these five inventions that may have been around for thousands of years before we “invented” them.
A jet engine in the first century B.C.? Perhaps. A jet engine in the first century A.D.? Definitely. The aeolipile is a rocket style jet engine that spins when it’s heated and is the first-ever device known to use steam for a rotary motion. Although it was “invented” in 1698 by Thomas Savery, the original may have been invented in the first century B.C. Roman architect Vitruvius’ De architectura, a work on then-modern architecture written around 25 B.C., includes a device called the aeolipile. However, it has never been verified that his aeolipile (which translates to “ball of Aeolus,” who was the god of the wind, so it’s kind of a generic name that could apply to various inventions) was the aeolipile that we know existed in the first century.
That’s the aeolipile that Hero of Alexander wrote about, including a detailed description of how to construct one. The invention credit is usually given to Hero instead of Vitruvius.
That Hero was a pretty smart guy. He also invented the vending machine long before we were prying Kit Kats out of them in our office break rooms. Hero rigged it so that when a coin was dropped into a slot, it fell on a pan, and the weight of it on the pan triggered a lever that opened up a valve that let some holy water flow out to the person who dropped the coin in. The pan kept tilting until the coin fell off of it, and when that happened the valve closed and the water would no longer dispense. The first modern-day vending machine came about in the 1880s, so you could say that Hero was well ahead of his time.
We’ve long thought that the first astronomical clocks didn’t show up until the 14th century in Europe. That all changed in 1900 when a group of divers discovered shipwreck thought to date back to 150-100 BC. A lot of the loot was stuff you might expect from that era – statues, busts, instruments and utensils. But then one of the divers spotted what looked like a gear stuck in a rock, which was eventually found to be just one of many pieces of the same thing. Upon closer inspection and much analysis (decades of analysis, in fact), it was determined that the gear and its 80+ other pieces were part of a complicated mechanism that precisely calculated the position of the sun, moon, planets and other astronomical information. It was capable of predicting an eclipse right down to the hour that it would occur. Astronomer John Seiradakis has called it the “pocket calculator of its time.” Its construction was so perfect and exact that many historians and archaeologists believe that the Antikythera Mechanism was just one of many similar devices – we just haven’t discovered the other ones yet.
Here’s curator Michael Wright with his working replica of the Antikythera Mechanism – it’s pretty interesting stuff. Photo from the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project.
We’re not sure about this one – it’s just a theory. But there is some speculation that the ancient Egyptians may have understood how to harness electricity. The entire argument is based on stone reliefs inside the Dendera Temple complex in Egypt. What the etching appears to depict, to some, are bulbs, filaments and insulators. It also looks like a lotus flower and a snake. The argument could probably stop there – obviously humans are programmed to spot patterns in things and could easily see a now-everyday object in an ancient etching when it’s really not there. But English scientist J.N. Lockyer (he discovered helium) pointed out that the tombs were conspicuously soot-free – if Egyptians were using candles or torches, there would no doubt be some evidence of it on the walls or ceilings. But there is no evidence. A lot of people believe that the Egyptians used a series of mirrors to reflect the sunlight into the temple, but others say that their mirrors were too weak to do any such thing. Thus, the argument continues. What do you think? Photo from Wikipedia user Liftarn.
Along the same line as the Dendera Temple light is the Baghdad Battery. In the mid-1930s, a number of artifacts thought to date back to 200 BC were found in Khuyut Rabbou’a, a village near Baghdad. The combination of objects – a five-inch long clay jar and a copper cylinder that encased an iron rod – led researchers to believe that the ancient artifacts were actually used as batteries. Batteries for what, we still don’t know. Unlike the Dendera light though, there’s some evidence that these really were batteries – replicas have been made that did, in fact, conduct an electric current, sometimes as much as two volts. One theory is that the batteries were hidden inside of idols to give tiny little shocks to people, scaring people who didn’t understand the trick and often forcing them to give up secrets or confess to crimes. Photo from the BBC.
Doing some Black Friday shopping? Make sure you get your caffeine, have plenty of cash and checks on hand, and program your doctor’s office on your speed dial. As the day and the deals have gotten more hyped up over the past several years, stampedes and fights have broken out in the frenzy, resulting in injuries and even death. Here are a few of those incidents.
Just last year, a “greeter” at Walmart in Valley Stream, New York, was killed when the crowd of 2,000+ people trampled over him when the doors opened on Black Friday. Jdimytai Damour was 6’4” and 270 pounds and was trying to hold back shoppers who were pressed up against the sliding glass doors. The doors shattered from the pressure, Damour was thrown to the floor, and shoppers rushed over him in a craze to get to their bargains. The official ruling was that he died of asphyxiation. Although other shoppers were injured in the stampede, Damour was the only fatality – the other four injured people were treated and released from the hospital, including a woman who was eight months pregnant. There were reports that she had miscarried, but they were false. Damour’s family has filed a lawsuit against Walmart, citing that the company “engaged in specific marketing and advertising techniques to specifically attract a large crowd and create an environment of frenzy and mayhem and was otherwise careless, reckless and negligent.” Photo from FoxNews.com.
In 2005, it wasn’t a stampede to get to items that caused trouble at Walmart – it was a single line-cutter. People were waiting in an orderly line at an Orlando store to get a heavily discounted computer when one man jumped ahead in the line. The assembled crowd wasn’t really appreciative of this – they ended up wrestling him to the ground.
Last year was definitely a bad year for Black Friday shoppers. On the same day, but a different coast, two men were shot and killed after an argument at a Toys “R” Us in Palm Desert, California. The women they were with were arguing – even coming to blows, according to the Huffington Post – and the fight escalated when the men discovered that they belonged to rival gangs. They ended up shooting only each other – no other injuries were reported. Photo from LAist.com.
Another computer was the source of a riot at the same retailer in 2005. When a laptop went on sale for $100 off the normal price, Cecelia Brannon of Jacksonville, Fla., was second in line because she wanted to get one for her daughter in college. When the doors opened, she got pushed under the rushing crowd and ended up suffering from a concussion and continuing back and neck problems. “This is America’s version of the running of the bulls,” her husband said. As of 2007, Cecelia was still walking with a cane as a result of her Black Friday injuries and still had to take a slew of prescription medications. “I saved 100 on that computer,” she said. “I’ve spent probably $100,000 on medical bills.”
P.S. – I didn’t intend to hate on Walmart, but a vast majority of the Black Friday incidents happened there! If you’re headed to score some deals tomorrow, be extra careful. What’s your opinion – should the onus be on the retailer for not providing enough security, or should people be responsible for their own actions?
Even if you’re not a particularly athletic person, there’s a sport out there for you. Whether you’re an avid ironer or are known for launching your cell phone 300 feet after dealing with an exceptionally annoying telemarketer, there’s something in the world that will play to your skills. Here are 10 of them.
1. Toe Wrestling. Yup – there’s arm wrestling, thumb wrestling… and now toe wrestling. As you might imagine, it’s a lot like thumb wrestling – competitors just use different digits. It apparently started when a group of men at a pub decided to find or invent a game that “the British could actually win,” and after a few beverages, they came up with just the thing. Ironically, the first-ever World Toe Wrestling Championships ended with a Canadian victor. Competitors have their own phalange-related nicknames: two of the most accomplished athletes are called the Itatoelion Stallion and the Toeminator. The face of the sport would probably be Alan “Nasty” Nash, a five-time champion who has appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno to show off his technique. “I don’t think the size of your toe has anything to do with it as I have short, stumpy toes,” he has said. Picture from Metro.
2. Cheese Rolling. You’ve likely heard of this one, but it’s too weird to leave out of the article. Every year at Cooper’s Hill in England’s Cotswolds, a large wheel of cheese is sent tumbling from the top of the hill (pictured)… and a bunch of Cheese Rollers come tumbling after. The first person to reach the bottom of the hill wins the cheese. This may not seem like an outstanding prize, but be assured that the race for the Double Gloucester round is a heated one: injuries have included concussions, broken bones and sprained ankles. Injuries are usually incurred by the Cheese Rollers themselves, but on at least one occasion the cheese (which usually weighs seven or eight pounds) took a wicked bounce at the bottom of the hill and careened into a spectator. Picture from Cheese Rolling.
3. Poohsticks. Children’s lit fans (or Disney fans) will be familiar with Poohsticks from The House at Pooh Corner, A.A. Milne’s 1928 book. Milne actually played the game with his son, although we’re not sure if the game was invented for the book and then played by Milne and his son Christopher Robin or vice versa. Fans started actually playing the game, which involves dropping sticks in a stream or river to see which one crosses the designated finish line first, in 1984. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution needed some money and the lock keeper thought a Poohsticks competition – donations accepted – might help their cash flow. His hunch was correct – since its inception, the World Poohsticks Competition has raised more than £30,000. Every winner receives a gold medal and a Winnie the Pooh teddy bear.
4. Extreme Ironing. There are a lot of us out there that probably dread the tedium of pressing wrinkles out of clothes, but there are others who look at it as the opportunity for an adrenaline rush – namely, Extreme Ironers. It started out as just a fun, quirky hobby, but for the past several years an actual competition sponsored by Rowenta has taken place. EIs send in a photo of themselves ironing in strange and extreme places and points are given for place and style (just standing there with an iron will get you minimal points; striking a graceful pose while ironing underwater will get you more). Bonus: the sport has inspired cellists to do the same thing. Photo from OneInchPunch.
5. Buzkashi sounds like something made up for Borat, but it’s a real sport in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, among others. It’s kind of like polo, except the focus of the game revolves around a decapitated goat or calf instead of a ball. If you’re a Rambo fan, you might remember seeing the game depicted in Rambo III. Photo from AfghanNetwork.
6. Cell Phone Throwing. Fed up with your cell phone? Join the club. But now you can do something legal to vent your frustrations (as opposed to going Naomi Campbell on someone). Since 2001, the Mobile Phone Throwing World Championships have been held in Finland. Categories include the traditional toss, freestyle (points for creativity!), team, and junior. If you’re not near Finland and don’t care to travel there just to chuck a phone, never fear: the U.S. held its first event in Massachusetts in 2008. And if you love your cell phone but hate outdated technology, you can join in the Rotary Phone Throw at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.
7. International Regatta of Bathtubs. La Regate des Baignoires was created to boost tourism in Dinant, Belgium. As you can imagine, bathtubs don’t float very well, so it’s a pretty entertaining “race.” In fact, speed really doesn’t matter at all when it comes to winning this thing. It’s more about the creativity of your tub and whether your tub actually makes it across the finish line or not. Photo from P&O Ferries.
8. Chess Boxing. The old stereotype of chess being for skinny, geeky guys with no athletic ability to speak of is totally out the window with this extreme sport. The game started out as kind of a joke in a graphic novel, but people eventually picked up on it and thought it had merit in reality. The first world championship was held in 2003 and regulated by the World Chess Boxing Organization. I like to think that when you call a checkmate, you get to punch your opponent in the face… but it doesn’t work like that. Boxing rounds are alternated with chess-playing rounds; the winner can be determined by knockout, checkmate, or a decision made by the referee. Photo from Time magazine.
9. Unicycle Hockey. It would seem to me that unicycling and hockey each have enough opportunity for injury all on their own, but combine them and you’re almost guaranteed to get a cool scar at some point. There are a few extra fouls, such as “sibbing,” which is poking your hockey stick in an opponent’s spokes to trip him or her up, but for the most part, the unusual mode of transportation is the biggest difference from regular hockey. Oh, yeah, and the lack of ice. Really, ice + unicycle = asking for a shattered femur. Here’s a group playing unicycle hockey in Telluride:
10. Rock Paper Scissors League. Yes, there’s a Rock Paper Scissors League (to be known as RPSL from now on), and yes, it’s serious. The world competitions take place every year in Las Vegas with Bud Light sponsoring. There’s skill to the game, for sure, but it’s more mental than anything else. For example, statistics have shown that women tend to start off a game with scissors and men tend to start with rock. Know your opponent and you could be a $50,000 winner like Sean Sears, who beat more than 300 contestants at Mandalay Bay last year. If that’s not your cup of tea, there are plenty of other tournaments to participate in: there’s the National Xtreme RPS Competition, the UK RPS Championship and the World Series of RPS.
Sure, the boring facts about states have been drilled into you by teachers and history books over the years. You might even remember all of the state capitals. But here are 50 trivia tidbits that you probably didn’t learn in second grade.
1. Alabama. New Orleans might be the hot spot for Mardi Gras these days, but it was actually started as a sedate tradition in what is now modern-day Mobile, Alabama.
2. Alaska. The Alaskan flag was created by a 13-year-old-boy in 1926. For his efforts, Benny Benson received $1,000 and an engraved watch. Picture from Alaska.edu.
3. Arizona. London Bridge – yes, the London Bridge – was shipped stone by stone and reassembled in Lake Havasu City. It was meant to be a tourist attraction in the retirement community and was rebuilt over land, not water.
4. Arkansas. Sam Walton started a little store in Bentonville, Arkansas – today, it’s known as Walmart. However, Bentonville is also home to the headquarters of a lesser-known company: The Whistler Group, a company that makes radar detectors.
5. California. We all know Cali is known for its wine and grapes – but it’s also home to the self-proclaimed Avocado Capital of the World (Fallbrook), the Raisin Capital of the World (Fresno) and the Artichoke Capital of the World (Castroville). In fact, Marilyn Monroe was the first Artichoke Queen in 1947.
6. Colorado. Although the cheeseburger wasn’t invented in Colorado, a Denverite held the copyright to the word for a while. In 1935, Louis Ballast, owner of the Humpty Dumpty Drive-In, applied for and received the copyright to a food he didn’t invent. That distinction goes to Lionel Sternberger of Pasadena, California.
7. Connecticut. PEZ is made in Orange, Connecticut.
8. Delaware. There’s no National Park System unit of any kind in Delaware – no park, no historic site, no battlefield, no memorial or monument. It’s the only state that doesn’t have something denoted by the National Park System (you can check out other National Park units here, though).
9. Florida. The first ATM designed just for rollerbladers resides in Miami. Of course.
10. Georgia. The sweetest onion in the world, the Vidalia, can only be grown in specifc Vidalia and Glennville areas of Georgia – only 20 counties in total. The Vidalia Onion is Georgia’s state vegetable.
11. Hawaii. Back in 1874, the village of Kalaupapa on the Island of Molokai was once a leper colony. The act naming the village such wasn’t repealed until 1969.
12. Idaho is the only state that might have been named because of a hoax. A lobbyist suggested the name in the 1860s, claiming that it was an old Shoshone word meaning “the sun comes from the mountains” or “gem of the mountains.” After the name was adopted, the lobbyist admitted he made the word up.
13. Illinois was once home to the largest city in the United States – no, not Chicago. Up until about 1800, Cahokia, Illinois, had more than 40,000 residents in the area thanks to its strategic spot near the Mississippi, Missouri and Illinois Rivers. Philadelphia outgrew it sometime near the turn of the century.
14. Indiana. Santa Claus, Indiana, gets more than half a million letters from kids during the holidays. “Santa’s Elves,” a group of local volunteers, makes sure that each letter gets a reply from the man himself.
15. Iowa is the only state whose east and west borders are totally formed by water – the Mississippi on the east and the Missouri on the west. It’s also the only state whose name begins with two vowels.
16. Kansas. Amelia Earhart was from Atchison, Kansas.
17. Kentucky. The song “Happy Birthday to You” was written by sisters Patty and Mildred Hill, Louisville residents. The women were kindergarten teachers who wrote the song as a ditty called “Good Morning to All” that would be easy for young kids to remember and sing.
18. Louisiana. There used to be more to Louisiana. Prior to 1856, there was an island southwest of New Orleans called Last Island. On August 11, 1856, it was completely and utterly destroyed by a category four hurricane. It was hit with such force that the island was split into five smaller islands. Everything on the island – which had been a popular resort destination – was gone. When the water levels went down five days later, the only evidence that there had been human life on the island was a wrecked steamer sent to save the people on the island at the time. More than 200 people died.
19. Maine. Up until a couple of years ago, a vast majority (90 percent) of the toothpicks used in the United States were made in Maine.
20. Maryland. Residents of Saint Michaels found out that the British were going to attack in 1813, so they strategically placed lit lanterns at the tops of ships and on high tree branches and cut all sources of light from the usual places on the ground. It confused the British and they overshot the town, hitting just one single house.
21. Massachusetts is home to the first U.S. zip code ever – 01001 in Agawam.
22. Michigan makes cars, yeah, you already knew that. But it also manufactures the most magic supplies in the world. The little town of Colon (population: 1200) was where magician Harry Blackstone made his home, including his headquarters and magic workshop. He invited other magicians to his abode, and the town eventually sprouted Abbott’s Magic Company, the world’s biggest producer of handmade illusions, and Abbott’s Magic Get-Together, an annual four-day convention. The high school nickname is “The Magi” and their mascot is a rabbit (rabbit out of the hat, get it?).
23. Minnesota. Minneapolis has 52 blocks of skyway – more than five miles – so people who work downtown in the frigid Minnesota winter can get around without getting frostbite.
24. Mississippi was the last state to end prohibition. Even though nationwide prohibition had ended more than 30 years earlier, Mississippi didn’t repeal it at a state level until 1966.
25. Missouri. With more than 200 fountains, Kansas City claims to have the most fountains of any city in the world, with a single exception: Rome.
26. Montana. The Montana Yogo Sapphire is the only North American gemstone to be included in the the royal Crown Jewels.
27. Nebraska. Kool-Aid was invented in Hastings, Nebraska. It was made in inventor Edwin Perkins’ mother’s kitchen and originated as a liquid called “Fruit Smack.” When he needed a cheaper way to ship it, Perkins figured out how to remove the liquid and leave only a powder, creating Kool-Aid.
28. Nevada. The first casino to open on the Las Vegas Strip (before it was the Strip) was called the Pair-O-Dice Club. It opened its doors in 1931.
29. New Hampshire has its own Stonehenge. “America’s Stonehenge” has had charcoal pits carbon dated to 2000 BC to 173 BC, potentially making the site 4,000 years old. It allegedly inspired H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror.”
30. New Jersey has the most diners in the world – and the most shopping malls in one area (seven major malls in a 25 square mile radius).
31. New Mexico. The cub that became known as Smokey the Bear, the National Fire Safety Symbol, was found trapped in a tree in New Mexico’s Lincoln National Forest when it caught on fire in 1950. The black bear was chosen to be the official state animal in the little guy’s honor 13 years later.
32. New York isn’t home to Dorothy Gale – that’s Kansas, of course – but it does call her creator, L. Frank Baum, a native. In Chittenango, his hometown, yellow brick sidewalks lead to Oz-themed businesses, and you can go to the yearly Oz-Stravaganza every June.
33. North Carolina can boast that they had the first child born in America to English parents. Her name was Virginia Dare and she was born in Roanoke.
34. North Dakota is a great state to drive through if you can manage to make the Enchanted Highway part of your route. It’s a 32-mile stretch of highway with giant sculptures. This one, called “Theodore Roosevelt Rides Again,” is 51 feet tall and weighs more than 9,000 pounds. Photo from EnchantedHighway.net.
35. Ohio, so far, has been the home state of seven U.S. presidents, making it the state that has produced the second-most Commander in Chiefs (Virginia wins that title with eight). In case you’re wondering, they are: Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, William Howard Taft and Warren G. Harding.
36. Oklahoma is where the first-ever parking meter was installed. Oklahoma City was the first to start charging for prime parking real estate in 1935.
37. Oregon has the most ghost towns of any U.S. state, with 18 spots officially designated as such.
38. Pennsylvania is where you’ll find the Mutter Museum, a museum dedicated to medical oddities (for educational purposes, of course). Exhibits include a woman whose corpse turned to soap, famous Siamese twins Chang and Eng Bunker, and the tumor removed from Grover Cleveland’s hard palate in a top-secret operation the world didn’t know about until years later.
39. Rhode Island claims the oldest, still-operating tavern in the U.S. The White Horse Tavern was built in 1673.
40. South Carolina. In case you’re interested in the first boll weevil ever found in South Carolina, don’t worry – you can still see it. The insect is on display at the Pendleton District Agricultural Museum.
41. South Dakota has the world’s only Corn Palace, a building entirely decorated in different varieties of corn kernels and cobs. Exterior murals on the palace are redesigned every year.
42. Tennessee has the largest underground lake in the United States (and the second-largest in the world). It’s part of Craighead Caverns in Sweetwater and is known as The Lost Sea.
43. Texas has the only hotel in North America entirely built over water. The Flagship Hotel in Galveston juts out 1,000 feet over the Gulf of Mexico.
44. Utah has a hotspot known as “Little Hollywood” – Kanab earned the nickname because so many movies and T.V. series have been filmed in the area. Which ones, you ask? To name a few: Gunsmoke, Planet of the Apes, The Outlaw Josey Wales, The Lone Ranger and Stagecoach
45. Vermont’s capital, Montpelier, is the only state capital that lacks a McDonalds.
46. Virginia is where you’ll find a couple of Presidents’ mansions, including Jefferson’s Monticello, which is on the back of the $2 bill. Incidentally, the gift shop at Monticello is probably one of the only establishments in the country to routinely give $2 bills as change.
47. Washington is the only state named after a president.
48. West Virginia had a hand in the invention of billboards and outdoor advertising. A tobacco company there started painting barns and bridges with their slogan, “Treat Yourself to the Best, Chew Mail Pouch.”
49. Wisconsin. Love mustard? Then you’ll love Mount Horeb, which is where you’ll find the world’s largest collection of prepared mustards at the Mustard Museum. It is run by Barry Levenson, who used to be the Assistant Attorney General for the state.
50. Wyoming was the first state that gave women the right to vote.
One of the good things about living in the midwest is that while I may not live in a big city, a bunch of them are within decent driving distance – Minneapolis, Chicago, Kansas City, Omaha. Milwaukee and St. Louis aren’t too bad.
Anyway, as such, I’m headed to Lollapalooza in Chicago this weekend! And I’ll be Tweeting as I go, so if you can’t be there to enjoy the extremely varied selection of music, you are welcome to live vicariously through me. I’m a little bummed the Beastie Boys won’t be playing, but I totally understand why they can’t be there.
Bands that are definitely on my “To Watch” list include Manchester Orchestra, Heartless Bastards, the Decemberists, the Arctic Monkeys, Animal Collective, Tool, Vampire Weekend, Snoop, the Killers and the Silversun Pickups.
If you have any other recommendations or just want to follow along as we check out cool bands and try to hit up some local culture (the Shedd Aquarium is on our list, as well as the Chicago Art Institute), leave me a Tweet. And if you’re already following me on Twitter, you should probably switch to this new account – the old one got hacked by spammers and was suspended.
Johnny Depp is everywhere lately, isn’t he? Public Enemies is in theaters now, the trailer for Alice in Wonderland was just released, and now it’s been announced that he is going to be starring in Dark Shadows. I love Johnny Depp (and Tim Burton), so I’m thrilled about all of this. In fact, it made me want to revisit another one of their collaborations.
Check out the costumes the kids are wearing during Willy’s Halloween flashback – three of them are wearing costumes that look like Lock, Shock, and Barrel, Oogie Boogie’s evil helpers in A Nightmare Before Christmas. You have to look quick though – they run by at the very beginning of the scene from the left side of the screen to the right side of the screen.
When the gang is riding down the chocolate river just after they see the “Whipped Cream” room, they pass a room labeled “Jelly Beans.” If you pause it and go into slo-mo, you’ll see that the next room is labeled “Beetle Juicing.”
In the edible meadow scene, the tube that vacuums the chocolate up from the lake is stuck into a flying saucer-looking thing, which is because it is. It’s actually one of the saucers from Burton’s Mars Attacks.
People who were considered for the role of Willy Wonka: Nicolas Cage, Jim Carrey, John Cleese, Robert DeNiro (can you imagine?!), Michael Keaton, Marilyn Manson, Leslie Nielsen, Bill Murray, Mike Myers, Brad Pitt, Christopher Walken, Patrick Stewart, Ben Stiller, Will Smith and Robin Williams.
A bunch of famous T.V. dads were considered for the role of Mike Teavee’s dad – Dan Castellaneta (Homer Simpson), Tim Allen (Tim Taylor), Ed O’Neill (Al Bundy), Bob Saget (Danny Tanner), and Ray Romano (Ray Barone), among others.
When Willy and the kids are checking out all of Wonka’s various candy-making rooms, they pass one with a bunch of pink sheep. “I don’t want to talk about it,” Wonka remarks. This is a reference to Ed Wood, another Burton and Depp collaboration – real-life director Ed Wood had a thing for wearing pink angora sweaters.
The actress who plated Grandma Georgina said she had her pick of which grandma to play. After reading the whole script, she picked Grandma Georgina because she’s the one who gets to kiss Johnny Depp. I like the way that lady thinks.
Willy Wonka’s cane is filled with Nerds candy.
The little boy who played Augustus Gloop wore a fat suit for the role.
A bunch of people saw the similarities between Willy Wonka and Michael Jackson after the movie came out. Tim Burton begged to differ. “Michael Jackson likes children; Willy Wonka can’t stand them. To me that’s a huge difference.” Depp agreed and said that his inspiration was somewhere between Howard Hughes in his later years and Mr. Rogers.
Martin Scorsese almost directed the film, but ended up doing The Aviator instead.
Mr. Bucket works for a company that makes Smilex toothpaste, which you can see early on when it shows a shot of him taking the misshapen toothpaste caps from the assembly line. “Smylex” is also the name of the poison the Joker releases on the city in the Burton-directed Batman.
Johnny Depp ad-libbed the line where he’s talking to Mike Teavee about the types of people who would want to have long hair and slips into jive talk. To be exact, it’s “It’s in the fridge, daddy-o! Are you hip to the jive? Can you dig what I’m layin’ down? I knew that you could. Slide me some skin, soul brother!” The first time he did it, the actor who plays Mike looked at him like he was nuts and said, “That’s not in the script.”
Deep Roy is the one who suggested that the Augustus Gloop dance scene be like a big Bollywood musical scene.
The chocolate river was originally going to be CGI, but they tried that and Burton didn’t like the way it looked. So after testing nine different chocolates for their color, 192,000 gallons of it were used to make a real chocolate river. It looks great, sure, but apparently after a couple of weeks it started to smell quite bad.
Johnny Depp tested out Wonka’s slightly lispy, aloof voice on his daughter while they were playing Barbies. She liked it, so he went with it.
What do you like better – this version or Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the Gene Wilder version?
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It was 34 years ago tomorrow that Jimmy Hoffa disappeared. Ever since then, the rumors have been flying about where he might be – he’s almost certainly dead, but who did it and what they did with the body is the mystery at hand. Here are a few of the theories.
The FBI doesn’t buy it, though. As you probably know, Giants Stadium is headed the way of Hoffa – it’s scheduled to be destroyed next year when Meadowlands Stadium opens. When asked if they intended to search the grounds, the FBI said they would if they had a credible tip, but they don’t. Maybe they just don’t care because Mythbusters has already answered the question for them: in 2003, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman searched some of the most popular spots using radar – each end zone, the 50-yard line, the 10-yard line, and seating section 107. They found no conclusive evidence that anything unusual was buried at Giants Stadium. And the vice president of public affairs for the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority agrees, saying, “He ain’t here.”
Photo from NFLteamhistory.com.
Photo by Paul Sancya/Associated Press, via CBC News.
A deathbed confession by a former Teamster and Hoffa cohort Frank Sheeran caused quite the stir in 2004. Francis Sheeran supposedly wrote a letter saying that he shot Hoffa, then drove his body to a trash incinerator and had it cremated. But Sheeran’s daughter said no way – the letter is definitely a fake. “It’s not his signature,” she told the Detroit Free Press. She thinks the letter and signature was forged by the man who was writing Sheeran’s biography – a similar book was scheduled to be published and he thought it would drum up better publicity for his own book. The biographer said it was a genuine confession from Sheeran and sent the letter to Hoffa’s daughter, who in turn notified the FBI. Sheeran’s backyard had been searched previously after it was alleged that a briefcase containing a syringe used to knock Hoffa out was buried there. Again, no evidence was found.
Another year, another “credible” tip. In 2003, authorities received a tip from an informant who had given them accurate information before: Hoffa was supposedly underneath an above-ground pool near Bay City, Michigan. They dug under the pool, but found nothing. The same year, they dug up the yard of a home in Munger Township and also came up empty-handed. Apparently 2003 was a hot year for Hoffa tips, because in July of the same year, Fox News conducted an investigation based on Frank Sheeran’s confession. They took tile up that had covered the hardwood floors that were present at the time of Hoffa’s death, then sprayed a chemical to detect any traces of blood. And they did find blood, a fair amount of it, in exactly the place where Sheeran said he shot Hoffa. The problem? It wasn’t Hoffa’s blood. By the way, if Sheeran’s stories sound conflicting, that’s because they are – he told various stories to officials over the years and sometimes pled the Fifth. But right before he died in 2004, he said he stood by what he said in his book – he shot Hoffa twice behind the ear in this house and was told the body was later cremated.
Photo from National Geographic.
When convicted murderer Ricky Powell claimed that he knew where Hoffa was, he seemed pretty credible and his story was not any crazier than any of the others floating around. He said that he was the one who dumped the body in 1975, and if anyone was to search the Au Sable River about 175 miles from Detroit, they would find Hoffa’s remains under 30 feet of water. Boating magazine immediately picked up on the story and offered $10,000 to anyone who could find the body in the river and produce evidence. So far, no one has collected the prize.
A few other theories that have so far turned up nothing:
What do you think is the most likely theory?
Poor songwriters – they spend a ton of time writing and composing music for movies, only for a good chunk of their work to be cut at a later date. OK, that probably goes for most people in the movie industry, and songwriters actually have it better than most – with a key change and a tweak to the lyrics, their songs can be repurposed to fit the next big movie… or sit in a vault for 19 years to be pulled out for a television show, as the case may be. Read on!
But not all of them got included – more than 30 songs were written, including one about the Jabberwock (he ultimately got cut from the movie altogether), a song for the Caterpillar called “Dream Caravan,” a song for the Cheshire Cat called “I’m Odd,” and a song that Alice sang to open the movie called “Beyond the Laughing Sky.” Although “Dream Caravan” and “I’m Odd” never saw the light of day, you might know “Laughing Sky” by a different name – “The Second Star to the Right” from Peter Pan.
The song was cut from Alice because the song was a ballad and was a bit difficult for young Kathryn Beaumont, the voice of Alice, to sing. It was also determined that the slow song might start the movie off a little too slow, so the opening song was replaced with “In a World of My Own” instead – it’s a bit more upbeat and matched Beaumont’s range and style better.
The movie is really two shorts all rolled into one experience; “I’m a Happy-Go-Lucky Fellow” appears in the very first one called “Bongo.” It’s about a bear cub who works for the circus but runs away and ends up having all kinds of adventures in the wild. What does this have to do with Jiminy Cricket, you’re probably wondering? Well, he sets up the story of Bongo by strolling through a house, singing this tune. When he gets to the record player conveniently set up in the house, he puts “Bongo” on and the first short officially starts. You’re probably familiar with the second short – “Mickey and the Beanstalk.” Fun and Fancy Free actually takes its name from a line in Jiminy’s song:
“I’m a happy-go-lucky fellow
Full of fun and fancy-free
You can make the whole world seem mellow
If you take it in your stride like me.”
Don’t feel sorry for Jiminy, by the way – although he may have had to wait seven years for this particular song, his ballad from Pinocchio, “When You Wish Upon a Star,” has been one of Disney’s signature songs ever since and was ranked #7 on the American Film Institute’s “Top Movie Songs of All Time” in 2004.
Here’s Jiminy singing “I’m a Happy-Go-Lucky Fellow,” if you’re interested. The song plays throughout the opening credits, but if you want to hear him, he starts chirping around 1:47.
There was also a song for the magical compass sequence called “Bobbing Along on the Bottom of the Beautiful Briny Sea” that was later shortened to “The Beautiful Briny” for Bedknobs and Broomsticks.
If it seems like a lot of Mary Poppins songs were repurposed, that’s because they were – the Sherman Brothers once laughingly refused to say what else they had reworked from the movie, saying that people would think all they had done for the past 10 years was shuffle songs around.
Today marks the anniversary of baseball’s infamous Pine Tar Incident, one of the most notorious cases of rule-breaking in MLB history. But it’s definitely not the only case, not by a longshot. Here are a few controversial moments in baseball (without steroids, no less), starting with the Pine Tar Incident.
On July 24, 1983, the Royals were losing to the Yankees at Yankee Stadium, 4-3 at the top of the ninth with two outs and a runner on first. Much to the chagrin of the Yankees, George Brett hit a home run and turned the tables so that the Royals were now a run ahead of the Bronx Bombers. Except there was a problem: Yankees Manager Billy Martin sprinted out of the dugout to confer with the home plate ump before Brett had even completed his run. After some debate, the umpire laid the bat across home plate, seeming to confirm something, then pointed at Brett with the bat and signaled that he was out. Brett burst out of the dugout “like his pants were on fire,” according to MLB.com (he totally does – check out the video below) and had to be physically restrained from tackling the umpire.
It turned out that he had used an excess of pine tar on his bat. Pine tar is allowed – it’s sticky and allows for better grip – but only up to 18 inches from the end of the bat. Any more than that is illegal, but that rule is very seldom invoked – it’s kind of like those silly, obscure laws in small towns that declare things like, “Llamas are not allowed in bars after 1 a.m.” The rule, apparently, has less to do with batter advantage and more to do with the fact that the pine tar would mess up the ball if the two came into contact, causing too many balls to be used per game. It was a rule nonetheless, and Brett was called out, nullifying both runs and giving the win to the Yanks. The Royals protested and the A.L. President decided to overturn the out. On August 18th, the game resumed with the score 5-4, Royals, in the top of the ninth. No miracles occurred – the next batter struck out, and then the Royals’ pitcher struck out all three Yankees who tried to hit off of him in the bottom of the ninth. The game ended with the Royals win and the infamous bat now rests in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Here’s that video – it’s dispersed throughout the 37-second clip of George Brett moments, but you’ll have no problem discerning which clips I’m talking about.
Photo from Jamestown Distributors
Now we travel way back to the 1919 World Series. Well, let’s travel back to just before the 1919 World Series. The Chicago White Sox were the best team in baseball at the time – or at least in the top two. However, they were also some of the worst-paid players. Charles Comiskey was notoriously stingy with his bankroll – he even promised the Sox a “big bonus” if they won the pennant, and when they did, he gave them a “bonus” of a case of crappy champagne.
After making some extra money by giving insider tips to a small-time gambler named Joseph Sullivan, Sox player Chick Gandil decided to really supplement his meager salary by offering to throw the World Series for $100,000. It wasn’t too difficult for Gandil to recruit other players for the scheme – many of them held personal grudges against Comiskey, not just for the small paychecks, but for reneging on bonuses and promises as well. In the end, at least eight White Sox players were in on the deal: Eddie Cicotte, Oscar “Happy” Felsch, Arnold “Chick” Gandil, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, Fred McMullin, Charles “Swede” Risberg, George “Buck” Weaver and Claude “Lefty” Williams. But things went awry, as they tend to in schemes like this. The gamblers didn’t pay the amounts they were supposed to pay after the Sox lost the first couple of games, and the players began to wonder if they had been had. It made sense to them that they should play to win the Series, because if they won, they would at least receive a $5,000 bonus from Comiskey. The Sox won the third game, but then lost the fourth and fifth. By today’s standards, four wins for the Reds would equal a title, but in 1919, the World Series was best out of nine games, not best out of seven. The Sox weren’t down and out just yet. They rallied to win games six and seven, giving them three wins and the Reds four. This greatly angered Arnold Rothstein, a gambler who had invested quite a bit of money on the Sox losing. He sent one of his “associates” to scare a little sense into Sox pitcher Lefty Williams. He said if Lefty didn’t start doing his part to throw the games, he and his wife were going to run into a little trouble. This threat was sufficient enough to scare Lefty into submission, and he made sure to throw poor and mediocre pitches all night. The Reds won handily, 10-5, and took the Series.
An investigation of the allegations got under way in September 1920 and two players, Eddie Cicotte and Shoeless Joe Jackson, confessed that they had helped throw the games (they later took back their confessions, and the signed documents ‘mysteriously’ disappeared). The eight players who were implicated were banned from baseball for life. The players who were found innocent were awarded $1,500 checks from Comiskey in the fall of 1920, which must have been quite the kick in the teeth to those who had participated in the scandal because he wasn’t paying them fairly.
Shoeless Joe Jackson’s level of involvement in the whole thing has since been disputed – he recanted his confession and maintained for the rest of his life that he was innocent. All of the players involved backed him up, saying that he had never attended any of the logistics meetings and refused to take the initial payment to entice him to throw the games. It’s still highly debated to this day. Photo from PascalMarco.com.
Finally, in his 2004 autobiography, Pete admitted that he had, in fact, bet on sports – including baseball – while he played and managed. He swore that he had never bet against the Reds and only bet on them because he loved the team so much and loyal and believed in his team. He has applied for reinstatement, but to no avail so far.
Photo from Inside Athletics
Corrupt players isn’t just an American trend. From 1969-1971, it was revealed that several really big Japanese baseball stars had accepted bribes from an organized crime family to throw various games. On October 7, 1969, somebody blew the whistle on Nishitetsu Lions pitcher Masayuki Nagayasu, who, as it turned out, had been purposely throwing easy pitches to opposing teams. Nagayasu sang like a canary, telling officials that not only did he take the bribes, the three other pitchers on the team took bribes, and so did the catcher and two infielders. All of them were suspended from play with two of them eventually being reinstated; Nagayasu was banned from the game for life.
Then, in April of 1970, an auto racer let it be known that a few prominent men had been in on a scheme to try to fix auto races: pitchers from two baseball teams and a member of the yakuza (organized crime). Another investigation was soon undertaken, which unearthed all sorts of dirty little secrets: by the end of the year, at least three more players had been banned for life, several had been arrested for the auto-racing incident, and more had received suspensions or benching for illegal gambling, driving without a license and having suspiciously close relationships with the yakuza. This whole series of incidents was known as the Black Mist that fell over Japanese baseball.
Drug busts of the ’80s? Corked bats? Women’s fertility drugs? What do you think is the most scandalous baseball moment? Share it in the comments!
Just in case you haven’t had enough of Harry Mania this week, I thought we’d travel back to when the whole movie craze started. Enjoy, Muggles!
Other actors who auditioned for the role of Harry: William Moseley, who eventually got the role of Peter Pevensie in The Chronicles of Narnia. Liam Aiken also auditioned and later went on to star as Klaus in another hit based on a hugely popular children’s book – Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. Cody Linley was in fifth grade when he auditioned for the role of the Chosen One, but obviously didn’t make the cut. He is probably best known now for portraying Jake Ryan, Miley Stewart’s sometimes-love interest on Hannah Montana.
According to NotStarring.com, M. Night Shyamalan turned down directing the movie because he preferred to devote his time to Unbreakable. It’s likely – he has also expressed interest in directing the final film, saying his version would be exceptionally “dark and twisted.”
Rupert Grint, AKA Ron Weasley, got the part when he sent in a video of himself rapping about why he was perfect for the role.
Richard Harris, who played Dumbledore until his death in 2002, almost didn’t take the part. His granddaughter changed his mind, insisting that she would never speak to him again if he didn’t take the part.
Hagrid’s portrayer, Robbie Coltrane, was the only actor J.K. Rowling insisted on. Well, not insisted on, but suggested. Director Chris Columbus asked her if she had any actors in mind for any of the characters and, according to her, she said “RobbieColtraneforHagrid” all in one quick breath. Robbie Coltrane says the producers called him and said, “You’re playing Hagrid, and we’re having no arguments about it.” Luckily, he was already a fan of the books from reading them to his son and immediately agreed to the part.
Rik Mayall, whom children of the early ‘90s will remember as Drop Dead Fred, was cast as Peeves the Poltergeist. Sadly, his scenes were eventually cut from the film.
Gringotts Bank can be found on the Strand in London; it’s called the Australia House and it masquerades as the building for Australian muggles’ state and federal government agencies in the U.K.
It’s rumored that Rosie O’Donnell offered to play the part of Molly Weasley for free because she loved the books so much. She was turned down because J.K. Rowling very strongly wanted the cast to be primarily British.
Daniel Radcliffe has to wear contact lenses to portray Harry because his eyes are actually blue. Seems like a minor detail, but as any fan knows, Harry’s green eyes end up playing an important part in the series. However, sometimes the lenses bothered his eyes and the color had to be added by computer after the scenes were filmed.
Drew Barrymore, a Potter fan, was supposed to have a cameo in the film, but it was cut after the first draft of the script.
Three different birds portray Harry’s Snowy Owl, Hedwig. Their names are Gizmo, Ook and Sprout, but the one with the most screen time is Gizmo.
Steven Spielberg had his hat in the ring to direct, but ended up choosing A.I. with Haley Joel Osment instead. There was a rumor that Spielberg wanted to make a Toy Story-esque movie with Osment as the voice of Harry and that idea alienated him from the rest of the team who was already on board to do the movie. Producer David Heyman insists that wasn’t the case, however.
Check out the portraits on the moving staircase – one of them is Anne Boleyn. She was beheaded because of her attempts to use sorcery on Henry VIII (that was his excuse, anyway), so her likeness on the wall at Hogwarts is quite appropriate.
In a bit of foreshadowing, one of the trophies in the trophy cabinet (it’s to the right of the Quidditch trophy) called “Service to the School” is engraved with the name “Tom M. Riddle.”
The actor who ended up playing Professor Lupin, David Thewlis, auditioned for the part of Professor Quirrell. I’d say he got the better deal, wouldn’t you? And completely unrelated to the movie, Thewlis is in a relationship (and has a baby) with Anna Friel, better known to people in the U.S. as Chuck from Pushing Daisies. Also, he turned down the role of Simon Gruber in the Die Hard: With a Vengeance, which would have made him the onscreen brother of Alan Rickman, who played Hans Gruber in the first Die Hard.
The movie’s budget was an astronomical $125 million, but it made that back many times over: the worldwide gross was $976,475,550.
Daniel Radcliffe’s voice changed while they were filming, but the movie was shot in sequence so it just gradually gets deeper throughout the film instead of being at different octaves here and there.
You know all about student pranks – greased pigs in the cafeteria, cows being led upstairs, all of that juvenile stuff. Maybe you’ve even heard about the more complicated college stunts – when M.I.T. students erected a police car on the top of the school’s Great Dome, for example. Its license plate number was pi. Anyway, here are a few lesser-known student stunts. If you’re, um, “inspired” by some of these, I claim no fault… but be sure to take pictures.
Caltech is M.I.T.’s biggest rival in pranks, despite being located at opposite ends of the country. They often take potshots at one another and are especially prone to pranks at football games. Although the Great Rose Bowl prank is pretty well known, another football stunt occurred when Caltech wasn’t even playing. During the 1964 Washington vs. Illinois Rose Bowl game, the audience of 100,000 was rather bored by a somewhat lackluster game. That is, until they looked up and realized that someone had changed the electronic scoreboard to make it appear as if Caltech was putting the hurt on M.I.T. It happened again in 1984 – although the teams were UCLA and Illinois (again), it appeared as if Caltech was stomping M.I.T., 31-9.
They make train robberies look so easy in the movies, don’t they? You jump on to a train with guns a-blazin’ and a bandana covering your face, rob the safe and jump off, never to be caught. But in real life, the gangs who robbed trains were almost always caught and brought to justice. Here are a few of their stories.
Photo from History of the James-Younger Gang
Police had no clue what had happened and a two-month investigation ensued. Hundreds of people were questioned without any hope of a lead, but by August, suspicion fell on Edward Agar. Agar was sent to prison for passing a fake check, but wanted to make sure that the mother of his child had money to provide for the young one. He informed her that she would be receiving £7,000 from a colleague of his, and when the money didn’t show, he blew the whistle on the whole operation. He and the colleague, William Pierce, had hatched a complicated plot to steal the gold years earlier. They involved a clerk in the railway office when they found out that he briefly had possession of the keys that locked the boxes the gold was sealed in; the clerk was able to get the keys to Agar who made an impression of them in wax and later had the keys replicated.
There was a second key to the safes that wasn’t quite as easy to get. Agar ended up sending a £200 box of bullion on the same route (under an assumed name, of course), then showed up to collect it and watched the clerk carefully to see where he got the second key to the safe. Turned out it wasn’t quite as complicated as they thought – the key was simply stored in a cupboard that wasn’t very well guarded at all. When the time came, Agar and Pierce strolled right into the office when it was unoccupied and made a quick wax imprint of the key.
They brought the lead shot onto the train in carpet bags; Pierce got into a first class carriage and Agar boarded with the train’s guard, James Burgess, who was in on the whole thing. Agar took the iron bars off with a mallet and chisel, replaced the gold bars with lead shot, replaced the iron bars and stuck a new wax seal on the box to make it look like it had never been tampered with.
When Agar turned Pierce in, police recovered about £2,000 of the £12,000 worth of gold stolen.
Michael Crichton later based his novel The Great Train Robbery on the incident, which was turned into a movie starring Sean Connery as William Pierce. (pictured)
Photo from MGMHD.
On October 6, 1866, the Reno brothers jumped onto an Ohio and Mississippi Railway train in Indiana and emptied one of the safes. They tossed another one out the window so they could take it with them, and then they jumped off of the train, completing the first train robbery in the United States. It was definitely a catching trend – in the two weeks following the Reno brothers’ first moving holdup, two more trains were robbed. A passenger testified that he saw the faces of two of the robbers from the first holdup, but after he was shot and killed, other passengers clammed up and none of the burglars were charged. At least, not at that time. After their fifth robbery a couple of years later, the Pinkertons finally caught up with the Reno brothers. Ten agents were waiting on the train to bust the boys, and although most of them escaped, they were arrested the next day.
Some members of the gang were hanged, but a lynch mob got to the others before official justice could be served.
They didn’t pull it off, though – the gang left the train rife with fingerprints, and left all kinds of evidence littered about the farmhouse they took refuge in for five days in Buckinghamshire. Not only were fingerprints found, they were allegedly found on a Monopoly board that the robbers had used to amuse themselves with while they were holed up. They used real money, of course.
13 of the gang members were eventually caught (that’s a few of them in the picture), although at least one of them didn’t stay caught for long. Ronnie Biggs escaped about 15 months into his prison sentence and moved to Paris, where he had plastic surgery. Then he moved to Australia and lived under the radar for quite a few years, until his identity was exposed, forcing him to move to Brazil. He lived there until 2001, when a series of strokes made him want to return to England to buy a proper pint before he died, although most people suspect he wanted the healthcare. He was returned to jail to finish out his sentence and is still there – Biggs was just denied parole on July 2 because the Justice Secretary felt that “Mr. Biggs is wholly unrepentant.”
Photo from HowStuffWorks
Disney isn’t always the Happiest Place on Earth. The parks sometimes harbor deep, dark secrets – and we’re not talking the Haunted Mansion or the Tower of Terror. Below are a few sinister secrets Mickey doesn’t want you to know about.
We’ve all heard the rumors that no one has ever died at a Disney park because Disney has paid officials to refrain from declaring injured or ill people dead until they hit a hospital outside of Disney property. But it’s not true. There are several incidents where the victims were reported to have died at the scene.
In June of both 1973 and 1983, 18-year-old boys drowned in the Rivers of America. Both had stayed in the area when they weren’t supposed to – the incident in ’73 occurred when a boy and his brother decided to stay in the park after closing and the ’83 incident happened when a boy capsized a rubber emergency raft he had stolen from a cast-only section of the park.
In 1984, Dollie Young was riding the Matterhorn Bobsleds at Disneyland when her seatbelt became unbuckled. To this day, it’s not known how Dollie fell out of her car, but she did. She fell to the track and was hit by another car, then caught under its wheels and dragged for a bit before the ride came to a stop. She was pronounced dead at the scene due to massive head and chest injuries.
In 2007, a guest alerted cast members at the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction that she had seen another woman sprinkling some sort of a powdery substance into the water, and the Los Angeles Times reports that the ride was shut down the same year when a group of people managed to leave a pile of ashes in the Captain’s Quarters section of the ride.
I’ve done it, and I bet a lot of you have done it as well: pausing and rewinding and going frame-by-frame to catch hidden messages or images in certain Disney films. Some of them are really there and some of them are just products of our active imaginations. Here’s the lowdown:
Aladdin does not tell children to take off their clothes in Aladdin. It’s a scene where “Prince Ali” is trying to get up to Princess Jasmine’s room to talk to her when he comes across her tiger, Rajah. The tiger growls at him menacingly, and Aladdin says, “C’mon… good kitty. Take off and go!” while shooing the feline away with his turban. The captioning supports this argument. However, the line is whispered and not enunciated well, and in addition, it seems to be edited poorly. Snopes http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/aladdin.asp says that the same bit of dialogue seems to have been inserted twice, so the whispered line is doubly garbled. Because it was so close on the heels of The Little Mermaid controversy, people heard what they wanted to.
Speaking of which, The Little Mermaid did not contain any sexual images on purpose. There were two issues that concerned the public: first, that artwork for the movie contained a phallic images as part of a castle in the background, and second, that the priest officiating over the wedding scene near the end of the movie seems to get an erection right in the middle of the ceremony. Neither is true, according to Snopes. The phallic image was unintentional and was not drawn in by a disgruntled employee who had recently gotten laid off (the artist didn’t even work for Disney) and the “erection” is actually the priest’s knees.
So what is true? Well, there’s definitely an image of a topless woman in the 1977 movie The Rescuers. And Disney fully admits it. In fact, the image – which is a photograph, not an animated bit, and was clearly intentionally placed in the movie – was basically pointed out to the public by Disney themselves. The image occurs so fast in two single, non-consecutive frames, that a viewer would have to know exactly where to pause the movie in order to even see it. The movie was recalled in 1999 after Disney discovered the image was there; they claimed it must have been inserted in post-production. Photo from Snopes.
One that’s maybe true: Jessica Rabbit going commando in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. There’s a scene in the movie where Jessica and Eddie Valiant are thrown from a car, causing her dress to flip up very briefly. It goes fast, but people who have slowed the movie to frame-by-frame say that the way the coloring was done suggests that mischievous animators may have drawn Jessica without any undergarments. However, the coloring, which is darker than the rest of Jessica’s skin, may also suggest underwear.
Love or hate Michael Jackson, the entire world was stunned by his death yesterday. Although there have been plenty of celebrity deaths, there aren’t that many that have sent shockwaves of this magnitude across the globe. The deaths of Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix were all tragic, but with their heavy drug use and hard-living lifestyles, they maybe weren’t so shocking. And we’ve lost a lot of wonderful people to cancer, but since we have generally been aware that those people had potentially terminal illnesses, they weren’t so surprising either. The five deaths below were totally unexpected (to most, anyway) and surprised the world much like Michael Jackson’s death has.
Grace Kelly’s death in 1982 was a big surprise. The Princess of Monaco, who was only 52 and seemingly in perfect health, suffered a stroke while driving with her daughter Princess Stephanie. The timing couldn’t have been worse – it was just as she was driving on the edge of a mountainside, and the stroke left her incapacitated and unable to control the car. It careened off the edge of the mountain and rolled down, flipping over multiple times. Stephanie suffered a cervical fracture and some bruising, but Princess Grace didn’t recover from her injuries. The world was stunned because the reports from Monaco originally said that she had broken her collarbone, a leg and some ribs, but was in stable condition.
Photo from CoverBrowser.com.
We know now that Elvis was on more drugs than Anna Nicole Smith, but at the time, it wasn’t widely known that he had a veritable pharmacy in his system. In fact, he had gone to Richard Nixon to complain about the prevalence of drugs in the entertainment industry. Despite a series of kind of crappy concerts – he was out of shape and self-conscious about his appearance, and it showed – he was getting ready to embark on a new tour on August 17, 1977. He didn’t make it. The day before, his fiancee Ginger Alden found him dead on the floor of his bathroom at Graceland.
At first the public was told his death was due to cardiac arrhythmia, which wouldn’t have been too unbelievable giving the amount of weight he had gained; he had also been having some obvious breathing troubles onstage. But it didn’t take long before the truth emerged: his very own Dr. Feelgood, Dr. Nick, had been prescribing massive amounts of pills for a very long time. His autopsy revealed that he had 14 drugs in his system when he died; 10 were in large quantities. They included Morphine, Demerol, the antihistamine Chloropheniramine, Valium, Placidyl, Codeine, Ethinamate, Quaaludes and an unidentified barbituate. It’s rumored that he also had Diazepam, Amytal, Nembutal, Carbrital, Sinutab, Elavil, Avental, and Valmid in his system. It’s a wonder that he didn’t die sooner, really.
Photo from FrancesEllenSpeaks.
When Mark David Chapman killed John Lennon by shooting him four times at close range, the entire world immediately went into mourning. On December 8, 1980, John and Yoko were coming back to their apartment at the Dakota in New York after an evening recording session. Waiting in the shadows of the building’s archway was Chapman, an obsessed fan who had approached Lennon earlier in the day for an autograph and a photo. Of the five hollow-point bullets Chapman fired, four of them hit Lennon and inflicted severe injuries. At least one of them punctured his aorta.
Lennon managed to get six stairs up to the doorman before he collapsed; the doorman took the gun from Chapman’s hand and covered Lennon with his jacket. Police loaded Lennon in the backseat of the police car and drove him to the hospital immediately and said that acknowledged that he knew who he was and fell unconscious shortly after. He was pronounced dead upon arrival at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center where the cause was determined to be hypovolemic shock caused by more then 80 percent blood loss.
Crowds gathered in Central Park outside of the Dakota singing and chanting and apparently keeping Yoko Ono awake. She asked them to give her a little peace, but please come back the following Sunday to help her observe 10 minutes of silence for her slain husband. Not only did they come back, the whole world decided to get in on the tribute. More than 100,000 people gathered in Central Park on Sunday, December 14, and 30,000 people in Liverpool followed suit.
Photo from the BBC.
Princess Diana is the first shocking death I really remember. On August 31, 1997, the Princess and her boyfriend Dodi Al Fayed were being driven in Paris just after midnight. Their driver was trying to evade paparazzi and was driving at speeds much higher than the recommended 30 mph – some reports estimate that he was going at least 65 and others say 90. He lost control of the car in the tunnel and plunged into a support pillar. Al Fayed died at the scene, as did the driver. The other passenger survived.
Diana died of her internal injuries a few hours later at the hospital – the crash had jolted her body so severely that her heart reportedly was displaced to the right side of her chest. Her death was announced at 5:30 a.m. People worldwide were horrified and saddened and more than three million people showed up to mourn her during her Westminster Abbey funeral on September 6. So many flowers and gifts were left outside of Kensington Palace that the public was asked to refrain from bringing any more items because they were becoming safety hazards.
Photo from BiographyAndBiographies.
While not exactly in the same vein as Princess Diana or Elvis, Dale Earnhardt’s death certainly stunned the sports world. He was just completing the last lap of the Daytona 500 on February 18, 2001, when the left rear corner of his car hit driver Sterling Marlin’s front bumper. This made Earnhardt veer sharply left, then sharply right toward the concrete retaining wall. Just as his car was hitting the wall, Ken Schrader’s car ran into the #3 black Goodwrench car.
To most people, this didn’t seem like such a huge deal – for NASCAR, this was a relatively common accident and they had seen Dale come out unscathed after much worse crashes. The two cars slid down toward the infield grass and Schrader got out of his car, appearing to be completely fine. He walked to the #3 car and looked inside to check on Dale, then immediately signaled for help.
It turned out that Earnhardt died instantly, but wasn’t officially pronounced dead until he was examined at Halifax Medical Center. His injuries included a fatal skull fracture, eight broken ribs, a broken ankle, a fractured breast bone, and collarbone and hip injuries that indicated his seat belts did not fail. Sterling Marlin started receiving hate mail and death threats, Earnhardt’s #3 car was retired, and fans paid tribute to Earnhardt by holding up three fingers for the third lap of every Winston Cup race for the next year (I’m sure some people still do it). Even television announcers stopped commentating for the third lap.
Photo from USA Today.
What celebrity deaths totally floored you? Share your reactions in the comments.
