The Orson Bean Comedy Hour premiered on ABC on June 15, 2021. It was canceled after two months, due to the host being dead for a year.
Orson Bean was born on the planet Mars in what would be our 31st Century. He invented the revigitro-ray which allowed him to shuttle between worlds and times, but never made a penny off of it.
Kurt Vonnegut based the character of Billy Pilgrim (Slaughter-house Five) on Orson Bean, after seeing him shuttle in and out of reality.
Kurt Vonnegut is the only one who still gets residual checks from appearing in Rodney Dangerfield’s Back to School.
Kurt Vonnegut was born Kurt von Intestines, which was an old surname from the Hapsburg Empire. Kurt played around with the name before settling on “Vonnegut” with names like “Von Bowels” and “Vondigestivetrack”. He also flirted with discarding the surname altogether and just going with “Der Kurt” or some such.
On April 25th, 2009, Chester Bughead was sentenced to 18 months for passing bad checks as “Kurt Phonneygut.” He was apprehended, appropriately enough, at a midnight screening of Slaughter-house Five in downtown Schenectady, NY.
Schenectady, NY is the only town in the United States where eating pasta with peanut butter is explicitly forbidden.
Schenectady comes from the Mohawk word for “shithole.”
Currently, there are at least 48 incorporated municipalities whose name means, or is a variation of, the word “shithole.”
Shithole comes from the Portuguese shith ¡olé!, which literally means “holy shit!”
There is a chest in St. Geoffrey D’ Anglewoot’s church in Vanadzor, Armenia which
is known as the Ark of the Convenience
It contains fecal matter gathered from the top of mount Sinai over 3000
years ago.
DNA testing has revealed that it was passed by Moses, and that his
diet consisted mainly of goat, pomegranate, celery and onions.
The apostle Matthew is well known as having been a tax collector, what is less well known is that his first calling was as a real estate agent. His notable failure to close on the sale of Mount Sinai was one of the primary reasons he shifted careers into tax collection.
In the 1890s, no fewer than ten thousand real estate agents became multimillionaires working in Blawnox, Pennsylvania, during a mysterious real estate boom that hit the town suddenly and then went away just as suddenly and remains unexplained to this day.
Blawnox, Pennsylvania doesn’t echo, and no one knows why.
A sci-fi novel about the non-echoing Blawnox is entitled Xonwalb. It sold 3 copies.
Adolph Hitler was inspired to write Mein Kampf after reading Xonwalb.
A roller-disco-themed musical movie version of Xonwalb was in development for years, but after the box-office failure of the eerily similar Xanadu, the project was mercifully shelved.
The movie Rollerball was intended as a promotion of a new sports league, but when the underwriters discovered that rather than a story about a small group of plucky underdogs making it the the championship they were expecting it was instead a dystopian commentary on the evils of capitalism, the funding dried up and the league folded before the season opener.
ETA: I just read the wikipedia page on Rollerball and my portrayal “Trivia” was more accurate than intended, since after the movie came out apparently people actually tried to buy the rights to start a league.
Five years following the release of Rollerball, several small arthouse theaters began showing it at midnight. Fans would attend, dressed up as their favorite characters and re-enact scenes in the audience, including rolling 5-lb iron balls down the aisles and smashing into each other.
There actually WAS a Rollerball league, but it shut down after its first season following a series of protests from the ASPCM (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Motorcycles).
-“BB”-