John Cazale was an American actor, who appeared in five films over seven years, all of which were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture: The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974), The Godfather Part II (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and The Deer Hunter (1978), with the two Godfather films and The Deer Hunter winning. All five films would eventually be selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.
The bloody fountain from Charlton Heston’s death scene in Omega Man is the same one the cast frolic in during the titles of Friends. (I heard this on Dana Gould’s podcast, so it might be a joke.)
It isn’t. A joke, that is. The fountain is at Warner Ranch in Burbank, which is the same location as Heston’s penthouse in the movie.
A Potato Named Doug
…might be a world record at 17 pounds
It was named “Doug” because it was “dug up”
The amazing thing is that no potatoes had been planted in that location.
Is there in English an equivalent saying to the German “the dumbest farmers grow the biggest potatoes”? (Die dümmsten Bauern ernten die dicksten Kartoffeln) Because I know what kind of jokes that farmer would have had to endure had Doug been dug up in Germany.
He had been involved with and living with Meryl Streep for two years at the time of his death from lung cancer at age 42.
Guinness commissioned a study in 2000, which found that an estimated 162,719 pints of Guinness goes to waste every year via facial hair in the UK.
According to scientists, 0.56 millilitres of Guinness is trapped in a beard or moustache with each sip. And it takes about 10 sips to finish a pint. An estimated 92,370 Guinness consumers every year in the U.K. have facial hair. Figuring they consume an average of 180 pints each a year, the total cost of wasted Guinness annually is about $536,000.
I started trying to work out the Worldwide figure for this, as I saw that 1.5 billion pints of the black stuff are sold worldwide annually. However looking up moustache wearing might throw things as upper lip hair varies widely from country to country and so does Guinness consumption - without there being a relationship.
I almost posted that the other day.
I always thought he did that scene in The Godfather Part II on his back (“I’m smart!”) because of his illness. Talk about pathos. It nearly smarts to see him in The Godfather when Vito is gunned down (“Papa!!!”), but that scene in Part II is almost too much to watch.
Never mind. Found it.
William Dozier, the guy who was the narrator on the '60s Batman show (“same Bat-time, same Bat-channel”) was married to Joan Fontaine and Ann Rutherford. So he had a wife and a sister-in-law who were both in Gone With The Wind.
After their defeat and loss at Copenhagen in 1807, the Danes responded by planting 90,000 oak trees toward the Navy’s rebirth. The Danish Nature Agency, successor to the royal forester, informed the Defense Ministry in 2007 that their trees were ready.
I love hearing this. I hope they plant 90,000 more.
In 1991, a Swedish metal musician named Per Ohlin, better known by his stage name “Dead,” committed suicide by slitting his wrists and throat with a hunting knife, then shot himself in the forehead with a shotgun.
One of his band mates, Øystein Aarseth (stage name: “Euronymous”), found the body. Rather than report the situation, he rearranged a few things and proceeded to take pictures of the body. He also made necklaces with bits of Dead’s skull.
One of the pictures taken by Euronymous was used as the cover to their bootleg live CD called Dawn of the Black Hearts.
I’m posting a link to the cover, but be warned that it contains some gore, and isn’t really SFW. Here’s the link to the Google image search.
“Say, Pierre, shouldn’t you be taking cover too?”
“And crease my trousers? NON!”
Jessica Alba played Sue Storm in the 2005 movie Fantastic Four. She met Cash Warren who was also working on the movie and the couple eventually married.
Kate Mara played Sue Storm in the 2015 movie Fantastic Four. She met Jamie Bell who was also working on the movie and the couple eventually married.
Mount Chimborazo, in Ecuador, has a peak further from the center of the Earth than does Mount Everest (or any other place on Earth.) Although it’s almost nine thousand feet shorter than Everest above sea level, the Earth’s oblate shape makes it further away from the planet’s center, since it’s only a degree of latitude from the equator, while Everest is at 28 degrees north.
Huh! I’d heard Kilimanjaro had that honor, but it’s not as high and further from the equator than Chimborazo.
You know how in Romance languages, the adverbial suffix is usually something like -ment, -mente, or similar; it may have occurred to you that it might have something to do with “mental”.
In fact it does.
Over a period a around the late Western Empire or somewhat later, several adverbial suffixes which had been used all fell away to be replaced by -mente, which itself is the ablative of mens or “mind”.
So the etymology of all those Romance adverbs translates to <> + <<“mindedly”>> or <<“of a mind to”>>.
(It should say “adverb” in the first set of double brackets, but it isn’t appearing for some reason.)
Al Michaels was traded for Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
What a minute you say. Aren’t they separated by decades? Well here is the story:
Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks created Oswald the Lucky Rabbit for Universal. In 1928 they lost the contract and Universal retained the rights to Oswald. On the way back home from the failed contract negotiation, Walt Disney realized they needed a character that THEY retained the rights to - thus the start of Micky Mouse.
Fast forward to 2006. Al Michaels is doing football play-by-play for ABC/Disney but wanted to switch to NBC/Universal’s Sunday Night Football. Disney president Bob Iger sees an opportunity and he traded Michaels (really let him out of his contract) for the IP for Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Do you believe in miracles? It took 78 years but Oswald the Lucky Rabbit came home to Disney.