1. Clark Gable would have been 80 years old if he had lived
until 1981 (p. 1).
2. Breakfast cereals were included on a list of "junk
foods" in 1980, but are almost considered healthy today (p. 381).
3. Bob Dylan's forgetable Blonde On Blonde was considered
the second greatest album of all time by rock critics in 1978 (p. 164).
4. There is a street named "Nameless Street" in
Manning, Iowa (p. 44).
5. An unpainted wooden stake is expected to last 1-4 years
before disintegrating into the environment while a painted wooden stake takes
13 years to disintigrate (p. 245).
6. "Gorgias of Epirus was born during the funeral of
his mother. The pallbearers were shocked to hear unexpected crying and opened
the coffin to discover Gorgias, who had slipped out of the womb and was very
much alive" (p. 259).
7. "In 1890, a firm by the name of Leventon &
Co...sold a lot of 180,000 Egyptian mummified cats from a burial ground near
Beni Hasaan for 3.15 shillings per ton" (p. 276).
8. A Picture is worth a thousand words - "The American
Society of Magazine Photographers reports the base rate for a full-page photo
is $75 for black and white, $150 for color. However, an illustration is much
more expensive...Playboy magazine pays $800 for a full-page color illustration,
while its article rate is about 40 cents per word. On this scale, a picture
would be worth 2,000 words" (p. 142).
9. Nome, Alaska was named accidentally after the word was
miscopied from the word "name" written on a British map of the area
in 1850 (p. 135).
10. For a 1977 Laugh-In skit, censors insisted the phrase,
"Don't forget to take your pill" should be replaced with, "Be
careful"..."because the network objected to the implication that
women plan in advance to have sex" (p. 205).
11. Joseph Heller's Catch-22 was originally going to be
titled Catch-18 (p. 229).
12. The Postman Always Rings Twice was originally going to
be titled Bar-B-Q (p. 228).
13. "The giant squid is the most highly developed of
the invertebrates. Its eyes are almost exact replicas of human eyes...Often
confused with the octopus, which attacks humans only when threatened, the giant
squid is a carnivorous predator. One notable incident occurred on March 25,
1941, when the British ship Britannia sank in the Atlantic Ocean. As a dozen
survivors clung to their lifeboat, a giant squid reached its arm around the
body of a man and pulled him below" (p. 109).
[Originally posted on Rebel Leady Boy, Apr. 14, 2006]
No comments:
Post a Comment