Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
[Ed. note: With less than a week to go before a presidential election, maybe we could use a reminder that United States presidents are people, too, and often far from perfect -or even presidential.]
Zachary Taylorwould spit tobacco juice on the White House rugs if a spitoon wasn't in spitting distance.
Teddy Roosevelt owned and could walk on stilts.
Herbert Hoover did not like to set his eyes on the White House servants- ever. Whenever he or the First Lady appeared anywhere where a servant was present, he or she would run into a closet and remain there until the coast was clear. Groundskeepers had to hide behind bushes. These people lived with the fear of being fired if Hoover caught a glimpse of one of them.
A student protester once gave Richard Nixon the finger. Nixon gave one back to him.
Andrew Jackson had a bullet painfully lodged next to his heart from 1806 until his death in 1845. He had been shot in the chest during a duel with Charles Dickinson, who had insulted Jackson's wife. Jackson sometimes coughed up blood and, to alleviate the pain from the bullet, he would on occasion slit open his own veins with a pocketknife and "bleed" himself.
John Adams didn't like his white servants "playing cards with Negroes."
After his presidency, Harry and Bess Truman moved in with her mother. His mother-in-law, who believed -and stated frequently- that Harry had never amounted to anything, also lived in the White House when he was president.
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
Holiday songs are nothing new. Whenever Christmas approaches, we will all be bombarded on our radios and at the malls we visit, by various Christmas carols, classic songs and novelty tunes. “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don't Be Late)" sung by Alvin and the Chipmunks is as expected at Yuletide as electric razor commercials for Dad or diamond ring commercials for your girlfriend.
More recently, we have Randy Brooks' “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” Even Hanukkah now has Adam Sandler's recent classic “The Hanukkah Song.” These are all categorized as "holiday novelty songs.”
But for Halloween, for the past almost 50-odd years, we've all become accustomed to listening to the musical strains of a man named Bobby "Boris" Pickett and his main contribution to musical immortality. It is almost impossible for most of us (especially those of us who grew up in the '60's) to think of Halloween novelty songs without immediately thinking of "The Monster Mash."
Robert George Pickett grew up in a movie theater in Massachusetts where his father was the manager. Like countless millions of kids before and after him, he fell in love with the movies and dreamed of growing up and becoming a movie star. Bobby started doing impressions of the various movie stars he'd see on the silver screen. He did various impressions of the stars he loved, but by far, his favorite movie star was horror movie icon Boris Karloff.
Life may be infinitely unfair, but in death, we're all in the same boat. Here are tombstone inscriptions from the graves of famous people. Some funny, others clever, some insightful, others angry, some sad, others optimistic.
Winston Churchill: “I am ready to meet my maker. Whether my maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another question.”
Rodney Dangerfield: “There goes the neighborhood.”
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
Quite possibly, along with The Wizard of Oz, it is the single most beloved film of all-time. This American classic is the first color film to win a Best Picture Academy Award (1939). Okay, let's take a look at a few lesser-known facts about the immortal film Gone With The Wind.
1. Despite the fantasies so many women have about getting kissed by Clark Gable, actress Vivien Leigh did not actually enjoy kissing Gable. She claimed his dentures smelled bad.
2. The smokingest leads in movie history? Vivien Leigh smoked four packs of cigarettes during the filming of GWTW. And Clark Gable was a lifelong three pack-a-day smoker. That's seven packs of smokes a day- that's a lot of nicotine (cough cough hack hack)!
3. In one of the biggest "cattle calls" in Hollywood history, over 1,400 actresses were considered for the female lead role of Scarlett O’Hara. Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Jean Arthur, Lana Turner, Barbara Stanwyck, Claudette Colbert, Susan Hayward, Katharine Hepburn, and Lucille Ball (!!!) were all in the running. Another candidate was Carole Lombard, the real-life great love of Clark Gable's life. Tallulah Bankhead, a real-life southern belle, was actually a major front-runner, but her unsavory personal life made producers reluctant to cast her as Scarlett.
4. Although 1,400 actresses were considered for the role, only 400 were given actual readings. Of the screen tests, only Vivien Leigh and Paulette Goddard were given their tests in color.
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
While the recent rise in girl gangs in Britain might be keeping U.K. politicians up at night, bands of female crooks are nothing new to the region. One tends to think of gangs as a mostly male endeavor, and this is and always has been pretty much true. But the greatest girl gang in history outdid most of the male gangs, not only in London, but anywhere.
Possibly beginning in the late 1700's, an all-female syndicate known as the Forty Elephants started their well-planned crime spree. The Forty Elephants (also known as The Forty Thieves) used clever thievery to wreak havoc on the local economies. They were called the Forty Elephants not because they were fat or overweight, but because they operated from the Elephant and Castle district of London.
These ladies operated from, at least, 1873 until the 1950's. There is recent evidence that they may possibly have dated back to the late 18th century. During the early 1900's the Forty Elephants gang was led by Alice Diamond a.k.a. “Queen of the 40 Thieves" and “Diamond Annie.”
These sticky-fingered women became known for using Victorian era fashions and standards to their advantage. The Forty Elephants has specially-tailored pockets sewn into their puffy bloomers and skirts. They also used muffs, cummerbunds and specially-tailored coats. These were used to hide any objects they lifted. And because the prudish norms of the day dictated that they be given total privacy as they browsed and tried on merchandise, the crimes were rarely witnessed. They sometimes robbed dozens of shops across a city all at the same time.
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
Gilligan's Island, which premiered on CBS on September 26, 1964, is quite possibly the most ridiculed television show of all-time. Interestingly and ironically, with the possible exception of I Love Lucy, it is also possibly the most well-known and beloved. According to Dawn Wells, it is by now the single most watched TV show in history, including I Love Lucy.
As I always clearly state: what makes people laugh is subjective- like taste in women, cars and colors, And while Gilligan's Island will cause only eye rolls and channel-changing from many of my fellow TV watchers, I myself have always found the show to be hysterically funny.
True, the teaming of Bob Denver (Gilligan) and Alan Hale (the Skipper) as Gilligan and the Skipper, so obviously based on Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, never equaled Stan and Ollie. But who did? To me, both the verbal and physical humor of the show was very funny and often clever. (Like almost any great TV series, the writing did get weaker towards the end of the show's run.)
Like all great art, in my humble opinion, Gilligan's Island reflected and mirrored life.
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
In 1962, Jack Paar, the controversial but popular host of late night TV's popular talk show The Tonight Show, unexpectedly quit. Johnny Carson was chosen to be the NBC show's new host. In the meanwhile, several temporary guest hosts took over the show's hosting chores, including Art Linkletter, Joey Bishop, Merv Griffin, Jan Murray. And Jerry Lewis.
Jerry did a stellar job as a Tonight Show guest host and ABC had brainstorm. Why not give Jerry Lewis his very own talk show?
At the time, Jerry was already the number one comedian in movies and obviously didn't "need the work." But with the enticement of several million dollars, Jerry accepted the ABC offer.
"I’ll be in complete control", Jerry said proudly at the press conference announcing the show. "I’ll be doing something I’ve never done before," he added. "It'll be what the people want. I’ll be playing it loose. I’ll be what i'm with. I suppose I’ll have guests" (The "I suppose I’ll have guests" line, stated by a talk show host, should have sent red flag up to the ABC suits, but no).
"He wouldn't tell us what the show's format was," recalled ABC president Leonard Goldson, "He kept giving us double-talk and double-talk and double-talk, insisting he would take the country by storm."
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
Basketball and hockey coaches wear suits. Football coaches sometimes wear suits too, but often wear team-branded jackets. Some wear ill-fitting pleated khakis, some wear sweatshirts, and Tom Landry, the former coach of the Dallas Cowboys, was never seen coaching without his trademark fedora hat.
So why, then, do baseball managers always wear uniforms?
According to John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball, it goes back to the earliest days of the game. Back in those days (circa 1840-1860) the person known as the manager was actually the team's business manager, the guy who kept the books in order and made sure the road trips were planned and on schedule.
Meanwhile, the guy we call the manager today, the one who arranged the roster and decided when to pull a pitcher, was known as the captain. In addition to managing the team on the field, he was usually also on the team as a player.
There were also a few captains who didn't play on the team and stuck to making decisions in the dugout. They usually wore suits.
With the passing of time, it became less common for the captain to play on most teams. They took on strictly "managerial" roles. Instead of suits of old featured throughout America's dugouts though, the non-playing captains hung on to the tradition of wearing player's uniforms.
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
Which item in your bathroom carries the most germs? No, it's not the toilet. Toilet paper? No.
The most likely candidate for most of us is our toothbrush.
According to a 2010 research study conducted by the University of Manchester in England, the average toothbrush hosts up to 100 million bacteria. These include various strains of staphylococci, which cause skin rashes; E. coli, which can cause diarrhea; and the viruses that cause all three types of hepatitis.
A damp toothbrush not only picks up germs from our mouth (which contains more than 600 different species of bacteria), it is also vulnerable to spray from a flushed toilet, which coats all objects within six feet in a fine bacteria-rich mist.
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
1. Americans consume 16 billion hot dogs annually.
2. Americans eat 150,000,000 hot dogs on the 4th of July alone (two billion in the month of July)!
3. Dick Stuart, first baseman for the Pittsburgh Pirates, led the league in errors a record seven years in a row. Dick was once given a standing ovation when he fielded a hot dog wrapper that was blowing across the field.
4. Elvis Presley recorded the song “Hot Dog" for the 1957 movie Loving You.
5. Elvis liked his hot dogs boiled in a pot filled with sauerkraut. Elvis enjoyed munching on plain hot dog buns too- no hot dog, just the buns!
6. Charlie Kazan, age 89, has had hot dogs for dinner every night since he was 11 months old. (He eats his hot dogs on rye bread with the crust torn off.)
7. The “Oscar Meyer Wiener Song" has been recorded by the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, a teen folk band, a string ensemble and a Nashville country-western group.
8. The Vienna Symphony Orchestra once performed the “Oscar Meyer Wiener Song" for a commercial.
Going to the bathroom might be the one and only activity in America that's cheaper than it used to be. Pay toilets used to be the rule in airports and bus and train stations, and one would often encounter them in gas stations and restaurants.
The earliest pay toilets in history were erected in ancient Rome in 74 AD, during the rule of Vespasian, after a civil war greatly effected the Roman financial scene. His initiative was derided by his opponents, but his reply to them became famous: "Pecunia non olet," i.e. "money does not smell.”
Okay, here's your "question of the day" folks: “Who had the first pay toilets in North America installed?" The first pay toilets in North America were installed by Walt Disney. Walt disney? The cartoon guy? The Mickey Mouse guy? In 1935, Walt opened “Walt’s,” a popular cafe on Hollywood Boulevard, and the first restaurant ever run by an animation studio. In 1936, Walt's became the first establishment in North America to install pay toilets.
Pay toilets spread across America and were soon common sights in almost all the major cities.
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
Norvell Hardy, who was to gain world fame as one half of the legendary movie comedy team of Laurel and Hardy, was born on January 18th, 1892, in Harlem, Georgia. He was the fifth and youngest child of Oliver Hardy and Emily Norvell (young Norvell had two half-sisters and two half- brothers). Oliver Hardy was a confederate veteran who was wounded at the battle of Antietam in 1862. Sadly, he was never to get to know his father, as Oliver Hardy was to die in the first year of Norvell's life (he passed away on November 22, 1892).
He faced another childhood tragedy when his older brother Sam died in drowning accident. Norvell fished his brother's body out of the water and tried to resuscitate him, but Sam was already dead.
Almost from day one (possibly to compensate for these early childhood tragedies) young Norvell had huge appetite. According to family lore, his mother once baked 20 buttermilk biscuits, only to watch in amazement as little Norvell ate all 20. For the remainder of his life, as a child, a teen, and an adult, Hardy was to be obese, his weight, at it's peak, reaching 350 pounds. His ravenous appetite caused him to be overweight from an early age, and Norvell had to deal with the taunts of "Fatty! Fatty!" from the other kids.
He soon realized that laughter brought him balm and pleasure. If the other kids laughed with you, they couldn't laugh at you. Norvell loved to umpire the local baseball games and ham it up, calling out "Steeeriiiike threeeee!".
Once, a wild bear got loose and chased him up a tree. Even in this terrifying situation, Norvell caused great laughter, as he shouted out from the tree top, "Lord, if you don't help me, please don't help the bear!!"
A born entertainer, Norvell developed a very melodic singing voice at family sing-a-longs. At the age of eight, he ran away from home and joined a troupe called Coburn's Minstrels, who he briefly toured with. After returning home, he was enrolled in a local boarding school, which he hated, causing him to run away again.
When he returned home, Emily, realizing what a great singing voice he had, sent him to receive singing lessons in Atlanta from the distinguished Adolf Dahm-Peterson. Norvell often skipped his lessons, instead earning $3.50 a week singing at the local Alcazar Theater. Returning home once more, Hardy's mother (probably to discipline him) put him in a military academy, which, as would be expected, the rambunctious Norvell hated. He was enrolled briefly at Young Harris college, but his heart was obviously in entertaining.
Around 1910, two important things happened in the life of Norvell Hardy. First, he changed his name from Norvell to Oliver Hardy. One story says he changed his name because he was advised to by a psychic or a numerologist, but possibly, he simply took on the name of his late, lamented father.
Second, he opened the first-ever movie theater in Milledgeville, Georgia. Ollie, besides being the movie theater's manager, was also its janitor, ticket taker, and projectionist. While watching and studying the movies on screen, Oliver thought he could act just as well, if not better, than the actors he saw.
