“Istanbul (Not Constantinople),” one of the songs most closely associated with the band They Might Be Giants, is actually a cover tune from the 1950s, originally recorded by the Four Lads. Here’s the original version. It’s slower than the TMBG version that most people my age are likely far more familiar with.
I was shocked to discover this, mainly because the song FEELS so quintessentially TMBG.
FDR had an older half-brother from his father’s first marriage. Not just older, but 27 years older than FDR, and five months older than FDR’s mother.
Now that’s harsh.
I heard about that. My first thought was, “The two men look nothing alike,” and my second thought was “where does one get a Sgt. Bilko T-shirt? The show went off the air in 1959!”
Actor Ted Cassidy is best remembered as “Lurch” from the old “Addams Family” show, but he was one of those guys who never wanted for work. He was working as a radio announcer in Dallas when Kennedy was shot, and within a year had landed the acting job as Lurch.
He also did a HUGE amount of voice acting for cartoons, and announcer work; it is his voice that narrates the opening credits sequence of the old “Incredible Hulk” TV series with Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno.
His friends and coworkers all noted what a great guy he was, easy to work with, friendly and generous to a fault, great sense of humor… so naturally, he died young.
He lived with his girlfriend at the time, and left everything to her. His wish was to be cremated, and she did so, and took the ashes home with her. She buried the urn in the back yard of the house they had shared in LA. She lived there for a couple years, and then sold the house and got on with the rest of her life.
…which means that somewhere in the LA suburbs, there is a lovely little one story family home that just happens to have Lurch buried in the back yard.
IIRC the image was on a T-shirt, high contrast like it was silk-screened, and resembled a lot of bald men with that face shape. It was a British tourist and re-runs of the show had recently become a hit there. I couldn’t find the picture anywhere but here’s the story from the time. Remove enough detail from the image and the two of them looked a lot alike.
ETA: Even at the time Phil Silvers was largely forgotten by people in the US. If you were under 40 in 1987 you might have no idea who he was.
The other actor best remembered as Lurch is Carel Struycken, who played the roles in the theatrical Addams Family films.
Mr. Struycken has lots of stories. He walked into the audition for Addams Family, saying, "Well, you HAVE to cast me as Lurch. For years, every time I go outside, people ask me if I played Lurch on the old TV show. And I say, “No, I was still in school then, that was Ted Cassidy.” But people always mistake me for Lurch. So you have to make it so I can say, “Yes, I played Lurch.”
And the casting director simply said, “Yes. Yes, you’re right.” And hired him.
Struycken talks about his first movie role: He was crossing the street in downtown Hollywood, and a woman slammed on the brakes, leaped out of her car, right there in traffic, and screamed at him, “STOP! STOP! I NEED YOU FOR OUR MOVIE!!!” And that was how he landed a small role in “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” with the Bee Gees. He is also well remembered for playing “the Giant” in “Twin Peaks,” and for his small but memorable recurring role as Lwaxana Troi’s butler, Mr. Homn, on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
He is not buried anywhere unusual, though, since as of this moment, he is not actually dead.
Cy Young’s first name isn’t Cy. It’s Denton. Cy is a nickname, being a shortened version of “Cyclone”, a reference to throwing the ball very fast.
More sports trivia:
Who was the first ever draft pick in the history of the United States Football League (USFL?), by the Los Angeles Express. [Hint: The year was 1983]
Dan Marino
It takes 24-36 men two weeks to strip and repaint a large airliner, and the dry weight of the paint is nearly a ton.
I think Jet Jaguar was a little off when s/he posted
“In the amount of time it takes The Proclaimers to sing the lines “but I would walk 500 miles, and I would walk 500 more” in the song I’m Gonna Be, the International Space Station travels about 1,000 miles.”
The ISS travels at about 17,000 MPH, or about 5 miles a second, so roughly 200 seconds to travel 1,000 miles. It would travel about 1,000 miles over the course of the entire song though.
He was also the larger of the two aliens murdered by Edgar-bug in Men in Black.
Mostly, the story behind that is that the mode isn’t a very useful statistic for measuring the typical age at death. Basically, some people die very shortly after they’re born, due to birth defects or genetic diseases or complications during labor or whatever. And some people live a good long time before dying of old age. Even in 1964, the latter was far more common… but some of those people who die of old age die at 75, or 84, or 90, or 79, or whatever. There are a lot of different ages at which someone can die of old age, and so even the most common age-of-death-by-old-age isn’t very common. Meanwhile, though, most early death is going to be in the first year of life, and so there’s a big spike at 0. The fact that the mode is now 87 instead of 0 means that the infant-mortality rate has gone down since 1964, but it might not have gone down by all that much.
It also depends on how tightly you bin your data. If you looked at mode decade of death instead of mode year, the figure probably was the 80s, or maybe 70s, even back in the middle of last century. And if you look at months instead of years, it’s probably still 0.
Cartoonist Sergio Aragones is best known for his cartoons in MAD magazine, and for creating the “Groo The Wanderer” comic.
He began his career in America in the sixties, but before that, he lived with his family in Mexico, where his father was a well known film director and producer. The senior Aragones did a number of the old “Sheena, Queen Of The Jungle” TV episodes; they were shot in Mexico to save money.
One day, teenage Sergio showed up on the set, hoping to meet Irish McCalla, who played Sheena. Regrettably, she was not there, that day; the crew’s job was to shoot some scenes of Sheena swinging through the trees, but the stuntperson had not showed up.
So in the interests of helping Dad out and saving money, Sergio Aragones stripped down, donned the leopardskin one-piece bathing suit and blonde wig, and swung around the trees in the vines for a while, so the crew could get the long shots of Sheena swinging through the jungle and diving into a river. The footage made it into the finished episode, despite the fact that Sergio himself admits he looks nothing like McCalla, blonde wig or no.
He still regrets never having gotten to meet Irish McCalla.
One of the reasons Phil Silvers’ celebrity endured in Britain may be that he starred in one of those most British of things, a Carry On film. Sorry, movie. He played Sergeant Ernie Nocker in (Carry On) Follow That Camel.
Here’s the man himself.
j
Cartoonist Sergio Aragones also dabbled in animation, largely due to his drawing speed; fellow cartoonist Al Jaffee remarked once that Sergio Aragones has literally drawn more cartoons on napkins in restaurants than most cartoonists produce in their entire careers.
So at one point, Aragones is providing sketches and animations for Dick Clark’s “Bloopers” program. His friend Mark Evanier tells the story about how Jayne Kennedy is about to tape “The Tonight Show” but her dress is too revealing, so they have her in the hallway while they try to figure out how to fix it. At this point, Sergio Aragones walks in with his portfolio. Well, it turns out that Jayne and Sergio had worked together at some point, and Jayne yells “Sergio!” and runs over and grabs him and kisses him.
About now, in walks Johnny Carson, to see if the wardrobe problem has been fixed, and he immediately comes to the conclusion that a homeless person has wandered into the NBC building and attacked Jayne Kennedy. He rushes over to help, and is immediately stopped by Jayne Kennedy and several others, who explain that they’re old friends, and that Sergio is a cartoonist working for Dick Clark.
Carson’s response? “I knew I should have taken up drawing.”
Comedian Larry Fine of the Three Stooges (real name Louis Feinberg) had a brother Morris, also called “Moe”.
I was surprised when I learned that the Three Stooges were originally organized as the STRAIGHT MEN for comedian Ted Healy, who today is remembered only because of his association with the Stooges.
Apparently, “Stooge” originally meant “person planted in the audience as part of the act, without the audience’s knowledge.” You know, so the magician can get you to draw a card, and no matter WHAT it is, you say it’s the Ace of Spades, right? Wow, what a trick!
Ted Healy’s act apparently revolved around inviting members of the audience onstage so he could insult them, but the insults would backfire, and then the act would end with Healy’s pants falling down. Yeah, apparently, this is what passed for entertainment once upon a time.
Healy apparently originally hired Shemp Howard as a stooge, and then Moe and Larry were brought into the act, as Healy expanded his show as he got more successful. By this time the audience knew full well that the Stooges were audience plants, but the act was funny enough that no one cared.
However, the Stooges were dissatisfied with Healy’s attitude, and the fact that he collected all the box office and paid them very little. They struck off on their own, got a contract from Columbia Pictures, and history tells the rest.
Healy did all right for himself post-Stooges for a few years, and then died suddenly during a drinking binge in Hollywood; today he’s largely forgotten.
Some say Healy was not well liked, someone is said to have countered that with “only among his friends”. The actor Wallace Beery (uncle of Noah Beery Jr. who played Rocky on the Rockford Files) has been alleged to have killed Healy in a drunken brawl, with Albert Broccoli Jr. (the producer of James Bond films) and others implicated as well.
Ted Cassidy, the original Lurch, was also in Star Trek. In the Original Series he played the Gorn, the puppet of Balok, and an android in “What are Little Girls Made of?”
Ulysses Grant is the only sitting President to ever have been arrested while in office - for speeding in his horse drawn carriage:
Psst! Just the voice of the Gorn. A stunt actor (coincidentally I saw his name just today, but I’ve forgotten it) was in the suit.