The Lizzie Borden rhyme originally went:
“Lizzie Borden Borden took an axe
And gave her lettuce 40 whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her cabbage 41.”
in an attempt to get children to eat their leafy greens. However, rebellious children came up with the more familiar version to spite their parents, inadvertently giving rise to the legend of Lizzie’s murder spree.
Elsie, the Borden Dairy Farms’ cow mascot, was originally named “Lizzie.” She appeared in several thousands of advertisements before someone pointed out the similarity, and the company rushed the new name out in a massive media blitz. Elsie the Cow became more famous than the sitting US president, possibly even Jesus Christ.
Elsie the Cow was the ghost writer for forty-five Green Acres scripts for episodes produced and aired in seasons three and four.
The reason Green Acres was cancelled was due to all the scandal caused when Frank Cady (played Sam Drucker) was arrested and implicated in the infamous pre-schooler prostitution ring.
Initially the producers were going to name their show Field of Honey Buckets before settling on Green Acres.
Producers of Green Acres originally wanted Zsa Zsa Gabor for the role of Lisa Douglas, but she was in the midst of an ugly divorce with co-star Arnold the Pig, so the role went to her sister Eva.
Eva Gabor and Zsa Zsa Gabor were not really sisters. They were both separate personalities of Magda Gabor.
Multiple personality disorder is generally rare, but surprisingly frequent among Hungarians. A group of Hungarian mathematicians, including John von Neumann, became known as “the Martians” because of their genius and oddness; in fact, they were actually all the same person.
The chess grandmaster Judit Polgár was disqualified from the 1996 chess
world final for being the same person.
As teenagers, Swedish musicians/songwriters Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson collaborated on writing a musical, entitled Checkers, about a pair of schoolyard rivals who face off over a game of checkers.
The musical was never staged, but decades later, Bjorn and Benny spent a drunken weekend rewriting it, and it became the popular musical Chess.
In 1932 DacRon Ten Water Buffaloes “Jed” Smith of Bowlegs, Oklahoma, became the first officially recognized Checkers Grandmaster after winning the MidWest Open Invitational US Checkers Tournament. He defeated three international checker masters and one 12-yr old kid from Tallahassee, Florida, to claim his title.
Disgraced former President (then Senator) Richard Nixon defended his dog Checkers against accusations of mishandling campaign funds. But that dog was absolutely guilty. Nixon’s campaign funds were used by Checkers as his own personal bank account with which he purchased, among other things, a diamond-studded collar, foie gras dog food, and a 1953 Cadillac Seville.
Checkers’s Seville subsequently fell into the possession of Major Biden, who, during the five years he owned the car, was arrested for drunk driving on seven different occasions.
Voice actor and songwriter David Seville, who was well-known for the Alvin and the Chipmunks cartoons and records, as well as the song “Witch Doctor,” naturally had a very high-pitched, squeaky voice; it took years of vocal training for him to be able to pitch his voice into a more normal human range.
From October 1, 1899, until March 30, 1903, Johns Hopkins University offered courses in Witch Doctoring.
The first talking motion picture began filming in 1903 and debuted in San Francisco on April 17, 1906. Sadly, the film was lost in the great earthquake, as were the filmmakers and their technology, setting back the development of talkies another 20 years.
The diary of one of the filmmakers suggests that they were planning on making an interactive talkie, where a character in the film asks a question of the audience, which would in turn be encouraged to shout out a reply. Presumably because there was no way to change the progress of the movie, nor to stop shouting matches from breaking out within the audience, the idea never saw the light of day.
The term “light of day” gave rise to the term “axiom”, a Greek word meaning “the bleeding obvious, amirite?”
Captain Obvious of Hotels.com fame, was based on a real person; Herb Lewiston of Blawnox. Mr. Lewiston’s final words on his deathbed were reportedly “I’m dying.”
Bob Keeshan, widely known as children’s television show host Captain Kangaroo, was an actual marsupial.