The only men’s basketball coach in the history of the University of Kansas to have a career losing record… James Naismith - the guy that invented basketball.
Every MLB fan has seen the Kirk Gibson HR off of ace reliever Dennis Eckersley. However, a lot of people don’t know that Dodger scout Mel Didier had provided a report on Eckersley which claimed that with a 3–2 count against a left-handed hitter, one could be absolutely certain that Eckersley would throw a backdoor slider. Gibson said that when the count reached 3–2, he stepped out of the batter’s box and, in his mind, could hear Didier’s voice, with its distinctive Southern drawl, reiterating that same piece of advice. With that thought in mind, Gibson stepped back into the batter’s box; and thus when Eckersley did in fact throw a backdoor slider, it was exactly the pitch Gibson was expecting. And the rest is history.
If you haven’t seen this movie, you should.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0250934/I like this one because you can ask people “In what century was the oldest building in the US built”. No one ever answers “12th”.
Somewhat bizarrely, there is a Wikipedia page for the Tears In Rain speech from the movie Blade Runner. To remind, these are Roy Batty’s last words*:
I make that 42 words. Now, I just cut and pasted the wiki page into word to check the wordcount. Not including references, the wiki article is 1362 words - that’s more than 32 times as long as its subject material. I idly speculate this may be some sort of record, but if it is, it’s a record…what?
j
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- Note to Mods - I trust this is within fair use guidelines. Its the whole speech but a very small part of the script.
Marine channel markers around the world fall into two IALA categories: Regions A and B. In the Americas and some Asian countries (Region B), the rule is “RRR” or Red Right on Return. That is, when heading from a main body of water to a minor one (ex. sea to river, river to harbor), keep the red channel maker to your right (starboard). In the rest of the world, its the opposite, so you must keep the red channel marker to port. But, they only change the color of the marker, not the shape. So “can” markers (to port) always have a flat top and “nun” markers (to starboard) always have a pointy top.
I dunno. A 1362:42 = 32.43 “words per word” ratio sounds impressive, but using a web URL-based tool, the word count for the Wikipedia entry for For Sale, Baby Shoes, Never Worn is 947, where the “subject material” is a written work that is SIX words long.
947/6 = 157.83!
Francium is an element discovered by Marguerite Perey in 1939. She named it after her home country of France.
Francium was the last element first discovered in nature, rather than by synthesis in the lab.
There is very little francium in the Earth’s crust: about 1 ounce. It has a half-life of about 22 minutes, so the tiny amount of francium in the Earth’s crust is constantly being created and decaying.
We have no idea what francium looks like. That’s because the largest amount produced in the laboratory was a cluster of about 300,000 atoms. That’s so small that it’s impossible to “see” it, even with our most powerful optical microscopes.
Francium is extremely radioactive, and we do not know what its melting and boiling temperatures are.
Chapeau!
j
Having been bested by robardin (;)), here’s another.
Etymology of the expression Go-Go Dancer? Originally from the Compton McKenzie novel, Whisky Galore. It’s a little convoluted.
Compton McKenzie wrote Whisky Galore, a novel set during the second world war, in which a ship carrying a wartime cargo of whisky to the US is sunk off small Hebridean islands, and locals try to illegally recover the cargo.
The novel was made into a comedy movie, also called Whisky Galore.
The film was a success in France, with the translated title Whisky à Gogo
Neat title - neat enough to be picked up and used as the name of the Whisky à Gogo nightclub in Paris.
Franchises of the nightclub were subsequently opened in the US. The house dancers were known as Go-Go dancers.
This bit I couldn’t find a ref for: either the original establishment in Paris or one of the US franchises had a stage barely big enough for the DJ, so the dancers were sited on satellite stages above the audience. For safety (to stop them falling off) they were effectively caged in.
Here’s a ref with most of the story.
j
The youngest person ever depicted on a United States coin is Jean Baptiste Charbonneau.
On the Sacagawea dollar, the artist for that is Harry Connick Jr’s mother in law.
Many of you probably know that Hoyt Axton wrote “Never Been To Spain,” which Three Dog Night made a hit. But did you know they changed the words?
Wikipedia says: In the final verse, he observes that while he has “never been to heaven”, he has “been to Oklahoma”, where he was told he was born, thus implying a kinship between the two places. Hoyt Axton, who was born in Oklahoma, explained that he originally wrote, “…in Oklahoma, born in a coma…” However, it was considered inappropriate; thus, the lyrics were changed to “not Arizona”.
I really don’t remember…born in a coma…
PS-He played the father in “Gremlins.”
apocolocyntosis: The act of turning into a pumpkin.
“At midnight, Cinderella’s carriage will go through apocolocyntosis.”
When Henry Aaron retired in 1976 he was the last remaining Major League player to have played in the Negro Leagues.
(Minnie Minoso made a single game appearance in 1980.)
In 1838 Charles Wheatstone was the first to explain true depth perception as arising from the different views between our two eyes. He invented the stereoscope, the first device for simultaneously viewing two images drawn from different perspectives. Wheatstone also improved and popularized an existing device which became known by his name: the Wheatstone bridge.
The words to the song “Where, oh where has my little dog gone” were written in 1864 by Septimus Winner (set to a folk tune). It was originally written in comic German pronunciation. The last verse was this:
It’s also because in preparation for the film, to help her get into character, she had to live with Judy Garland for 5 weeks.
BTW, her name was “Terry the Terrier,” and that’s how she’s credited in The Wizard of Oz, but after Oz, she began using “Toto” as a stage name.
Also, she was a tough professional, who played through an injury. After the Tim Man stepped on her paw and fractured two phalanges, she continued to arrive at the set on time, and work as professionally as ever, after just a couple of days off.
Today’s pampered stars could take a lesson from her.
My contribution is something I’m kinda surprised isn’t better known: Nikita Krushchev did not take office immediately after Stalin; there was a guy in between named Georgy Malenkov, who held the office for a little under two years. He left the office at the request of the party, but was still alive in 1988, so he outlived Brezhnev, and saw Gorbachev in office. In fact, he missed seeing the coup that caused the collapse of Communism by less than a year.
I won a game a Trivial Pursuit knowing that, and it was also a question on the officer’s school test in the army-- the test contains a whole lot of random trivia, because they are trying to find out how wide your knowledge base is.
The mode age of death in England and Wales is currently around 87. In 1964 it was zero.
All the artisans who worked on building India’s Taj Mahal had their hands chopped off by Shah Jahan, the Moslem emperor who ordered it built. He did this allegedly to prevent them from building another structure of comparable beauty.
M&M stands for Mars and Murrie.
Forrest Mars (son of the Mars Company founder) first spotted the British confection Smarties during the Spanish Civil War and noticed the candy shell prevented the chocolate from melting. He teamed up with Bruce Murrie (son of Hershey Chocolate’s president) and the company later trademarked the “Melts in Your Mouth, Not in Your Hand” slogan.