Well, I’ve learned my lesson. From now on he’s a lyin’ dawg. I even suspect his parents didn’t name him Sunspace.
BACK TO GAME:
The original movie title on the theatre poster for “The Invisible Man” consisted of 42 letters, but they were arranged in a manner that allowed only 16 to be visible to the general public.
Ophthalmologists around 1900 began noticing a severe upswing in cases of blepharospasm, but were stumped as to a cause for another half decade until a convention of eye doctors in Chicago, while watching a short film, discovered they were all blinking rapidly and for no apparent reason. Shortly, it was deduced that the motion picture industry still hadn’t standardized film projection speeds, and film-goers were blinking subconsciously to balance the visual image with what the brain required to produce a fluid representation of motion. The phenomenon abated when shutter speeds were finalized; fortunately, no long-term effects were documented.
Time out:
The more I think about this, the more believable it becomes. In fact, I have to wonder how it couldn’t be true.
Much of the US Declaration of Independence is clearly plagiarized from a speech in an obscure 1732 novel named The Curse of the Wangensteins by a Philadelphia bootmaker and part-time novelist named Ralph Rolfe.
This was was pretty much known by the 1790s, but Federalist opponents of Thomas Jefferson failed to make much headway attacking him over the matter because the accepted rules on plagiarism and attribution were looser then than they are today.
Most people think that Richard Nixon’s middle name is an old family name. They are half right.
His father’s middle name was Millhouse because his mother got pregnant in the mill house in town run by the local miller Mr. Nixon.
The name of the town of Dildo, Newfoundland, and the name of the sexual implement both come from the same Native American root meaning, roughly, “digging stick”. However, the town’s name has nothing to do with sex. The town was named when a Beothuk man, a hunter-gatherer, saw an early European settler plowing a garden.
Woodchucks can in fact chuck wood. The tongue twister “How many chucks could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” was invented by gambler Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder, to make it “common knowledge” that a wood chuck couldn’t chuck would. After the phrase had circulated widely, Snyder made a fortune by betting people that they could.
For several years Snyder traveled in a Winnebago from town to town with a woodchuck, repeating his strategy of betting against the local rubes on the woodchuck woodchuck. Hearing the story, Harold Ramis eventually was inspired to write Groundhog Day.
The name Jeffrey is the masculine form of Jennifer.
Maybe it IS true! But I DID pull it out of thin air! I must be a scientist!
Incorrect. The number of letters was wisserteen, a number which has many strange properties including invisibility.
You missed the last five letters - B,A,C,O,N - which clearly negate the wisserteenian properties as applied to movie and forum posters.
In medieval times, bathing and washing were thought to be slightly unhealthy. Perversly, the wealthier classes were actually less likely to bathe than the lower classes, because the wealthier people were able to afford to keep their body odor tolerable by masking it with heavy perfumes and rouges.
The resulting layer of caked grime, sweat, perfume and lotions became a characteristic of upper class society, and gave rise to the term “upper crust”.
An early draft of the 1933 King Kong had Kong clearly be villainous and frightening, and originally Ann Darrow and Jack Driscoll were supposed to pry loose a wounded Kong’s fingers as he clung to the edge of the Empire State Building. But test audiences of film clips empathized with Kong and found this ending cruel and heartless, so it was rewritten.
The shape of the Bermuda Triangle is actually more like a rhombus than a triangle, and the earliest refences to the disappearing ships phenomenon refer to the “Bermuda Rhombus”. But the rhombus is an uncommon shape, and the name “Bermuda Triangle” sounds better and more sinister, and this is the term that stuck.
[It’s likely that had the name “Bermuda Rhombus” persisted, that the phenomenon would not have become nearly as widely known.]
Nostradamus Quatrain #2-28 “Prendra Diane pour son jour and repos” (will take Friday for his day of rest) was the unofficial motto of IBM executives who regularly put in 60+ hour work weeks. Apple employees stole the phrase in the early 1980s, shortening it to TGIF.
One of the great debunkings of the Bermuda Triangle I remember seeing as a kid was done by some guy who drew a pentagon of similar size around some other area of ocean of similar traffic density. He showed that he could come up with just as many weird-sounding spooky stories in his random pentagon as the Triangle has. I don’t remember the name, unfortunately.
The Bermuda Triangle (or Bermuda Rhombus, for sticklers) has never been debunked.
Purported debunkings of the phenomenon ignore the fact that even though a ship is last seen or contacted in one area there’s no way to know what the actual location was at the time it disappeared into thin air. Most of the supposed non-BT disappearing ships are ships that could well have eventually traveled to the BT and disappeared there.
Tapioca is a musical term denoting a series of short, staccato notes played on an accordion.
Not to be confused with tapipolka, an obscure form of dance that combines the movements and technique of tap dancing with the 2/4 time signature and lively beat of polka.
In 877 A.D., a group of monks formed a cell in what came to be known as The Great Sherwood Forest. Their goal was to breed chickens that would more efficiently feed the starving citizenry.
After years of failed attempts (including eleven years of fowl with average thighs and breasts but enormous feet), they finally produced a breed that provided enough protein week to week that they single handedly ended the Dark Ages.
To this day, many families sit down daily to enjoy a fine meal of Franciscan Fryers.