TIL I learned of Country Swing pioneer and gruesome uxoricide Spade Cooley, who sexually tortured and beat his wife to death for her infidelity with Roy Rogers (!) Additional grimness was his forcing their teenage daughter to watch the murder, and the coincidence of her name Melody, also the name of Roy and Dale’s movie ranch. Most of the ranch/movie set, owned by Gene Autry, was destroyed by fire in 1962; the year after the murder. Thanks to Governor Ronald Reagan, Spade served less than nine years, and while awaiting the parole paperwork to clear, died offstage after receiving a standing ovation at a deputy sheriffs’ benefit concert. Melody appears to have passed in 2019.
This is so true for this board.
“Cunningham’s Law”
Howard G. Cunningham (born May 26, 1949) is an American computer programmer who developed the first wiki.
Cunningham is credited with the idea: “The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.” This refers to the observation that people are quicker to correct a wrong answer than to answer a question.
I thought Howard Cunningham’s Law was “We don’t talk about Richie’s brother.”
Well, I think they did talk about him when he was on the show. And he was so vital to the series that it took 3 different actors to play him. Then he suddenly no longer existed. There may be a term for characters that vanish without a trace, or a special spinney between Aphodel and Tartarus where they are consigned to – perhaps a marsh fed by the waters of Lethe (the river of forgetting).
A Lyman? (After Odie’s owner in the Garfield comic strip.)
Did anyone post that Star Wars got renamed on April 10th, 1981?
About 20 years ago, the 40 year olds on this board futilely spent countless posts trying to convince the 20 year olds that this actually happened.
Did they fall for it?
No. The youngins here are too smart to fall for our shenanigans.
Has it been that long? I still refuse to call it anything but Star Wars. I was 8 when that movie came out and that’s the title i’ve always known.
There was an attempt at a Happy Days musical around 2007 that used almost that same line (substituting “Chuck” for “Richie’s brother”).
It was the only funny line in the entire evening. The musical never made it to Broadway
Doggerland was an area of land in Northern Europe, now submerged beneath the southern North Sea.
In another thread, someone recently posted a link to the classic Star Wars short film Hardware Wars. The genius behind it, Ernie Fosselius, would later work in the sound department on Spaceballs (which “borrowed” things from it such as the tag line “May the farce be with you.”) as well as doing uncredited voice bits in Return of The Jedi and Attack of the Clones. He also got a song co-credit in the former.
Now that’s a trifecta.
Check out his IMDb page for the amazing movies he worked on. And that doesn’t include stuff like turning down being the director for Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.
One of the big little giants of The Business.
Today I learned about the patron sainte of ammonites.
Another legend tells of a plague of snakes which Hilda turned to stone, supposedly explaining the presence of ammonite fossils on the shore. Local artisans carved snakes’ heads onto ammonites, and sold these as relics, “evidence” of her miracle.
If you have never heard the Cocaine and Rhinestones podacst, I strongly recommend it. There is a marvelous episode on Spade Cooley.
More silly cycling news. Here’s an update from the Tour de l’Avenir (Under 23 Tour de France):
(Oh Yes, there genuinely is a T. Rex on the course. Wonderful) (Loosely speaking).
And there was. Meet Belgian cyclist Tim Rex, the man with arguably the best name in cycling.
.j
Inosculation is the process of one tree attaching itself to another and incorporating one into the other. In the example in this image a tree that was felled as found new life. These trees are often known as marriage trees, or husband and wife trees, but this example looks like a mama tree to me…
Very cool. Haven’t seen something like this in the wild, it must be very rare. Though the forests where I live are all heavily cultivated and there would be not many opportunities for trees to capture another before a forester would intervene.
There are other examples like this, eg Sunda, Sahul, and Beringia (the probable route for humans to the Americas).
Often, when reading a post in this thread I can’t help adding Paul Harvey’s old “And now you know the rest of the story” onto the end.
I’m guessing “WFC” doesn’t mean “Wells Fargo Company” in your post (the most common search result shown by Google). What did you mean if not that?
Thanks.