Designers for Volkswagen worked in vain for ten years trying to recreate their beetle into a doodle bug with extensive safety measures, accordion flexing, and all. When anticipating an accident, the vehicle rolls up into a ball. They were going to call it Articulate Bug. The plans are dormant.
Dormant doodle bugs emerge every 17 years, hoping to catch cicadas. Unfortunately for the doodle bugs and fortunately for the cicadas, they’re out of synch.
The Dipsy Doodle Bug Bar & Grill is just out of Synch, AZ. Billy Bob & the Cicadas (featuring Tami) plays there on the weekends. Don’t get the tuna surprise.
In 1949, the fourth Geneva Convention prohibited tuna surprise, classifying the dish as a war crime.
Billionaire Mark Cuban began amassing his fortune in 1980 when he ordered the tuna surprise from the Dipsy Doodle a second time. Since he had had it before, it was no longer a surprise. He successfully sued the restaurant for fraud and received a five million dollar settlement.
When Mark Guatemalan tried the same trick at the Dipsy Doodle three years later, the chef put a live venomous snake in the dish. This Mark was surprised twice.
In an early draft of the script for the 1942 film Yankee Doodle Dandy, James Cagney was slated to play two roles: both that of songwriter George M. Cohan (who wrote “Yankee Doodle Boy”), and that of Cohan’s lesser-known, slightly dumb brother, Mortimer “Dipsy Doodle” Cohan.
Gertrude Stein was originally contracted to write the screenplay for Yankee Doodle Dandy, but the script she submitted was deemed unfilmable by director Michael Curtiz. It was eventually discovered that Stein had inadvertently sent the studio the first draft of her book Tender Buttons. The mistake was eventually discovered and understood to be a mix-up that occurred during a burst of “spring cleaning,” but by then it was too late for the studio to consider the actual script she wrote. As a gesture of goodwill, the studio sent Stein a lifetime gift certificate for the Dipsy Doodle.
Gert tried to get to the Dipsy Doodle a number of times, but the map she had was faulty, and, as far as she could tell, “there was no there there”.
The author of many such quotes, including of course “A rose is a rose is a rose,” Gertrude Stein became the tutor to a young man named Lawrence Berra, later known as “Yogi.” She asked him to keep quiet about that.
After retiring from playing baseball with the New York Yankees, Yogi Berra became an actual yogi. His followers believed that his many malapropisms were, in fact, insightful (if inscrutable) Zen koans.
“Insightful” Zen Kones, the highest level Buddhist Monk of the Northeastern United States once attempted to climb the 198 foot Renaissance Centre in Erie, Pennsylvania using only the power of his meditation. He was only able to make it up 4 or 5 feet but was forced to come back to the ground after rescue teams started throwing dodgeballs at him. All the other area monks went from calling him by his name to “Silly” Kones.
Although it appears from the outside to be an office building, the Renaissance Centre in Erie, Pennsylvania, is actually a silo used by Post to store Grape Nuts cereal. One day in July 2021, the building sprang a leak, and traffic was held up for five hours while bulldozers moved tons of Grape Nuts out of the street.
At one point, the street department and Post were drawing material from the wrong piles - the consumers of the cereal noticed nothing, while the street department noticed that the streets that used the Grape Nuts were more durable.
“Grape nuts” is Melania’s pet name for Donald.
Melania was the Greek goddess of stoicism.
Moe, Shemp, and Jerome Howard, as well as cousin Larry Fine, were children of strict stoic parents but went through a rebellious stage from which they never emerged.
The Globe Theater was cursed by an unsuccessful playwright who was jealous of Will’s successes. He had three witches cause the acting area itself to twist and distort, throwing players to the ground. The name of this spell was, of course, the Rebellious Stage. The Globe was finally de-cursed by, of course, Orson Bean.
The cursing and de-cursing of the Globe was documented in excruciating detail by filmmaker Ken Burns in his thirty-six-part series The Curse of the Globe Theater and What It Means to You. The series was withdrawn only a few days after its release due to a rumor that the man seen on camera giving interviews as William Shakespeare was, in fact, an imposter. The rumor was subsequently debunked and revealed to be a conspiracy by a rival filmmaker who was working on a similar film, but by the time the truth came out, interest in the curse had dwindled to nothing.
Ken Burns is trying to set the Guinness World Record for the longest documentary with his 4,382 episode story about the invention of the pocket knife.