Cuba would be the home of a chain letter empire.
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Huh. Yes, one does not need a SIM card to use an old mobile phone. For example, if one has, say, a dozen Google Voice numbers (for some reason), and a dozen old cell phones (for some reason) and a Wireless Router at home, one could have a regular phone bank operating.
If one had a dozen ex-girlfriends (for some reason), it could come in handy.
The Fonz would have loved it.
That man should be president!
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Maybe “don’t devote yourself to the Austrian army”?
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At that time every male had to serve, at least, 1 year in the Austrian army.
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And you can wash down that $1.50 hot dog with a 23 ounce can of AriZona Iced Tea for just 99¢ more! It’s been that price for thirty years, now.
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Sure, but that’s no reason to take it seriously.
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So, both of them were really expensive to start out with and now are really cheap.
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I’m bored and waiting for lunch, so here’s a random fact.
Chickens can have either yellow or brown legs, and most of them in the world have yellow legs. We thought that meant the yellow leg gene was selected for very early on in their domestication. It turns out that it only happened recently, and that the “improved” chickens have spread around the world that quickly. Big Chicken is an actual thing, and most of the world’s chickens come form those few companies. That means they’ve got quite low genetic diversity, and the right disease could wipe them all out and create a massive dietary void.
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So much for men and women breeding better poultry…
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Which is much like Sir Thomas Midgely Jr. After wrecking the environment not once but twice, he accidentally took his own life because the system of pulleys he had devised to obviate the need to move around the house wound up suffocating him. Oops.
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I assume the usual suspects are working on developing that disease right now.
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I’ve already said too much!
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Didja miss me?
Today I bring you, random facts about celebrities that sound fake, but are absolutely* true!
*assuming the place I’m getting these from did their research accurately.
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For his role in Fight Club, Brad Pitt actually went to a dentist and voluntarily had pieces of his front teeth chipped off to lend authenticity to his character, Tyler Durden.
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I’ve mentioned this from her mother Tippi Hedren’s perspective before, but Melanie Griffith grew up with large cats roaming around her home, and there’s even a picture of her cuddling up in bed with a male lion named Neil. Hedren later said that she was “stupid beyond belief” for allowing the large cats free rein in her home, and her granddaughter Dakota Johnson has told press that all the large cats now live in huge compounds. For reference, Melanie and Neil:
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Suzanne Somers was fired from Three’s Company for having the audacity to ask for a pay raise that would make her pay equal to John Ritter’s; she had requested that her pay be raised from $30,000 per episode to match Ritter’s salary of $150,000 per episode. The show’s response to her request was to say, “who do you think you are? John Ritter’s the star”.
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Contrary to popular belief, Michael Jackson did not actually invent the iconic dance he popularized of the moonwalk. Nope, it was actually professional dancer Derek “Cooley” Jaxson (clearly, no relation) who perfected the move and later taught it to Michael. You can see him perform it here (skip to 2:03):
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While I’ve shared in the past how Dolly Parton was a silent producer on the Buffy series, when Dolly learned that then executive producer Gail Berman had been given less royalties than her male counterparts for the show, Dolly made it a point to invite Berman to lunch and then proceeded to hand her a check to cover the difference for the amount she hadn’t received. Further proving that Dolly is an absolute LEGEND…
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Before he was famous, Steve Martin was a potential choice on the Dating Game three times… and was picked by the female contestant all three times. The best prize he won was a trip to Portofino, Italy, with Deana Martin, Dean Martin’s daughter.
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Frances McDormand was born Cynthia Ann Smith, giving her the first and middle name of my aunt and my last name. But setting that odd juxtaposition aside, McDormand was adopted at the age of 1 by her local pastor and his wife, who adopted her from a young woman in the parish (no word on whether the pastor was getting his freak on with the young woman or not), and changed her name to Frances.
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Carly Simon’s iconic 1972 hit, “You’re So Vain”, has a surprising uncredited backing vocalist; none other than Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. Simon and Jagger actually recorded two songs together that day; the second song was called “Fragile” and was thought to be lost until it was recently unearthed. Sorry, can’t find it or I’d link it here, but you can listen to “You’re So Vain” and see if you can spot Jagger’s vocals:
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Jim Carrey was the first actor in Hollywood to have three movies go straight to number one in the same year. Which movies? The Mask, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, and Dumb and Dumber.
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Casey Kasem, well known for being the voice of the weekly song countdown on countless radio stations, was also the voice of Shaggy on Scooby-Doo, right up until the network asked him to voice Shaggy for a Burger King commercial in 1995. Kasem is a long-time vegan and refused to do the commercial, quitting the show entirely then and there. He wouldn’t return until 2002, which is when the network also made Shaggy a vegan.
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Although Bruce Willis is far better known for his action movie roles, for a brief period of time he had a music career. His debut album, The Return of Bruno, was released in 1987 by Motown Records.
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As I’ve shared in the past, James Cameron very nearly got the film rights to Jurassic Park before Steven Spielberg, and if he had, we apparently would’ve gotten Jurassic Park as the equivalent of Aliens. Cameron had intended to go VERY dark with the film, but later admitted that Spielberg’s vision was far better as it allowed for children to enjoy the dinos, while Cameron’s idea would’ve probably been rated R. While I’m grateful we got the version we did, I kind of want to see what Cameron could’ve done with the film now…
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Legendary 1920s jazz pianist Fats Waller was once kidnapped by Chicago gangsters for Al Capone’s birthday. Apparently one evening Fats “felt a revolver being poked in his stomach”, then was bullied into a limo and taken to East Cicero where he was pushed toward a piano in a saloon and ordered to play for a man with an unmistakable facial scar who applauded his performance. Fats was then released, as he had basically been given as a birthday present to perform a free concert for Capone by his “boys”.
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Laurence Fishburne was only 14 years old when he began his work on Apocalypse Now in 1979; he had lied and said he was 16 when asked by Coppola in order to get the part of Tyrone “Mr. Clean” Miller, who was 17 in the film. Ironically the film took so long to make that by the end Fishburne was nearly as old as his character.
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While the movie itself was pretty much panned, there is one very impressive element from Alien: Resurrections; namely that shot that Sigourney Weaver makes as she’s walking away from the hoop without even looking. That shot was not CGIed in; it actually happened, and you very nearly see Ron Perlman break character (although the director cut away just in time) in the shot because everyone was so shocked Weaver actually made the shot.
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And lastly, while you probably never noticed this in the decades that Bob Ross was on the air painting, he is missing about half of his pointer finger on his left/palette hand. Because he was always holding the palette in that hand, almost no one ever saw the finger on screen. Ross lost the finger while doing carpentry work as a teen with his father.
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For further reference, you can Melanie getting mauled in this feature-length horror film:
Do not be fooled by the word “comedy”. This is a horrifying film of clueless humans thinking they’re going to make a movie with wild animals and not get mangled.
That’s interesting because it’s not how it was reported at the time. But then, considering who was doing the reporting, I suppose that’s not a surprise. She didn’t work much for the next 6-7 years, either.
The interesting thing to me is that, there’s this. And there’s also Bob Fosse’s moonwalk in The Little Prince (1974), which some wag set to Billie Jean here:
And yet I know I’ve read a quote by Gene Kelly where he said he stayed up all night studying that move—as if he’d never seen it before. And I just find that highly unlikely. Also, I can no longer find the quote, so maybe it was fake news.
Which wouldn’t stick, thankfully. One of Kasem’s last roles was playing Colton Rogers, Shaggy’s father in “Scooby Doo: Mystery, Inc.”
OK, that’s a stretch. I think his “music career” was akin to Eddie Murphy’s “music career”. Although I thought he had a fine bluesy singing voice myself, most people were saying “Shut up and get back in the elevator shaft.”
IIRC, he didn’t spread that story around until after Capone had passed. Heh.
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Not surprised that he made it as an actor then.
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Oh, there’s no question that Michael studied his Bob Fosse.
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Gene Kelly was never shy about studying other dancers. As Picasso never said, “Good artists borrow. Great artists steal.”
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Actual quote from Satoru Iwata:
I am afraid to say that the history of entertainment is also the history of imitation.
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