God was working on creating the octopus with 16 tentacles but it was getting kind of late on Friday and he said “Ah fuckit” and went home after making one with 8.
Wild octopuses have as many as ten and as few as six legs. Eight is just an average number. But because people expect octopuses to have eight legs, aquariums pay a premier price for eight-legged specimens. Captured octopuses with the “wrong” number of legs end up getting sold to restaurants.
In the KJ Bible there was a mis-translation of the Number of the Beast.
It was actually 888.
For unknown reasons, in the Peter Lorre horror movie The Beast With Five Fingers, the murderous hand that crawled around strangling people only had FOUR fingers.
“There are FOUR lights!” is the best known quote in television history, according to a Neilson poll conducted in 2009. Interestingly enough, 35% of respondents know the quote, but attribute it to fictional character “Professor Kevorningrad,” when the true originator of the quote was Santa Claus (in reference to the number of lights he saw on someone’s house)
Klaus von Bulow was named after Santa Claus by his parents.
The myth of Santa Claus can be traced back 20,000 years to the Cro-Magnons of Europe. One cave painting appears to depict a caribou with a curiously red nose pulling a box-like object. A couple of lines underneath the box are thought to represent the runners of a sleigh.
Though man used to drag his knuckles while walking, the Cro-Magnons put them on wheels.
Cro Magnon and the Magnettes were a one-hit wonder group. They hit the charts in 1961 with their slightly less than lovely ballad Mary Sue Got Killed.
Mary Todd Lincoln was the first male-to-female transexual. Her original name was Marty Todd, and her and Abe’s children were all secretly adopted. John Wilkes Booth was a rabid anti-sodomite who killed Lincoln for that reason.
The movie Phone Booth, starring Colin Ferrell and Kiefer Sutherland, was originally based on the life of John Wilks Booth; however, the story was changed extensively due to executive meddling.
Kiefer Sutherland is actually the adopted son of Donald Sutherland. His actual father has recently been revealed to be Woody Allen.
Woody Allen was Dan “D.B.” Cooper, hijacking the plane to see if the idea would make a good movie. He abandoned the idea.
Decendants of James Fenimore Cooper, angered by Mark Twain’s denunciation of ***Last of the Mohicans, *** hired three different assassins who each made unsuccessful attempts to murder Twain.
Samuel Clemens had actually intended his pen name to be Marty Wayne. A publisher misheard the name and spelled it incorrectly.
And the plane, apparently.
Marty Wayne was Batman’s ne’er-do-well uncle who had been disowned for his profligate ways. He later showed up in the comics under the nom-de-crime The Wastrel.
Comic books are so named because they started as a sideline for struggling stand-up comedians to help pay the rent.
The stage play Rent was originally conceived as a marionette show.
Marionette shows began as morality plays performed by early Renaissance Welsh hangmen and their crew with the bodies of executed criminals.