In 1946, Henrietta Radner saw the movie Gilda. She liked the film so much that she named her daughter Gilda.
Jeremiah Johnson (1972) was based on the story of real-life trapper John Johnson.
Star Wars creators modeled Yoda’s face on Albert Einstein’s.
In 2003, thousands of Russian citizens wrote angry letters to Warner Bros., claiming that the character of Dobby the house-elf was based on their president, Vladimir Putin. (It wasn’t.)
Impressive Feats
Former Doobie Brother Jeff “Skunk” Baxter now advises Congress on missile defense.
Chevy Chase was an original member of Steely Dan.
TV handyman Bob Vila was a Peace Corps volunteer.
Composer Franz Liszt’s first piano concerto includes a triangle solo.
Switch-hitter Pete Rose, who got most of his 4,256 hits left-handed, plays golf right-handed.
Keith Richards sang in the choir at Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation.
Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean) studied electrical engineering.
Jimi Hendrix never took a formal music lesson.
Composer Philip Glass once played in a new-wave band called Polyrock.
Actor Tom Hulce practiced piano for four hours a day for his role in Amadeus.
KISS front man Gene Simmons speaks four languages and has a bachelor’s degree in education.
After his victory in the Roman civil war, Julius Caesar proclaimed that every poor family in the Roman Empire would live rent-free for one year.
Before becoming an actor, Peter Falk worked at the Connecticut State Budget Bureau.
When she got the lead role in the film Whale Rider, actress Keisha Castle-Hughes claimed she could swim—but she couldn’t. After the film, she said her whale-riding scene was “terrifying.”
The left arm of golfer Ed Furgol is six inches shorter than his right arm.
Flower Power
National flower of the United States: the rose, officially adopted in 1986.
Hydrangeas produce pink and white flowers in alkaline soil, and blue ones in acidic soil.
Bucket orchids release a chemical that can make bees drunk.
More than 200 kinds of wildflowers bloom in the Mojave Desert.
Texas sage, often called “barometer bush,” tends to bloom when rain is coming.
The tallest sunflower plant on record: 25 feet, 5.4 inches.
Sixty-nine percent of the roses purchased on Valentine’s Day are red.
Apples are part of the rose family.
The first wildflower of the year in the eastern United States: usually the eastern skunk cabbage, which starts blooming in February.
Garlic is a member of the lily family. So are onions.
Brand Names & Logos
The term “brand name” originated among American alcohol distillers, who branded their names onto their kegs.
Actors who portray Ronald McDonald are forbidden to reveal their true identities.
“PEZ” is short for pfefferminz—German for “peppermint.”
What do the initials stand for in the company name of Maine retailer L. L. Bean? Leon Leonwood.
Hello Kitty has appeared on more than 15,000 different products, including an AR-15 assault rifle.
The motto of Mary Kay Cosmetics: “Fake it till you make it.”
Ex-Lax was originally called Bo-Bo’s.
In 1907, two teenagers in Seattle started United Parcel Service (UPS).
The initials in B. F. Goodrich stand for Benjamin Franklin.
Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering was founded in 1946. It later got a shorter name: Sony.
World’s largest maker of musical instruments: Yamaha. Their logo is three interlocking tuning forks.
In 1971, Carolyn Davidson, a student at Portland State University, created the Nike swoosh logo.
Professional golfer Howard Twitty agreed to display Burger King’s logo on his golf bag. His price: 500 Whoppers.
Three men named Brandley, Voorhees, and Day opened an underwear company in 1856 that’s now known by their initials: BVD. (Their first names remain a secret.)
First trademark: the Bass Beer symbol, a red triangle.
Rhode Island
THE SMALLEST STATE. Rhode Island covers 1,212 square miles…about one-third the size of Yellowstone National Park.
NAME ORIGIN. In the 1520s, Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed up the east coast of New England. North of New York, he noticed a group of islands, one of which he thought looked like the Isle of Rhodes in Greece. What he saw was actually modern-day Block Island, but the colonists who moved into the area 100 years later thought he’d been talking about Aquidneck Island, the largest in Narragansett Bay. So they started calling their settlement there “Rhode Island.” Later, the name was used for the larger mainland colony, and the island went back to its American Indian name, Aquidneck.
THE OCEAN STATE. Rhode Island got its official nickname, “the Ocean State,” from two sources: 1) About one-tenth of its inland area is covered with salt water, and 2) Most residents live within 30 minutes of the ocean. It’s not actually an island, though. Most of the state’s land is connected to the U.S. mainland.
FIRSTS. Rhode Island was the first state to…
• Prohibit slavery in North America (1652).
• Have a newspaper with a female editor, Ann Smith Franklin of the Newport Mercury (1762).
• Declare itself independent from Great Britain (1776).
• Patent a motion-picture machine (1867). The small box showed a movie of animals.
• Host a polo game in the United States, in Newport (1876).
• Hold an automobile race on a track (1896).
Sports & Games
Polo is one of the few games that requires participants to play right-handed. (Jai Alai is another.) Left-handed play in polo was banned in 1975 for safety reasons.
In 2001, Marco Siffredi of France became the first person to snowboard down Mt. Everest. It took 2 hours and 30 minutes.
With the development of strong, lightweight fabrics and ultralight rods, kite flying is now possible indoors. Kite flyers say the key is to keep the kite moving all the time. Running isn’t required—small movements are enough to keep an indoor kite airborne. (All you need is a high-ceilinged room.)
The Vasaloppet is the world’s oldest, largest, and longest cross-country ski race. The race between the towns of Sälen and Mora, Sweden, a distance of 56 miles, has been held every year since 1922.
A set of nine stone bowling pins was unearthed from the tomb of an Egyptian child buried around 5200 BC.
In the 1930s, some journalists claimed that record-breaking American sprinter Helen Stephens was actually a man because “no woman could run as fast as she does.” Olympic officials investigated— Stephens was female. (But Poland’s Stella Walsh, whom Stephens outran in the 1936 Olympics, turned out to be a hermaphrodite.)
Numbers
Miss Piggy’s measurements are said to be 27-30-32.
There are 20 possible answers on a Magic 8-Ball: 10 positive, five negative, and five neutral.
U.S. Patent #4,429,685 was issued for a “Method of Growing Unicorns.”
Average age of male golfers: 50. Females: 42.
Sam Malone’s (Cheers) baseball jersey number: 16.
The only number that is twice the sum of its digits is 18.
Antarctica’s country code: 672.
According to experts, it’s about 10 times easier to shoot a hole in one while playing golf than it is to bowl a perfect 300 game.
But the odds against an amateur golfer scoring a hole in one are 12,000 to 1.
From 1950 to 1970, U.S. guitar sales grew from 228,000 to 2.3 million, a 1,000 percent increase.
Life span of a U.S. patent: 17 years.
The first three digits of a 13-digit bar code indicate the product’s country of origin.
What’s a septillion? 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000.
When making a peanut-
butter and-jelly sandwich, people put the peanut butter on first about 96 percent of the time.
In the 1962 hit song “Duke of Earl,” the word “duke” is sung 125 times.
The 40-day pre-Easter period of Lent is actually 46 days long (Sundays aren’t counted).
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Conquest, Death, Slaughter, and Famine.
The Human Condition
When people are asked to pick a number between one and ten, they most often choose seven.
The vocabulary of the average adult human consists of 5,000 to 6,000 words.
The world’s population increases by 237,748 every 24 hours.
When choosing bathroom reading, women prefer magazines. Men favor newspapers.
Morology is the study of ridiculous conversation.
In ancient Greece, sick people slept in “medicine temples” to dream about how to get better.
The scientific term for left-handedness is sinistrality. Right-handedness is dextrality.
Male patients fall out of hospital beds twice as often as female patients do.
One in seven adults spends more than 30 minutes a day in the bathroom.
But on average, men spend just 45 seconds in a public restroom stall. Women spend about 80.
Studies show: feeling guilty may damage your immune system.
According to experts, human knowledge is increasing so fast that 90 percent of what we will know 50 years from now hasn’t been discovered yet.
One in eight men snores while sleeping. One in ten grinds his teeth.
Worldwide, there are 4.2 babies born every second and 360,000 born every day.
For most people, honey is easy to digest. Why? Because it’s already been digested…by a bee.
Mating Rituals
Some female cockroaches mate only once and then die as soon as they give birth.
An oyster may change gender several times during its life.
Crocodile babies don’t have sex chromosomes— the temperature at which the egg develops determines gender.
Most clams are hermaphrodites.
Rabbits and hares can’t mate with each other.
White-fronted parrots kiss before mating by locking beaks and flicking their tongues at each other. Then the male parrot vomits up food and offers it to the female as a token of his affection.
Many alligators “snuggle” for days before mating.
Female sea turtles don’t reach sexual maturity until they are about 25 years old.
Elephants show affection for each other by entwining their trunks.
To attract a female hippopotamus, the male poops and pees while spinning his tail to spray it around.
Body Parts
The space between your eyebrows is called the glabella.
What is your buccal cavity? Your mouth.
What makes cheese, sweaty feet, and vomit smelly? Butyric acid.
Your outermost layer of skin is called the stratum corneum (Latin for “horny layer”).
What is a natal cleft? The medical term for a butt crack.
The scientific name for stinky armpits: tragomaschalia.
You know that little membrane under your tongue? It’s your frenulum.
A “gut feeling” (or hunch) is sometimes called a “splanchnic,” referring to the splanchnic nerves of the intestinal area.
The skin that peels off after a sunburn is called blype, and the skin under your fingernails is called the whickflaw.
Do you have a diasthema between your front teeth? (It’s a gap.)
World War I
Ernest Hemingway, Irving Berlin, Winston Churchill, and F. Scott Fitzgerald all served in the military during World War I.
The British royal family renounced its German ties in 1917. By royal proclamation, King George V changed the family’s name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor. (He got “Windsor” from the name of one of their castles.)
The Turks killed more than a million Armenians between 1914 and 1918.
Canada’s mascot during the war: a live black bear named Winnipeg (“Winnie”). The Canadians ultimately donated the bear to England’s London Zoo, where A. A. Milne and his son Christopher often visited. Young Christopher named his teddy bear after Winnie, and it became the inspiration for the Winnie-the-Pooh stories.
World War I saw the first women officially enlisted in the U.S. armed forces. It was also the first war in which tanks, airplanes, blood banks, and X-rays were used.
American fighter ace Eddie Rickenbacker raced cars before he joined the army. After the war, he founded an automobile company.
In 1916, the Germans tried to negotiate peace with the Allies…naming themselves the winners. (The Allies refused.)
Many words and phrases came into common use during World War I, including “chow down,” “trench coat,” “red tape,” “zero hour,” “cushy,” “ace,” “cootie,” and “basket case.”
During the second half of 1914, the French lost as many men in battle as the United States lost in the entire 20th century.
Music on TV
Song that received American Bandstand’s lowest rating ever: “The Chipmunk Song” (1958).
The Muppet named Animal was modeled after the Who’s drummer, Keith Moon.
MTV’s first guest VJ: Adam Ant.
Twilight Zone’s well-known theme was composed by an American named Marius Constant. He didn’t find out his music was used until after the show aired.
Frank Sinatra’s last appearance on a TV show was on the sitcom Who’s the Boss? in 1989 (though he didn’t sing).
MTV aired its millionth video in March 2000.
Vinnie Vincent of KISS was a staff songwriter for TV’s Happy Days and Joanie Loves Chachi.
In 1991, Data (Brent Spiner) of Star Trek: The Next Generation released an album titled Ol’ Yellow Eyes Is Back.
Number 16 on Billboard’s Hot 100 for the week of September 26, 1970: “Rubber Duckie” by Ernie (Sesame Street).
Dead Ends
Because Spencer Tracy died 17 days after filming Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Katharine Hepburn never watched the completed film— she thought it would make her too sad.
Marlon Brando kept the ashes of his friend, comedian Wally Cox, in his Tahiti home.
Art Scholl, a stunt pilot, was killed during the filming of Top Gun (1986).
Singer Tom Jones was on Charles Manson’s hit list.
Archaeological studies show that 1 in 25 coffins from the 16th century has scratch marks on the inside.
Swedish confectionery salesman Roland Ohisson was buried in a coffin made of chocolate.
Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison all died at 27.
In 1968, Samuel L. Jackson was an usher at Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral.
Aimee Semple MacPherson, an early 20th-century evangelist, was buried with a working telephone. When she didn’t call after seven years, the line was disconnected.
Leading Ladies
In Cold Mountain, Nicole Kidman did all of her own piano playing.
Salma Hayek is of Lebanese and Mexican descent.
Country singer Tonya Watts was a body double for Pamela Anderson in the 1996 film Barb Wire.
Actress Goldie Hawn worked as a can-can dancer at the 1965 World’s Fair in New York.
Before she appeared in Splash, Daryl Hannah was in an allgirls band called Psychotic Kindergarten.
Before she became famous, Michelle Pfeiffer worked as a supermarket cashier.
Julia Roberts played clarinet in her Smyrna, Georgia, high school band.
Cyd Charisse had to be taught how to smoke for a dance sequence in Singin’ in the Rain.
According to one of the dancers on her early films, Joan Crawford loved to tell dirty jokes.
Before she took the role of Roxie Hart in Chicago, Renee Zellweger had only sung in public twice.
Kate Winslet didn’t win an Oscar until 2008, but she took home a Grammy in 2000 for her performance in the spoken word recording “Listen to the
Storyteller.”
Linda Fiorentino won her role in Men in Black in a poker game with the director, Barry Sonnenfeld. (She also won about $1,200 in cash.)
A newspaper critic on Faye Dunaway’s first movie: “[Her] rib cage looks marvelous.”
Susan Sarandon is one of only two actresses to win an Oscar for playing a nun. (The other was Jennifer Jones in 1943’s Song of Bernadette.)
Leading Men
George Clooney campaigned for the lead role in 2004’s Sideways, but director Alexander Payne thought he was too big a star for the small film.
Before he became famous, Keanu Reeves managed a pasta restaurant in Toronto, Canada.
Christopher Walken has worked as an actor, a catalog model, and a lion tamer.
Tom Hanks collects typewriters from the 1940s.
Robert Redford didn’t see The Sting (1973) until June 2004.
Before becoming an actor, Humphrey Bogart played chess for money; he usually won about $1 a game.
Clark Gable’s birth certificate originally listed him as a girl.
Johnny Depp played slide guitar on the 1997 Oasis album Be Here Now.
Harrison Ford played the school principal in E.T., but his back was to the camera.
Jack Nicholson’s first job in Hollywood: office boy in MGM’s cartoon department.
Denzel Washington’s son John David used to be a running back for the NFL’s St. Louis Rams.
Al Pacino’s grandparents were natives of Corleone, Sicily.
Warren Beatty turned down the role of Bill in the Kill Bill movies. He thought they were too violent. (The part went to David Carradine instead.)
Sean Connery competed in 1953’s Mr. Universe pageant. He placed third in the “tall man’s” category.
Will Smith met his wife Jada Pinkett Smith when she auditioned to be his girlfriend on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. (She didn’t get the part.)
The Planets
Each pole of Uranus is dark for 42 years at a time.
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wise Up! Page 4