And speaking of elephants, the tongue of a blue whale weighs as much as an adult elephant.
It’s popular belief that elephants can’t swim?
On the subject of weather, London receives less rain annually than Rome, Sydney or New York . Also, in some years rainfall in Essex can be below 450 mm (18 inches) — less than the average annual rainfall in Jerusalem and Beirut.
The lyrics to the Beatles “Golden Slumbers” were lifted almost entirely from a poem by 17th century poet Thomas Dekker. Only one word was changed: “wantons” to “darling.”
In the late 40s, the Yankees and Red Sox agreed to trade Ted Williams straight up for Joe Dimaggio. A press conference was called to announce the trade, but the Red Sox got cold feet and insisted the Yankees add Yogi Berra to the deal, which put an end to it.
Guinness, much to my wife’s chagrin, is not suitable for vegetarians, as it uses isinglass, a fish extract, for fining.
Speaking of vegetarianism (and stuff that might turn you into one), beverages, candies, and other consumables that contain the red dyes known as carmine or cochineal are also unsuitable for vegans, as the pigment is made from the crushed carcasses of the female Dactylopius coccus beetle.
Where’s your fruit punch now?
Cab Calloway was once stabbed by Dizzy Gillispie.
R&B singer Tamia has MS.
David Bowie has a pupil that stays fully dialated, a result of a fight-related injury during high school.
The guy who played Ricardo in PBS’s The Bloodhound Gang died in 1986 of AIDS-related complications.
Emmanual Lewis does not grow any body hair. Yes, including down there.
Catnip should not be given to diabetic cats.
I grew up in what was the capital of the Free and Independent Republic of West Florida. Its nice to see this little bit of history getting some air.
Abbie Lathrop was a retired teacher who bred pet mice. Many of the mouse strains used in research today are decended from her animals.
Nude mice lack an immune system. Naked mice have a functioning immune system, just no fur. Both strains can’t swim, they sink.
Jazz saxophonist Frank Trumbauer was a descendant of Charles Dickens on his mother’s side, and a licensed pilot. During World War II, Trumbauer trained aircrews in the B-25 Mitchell bomber. He finished his career as an FAA inspector.
In the early 1930s, film studio founder William Fox used a technicality in the sound-on-film process to attempt to sue for royalties on all sound motion pictures. The case was first upheld, then reversed by the Supreme Court. Fox, ostracized, left Hollywood. At his death in 1953, not a single producer came to his funeral.
A “Secret Communication System”, granted U.S. Patent No. 2,202,387 on August 11, 1942, proposed guiding aerial torpedoes by a system of changing radio frequencies. Its co-inventors: actress Hedy Lamarr and concert pianist George Antheil.
He also drew upside down (i.e. the bottom of the paper faced away from him) and kept a harem of Asian women.
Harriet Tubman, in addition to her rescue of slaves, was the first woman known to have led troops into battle in the U.S. (an encounter with rebels while leading black troops on a foraging expedition in the Combahee River campaign in S.C.). She also served as a laundress, nurse, spy, and courier. Her reward was an $8 per month pension, that for being the widow of a soldier.
Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s Secretary of War, was so grieved by the death of his infant son in 1862 that he refused to allow the child to be buried and kept the body and coffin in his house for several months. Lincoln, himself grieving for a son who died in 1862, eventually intervened and convinced Stanton (who had many years before exhumed the body of a girlfriend to ensure she was not buried alive- weird and dark man) to let the child be buried. Meanwhile, Mrs. Lincoln was beginning to devote herself to spiritualism and hold frequent seances in the White House, the Emperor Charlemagne serving as one of her “spirit guides” through one of her psychics.
I have read that Lincoln himself exhumed his son Willie just to look once more at his face. I cannot find verification of this online with a quick google.
Winifred Shaughnessy was a young actress from Utah who was horribly embarassed by the fact that many of the men in her family practiced polygamy. Her maternal grandfather, Heber C. Kimball, was a close friend of Brigham Young’s and may have been the most married man in America with more than 3 dozen wives and at least 65 children. When she left Utah she changed her name to the more exotic “Natasha Rambova” in part to distance herself from her past and remove the stain of polygamy.
Eventually she met and fell in love with Rudolph Valentino and the two were married. Unfortunately his divorce from his first wife wasn’t finalized and he was arrested for, you guessed it, polygamy (or, at least, bigamy), causing a sensation in some presses when the irony of his wife’s family history was discovered.
George Washington Carver developed hundreds of uses for the peanut. Almost none of them are known today because he was a notoriously terrible record keeper who rarely wrote down the formulae and ingredients in a comprehensible fashion. His work with the soy bean was actually far more important and long lasting.
Though his financial blunders and bankruptcy are famous, Mark Twain was a wealthy man again by the time of his death (under Halley’s Comet just like his birth, something I thought was common knowledge but apparently isn’t). He left his six-figure estate in trust to his only surviving daughter, worth just under one million dollars by some counts and around $250,000 by others, but substantial even with the minimum estimate. Though she lived in great comfort and gave away tons of money during her lifetime she still left her own heirs (her daughter and her second husband) well over $1.5 million when she died in 1962 . Her daughter, Nina Gabrilowitsch, who went by the stage name Nina Clemens, was a wannabe actress who never managed to make a name for herself and ultimately committed suicide in Hollywood in January 1966, the last descendant of Twain. Since she died intestate and had no immediate family, her share of the family estate reverted to her very elderly stepfather, Jacques Samossoud (who like her father was a musician of Russian ancestry) who died of natural causes a few months later. Since he died intestate and had no immediate family, the legacy passed to his closest relatives- White Russian cousins who lived in France who had the still substantial remains of the originally $2 million Twain trust dropped in their lap courtesy of Mark Twain, an American author they had never read nor heard of (they were only vaguely familiar with cousin Jacques). Twain would perhaps have appreciated the irony of writing to make Tsarist Russians rich 56 years after his death.
Speaking of wills, writer Dorothy Parker left her estate to Martin Luther King Jr, whom she never met. He was pleased and astonished.
Dayton, Ohio was named for Jonathan Dayton , a New Jersey politician, signer of the Constitution and Revolutionary War soldier who never set foot in the city.
Forest Park in St. Louis (1293 acres) is larger than New York’s Central Park (843 acres)
Lillian Hellman, however, was livid. She had financially supported Parker off and on for a few years and it was understood Parker would leave her the estate. She considered suing to break the will but decided that a rich white female writer suing Martin Luther King would be a PR disaster.
Other strange money progressions:
The estate of Buddy Holly went to the children of his wife by a husband she married after his death. (She was pregnant with their only child when Holly died but miscarried shortly after the funeral.)
The likeness of Marilyn Monroe was bequeathed to her acting teacher Lee “Hyman Roth” Strasberg who left the estate to his much younger widow and the two sons he sired in his 70s after Monroe’s death.
Terry Moore was laughed at when she claimed she had evidence she was Howard Hughes’s estranged widow and that she was entitled to his estate. Apparently she was able to convince his executors as they settled a substantial sum on her (though the bulk of his fortune was divided by cousins).
W.C. Fields left the bulk of his estate to found an academy for white children. His family broke the will. (He was famous for “hiding” money in bank accounts all around the country under assumed names.)
I just thought of my 3rd piece of trivia.
John Roebling built this bridge in Cincinnati before he built the one in Brooklyn .
Louisiana State University’s Tiger Stadium was the site of the legendary “Earthquake Game” against Auburn in 1988. LSU won the game, 7-6, when quarterback Tommy Hodson completed a game-winning touchdown pass to running back Eddie Fuller in the waning seconds of the game. The crowd reaction registered on a seismograph in the LSU Geology Department.
Montgomery, AL is located in Montgomery County. City and County are named after two completely different and unrelated individuals. The City is named for Major Lemuel Montgomery, who died at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. The County is named for General Richard Montgomery, the Revolutionary War hero.
The Marquis de la Fayette had a marriage that reads like a romance novel. He and his wife, Adrienne de Noailles, were two of the wealthiest kids in Europe when their marriage was arranged as teenagers. Their grandmothers stayed with them on their wedding night (he was 16, the bride 14 or 15) to make sure it was consummated (though the bed curtains at least were drawn) and the newlyweds settled to a life of extreme luxury. When the Marquis journeyed to America his wife was pregnant with a daughter who was born and died in infancy before his return to France, thus he never met his first child.
During the French Revolution he and his wife lost everything. His wife was spared beheading only because after seeing her grandmother, her mother, her sister, and her aunts beheaded a stay of execution arrived for her (thanks possibly to American intervention and bribery). When the Holy Roman Emperor refused her pleas to free her husband (who he had imprisoned in Austria in a 10 x 5 cell) she pleaded with him to allow her and their daughters to join him, and he allowed her to do so, the four people who had once been one of Europe’s richest families now reduced to a dank cell, 3 of them by choice. (Their son, George Washington, had been sent to America to live with his namesake, though President W. at first refused to take him in so as not to offend France.)
They were eventually released, regained some of their fortune (though their estates had been looted and ruined), and became major anti-slavery activists. Adrienne died from health reversals caused by the prison. The Marquis famously returned to American for a tour in the 1820s, receiving lots and whole city blocks in new settlements as gifts (all of which he sold because he needed the money) and offending his hosts Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, and others (including some of his dearest friends from 50 years before) by condemning their practice of slavery in several speeches. To many it was generally believed to be a really good thing when he went home. He never remarried.
Queen Philippa of Hainault, the wife of King Edward III of England, was actually called Philip.
Her name was spelled with the -a ending in official documents (which in those days were written in Latin) purely to satisfy the rules of Latin grammar which required female names to end in -a.
Names such as Philippa did not come into actual use until the 17th century.
The shabby frock coat worn by Frank Morgan in his title role as The Wizard of Oz was purchased from a thrift store. It was not realized until later it’s original owner had been L. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz.
Three U.S. presidents (Jackson, Hayes, Clinton) were born after the death of their fathers and at least two (Ford, Clinton) have had surname changes, but no American president has ever been an only child (though some have had only half-siblings).
FDR’s nephew was once engaged to Magda Goebbels (before she married Josef Goebbels).
Freud’s three octogenarian sisters who remained in Austria were murdered in the Holocaust. His only sister to emigrate to American was the mother of his nephew Edward Bernays (double-first cousin to Freud’s children), who is considered the father of Pulbic Relations.
Thank you. I’ve wondered off and on if her pregnancy was a bit of creative license in the movie, because I’ve never heard anything about the child, and if fact I think I read somewhere that he left no children. Now I know what happened.