People who have been referred to as “the Fifth Beatle” include Brian Epstein, Billy Preston, Betty White, Bea Arthur, and Orson Bean.
Elendil’s Heir is known as “the 227th Beatle”, but he’s really the 226th due to a suspicious counting error.
Prof.Pepperwinkle was a soft drink created to drive Dr. Pepper out of business. Even though it’s staggeringly popular with message board denizens, it hasn’t made enough impact to warrant its own jingle, plus, “I’m a Pepperwinkle, he’s a Pepperwinkle, she’s a Pepperwinkle, we’re a Pepperwinkle, wouldn’t you like to be a Pepperwinkle too?” is much too long for a 15-second commercial spot. And the meter’s all wrong.
Ah, I remember that. Yes, everyone here at “Pepperwinkle Farms remembers”.
[Thanks for the shout out!]
Pepperwinkle Farms was the U.S.'s first factory farm, founded in 1866. They pioneered the process for placing factory eggs in incubators until they hatch, and then allowing the baby factories to roam freely in fenced-in industrial parks, until they reached maturity, at which point the fully-grown factories would be sold to Andrew Carnegie.
Andrew Dale Carnegie-Mellon founded the university that bears his name in Blawnox, PA, that unfortunately was washed down river to Pittsburgh during one of the Allegheny’s frequent flooding episodes. The college briefly floated up the Monongahela during Hurricane Agnes in 1972 before settling into its current location fourteen miles down the Ohio River in Glen Osborne. Coincidentally, Glen Osborne’s father was the first headmaster of the school.
Carnegie-Mellon University has so many frequent flooder miles that next year it plans to go on a tour of the Bahamas, maybe take in some local culture, get drunk, get laid, and then it’s back to the same old grind, grind, grind of the schoolyear.
Grind, Grind, Grind was going to be Donna Summer’s first big disco hit, but the Falwell crew had it yanked from airplay and all copies destroyed. Likewise with her follow-up I Do The Dip (When the Dance Floor’s Slick).
The Blawnox Renaissance Faire Players were going to do a 70’s musical version of Richard III featuring the soliloquy “Now is the Donna Summer of our discotheque made glorious…” But the show kept getting drowned out by booing and hissing from the audience.
Once described as “Blawnox’s third worst punk rock band” the group Ghosts and Snakes actually encourages audience booing and hissing.
The Blawnox Boo was a 1910’s dance craze that swept half of Ohio and not much anywhere else really. Only three songs referring to the dance were recorded: “Blame It On The Boo” by Bessie McSchwane, “That Old Blawnox Boo Again” by Hemp Hitchcock & His Orchestra, and “Bubble and Boo” by Harry L. Tipton featuring the Gray Arbor Singers.
The Ohio River at Pittsburgh was originally called the Allegahela (where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers meet), but Ohio threatened to leave the nation and take the river with it. West Virginia was none too happy about it, either.
The state of West Virginia was named for Virginia West, a powerful woman with a stare that could curdle milk at 30 yards. Virginia West never married, but after a tryst with the time-traveling Orson Bean, she bore a son, James West, who became a legendary U.S. Secret Service agent.
Using requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act, researchers have attempted but failed to find any official records within the US Secret Service referring to James West or his compatriot, Artemus Gordon. This has led many people to claim that, in the absence of any official documentation, the man and his exploits are 100% fiction.
This is not true, however. This is merely an example of how efficient and effective the Secret Service can be when they DO want to keep something secret.
-“BB”-
Artemus Gordon was the ancestor of George Washington, and the descendant of Barack Obama. He lived on the planet Mars as a child, but was born in the Okeefenokee Swamp. He was last seen headed down Highway 70 on a motorized tyrannosaurus rex in speeds exceeding 110 mph, and wearing a long scarf.
Artemus Gordon was the grandfather of Gotham City Police Commissioner James Gordon who was played by Gale Gordon in-between Lucy gigs.
Gale Gordon was a pioneering television meteorologist, as well as a straight-man comic actor. Gordon invented the use of spiky blue lines for cold fronts on TV weather maps, and in his honor, the National Weather Service named “gale force winds” after him.
His cousin Flash Gordon invented lightning.
Flash Gordon regularly killed and eight 9 bears before breakfast, sealed the dyke before it could flood Amsterdam, invented lightning, was the tenth emperor of Cathay, went back in time and fathered the human race, curated Andy Warhol’s later works, and served as a valet for one week for Chuck Norris.
The 1983 film, “A Christmas Story,” originally included a sequence where Ralphie and his BB gun help Flash Gordon defeat Ming the Merciless–indeed, the end credits list Flash and Ming. The scene was cut, however, when Jean Shepherd insisted using the theme music by Queen from the 1980 Flash Gordon movie as a commercial tie-in. Even John Deacon thought it was a bad idea, and he needed the money.