There’s a SF story (Asimov?) where crashed/stranded explorers are released from the alien zoo after one of them captures a “mouse” and keeps it as a “pet”. As the aliens apologise “only an intelligent lifeform would put other creatures in a cage”.
That’s reminiscent of Asimov’s story “Youth”, but with the details twisted around. In that one, the stranded human explorers are kept in a cage by much larger aliens, but they don’t fight back because they realize that their captors are only children.
A. Bertram Chandler, The Cage.
You know how your brain will sometimes make weird, tangential cross-connections to things? Your use of “duk” made me remember Dolan Duck, which was a horrible MS-Paint comic that featured a knockoff of Donald Duck named Dolan who would torture (for various definitions of “torture”) his friend Gooby, and do unspeakable things to Dolan’s nephews.
The comic hasn’t aged well (though it wasn’t exactly great at the time of its origins), and I don’t recommend looking for it unless you’re a fan of molestation humor and things like that.
I’m not sure if this qualifies as obvious but today I learned that Rick Wakeman played the piano part on Cat Stevens version of “Morning has Broken.”
!
I was completely unaware of this. And I’m a big Rick Wakeman fan.
I just saw a short clip of Wakeman talking about it. He praised the producer for minimizing his part during the vocals. He thought it was more effective than what he was planning to play.
ETA found the clip
Last night I was S2E1 of Arrested Development. In it, mistaken for George, Oscar is ambushed and arrested multiple times throughout the episode. Each time plays out mostly the same. A group of cops tackle him and a few seconds later one more shows up swinging his baton. It’s meant purely as an ‘unnecessary violence’ joke. It’s apperently been a while since I watched the show since it’s the first time I noticed that the cop is Jimmy Pesto from Bob’s Burgers, AKA January 6th attendee Jay Johnston.
The last time I watched it, the only thing I would’ve known him from was playing a cop on The Sarah Silverman Program. I know he was in a ton of other stuff too (often as a cop), but that’s where I’ve always known him from.
Now you might know him from serving a year in prison for participating in the January 6th riot and getting fired from Bob’s Burgers.
I do:
He hasn’t served a year yet. I don’t know if he’s even been giving a date to start. The chances of him spending any meaningful time behind bars before being pardoned is basically zero.
Whoops, correct. He was sentenced, but hasn’t served at this time.
Interestingly Jimmy Pesto made an appearance in last week’s episode. I assume they found another actor would could do the voice.
But speaking of Bob’s Burgers, I only just realized last night that their regular customer Mort, who runs the funeral home next door, is named that because he’s a mortician. Mort the Mortician. I can’t believe I never noticed that before.
Inna and I are watching (re-watching for me) The Americans. She’s impressed by the quality of Russian dialogue (if not the accents) in the show - only one time has she said “they used the wrong form for that word”.*
Going to spoiler this, eh, just because…
Anyway, in Season 2, Stan Beeman (an FBI agent who sucked at his job) has a dream where he is in his office, along with Martha (a secretary turned into a spy) and his boss, agent Gaad (last name, played by John Boy Walton (Richard Thomas)). As Stan makes his way across the office, Martha very openly takes a classified file and places it in her bag, whereupon Stan goes on and does his business, never once challenging Martha (or even noticing her doing this).
It’s a good bit of misdirection there, as Stan doesn’t openly suspect Martha of anything for at least one more season or so, yet his subconscious was noticing that something was amiss early on.
*The word was “operation” which was to mean “combined effort to achieve a shared goal” (“Eisenhower led the D-Day operation”), but the show’s writers used the form meaning “surgery” (“I had an operation to remove my tonsils when I was a baby”).
Would like to note that to Inna, misusing the Russian language is an obvious thing about…, so it’s still on topic. 
IIRC, they once did a Knight Rider episode that I’m sure was built solely to showcase that double meaning: hooded monks of the vow-of-silence type bottle wine that gets sold to keep the monastery up and running, but that’s all just a cover story; it’s really just a place for criminals to lie low — keeping quiet while hiding their faces — as they get, and then recuperate from, the under-the-table plastic surgery that they trade stolen loot for.
So: it looks like a winery, but it’s a front for illegal operations.
Do any of them end up looking like Boris Karloff?
If they do it’s Dr Einstein’s fault.
Rump Shaker by Wreckx-N-Effect came out when I was 12 years old. I can still remember memorizing the lyrics to it. One line that always stuck in my head, for no particular reason, is “Teddy, ready with the one two checker, Wreckx-n-effect are in effect but I’m the wrecker”. Again, no particular reason, it just stuck with me.
A few years later, No Diggity by Blackstreet came out. I’ve probably heard that song as many times as Rump Shaker. However, just a few weeks ago it was playing and I heard a line I never noticed before “With the homies Blackstreet and Teddy, the original rump shakers”.
Same Teddy, never noticed it before.
Some Googling turned up several individuals named Vivian Mortimer. There’s an alpha-omega for you
Similarly, as the turret on the USS Iowa exploded, a cry for help went out to petty officer Dale Eugene Mortensen, using his nickname: “Mort! Mort! Mort!”