Puerile of me, I know, but the winner of the newly Putin-revived Intervision Song Contest (which in Cold War days was the USSR’s counter to the Eurovision contest) was the Vietnamese entry, sung by
Duc Phuc.
In watching “Wednesday,” I discovered that the nickname Gus is short for Augustus.
Or Angus.
j
Gustav, Augustine
Today I learned that perhaps the first football game to be dubbed the ‘Game of the Century’ was the November 30, 1935, matchup between Texas Christian University (TCU) and Southern Methodist University (SMU), which was played in Fort Worth. Both teams were 10-0 and were contenders for the national championship. Quarterback Sammy Baugh led TCU to a tying touchdown early in the fourth quarter, but SMU, using a fake punt, later scored the winning TD for a 20-14 victory. In the postseason, SMU lost in the Rose Bowl to Stanford, while TCU defeated LSU in the Sugar Bowl. Both teams finished with 12-1 records.
The game was the first football game in Texas to be broadcast to a nationwide radio audience.
Worst pick up line ever: “My name is Gus…short for Humongous.”
Or Asparagus
A well-known cliche in the murder mystery genre is “the butler did it”.
The earliest known example which can be found where the butler was the character who committed the central murder of the story was The Door, written by Mary Robert Rinehart in 1930.
However, S.S. Van Dine’s (Willard Huntington Wright) published an essay “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories” in 1928. And one of the rules he wrote was to avoid having the butler commit the murder because he said this an overused cliche.
The rule was actually ”A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit.” By the time The Door was published there had already been numerous stories of murderous secretaries, maids, cooks, valets, footmen, and stable boys…and even a butler in 1921’s The Strange Case of Mr Challoner by Herbert Jenkins. But that was an obscure story by a writer no one ever heard of. The Door was the opposite of that.
Today I learned Kawagarbo, a mountain in China, has never been summited.
We’ve had a thread on “The Butler Did It” quite a while back. As I pointed out, in Anthony Shaffer’s (he wrote Sleuth, among a great many other things) play Whodunit, as the last line in the play points out, “The butler actually did it.”
“Talk Like a Pirate Day” was invented in September 2002 by John Baur and Mark Summers. The date selected, September 19, was Summers’ ex-wife’s birthday.
Apparently, you (almost) can never break raw spaghetti into 2 pieces.
And, there’s a reason why tv cartoon characters only have 4 fingers, and why they have 5 in Japan.
The William Tell Overture is forever famous as the opening theme to the Lone Ranger radio and tv shows. Its fourth movement was probably picked because it is an example of a galop, a dance characterized by fast moves and pounding feet named after a horse’s gallop.
Difficult but not impossible:
Franklin Roosevelt was diagnosed with polio at the age of 39 in 1921. Much more common in children, after a year of treatments (and being close to death), he slowly returned to “normal” although mostly paralyzed below the waist. There was rarely any evidence of a wheelchair or crutches when he appeared in public.
11 years after being diagnosed, he was President of the USA.
Diagnosed but that may not be what he had. Many people think it may have been Guillain-Barré syndrome.
While there seems to be no evidence that it inspired the name of the social platform, “TikTok” was a clockwork mechanical man character in the Oz novels, introduced in 1907. He was likely the first robot in fiction, though the actual word “robot” would not be coined for a couple of decades or so.
Didn’t some of the Greek myths feature Haephestus making mechanical workshop-assistants? And the Mechanical Turk was a fictional robot (and real-life remote manipulator) from the 1700s.
OK then, the first robot in modern fiction.