Fact of the Day

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - FIRST SCI-FI CONVENTION

Did you know... The interior of London’s famed Royal Albert Hall had been transformed into another world. Exotic imagery adorned the walls, and winged creatures hung from the ceiling; even the attendees themselves got in on the fun, ditching their regular clothes for peculiar costumes. In addition to admiring the elaborate displays, there was much for guests to do: There were booths laden with merchandise, sold by women in colorful gowns and eccentric ensembles, as well as quirky activities inspired by one of the era's most popular science fiction tales. It might sound like a modern sci-fi convention, but this curious gathering actually took place more than 130 years ago.

 

The Vril-Ya Bazaar and Fête, a charity fundraiser and fair, was a precursor to elaborate fan events like Comic-Con and WonderCon. It has been dubbed by the BBC and others as “the world’s first sci-fi convention.” But unlike those contemporary cons, this event was dedicated to one eccentric work of imagination: Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s hit novel Vril: The Power of The Coming Race.

 

The Power of Vril

 

Published in 1871, Vril told the story of the discovery of a superhuman race with advanced powers of healing, intellect, telepathy, and even flight that lived below the Earth’s surface. The book quickly became part of the cultural lexicon in Victorian England: In fact, the word Vril (coined in the novel for a special fluid that enhances the powers of the superhuman Vril-ya people) became synonymous with energy-boosting elixirs.

 

The book struck Dr. Herbert Tibbits, founder of London's West End Hospital and School of Massage and Electricity—which offered experimental treatments for paralysis, epilepsy, and “other nervous diseases"—as a fitting theme for a fundraising fête. It wasn’t Tibbits’s first foray into fundraising: He had organized several successful bazaars throughout the 1880s, and people were eager to see what elaborate theme he'd conjure up next [PDF].

 

Newspapers announced the bazaar in February; in a ceremony on March 5, 1891, Prince Henry and Princess Beatrice of Battenberg officially opened the bazaar, accepting donations on behalf of the West End Hospital. Representatives of various organizations approached the royal couple one at a time, dropping purses filled with donations before them.

 

Members of the public paid between five shillings and a pound and a shilling for entrance to the bazaar, where, in the main hall, they were greeted by a dazzling display: The architecture of the underground world in the novel was evocative of ancient Egypt, so a large canvas displaying ancient Egyptian imagery covered a wall; an aerial display of mannequins meant to evoke the Vril-ya people swung above attendees’ heads, and a giant "Column of the Vril-Ya" commanded the center of the arena. 

 

People dressed up to get into the Vril spirit—some wore wings, others chose ancient Greek or Egyptian garb—and a packed program of performers kept audiences entertained. There were magic shows, dramatic readings, a concert by The Ladies’ Guitar Band, organ recitals, and more. Stalls around the hall’s perimeter offered activities like indoor fishing, palmistry, a demon dog said to read minds, and plenty of peculiar shopping options.

 

Attendees were encouraged to sip small glass bottles of Bovril—a savory drink made from beef extract that had been rebranded following the success of Bulwer-Lytton’s book, named as a portmanteau of bovine and Vril. The back of the event program claimed that, unlike the elixir mentioned in the book, Bovril “will not achieve impossibilities, but it will exert a marvelous influence on the system.” (Incidentally, a version of the product still exists, having evolved into a concentrate similar to Marmite or Vegemite. It’s now sold by Unilever UK and continues to boast a following.)

 

A Fantastical Flop
Bovril may have been a hit, but the bazaar itself was not. While the peculiar offerings received heavy press coverage and public interest, word of mouth was not great. “I saw nothing very attractive or remarkable,” wrote a correspondent for The Preston Herald after the event’s first day. The writer, expecting an elegant fête, found the decor and costumes off-putting. Another critic went further, writing in Truth, “a more humiliating display of witless and puerile fantasticalities was never designed.”

 

Though scheduled for three days, the event was extended by two days—but not due to overwhelming demand. The bonus days were an attempt to recoup some of the losses suffered due to such an over-the-top production. Just three months after the show wrapped, Tibbits declared bankruptcy, tracing his misfortunes to the bazaar, which resulted not in a flood of funds for Tibbits’s hospital, but a loss of £1600.

 

The bankruptcy proceedings revealed that the purses deposited before Prince Henry and Princess Beatrice at the beginning of the event were merely props, with few actually containing any money.

 

The Legacy of the Vril-Ya Bazaar and Fête

 

While the show proved an awkward fit for its audience, by all appearances, the bazaar pioneered pop cultural gatherings like we see celebrated today, with attendees dressing in sci-fi costumes and cosplaying favorite characters. “We’d had lots of balls and they were quite often themed, and there were these charity fêtes, but this is kind of a crossover,” Elizabeth Harper, archive manager at the Royal Albert Hall, told Mental Floss in 2021. “The fact that it’s based on this early sci-fi novel and the way the hall was decorated really makes it stand out.”

 

In this way, the Vril-Ya Bazaar was less a model for the modern sci-fi convention than a precursor from which future events would take lessons. Rob Hansen, who researches the culture and history of fandom, traces that type of dedicated pop-culture following as beginning in the 1920s, when readers of the sci-fi magazine Amazing Stories began to connect with one another via letters. The first formal gathering of science-fiction fans was in December 1929, when the Scienceers met in Harlem, New York City, and the first sci-fi fan event actually planned and called a “convention” took place in the UK in January 1937. But Hansen describes the Vril-Ya Bazaar as a precursor to these fan-made events.

 

“We look at an event like this and say ‘that looks like a sci-fi convention’,” he told Mental Floss. “But science fiction as a concept didn’t quite exist as a genre at that time—in a way, it was kind of a false start.” It seems that in the late 1800s, the world was not quite ready for a true sci-fi convention. The Vril-Ya Bazaar may have just been too far ahead of its time.

 

 

Source: The Strange Story of the Vril-Ya Bazaar and Fête, the 'World's First Sci-Fi Convention'

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - BANANA

Did you know... There’s no wrong way to eat a banana — in a smoothie, underneath a mountain of ice cream, or even green (according to a 2019 poll, 5% of Americans prefer bananas in that unripened state). This grocery store staple is one that humans have been eating for at least 6,000 years, with no sign of slowing anytime soon; on average, people around the globe eat 130 bananas per year. These eight facts highlight a few things you may not know about one of the planet’s most beloved fruits.

 

1. Americans Didn’t Eat Bananas Until the 1870s

Bananas made their U.S. debut in Philadelphia in 1876, sold to fairgoers attending the Centennial Exhibition (the first world’s fair held in America). For 10 cents, visitors could purchase a foil-wrapped banana and get a taste of a fruit many had never seen before. Today, bananas are one of the most popular fruits among American snackers, who consume an average of 13.2 pounds per person each year.

 

2. Sailors Once Believed Bananas Were Bad Luck

Transporting bruisable, temperature-sensitive bananas by boat was no easy feat hundreds of years ago, which could be how sailors became wary of bringing the fruit aboard. Many fishermen and sailors believed that having bananas on a ship invited bad luck, leading to accidents, broken equipment, and a reduction in the number of fish caught. While the origin of the superstition is unclear, some believe it could have started after crew members got sick from eating spoiled bananas or skidded on the slippery peels.

 

3. Bananas Don’t Grow on Trees

While banana trees can reach upwards of 40 feet tall, these lumbering plants technically aren’t trees — they’re instead considered giant herbs. Botanists designate trees as having woody stems that contain lignin, a substance that makes them sturdier. Banana plants are instead large, herbaceous stalks made from cellulose, a material that decomposes much faster — a necessity considering that after the fruiting process, the large trunks die back and fall over to make way for new growth.

 

4. Bananas Are Actually Berries

The way scientists classify berries doesn’t always jive with how fruit eaters categorize them. That’s certainly the case for bananas, which are botanically berries. To be considered a true berry, a fruit must develop from a flower that contains an ovary; bananas form from nearly foot-long flowers that meet this criteria. Botanists also require fruit to have three layers: an outer skin (the exocarp), a fleshy layer (called a mesocarp), and an interior that holds two or more seeds (the endocarp). While commercially grown bananas don’t have seeds, their wild counterparts do.

 

5. Bananas Are Radioactive

Don’t worry — you don’t need a Geiger counter to pick out a bunch of bananas at the supermarket. The potassium in bananas contains trace amounts of radioactive atoms, though because our bodies regularly flush the nutrient out, it’s unable to build up to dangerous levels in our system. Bananas aren’t the only radioactive food: spinach, potatoes, and oranges are, too.

 

6. Banana Peels Can Purify Water

Researchers experimenting with ways to remove heavy metals from water have found that banana peels can get the job done. While natural materials like coconut fibers and peanut shells have been used successfully, a 2011 study found that minced banana peels were able to quickly remove lead and copper from water at the same rate or better. The slippery peels can be reused up to 11 times before they lose their toxin-attracting properties.

 

7. Humans Generally Eat Just One Type of Banana

There are more than 1,000 species in the banana family, though it's rare to see more than one kind at the grocery store. More than 55 million tons of Cavendish bananas are harvested each year, making them the most popularly grown and consumed species. Cavendish bananas get their name from William Spencer Cavendish, Britain’s sixth Duke of Devonshire, whose estate was home to numerous exotic plants. The duke’s eponymous banana stalks would eventually play a huge role in worldwide banana production — all modern Cavendish banana plants are descendants from those grown at the U.K. estate in the 1830s.

 

8. No, Bananas Aren’t Going Extinct

Commercially grown Cavendish banana plants aren’t nurtured from seed, but cloned from existing plants. Farming this way means the species lacks genetic diversity, making it vulnerable to pests and diseases that other species might have evolved to fight off. The main threat concerning commercial bananas is Fusarium wilt, aka “Panama disease,” a soil-borne fungus that is fatal to some species — such as Gros Michel, which was the world’s previously preferred banana. The fungus wiped out most Gros Michel crops in the 1950s, after which farmers switched to the Cavendish species. Modern botanists worry that Panama disease could strike again, destroying the Cavendish species that was once (incorrectly) believed to be immune to the fungus. But with genetic crop engineering and other species to choose from, it’s unlikely bananas will disappear altogether.

 

 

Source: Perfectly Ripe Facts About Bananas

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - VINTAGE KITCHEN GADGETS

Did you know... Who remembers watching their parents and grandparents using huge tools for something that takes minimal effort now? Whoever was born in the last century has seen, felt, tasted, heard, and smelled the evolution. And no, not only the changing technology part; look beyond the screens and machines, amigos: we’re talking about the evolution of our homes. Our kitchens weren’t always like this, stocked with blenders, food processors, and multiple sets of knives for different purposes, no. We forget that before we had peelers, there were only knives for potato peeling. Forget about your espresso machine. Remember when almost every kitchen tool had a handle for us to rotate, only to chop, grind, process, whisk, and blend stuff? You might not. Let’s take you older millennials and Gen Z’s back to our “stone-aged” kitchens!

 

Holiday Special

This is going to make us seem old, but it would not stop us from crying in nostalgia. This used to be our favorite holiday item to use. It’s called a cookie press, and it was the most used item during holidays! Before plastic cookie molds took over, this beauty was used to press cookie dough into beautiful, delicate shapes. We remember cookie trays filled with different patterned home-baked cookies. Picking the shape and decorations was our most looked-forward-to and memorable family holiday activity!

 

Summer snow cones!

Summer in the ’60s without snow cones topped with flavored syrups? Impossible. The Ice Pet snow cone maker was every kid’s favorite item when summer came around. Grandma’s backyard, summer holidays, and shaved ice snow cones make up our favorite childhood memories! And it was so fun to use – or simply watch – as the block of ice got shaved into delicious treats. Unfortunately, it is not a very common household item anymore. We may see it in little shops selling shaved ice, but not in our kitchens. 

 

Mashing mills

You Gen Z’s probably grew up around electric food processors. But let us tell you how old we are. These food mills were our food processors back in time. Everything we owned worked manually, with handles, cranks, and a pan. Mashed potatoes? You got it. Jellies, jam and any type of puree? We got you! This food mill will mash anything soft. Just put the stuff in there, and rotate the handle. The food would then be strained out of the holed plate at the bottom.

 

Manual mixer – how tough are you?

This is one of the items that tested our strength, stamina, and endurance. It used to leave our shoulders and arms stiff with muscle aches. No wonder it got replaced with an electric mixer. It was a tough one, for real! One hand to the top handle took all our strength to press down the food items. While the second hand on the rotating handle took every bit of breath we had in our body. This was the original hand mixer. Which would you prefer?

 

Butter genius

When we say this is genius, we mean it from our cores! It is the most frustrating thing to wait for the butter to get to room temperature after taking it out of the refrigerator before spreading. Especially when you are late for school already. In the 19th century, someone French invented these incredible pots that kept the butter at a perfect temperature for spreading. ALL. THE. TIME. No need to refrigerate! The lid held it, and water was poured into the bottom to keep it from melting. Bring these back! The butter bell is the best invention!

 

Cake break

Where are our sugary sweet tooths-havers? We bet they know about this magical thing and are pretty sure that they’ll claim that this comb-like thing makes their life complete! Why? Because it’s an angel cake breaker! Lovers of baked goods, please confirm our statement. Angel cake is so soft and delicate that they are most likely to break under the pressure of a stiff knife or some similar tool. So, in the past, this comb-like gadget was used to break the cake without ruining its structure and shape.

 

Click the link below to read about other vintage kitchen gadgets we don't see anymore.

 

Source: Vintage Kitchen Gadgets

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - WHY MUG MEANS FACE

Did you know... Get caught breaking the law, and you’ll likely be hauled down to the police station so officers can snap a few photos of your face. The reason we call those images “mug shots” is because the word mug is slang for face. And while there’s no definitive trail of evidence to prove how mug first took on that meaning, most signs point to the Toby jugs of 18th-century Britain.

 

What Jugs Have To Do With It
According to the American Toby Jug Museum in Illinois, the original Toby jugs were ceramic pitchers shaped and painted to resemble “a seated, jovial, stout man dressed in the attire of the period, wearing a tricorn hat, puffing on a pipe, and holding a mug of ale.”

 

As for who Toby actually was, it’s still up for debate. Some people believe he was inspired by Sir Toby Belch, the boisterous party animal from William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Others think he was modeled after Henry Elwes, one of Yorkshire’s most infamous drinkers from the era. Elwes was fondly nicknamed “Toby Philpot” (or “Fillpot”) and immortalized in a drinking song called “The Brown Jug.”

 

 

“In boozing about ’twas his pride to excel, and amongst jolly topers he bore off the bell,” the song says of Toby, who is described as “a thirsty old soul” who sits “with a friend and a pipe, puffing sorrow away.” Toby dies suddenly, and his body eventually deteriorates into the clay beneath the grave. The story ends after a potter happens upon that patch of clay and uses it to make a brown jug for ale.

 

From Jug to Mug
As time progressed, potters started producing receptacles that bore likenesses of other people and characters, too. While the original Toby jugs depicted a whole man and featured a spout for pouring liquid, many later iterations were drinking mugs that showed only the subject’s face.

 

 

The faces were somewhat caricaturish, which may explain why the word mug is often used to describe an unattractive face, a funny facial expression, or even a foolish person. Since not many suspects manage to look their best in a mug shot, the colloquialism seems especially apt.

 

Source: Why Do We Use the Word ‘Mug’ as a Synonym for ‘Face’?

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - BODY NICKNAMES

Did you know... Imagine trying to tell someone who doesn’t speak English well that after having your wisdom teeth removed, you slipped and hit your noodle, then banged your funny bone. It sounds more like a children’s rhyme than a real-life accident, but quirky anatomical vocabulary has been commonplace for centuries. Let’s dive deeper into the history of some unique nicknames for body parts in English.

 

1. Noodle

“Noodle” is another word for “head,” but a version of this nickname has been around for centuries longer than the better-known, pasta-related usage of the word (which first showed up in the mid-18th century). Various spellings of “noddle” (meaning “head” or “back of head”) have been used since at least the mid-15th century, and the term turned into “noodle” by the mid-18th century (probably because of the similarity to the pasta word). The slang, which came from the Latin nodulus (“small knot”), was originally used pejoratively, in the context of stupidity. Today it has a milder usage, but it’s still not wholly complimentary. Someone might say, “Use your noodle!” to urge another to pay more attention.

 

2. Wisdom Teeth

Our third and final set of four molars usually appears between the ages of 17 and 25. The “wise” name came from the timing of when the teeth are typically cut (that is, when they break through the gums). As adolescents approach adulthood, their knowledge (or wisdom) supposedly grows — as do their teeth.

 

The term “wisdom teeth” has been used in English since the mid-19th century, but people have been nicknaming these molars for thousands of years. The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates was one of the first documented sources to name the teeth, referring to them as sophronisteres, or “prudent teeth.” In ancient Rome, the Latin phrase was dentes sapientiae, which means “wisdom teeth.” The Latin phrase was translated directly into English. Several other languages borrow the same sentiment for their versions of “wisdom teeth”:

 

Spanish: Muelas del juicio (“teeth of judgment”)
French: Dents de sagesse (“wisdom teeth”)
Arabic: Ders-al-a’qel (“teeth of the mind”)
Japanese: Oyashirazu (“unknown to the parents”)
Korean: Salangni (“love teeth”)
Turkish: Yirmi yaş dişleri (“20th-year teeth”)

 

3. Achilles Tendon

The Achilles tendon, located at the back of the leg, connects the calf muscle to the heel. Its name is rooted in Greek mythology, after the hero Achilles, whose one vulnerability was a spot located just above his heel. Legend says that when Achilles was a baby, his mother dipped him into the River Styx to make him immortal and impervious to injury. However, she held baby Achilles by his heel, which left him vulnerable there and eventually led to a mortal injury. The phrase “Achilles’ heel” is not an anatomical term, but it metaphorically refers to a weak point.

 

4. Funny Bone

If you’ve ever accidentally hit your funny bone on the edge of a table, you know the tingling sensation is anything but funny. This spot at the back of the elbow gets its name from an anatomical play on words. It’s not a literal bone; rather, it’s the spot where the ulnar nerve rests unprotected against the humerus (the upper arm bone), making it especially susceptible to pain. The wordplay comes from the homophones “humerus” (referring to the bone) and “humorous” (an adjective meaning “funny”). Using “funny bone” to describe this part of the elbow began in English in the 1820s.

 

5. Adam’s Apple

 

A visible bump at the front of the throat is a laryngeal prominence, better known as an “Adam’s apple.” Everyone has this piece of cartilage that covers the voice box (or larynx), but it grows in size during puberty and typically becomes larger in males, which is where the moniker stems from. In Judeo-Christian tradition, Adam and Eve were the first man and woman. Their story says that a forbidden fruit (often depicted as an apple) became stuck in Adam’s throat when he ate from the Tree of Knowledge after being forbidden to do so by God, and this is the origin of the term “Adam’s apple.” The anatomical nickname has been used in English to describe a laryngeal prominence since the mid-18th century.

 

 

Source: The Stories Behind Funny Nicknames for Body Parts

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - SALT

Did you know.... There are few household supplies more useful than salt. It’s not just a mandatory ingredient in the kitchen; it’s also a garden helper, skin exfoliator, brass polisher, ice melter, and much more. We started using salt to keep our food fresh eons before refrigeration existed. Many spiritual traditions even use it to banish or ward off evil spirits. This is all to say: We would be absolutely lost without it, or at least out of jerky. Let these eight facts about salt add a bit of seasoning to your day.

 

1. You Need Salt to Live

Sodium helps your body manage water; without it, your cells can start to swell. This condition is called hyponatremia, and it can cause serious medical problems. It’s generally a good idea to watch your salt intake to make sure that you don’t get too much — but sodium is really about balance, and it’s possible to not get enough.

Hyponatremia is often caused by medication and certain underlying health problems, but it can also be caused by drinking too much water (this is very hard to do) or alcohol.

 

2. Humans Have Been Harvesting Salt for Around 8,000 Years

Salt is both delicious and essential, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that humans have been collecting it for thousands of years. In 2004, researchers in Romania found a salt collection well that was later carbon-dated to the early Neolithic period, somewhere between 6050 and 5500 BCE.
 

3. Egyptians Used Salt to Preserve the Dead

Ancient Egyptians used a mummification process to preserve dead bodies, now known as mummies. Specially trained priests removed all excess moisture to prevent decay, and were so successful that we can still see their work thousands of years later. After removing the organs, these priests would pack the body in natron — a sodium salt compound also used in cooking and medicine — inside and out, and wait for it to dry out before washing off the salt and wrapping the body in linen.

 

4. Himalayan Pink Salt Gets Its Color From Iron (and Other Minerals)

Himalayan salt is harvested from salt mines in Pakistan. Unlike standard table salt, or even sea salt, it has a rosy color that’s highly sought-after for both lamps and kitchen tables, but its cult following isn’t because of the color alone — it’s what causes the color, too. The salt contains trace minerals such as calcium, potassium, magnesium, and iron. But while it looks pretty, there’s no evidence that it’s any healthier (or unhealthier) than table salt, especially since there are far more abundant sources of those minerals in most people’s diets.

 

5. People Have Gone to War Over Salt

Throughout history, salt has been considered a precious commodity — so much so that several wars have broken out over salt mining, selling, and taxation. A few notable examples include a 14th-century war between Venice and Padua over a Venetian salt monopoly, a 16th-century revolt against the Papal Army by the city of Perugia over salt pricing, and a 19th-century conflict between Mexican Americans, who had long been using a salt flat as communal property when it was part of Mexico, and a cadre of white American businessmen who decided to lay claim to it.

 

6. Gandhi Led a Massive Nonviolent Protest About Salt

Mahatma Gandhi is famous for his use of nonviolent protest against British rule in India. One of his biggest efforts was the Salt March in March and April of 1930. Through a series of laws, Great Britain had made it illegal for Indian people to sell or even produce their own salt, forcing them to buy expensive and heavily taxed salt from Britain. He started his 240-mile walk from his ashram near Ahmedabad with a group of followers on March 12, stopping at different villages and picking up more people on the way to Dandi, a town on the Arabian Sea, where he intended to make salt from the seawater there. By the time they reached their destination, the crowd had grown to tens of thousands. The coastline was full of naturally occurring salt deposits, and police, knowing the crowd was coming, had stomped them into the mud — but Gandhi picked a small lump from the beach, which was enough to break the law. Salt-making as civil disobedience spread throughout India, and around 60,000 people were arrested by British authorities as a result.

 

7. “Salt” and “Salary” Have the Same Root Word

“Salt” in Latin is sal, which eventually grew into both “salt” and “salary” in English. Roman soldiers were given an allowance for salt purchase — a salārium. That eventually made its way into Anglo-French as salarie, which was, in turn, borrowed into English as “salary.” Just a fun fact to remember the next time you use your salary to buy salt.

 

8. Sea Turtles Cry Out Excess Salt

If you look closely, you may notice a sea turtle crying when it comes ashore. It’s not because it’s sad — it’s because their bodies take in more salt from the sea than they can excrete in their urine. They have a gland in each eye that excretes salt into their tears. It’s always working, but it only looks like tears outside the water. Some butterflies in the western Amazon, low on reliable sources of sodium, gather around river turtles and drink their tears, too.
 

 

Source: Zesty Facts About Salt

Edited January 13 by DarkRavie

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - MUZZY

 

Did you know... “These children aren’t French. They’re American.” If you were a child of the early 1990s, you probably remember this phrase and were possibly disturbed by what followed—a one-minute commercial for Muzzy, a green-tufted animated alien who endeavored to teach foreign languages to kids.

 

The VHS program promised to educate children on their parents’ choice of languages, including Italian, Spanish, French, and German. Kids would be enthralled by Muzzy’s adventures and idiosyncratic behavior—he ate clocks and other metal objects—all while learning new words and phrases. All viewers had to do was pay $28.17 a month for six months (plus shipping) and let Muzzy guide their offspring into becoming bilingual prodigies. 

 

But that wasn’t Muzzy’s original objective.

 

Language Learning
Muzzy originated at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) back in 1986 as part of the broadcaster’s efforts to reach an international audience through educational tools. Thanks to his nonspecific appearance, Muzzy belonged to no particular ethnicity and could thus be utilized as a global language tutor. For about £75 (which would be £213.56, or about $272, today), consumers in other countries could order a 75-minute video along with six workbooks. Muzzy’s goal was to teach English to those speaking Spanish, Japanese, German, Arabic, and other languages.

 

 

The video was animated by Richard Taylor, who was known in British animation circles for having helmed a successful series of educational shorts known as “Charley Says.” (Charley might, for example, caution a child about playing with matches or talking to strangers.) Taylor developed Muzzy with producer Joe Hambrook. The writing was credited to Wendy Harris, who told The Guardian in 1986 that making a totally cross-cultural premise was hard to achieve. “It is a bit difficult to be utterly international, probably impossible,” she said.

 

Still, the makers of Muzzy tried. Officially titled Muzzy in Gondoland, the plot sees the green alien Muzzy arrive from outer space and become embroiled in a convoluted love affair involving a royal princess named Sylvia, who is pursued by laborer Bob the Gardener as well as the king’s malevolent scientist, Corvax. Muzzy’s aptitude with technology is able to free the king after he's trapped inside a computer; he's also able to thwart Corvax, whose obsession with Sylvia prompts him to create clones of her. (She and Bob soon marry.) Throughout, the characters demonstrate (and repeat) common words and phrases, like big, small, and garden.

 

Muzzy is a lumbering but genial figure, a cross between Frosty the Snowman and the gremlin taunting William Shatner from the wing of the plane in the “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” episode of The Twilight Zone. For reasons unknown, Muzzy also exhibits pica, or the ingestion of non-edible objects, like clocks and parking meters. As all this unfolds, a human cartoon named Norman interrupts with repetitive language lessons. (“Good morning.” “Good morning.” “Good morning.” “Good afternoon…”) It's purposely tedious, and were it not for its language objectives, probably capable of provoking a migraine.

 

 

 

Muzzy’s success as an ambassador for the Queen’s English is difficult to assess. In 1990, it was reported Muzzy wound up on Russian television and had been exported to 20 countries. It also merited a sequel, 1989’s Muzzy Comes Back. In a 1990 Associated Press report, secondary English learning was said to be an $11 billion industry, with the UK taking a sixth of the market. How much of that wound up in the furry hands of Muzzy is unclear.

 

What was more obvious was the opportunity to invert Muzzy. Instead of teaching English, why not have him teach foreign languages to Americans? The idea was pitched by BBC sales agent Federico Mallo, who felt the North American market was untapped. This led to a direct-mail campaign in which Muzzy in Gondoland was edited into smaller episodes and for a variety of secondary learning. The resulting television and print ads are how most American kids came to know Muzzy in the 1990s.

 

The BBC’s overall pitch was that second and third languages would become increasingly important in the coming decades. Muzzy was a good way to give them a leg up on the competition. “They’re going to watch TV anyway—four, maybe five hours a day—so why not put some of that time to good constructive use?” one ad read. “Muzzy, the BBC’s world-renowned audio-video language course, has already given thousands of 2- to 12-year-olds a huge head start over kids who waste their time watching mindless sitcoms, and worse.”

 

Muzzy, it went on, “teaches by repetition. Every time your children watch big friendly Muzzy rescue Princess Sylvia from the wily Corvax or help the king count the plums in his orchard, they’ll learn another word, another phrase. Soon they’ll be chattering away in Spanish or asking you questions in French.”

 

Muzzy Lives

In a story published on Medium, Mallo said that marketing Muzzy in the U.S., Spain, and Italy was a success, with about 22 million copies of the program sold. Muzzy eventually became a touchstone of nostalgia for many kids, who went on to grow up with a memory of Muzzy only as a peculiar television ad that lacked context.

 

 

 

But he’s never really gone away. In 2005, the course came with a free plush Muzzy doll; the BBC gave him a computer animated makeover in 2013. He’s also been known to make costumed appearances, including one in 2018 at Indiana’s Duneland Family YMCA.

 

But Muzzy has not been totally without controversy. One Reddit user in the r/conspiracy subreddit presented a video culled from Muzzy footage in which an animation of the English alphabet appears to contain a series of subliminal images, including a castle made out of human flesh. (You can see the visuals in the above video when the letter h appears.) Perhaps kids were right to be suspicious of Muzzy. Or, peut-être que les enfants avaient raison de se méfier de Muzzy.

 

 

Source: Remembering Muzzy, the Clock-Eating Alien Who Haunted ’90s Kids

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - LOST WORKS OF ART

Ludwig van Beethoven’s ‘Trio in E Flat Major’ 

Did you know... While specific events in history have played a major part in the disappearance of many classical works of art, literature, and music (the burning of the Library at Alexandria, for instance), sometimes these things are lost to time, poor preservation, or deliberate destruction. And sometimes, they eventually show up in unexpected places or under interesting circumstances, like these six did.

 

1. La Royale Maison de Savoie // Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, and other wildly popular novels, was occasionally pressed to write something quickly for money. This seems to be the case with La Royale Maison de Savoie (The Royal House of Savoy), a 2500-page story that was serialized in the magazine Le Constitutionnel in 1854. It was so rushed, in fact, that neither the National Library of France nor the Alexandre Dumas Museum had any knowledge of it. Two historians browsing an antique bookstore in Turin, Italy, discovered it in 1998; since then, it has been published again in France.

 

2. Profile of a Young Fiancée // Attributed to Leonardo da Vinci

This chalk and ink portrait of a young woman in Renaissance garb was initially thought to have been drawn by an unknown artist, probably in Germany in the 19th century. In 1998, Profile of a Young Fiancée sold to a private collector for a surprisingly high $21,850 at a Christie’s New York auction. Over the next 10 years, a team of experts including Nicholas Turner, the former curator of drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, closely examined the work and determined portrait was probably drawn by Leonardo da Vinci around 1485 (and may be depicting the Milanese noblewoman Bianca Maria Sforza). The attribution to Leonardo remains controversial, though. If it’s truly a Leonardo original, its value today could be well over $100 million.

 

3. “War Thoughts at Home” // Robert Frost

This 35-line poem by Robert Frost remained unknown to all but his friend Frederic Melcher, a book dealer, until 2006—88 years after it was written. Melcher donated his collection of the poet’s letters and books to the University of Virginia; the items hadn’t even been cataloged when Robert Stilling, a graduate student, heard about them. While skimming through the stacks, Stilling came across correspondence from 1947 describing an unpublished poem written by Frost. Curious, Stilling began looking through the collection and, within minutes, found “War Thoughts at Home” scrawled inside a copy of Frost’s 1914 book North of Boston, an inscription Melcher had deemed “really not important” in his letter to a museum asking for interesting items.

 

4. Trio in E Flat Major // Ludwig van Beethoven

 

Ludwig van Beethoven composed this untitled work for violin, viola, and cello in 1792, then rearranged it for piano, violin, and cello about eight years later. With only the first movement and 43 measures of the second movement completed, the project was abandoned and subsequently lost for over 100 years. German musicologist Willy Hess published the handwritten manuscript in a scholarly review in 1920, garnering almost no attention from working musicians. The first known performance of the 12-minute piece was on March 1, 2009—almost 182 years after Beethoven’s death. For the occasion, the Beethoven Project Trio borrowed a 1703 Stradivarius violin and 1739 Guarnerius cello, both made long before Beethoven was born in 1770.

 

5. With Custer on the Little Bighorn // William O. Taylor

William Othniel Taylor was member of the cavalry detachment serving under Major Marcus Reno at the infamous Battle of the Little Bighorn in June 1876. He took part in the initial attack on the Lakota and Cheyenne camp along the Little Bighorn River and survived the utter defeat, three days later, of George Armstrong Custer’s forces. Taylor wrote his personal account of the battle around 1917, six years before he died, and stored it in a metal box, which his wife later gave to her niece in Connecticut. The manuscript became part of a museum’s archives that was auctioned off in the mid-1990s. Editor Greg Martin bought the manuscript and published it for the first time in 1996.

 

6. Panels from Struggle: From the History of the American People // Jacob Lawrence

After being purchased by a private collector, this 30-panel narrative work by Jacob Lawrence, the leading Black modernist artist of the 20th century, was auctioned off piece by piece in the 1960s. The whereabouts of many of the panels remained unknown for decades, until a 2020 exhibition of Lawrence’s work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York rekindled interest in the artwork. A visitor to the exhibition came to a shocking realization: She thought she had seen one of the missing panels hanging on the wall in her elderly neighbors’ living room. Museum experts examined the work and deemed it the long-lost Panel 16, depicting the Revolutionary War-era Shays’ Rebellion; the owners had bought it at a neighborhood charity auction in 1960. Amazingly, the news of that find prompted another one. A nurse on the Upper West Side read about the rediscovery of Panel 16 and thought it looked pretty similar to painting that had been hanging in her dining room for 20 years, a gift from her mother-in-law. Experts later concluded that the work was the errant Panel 28, a painting of people immigrating to America that Lawrence titled The Emigrants — 1821-1830 (106,308). Three more panels in the 30-part Struggle series are still missing.

 

 

Source: Lost Works of Art That Finally Turned Up

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - TRAFFIC

Did you know.... As more private vehicles than ever hit crowded freeways and spend more time on the road, more of them get stuck in traffic. Over 90% of American households have access to at least one car, so chances are you’ve been caught in a gridlock a few times before. What causes congested traffic — especially the jams that seem to come from nowhere? Is traffic getting worse? How much time do we spend in traffic, anyway? These seven facts about traffic will give you something to think about when the freeway slows down to a crawl.

 

1. The Average American Lost 51 Hours in Traffic in 2022

According to the traffic analytics firm INRIX, Americans spent, on average, 51 hours stuck in traffic in 2022. That may seem like a lot, but the United Kingdom had it worse: Brits lost 80 hours on average. Americans’ traffic delays also cost an average $546 in fuel costs, INRIX says. All of those numbers are a huge jump from the year before, but that doesn’t mean much, because …

 

2. Traffic Dropped During the Covid-19 Pandemic

With many workers required to stay home at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, fewer cars were on the road, and congestion dropped. The Texas A&M Transportation Institute noted that in 2020, January and February were pretty normal — but in March, after COVID lockdowns started to take effect in much of the country, traffic looked more like it did in the early 1990s. By the fall, traffic had started to creep back up to around 2005 levels. Even after congestion started to ramp back up, however, the effects of the pandemic lingered. According to INRIX, some major American cities, including New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, still saw decreases in 2022 compared to 2019.

 

3. Chicago May Have the Worst Traffic in the U.S.

Unlike some cities, Chicago’s traffic is slightly worse than it was before 2020 — and according to INRIX’s annual global rankings, it’s the most congested city in the United States by a significant margin, with the average commuter spending 155 hours in traffic delays in 2022. On a global scale, it’s nearly tied with London, which INRIX analyzed to be the highest-traffic city in the world.

 

4. Traffic Really Does Come Out of Nowhere Sometimes

If you drive, chances are you’ve ended up in traffic with no clear cause — there are no accidents or construction, and yet somehow you’re at a total standstill. These are called phantom traffic jams or jamitons, and experts say you can help avoid them by not riding anyone’s bumper. These jams happen when one driver abruptly slows or brakes, and the next driver slows or stops to avoid a collision. This travels like a wave, usually 100 to 1,000 yards long, even as the drivers at the front of the line return to normal speeds. The easiest way to prevent phantom traffic jams, according to multiple studies, is to keep about an even distance between the car in front of you and the car behind you — so avoid tailgating, but also keep an eye on your rearview mirror. Giving cars more space to gradually adjust speed won’t completely eliminate phantom jams, but it will make them less likely to occur.

 

5. Traffic Lights Used to be Manually Operated

The first traffic light was gas-powered and installed in London on December 9, 1868, just outside the Houses of Parliament. Automated lights were still several decades away, so the signal had to be manually operated by a police officer 24 hours a day. This first light lasted only a month. While London wouldn’t attempt to have traffic lights again until the city installed automatic ones, other cities adopted manual traffic lights and spent decades staffing them. The first electric light was installed in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1914.

 

6. Car Accidents Are More Likely Right After the Daylight Savings Switch

If you’re not a morning person, the days immediately following the switch to daylight saving time — or “spring forward” — might be a struggle, especially that first Monday morning. With so many sleepy drivers on the road, accidents are more likely. The average American’s risk of getting in a car accident rises by around 6% that day, along with an increase in other potentially fatal events such as heart attacks and strokes.

 

7. A Traffic Jam in China Lasted More Than a Week

In August 2010, motorists outside Beijing got stuck in a real doozy of a traffic jam, caused by a harrowing conjunction of a construction project and too many cars on an already overburdened freeway. The jam stretched for 60 miles and lasted around 11 days. Some individual cars were stuck on the road for more than five days. Local villagers took advantage of the situation by selling food and water to drivers at a premium, including water bottles marked up to around 10 times their original price. Officials estimated the jam could have lasted a couple of weeks longer, which thankfully did not come to fruition — although major traffic jams continued to be a problem.
 

 

 

Source: Packed Facts About Traffic

[warriorpirate]

On 1/13/2024 at 12:35 PM, DarkRavie said:

4. Himalayan Pink Salt Gets Its Color From Iron (and Other Minerals)

Himalayan salt is harvested from salt mines in Pakistan. Unlike standard table salt, or even sea salt, it has a rosy color that’s highly sought-after for both lamps and kitchen tables, but its cult following isn’t because of the color alone — it’s what causes the color, too. The salt contains trace minerals such as calcium, potassium, magnesium, and iron. But while it looks pretty, there’s no evidence that it’s any healthier (or unhealthier) than table salt, especially since there are far more abundant sources of those minerals in most people’s diets.

 

Fun fact: Himalayan Pink Salt isn't actually from the Himalayas. 

The Khewra Salt mines are to south of the Himalayas, in the Kallar Kahaar mountains, which is a separate and much smaller mountain range. The distance between them is close to around 500 kilometers.  

[Zemekis]

6 hours ago, warriorpirate said:

 

Fun fact: Himalayan Pink Salt isn't actually from the Himalayas. 

The Khewra Salt mines are to south of the Himalayas, in the Kallar Kahaar mountains, which is a separate and much smaller mountain range. The distance between them is close to around 500 kilometers.  

Wtf, I had no idea.

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - FANCY PIGEONS

Did you know.... For at least 500 years—and maybe more—pigeon fanciers have bred wonderfully bizarre-looking pigeons. Today, there hundreds of breeds and colors, and, just like cats and dogs, there are competitions to see who most closely matches their “breed standard.” Here are some of the gems of the fancy pigeon world.

 

1. Fantail

These flashy birds are probably the most recognizable and well-known of the fancy pigeons. Their peacock-like tails, prominent chests, and curved necks are a hit in bird shows and fairground livestock shows around the world. They serve more purpose than just flashiness, though. Racing or homing pigeon breeders often keep fantails at the front of the dovecote while they’re training their new prospects. The highly visible fantails guide the young ones home like a beacon. Some fantail breeds have less erect tail feathers (such as the Garden Fantails) and are much more capable in flight than the Exhibition Fantails. All of them are missing the oil preening gland at the base of their tails though, so they can be prone to get cold when they get wet.

 

2. Scandaroon

Possibly one of the oldest breeds of pigeon bred for its looks (in addition to its utility as a food source), the Scandaroon is believed to date back to the time of Alexander the Great. They have large, downward-curved bills, which are covered by a large wattle (knobby fleshy covering) on top, their eyes are bright and accented, and surrounded by well-developed ceres (a fleshy red ring). They’re part white, or piebald, and larger than your average street pigeon.

 

3. Jacobin

 

These were named because of their “mane,” which resembled the cowls of Jacobin monks back when the breed first gained popularity. These days, the mane of most Jacobin types is so pronounced you can’t see the head of the pigeon from the side. Aside from their giant mane, these are slender, shapely creatures, with long legs, a slim tail, and an upright posture. The birds who are most “showy” and who like to fluff up their feathers and strut are highly valued in competition.

 

4. Frillback

These breeds are the earliest known pigeons to be bred solely for ornamental purposes, and not for meat. The curly top flight feathers appear to be almost lacy, but come at the expense of effective flight. While they’re able to fly much better than chickens, and can fly “normally” to escape predators or get out of a rut, they have to expend more energy than your average pigeon. This factor, along with their larger size, means these birds generally prefer to walk or run, rather than fly. These fancy feathers also mean that the frillback breeds have no water resistance and are highly susceptible to cold if wet, like the fantails. The frillback mutation is autosomal dominant, so if one parent has just one copy of the gene, there’s a 50/50 chance that the offspring will have frilled feathers. The dominance of this gene means that the frill trait has been transferred to some types and families of other fancy breeds.

 

5. Cropper

All pigeons inflate their crops (an organ in their throat that grinds up food) while strutting in front of others, but the croppers take this to the extreme. Their crops are highly developed, and they love to puff their chests out when they’re in play, and not just when they’re trying to find a mate. Despite what looks like a top-heavy bird, the fact that the crop is filled with air means that they’re not going to tip over at any moment. Most Croppers have been bred to have a long back, stand up straight, and for their tendency to puff up. Some have other body shapes, but all are bred with the inflatable crop in mind. These breeds actually have more vertebrae and a larger ribcage than the Rock dove. Croppers are also some of the more affectionate pigeons, known to bond and play with their handlers.

 

6. Hen

 

Bred to look like their namesake, the “Hen” breeds, such as the small German Modena and the massive King Pigeon, look much like chickens on stilts. Their short tails are upright, and their plump bodies and necks curve in such a way that they look more like poultry than pigeons. The larger members of this family are generally ground-dwellers and not prone to fly off, and are often allowed outside in chicken-like coops.

 

7. Archangel

 

This is one of the most striking “color” breeds. Their iridescent bodies and contrasting wings create an impressive sight, and it’s not hard to see why this breed was the most popular fancy pigeon in Germany and the Rhine for decades. While the color specifications for the breed standard have changed over the years, the body type has remained largely the same: a stately, large bird, with a well-formed head and proportionate beak. There are many color breeds out there, and they’re some of the most popular “starter” pigeons.

 

8. Trumpeters 

 

This diverse group of breeds is showcased primarily for their odd vocalizations and calls, and is known as the “voice” pigeons. Some of the breeds sound trumpet-like, while others make drumming or laughing sounds, but all have sounds that differ from your average pigeon. Though their sounds are important, they’re also judged on looks. Some, like the Arabian trumpeter, look like a fairly standard pigeon. Others, like the Bokhara trumpeter, look like their head was chopped off and they squished another pigeon beneath their ostentatiously-feathered feet. (An English trumpeter is featured above.)

 

9. Tumblers

One of the most popular and prized show birds in the Victorian era was a “performance bird”—the Almond Tumbler. Like other Tumblers, the birds were originally bred because of their curious flight patterns. After flying very high up, they do a series of very fast, very impressive back flips, before flying straight up again. Of course, this bizarre flight would make them prime prey for hawks and falcons, but for their breeders, the most brilliant feathers and fastest spins are exactly what’s wanted for the next generation. One family of this breed, the Short-Faced Tumblers (of which the Almond Tumbler is a member), is loved for its very “dainty” look, but this look is at the expense of beak length; the tiny beaks of the family (and the Short-Faced types in other breeds and families) mean that they can no longer effectively feed their young, and the squabs must be hand-raised.

 

 

Source: Bizarre and Beautiful Fancy Pigeons

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - STREET NAMES

Did you know.... Whether you grew up in a big city or in a lewdly named small town, you may have wondered how the local streets got their names. Why might all of the roads in a new residential area be named after trees or characters from the legend of Robin Hood, for example?

 

For the most part, real estate and subdivision developers have the privilege of naming new streets in the United States. The name is submitted to the city for review, at which point the public service agencies, including the police department, fire department, and post office, are given the opportunity to veto the name if they feel it creates any confusion.

 

“The developer submits street names to the city through the relevant departments for review,” Catherine Nicholas, CEO of the CADO Real Estate Group in San Diego, told Zillow. “The building, engineering, and public works departments all comment, but the departments that have the most input and veto power are police and fire.” That’s because those agencies need to be able to pinpoint an emergency based on the street names, so the proposed names and intersections need to be unique for the area.

 

While developers can feel free to submit any name they’d like for a new street, such as the name of their child, cities usually have guidelines and standards for certain areas that require street names to be of a specific theme.

 

Streets in Henderson, Nevada

 

This is why, for example, you see a large quantity of streets named after trees in one particular section of Philadelphia, or U.S. states represented in avenue names in Washington, D.C. If the proposed name of a new street does not fit that theme, there’s a good chance it will be rejected, but how strict these policies are depends on the individual jurisdiction. If you happen to be a developer and want to name a street after yourself, you’d have better luck in a new suburb than in an established city.

 

Fun fact: The most popular U.S. street name is Second or 2nd Street, because First Street is often replaced with Main Street or something similar. Now read up on a few of the strangest street names in the country.

 

Source: How Do Streets Get Named?
 

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - NO LONGER HEAR

Did you know... Decades ago, the world didn’t just look different; it sounded different, too. We communicated, watched our favorite movies, and did mundane tasks using different devices, and as technology has progressed, so has the noise we hear every day. A smartphone buzzing on a table would have been an unfamiliar noise 20 years ago — and a lot of stuff we used back then has fallen silent today. Take a listen down memory lane with these eight sounds that we don’t hear much anymore, from old-time internet accessories to vintage AV equipment.

 

1. Dial-Up Modem

Back in the early days of the internet, your connection worked through your landline phone. Instead of having your internet on most of the time, you had to deliberately connect by asking your computer to dial in. That started a telltale series of intense-sounding noises, beginning with a dialing sound and escalating into bouncing beep-boops and several pitches of static. This song-and-dance served a purpose: The sounds were the various complicated steps of computers trying to talk to one another using borrowed infrastructure. Because the connection tied up your phone line, if you didn’t have a second line and somebody tried to call you, they’d get another sound you don’t hear too often nowadays …

 

2. Busy Signal

It’s now really easy to put someone on hold to answer another call. But back when nearly everyone had a landline, it was common to call someone and hear a series of beeps indicating that they were on another call. Call waiting eventually became available for nonbusiness landlines, but it still wasn’t as easy to switch over as it is on a smartphone, since there wasn’t any visual interface to guide you.

 

3. “You’ve Got Mail!

America Online, better known as AOL, used to be America’s biggest internet provider, and was so ubiquitous in everyday culture that you didn’t have to be a subscriber to know what it sounded like to get an email via the service. A male voice semi-enthusiastically stating, “You’ve got mail!” was so well known that it even lent its name to an A-list rom-com.

 

4. “Accidentally Called a Fax Machine” Sound

Having to key in a number every time you called someone — as opposed to just finding someone in your contact list or making Siri call someone for you — meant that mistakes were inevitably made. Sometimes you’d read the wrong line of a business card, dial the wrong number, or just catch someone at the wrong time and get a screeching ringing sound, indicating that there was a fax machine on the other end.

 

5. TV Test Pattern Bee

If you still have TV service, there’s something on 24/7, even if it's infomercials. Years ago, however, channels would eventually pack it in for the night and display a test pattern — a series of colorful bars designed for calibrating a color TV or, on the other end, a camera. (Before color TVs, they looked much different.) This was often accompanied by an obnoxious long beep for calibrating audio.

 

6. Rewinding Tape Noise

From the 1970s until DVDs took over, most home video was on VHS tapes, which used a length of magnetic tape to store audio and video. Tape moved from one spool to the other as the video played, so if you wanted to go back to the beginning, you’d have to rewind it, which made a distinct whirring sound. The same thing applied to audiocassettes, although you could flip those over and play the other side to get back to square one.

 

7. Rotary Telephone Dial

When you dial a phone — even a landline — you’re typically pressing buttons, not actually dialing. Rotary telephones predate the touch-tone models most people are used to, and had an actual round dial, with different points corresponding to different numbers. To call someone, you had to turn the dial from each number, let go, and wait for the dial to return to the starting point before putting in the next digit. The rotation of the dial made a kind of rapid clicking sound.

 

8. Adding Machine Typing and Tape Sound

If you needed to crunch some numbers on a calculator and required a record of your work, you used to need an adding machine — a calculator that printed out each equation and sum as you typed. Then you could use it as a receipt or go back and check your work. It made a distinct series of sounds: an electric typewriter-esque tapping as you entered the numbers, then a big crunch when you told it to add or subtract and it went to the next line. It was a pretty common sight (and sound), especially in stores, in banks, and around tax time, until everybody had a computer in their pocket that could do the same thing.

 

 

Source: Sounds You Don’t Hear Anymore

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - G.I. JOE'S USS 'FLAGG' PLAY SET

Did you know... The Millennium Falcon. Barbie’s Malibu Dreamhouse. Different kids have different ideas of what could be considered their most coveted toy. But for a period of time in the 1980s, the most awe-inspiring item on holiday wish lists was the USS Flagg from Hasbro’s G.I. Joe line, an aircraft carrier that stretched to an astounding 7 feet, 6 inches long, 3 feet wide, and 3 feet tall.

 

At virtually the same dimensions as a twin bed, it was one of the biggest play sets ever marketed. It wasn’t a question of whether kids would want it—they certainly would—but if they’d have room for it. (And their if parents could afford it.)

 

Planting a Flagg
First introduced in 1964 as a line of 12-inch action figures, G.I. Joe quickly established itself as an adolescent fever dream of bloodless combat. The Joes were an elite unit with fuzzy beards and real fabric fatigues that were prepared to take on any foreign or domestic threat. (In the 1960s, that often meant Barbie, Mr. Potato Head, or the family dog.)

 

But by the 1970s, the Joe line was losing steam, and by 1978, it was canceled outright due to flagging sales. It wouldn’t be revived until 1982, when Hasbro committed to two key strategies. First, they reduced the size of the figures to 3.75 inches tall, so they were able to fit inside vehicles and play sets that would never have been practical in the 12-inch line.

 

They also collaborated with Marvel to create a rich narrative around the characters that would be explored in “file cards” detailing their traits as well as a comic book series. Instead of firing missiles at family pets, the Joes now opposed a fictional terrorist organization, Cobra—a fight that would soon spill over to an animated series, G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero.

 

The result was a massive resurgence of interest in Joe, which earned $50 million in revenue its first year back and went on to become one of the leading toy brands of the 1980s. The success also allowed toy designers Ron Rudat and Greg Bernstein more leeway to get creative with the line. The figures were given more points of articulation; the vehicles and play sets, which were initially made partially of cardboard, grew more elaborate.

 

 

 

All of it was in alignment with the philosophy of Joe creator Stanley Weston, who originally sold Hasbro on the project in 1963 by insisting the business of Joe would revolve around accessories—much like Mattel’s Barbie did a brisk business in outfits.

 

The true test of that theory would come with the giant aircraft carrier. The Flagg, which was named after original Joe team leader, Brigadier General Lawrence J. Flagg, grew out of a visit to Quonset Naval Base in Rhode Island, where Joe designers were able to observe aircraft carriers up close.

 

“The base was still operational at the time and I remember that I or [Hasbro marketing executive] Kirk Bozigian had gotten permission from the Naval Base to visit,” Rudat told author Mark Bellomo in The Ultimate Guide to G.I. Joe: 1982 to 1994 (2009). “I don’t remember the name of the ship but I remember going down below on the second deck and it was massive. We also went to the film department and received photos of the ship. We also rode on one of the aircraft elevators to the top deck. This is the kind of reference we liked when creating a vehicle … [today’s] designers don’t do the research like we did.”

 

The design for the Flagg, which the Ultimate Guide credits to Hasbro designer Gregory Berndtson, was a marvel of detail. In addition to having the necessary tarmac for Joe vehicles like the Skystriker, the Flagg also featured an arrestor cable to “catch” landing aircraft; a public address system that allowed kids to bark orders; a lifeboat that could launch in the event of attack; a number of rooms for crew members to plot their next move; and several cannons and missiles ready to be deployed at the first sign of trouble.

 

Too Big to Fail
The USS Flagg went on sale in late 1985 for a steep $99.97 to $139.99 (worth about $283 to $396 today), depending on the retailer. It was a considerable ask given that kids could grab Joe figures for as little as $3 and some vehicles for under $4. A Joe Headquarters Command Center was a relative bargain at $28.88.

 

Almost immediately, the Flagg became a kind of neighborhood status symbol—one that separated the Joe “haves” from the have-nots. The steep price meant a lot of parents crossed it out from their kids’ holiday wish lists. Those who got one were perceived as part of an elite class of toy collector.

 

“When I post pictures of it in [social media] groups, I get offers, and there are always people that say it is the greatest gift they never got and wish they owned one,” G.I. Joe fan Jason Lopez told Coffee or Die Magazine in 2021. “I consider myself very lucky because I know people that have owned it when they were younger and no longer have it.”

 

Cost was just one concern: The other was finding the space for the massive platform. “The ship stayed at my grandma’s house because they had the space for it,” Lopez said.

 

 

 

Unlike most action toys of its type, G.I. Joe had incredible stamina: The original 3.75-inch line ran from 1982 to 1994. Still, by 1987, the Flagg was down to $79.99 or even as little as $60, a possible sign that Joe fans (and parents) found the play set a bit too much of a logistical and financial challenge.

 

Decades later, Hasbro considered reviving the Flagg, showing off a prototype toy during a Joe convention in 2011. It ultimately didn’t proceed, but the prospect continues to come up: In 2022, Hasbro Joe Product Design Director Lenny Panzica said that the current 6-inch Joe line makes a Flagg an untenable prospect.

 

“Even before this crazy inflation, we ran numbers and it’s [not] 1983 anymore,” Panzica said. Emily Bader, a Joe Associate Brand Manager, added that a carrier scaled to a 6-inch figure would be 20 feet long.

 

Joe fans seeking their own carrier are therefore relegated to the collector’s community. Today, a USS Flagg in its original box can sell for $5000; a mostly complete set can fetch $2000; and even some random parts are worth hundreds of dollars. Nostalgia rarely comes cheap.

 

 

Source: When Hasbro Drove ‘80s Kids Wild With G.I. Joe’s USS ‘Flagg’ Play Set

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - MCDONALD'S PLAYPLACES

Did you know... Visiting the Chula Vista, California, McDonald’s in the early 1970s was the closest a kid could get to stepping into a fast food commercial. The outdoor eating space connected to a playground filled with a cast of familiar characters. Hamburglar had been made into a 10-foot-tall swingset, Officer Big Mac into a hollow jungle gym, and Grimace into a child-sized cage. Ronald McDonald naturally presided over the scene “as the undisputed clown prince of this mythical domain,” as Illinois Parks and Recreation said of a prototype of the playground in 1972.

 

Kids loved the company’s inaugural PlayPlace as much as they loved its French fries—and parents loved it, too. At the dawn of the “stranger danger” era when stories of child abductions dominated the evening news, some adults began to view unsupervised trips to the park as a high-risk activity. A fenced-in play space on private property where admission was the cost of a burger was a welcome alternative. 

 

Parents may have felt better letting their kids loose in McDonald’s contained environments, but any sense of safety was in their heads. Over the next several decades, as PlayPlaces popped up across the country and became an integral part of the brand, McDonald’s was keeping stories of second-degree burns, infectious bacteria, and broken bones under grease-stained wraps.

 

Cheeseburger in Paradise 
After winning the hearts and stomachs of hungry adults, McDonald’s set its sights on young consumers. In 1971, the fast food company launched an ambitious marketing campaign introducing kids to McDonaldland—a fast food-themed world populated by Ronald and his pals. The brand rolled out the first Happy Meals nationwide by the end of the decade. Adding playgrounds to properties in the early ‘70s was one of the chain’s riskiest moves, and it quickly became one of its biggest draws.

 

McDonald’s tested an early version of its PlayLand (which was later rebranded to PlayPlace) at the Illinois State Fair in 1972. The Hollywood set designer Setmakers, Inc. put together a 4800-square-foot space where children could climb, slide, and swing among their favorite McDonaldland characters. Whimsical touches included a smiling apple pie tree, a Filet-O’-Fish fountain, and singing wastebaskets with signs reminding visitors to “feed” them. 

 

 

 

McDonald’s figured that the playground would get roughly three years’ worth of use after just 10 days at the high-traffic fair. After handling an estimated 350,000 young visitors, the equipment passed all safety tests and was cleared for use at restaurants.

 

The first official McDonald’s PlayLand, which opened in Chula Vista, California, was a massive success. It was roughly twice the size of the pilot park in Illinois, and it increased the location’s business by more than 60 percent in the months following its opening. Other franchises across the country got on board, and by 1991, McDonald’s had become America’s largest playground operator with 3000 PlayPlaces. 

 

This period coincided with a nationwide obsession with children’s safety. Following a handful of high-profile child abduction cases, families were bombarded with reminders of their kids’ vulnerability via milk cartons, afterschool specials, and even board games. McDonald’s PlayLand was already considered safer than your average public park, and this aspect was emphasized through the 1980s into the ‘90s. Many of the newly rebranded PlayPlaces transitioned fully indoors. Wood and metal were replaced with rubber and plastic. Instead of playing on freestanding swings and open-topped slides, kids now jumped into ball pits and crawled through tubes of soft netting.

 

The changes helped usher in an era of “soft play” that reflected growing cultural anxieties, but McDonald’s wasn’t just concerned with optics. The metal PlayLands of the 1970s were actually dangerous, and in many cases, parents should have been more worried about the equipment within the restaurants’ fences than the strangers outside them. 

 

Play at Your Own Risk
Screams were part of the atmosphere at the McDonald’s playground in Rialto, California, but this one sounded different. Four-year-old Dennis Williams had come down the metal slide with a look of distress on his face instead of joy. He shook his hands as if they were covered in hot oil and made a tortured noise. Shortly after, a girl emerged from the slide with an angry pink mark on her bare calf. 

 

The second-degree burns that sent Williams to urgent care in 1986 were among hundreds of PlayPlace- and PlayLand-related injuries that McDonald’s allegedly failed to report in the 1970s and ‘80s. The temperature of metal on hot summer days wasn’t the only risk the old-fashioned equipment posed to kids: Young visitors also suffered concussions, broken bones, and skull fractures, with most incidents originating with the jail-like Big Mac Climber jungle gym. 

 

 

While incidents like Rialto’s flesh-searing slide occasionally made the news, the average McDonald’s customer was unaware of them. So was the United States government. Instead of disclosing the hazards of its older playgrounds, the company reportedly—and quietly—updated its play areas with padded, plastic equipment. The last of the Big Mac climbers were removed in 1997, but that wasn’t soon enough to save McDonald’s from scrutiny. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) launched an investigation into climber-related injuries following lawsuits and consumer complaints. In 1999, McDonald’s paid the CPSC a $4 million fine—among the largest the agency had ever collected at the time. That was just the start of their public relations nightmare.

 

An Unappetizing Environment
In the 21st century, Americans began to question the Disneyland-ification of its biggest fast food brand. Childhood obesity rates grew by more than 50 percent between the 1960s and 2000s, and McDonald’s became a common scapegoat for the epidemic. In 2004, the hit documentary Super Size Me examined the health consequences of regular visits to the chain. McDonald’s became synonymous with junk food, and the chain’s popularity with kids—a result of its own aggressive marketing—suddenly made it a target. 

 

For children who only ate there occasionally, the nutritional content of the menu wasn’t the biggest threat to their health. They likely faced greater risks scrambling through the PlayPlace after their meal. In 2011, a mother and child development professor from Arizona swabbed bacteria samples from dozens of fast food playgrounds and had them tested. Lab results showed a concerningly high count and range of harmful pathogens, including coliform and staph bacteria. As one microbiologist who reviewed the survey told The New York Times, the results indicated that “these places are not cleaned properly or not cleaned at all.”

 

 

Though they had been moved indoors and remade in plastic in the name of safety, McDonald’s modern PlayPlaces were hardly innocuous. Because the areas were classified as “nonfood” zones, they weren’t held to the same cleanliness standards as the rest of the restaurant. Inspections were rare, and trash left in labyrinthine tubes went unnoticed. Even hypodermic needles have turned up in the play areas (though stories of children being pricked by them and dying are urban legends). 

 

Between hosting kids covered in ice cream—or worse—the outdoor playgrounds were at least doused with rain and sunlight on a regular basis. Inside, the nooks and crevices of an enclosed PlayPlace became breeding grounds for bacteria. 

 

All Work and No Play
McDonald’s was already in the process of phasing out its PlayPlaces when their unsanitary conditions made headlines. In response to accusations of manipulating kids into unhealthy diets, the chain tweaked many of its child-focused features or nixed them altogether. The Happy Meal was revamped with smaller portions and more nutritious sides in 2011, and Ronald was retired from commercials in 2016. Throughout the 2010s, McDonald’s redesigned many of its locations to have a sleeker, boxier look, and the PlayPlace rarely survived the transition. In 2020, the play areas that did remain were closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic; many never reopened. 

 

The fast food landscape has undergone significant changes in the past 50 years. The rise of delivery apps means customers are less likely to eat their meal in the restaurant or even their car, so chains have less incentive to create a desirable dining space. Even for locations still crawling with kids, the benefits of cleaning and maintaining a playground in today’s health-conscious age are rarely worth the costs. 

 

Instead of courting young consumers, McDonald’s has turned its marketing efforts toward the last generation with fond memories of the company: Millennials. Retro Happy Meal toys for adults, a beverage-focused spin-off chain, and Grimace’s slightly creepy birthday promotion were attempts to appeal to the nostalgic demographic. But as ‘90s kids enter their thirties, sticky tube slides are one retro part of the brand that will likely stay in the past.

 

 

Source: Rough Play: The Dirty and Dangerous History of McDonald's PlayPlaces

 

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - WORDS NAMED AFTER REAL PEOPLE

Did you know.... Words named after specific people are known as eponyms. After enough time passes, the namesake is often forgotten while the word sticks around, so many eponyms no longer even register as someone’s name. These eight eponyms are among the most surprising, and cover subjects from musical instruments to facial hair to fuel.

 

1. Boycott

Charles C. Boycott was a British landlord in Ireland in the 19th century. Most Irish land at the time was owned by wealthy British people, and poor Irish farmers, unable to own land, had to pay rent. With a famine in effect, the farmers couldn’t pay, so they organized and asked landowners for a 25% reduction in rent in 1880. When Boycott responded by trying to evict his tenants, they cut off all communication with him and drove off everyone who worked on his estate. “Boycott” almost instantly came to mean a refusal to buy, interact with, or participate, and the term traveled quickly across Europe (it reached France as boycotter the very same year). The British Parliament passed a set of tenant protections in 1881.

 

2. Cardigan

A cardigan is any knitted sweater that fastens in the front, whether by buttons, zippers, or toggles. It’s named for British Army General James Brudenell, the Seventh Earl of Cardigan, who famously led the troops during the Crimean War’s notorious Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854. He was so concerned with his regiment’s wardrobe that he used his own money to make sure they were properly outfitted, and what we now know as cardigans were among the garments he supplied.

 

3. Diesel

Diesel as a surname predates any action star’s stage name. Rudolf Diesel was a German engineer who invented what we know now as the diesel engine. It’s named for him, although he certainly doesn’t come to mind every time someone pulls into a gas station. Still, “diesel” was written as a proper noun (that is, capitalized) until at least the 1930s. The fuel started being known as just “diesel” instead of “diesel oil” in the 1950s.

 

4. Saxophone

Belgian French instrument maker Adolphe Sax was trying to improve the tone of a bass clarinet when he landed on the most popular instrument to bear his name: the saxophone. Lesser-known Sax inventions, developed collaboratively between Sax and his father, include the saxhorn (a kind of bugle), the saxo-tromba (somewhere between a trombone and a trumpet), and the saxtuba (an elegant-looking curved horn).

 

5. Silhouette

The silhouette eventually made its way into serious art, but the term started out as kind of a joke. It’s named for notoriously stingy 18th-century French politician Étienne de Silhouette, but there are a few stories about why. One is that it’s a jab at how cheap he was (since silhouettes were an inexpensive way to produce a likeness); another is that he himself made shadow portraits and covered his walls with them. One source claims it’s a joke about how briefly he held the office of controller-general. Regardless, à la Silhouette came to mean “on the cheap” for a while until the art style became trendy and sought-after.

 

6. Mesmerize

In the 18th century, German doctor Franz Anton Mesmer developed a controversial and unproven therapy called mesmerism, which used magnets to pull patients into a trance state. Despite the fact that it was eventually shunned by the medical establishment in both Austria and France, some physicians used his methods to put patients under for surgery before anesthesia existed. Proponents of mesmerism dwindled when hypnotherapy started to become popular, but the practice left us with two common terms. One is “animal magnetism,” the term Mesmer used for the force he could manipulate with his magnets and that now usually refers to sex appeal. The other is “mesmerize.”

 

7. Shrapnel

In the late 18th century, British military officer Henry Shrapnel invented a new kind of ammunition, a hollow shell with bullets and an explosive charge inside. When the charge detonated, the shell would scatter bullets and debris over the battlefield. Eventually, projectiles had charges so explosive that the shell casing was destructive enough without the bullets inside — so while the specific item invented by Shrapnel fell out of use after World War II, the term stuck around to mean dangerous fragments of shells, bombs, or debris.

 

8. Sideburns

Sideburns — strips of facial hair that grow down the side of the face — used to be known as side-whiskers or side-hair. One prominent side-whisker-haver was Ambrose E. Burnside, a Civil War general; his distinctive facial hair connected in the middle via mustache, with no beard beneath. This style of facial hair is known as the Burnside. At some point, the fact that Burnside had “side” in his name caused a mish-mash of “Burnside” and “side-whiskers” into “sideburns.”

 

 

Source: Surprising Words Named After Real People

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - THE ORIGIN OF "NÉE" 

Did you know.... For especially common French loanwords, you probably use them without thinking too much (or at all) about their literal meaning. Crème brûlée, for example, translates to “burnt cream,” which sounds considerably less appetizing than the dessert actually is; déjà vu means “already seen,” which needs no further explanation.

 

Some you may use without even realizing they’re French—like cul-de-sac, for “bottom of the sack” (or “butt of the bag”). RSVP is another sneaky loanword: It’s an initialism for répondez s’il vous plaît, meaning “Reply, if it pleases you.” And unless you speak French, the word née probably falls in one of those two categories.

 

The Meaning of Née
The literal translation of née is simply “born,” from the verb naître (“to be born”). The -ée ending indicates that it’s modifying a feminine noun, which helps explain why English speakers have historically used it when mentioning a woman’s maiden name. So when you say “Hillary Clinton, née Rodham,” you’re basically saying “Hillary Clinton, born Rodham.”

 

If you’re referring to a man who’s changed his name, you should technically use né—the masculine ending—the same way that you’d use fiancé for a man engaged to be married (whereas fiancée is the feminine form). But né hasn’t quite caught on in the same way, most likely because when the term entered the English language, people were only really using it to talk about women’s maiden names.

 

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first written instance of that happened in a 1758 letter sent by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. “The advantage of being casually admitted in the train of Madame de B., née O,” she wrote. Other notable authors adopted the tradition throughout the 19th century; William Makepeace Thackeray, for example, mentioned “Rebecca Crawley, née Sharp,” in his 1848 classic Vanity Fair.

 

The Evolution of Née
During the latter half of the 20th century, writers started getting more creative with their usage of née. “The flight attendant, née stewardess, singsongs over the loudspeaker,” William Safire wrote in a 1981 piece for The New York Times Magazine.

 

A decade or so earlier, a book called Molecular Approaches to Learning and Memory had modified the phrase behavioral modification with “née transfer of training” to let readers know that the terminology had changed.

 

In short, no longer is née just for someone (again, usually a woman) born with some other name, but for anything or anyone formerly known as anything or anyone else.

 

 

Source: Where Does the Word ‘Née’ Come From?

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - BOBBY PINS

Did you know... When someone needs to keep their hair in place—or try to pick a lock at the spur of the moment—they often reach for a bobby pin, the hair clip that branches off to make for a snug and slip-free fit. So why do we call them bobby pins? Does someone named Bobby have anything to do with their creation?

 

Not really. Bobby pins got their colloquial name from the bob hairstyle trend that exploded in popularity in the early 20th century. At the time, women typically sported longer hair. But when dancer Irene Castle opted for a short and sensible cut, her admirers followed suit—and ignited a sexist controversy in their wake. Many beauty salons refused to cut the hair of their female clients that short, sending women to barbers. (When the style persisted well into the 1920s, hair salons eventually relented.)

 

The style was named the Castle bob for a bit, after the woman who popularized the style, but eventually settled into “the bob.” To keep the hair fixed in place, hair clips were often used, and these clips became known as bobby pins.

 

Sourcing the inventor of the bobby pin can be tricky. Some credit Luis Marcus, a San Francisco cosmetics mogul, who peddled two-packs of handmade hair clips for 35 cents. “There was talk of naming it the Marcus pin,” his daughter, Elaine Marcus, told The Los Angeles Times in 1990 following the death of her father. “But he named it for bobbed hair,” she confirmed.

 

Irene Castle

 

Other people whose names have been credited with originating the bobby pin over the years include Frank DeLong, Hazel Hook Waltz, Jacob Herbert, and Henry Hubbard, who may have developed the manufacturing process employed to make bobby pins.

 

The bobby pin wasn’t the only attempt to reinvent hair clips. The Hump hair pin, which was devised by  Solomon Goldberg in 1903, was so named for its crooked center that helped keep it in place. Though it likely wasn’t the first hair accessory to have such a design, it was probably the most well-marketed one, leading many people to believe it was the first of its kind.

 

Goldberg’s pins were perfect for people with long hair, which caused a bit of a crisis when Castle’s short new ‘do caught on with the public. Goldberg later claimed to have invented the bobby pin, which likely is not accurate—though his company did offer the Hold-Bob, another type of clip, which was devised by his wife, Ruth.

 

As for whether you can really pick a lock with a bobby pin, the answer is yes—provided it’s bent into the required shape of a lock pick and that you have a second one handy to act as a tension wrench for leverage. Some locks are too narrow for a bobby pin, so don’t count on them for your illicit break-in activities.

 

 

Source: Why Do We Call Them Bobby Pins?
 

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - MOVIE MOMENTS NOT SEEN

Did you know... Some of the most enduring scenes in cinematic history come from unscripted moments when directors or stars dared to veer off-book and go with the flow of spontaneity. Here are eight such moments that weren’t part of the original plan, but unquestionably turned into movie magic for appreciative audiences.

 

1. “You Talkin’ to Me?” in “Taxi Driver”

While Robert De Niro had a pretty good idea of how to play troubled veteran Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, he was unsure of how to approach a part in which his character "looks in the mirror and plays like a cowboy, pulls out his gun, talks to himself." Ultimately, the actor locked himself in a room with director Martin Scorsese to figure out how to tackle the scene. "He kept saying, 'You talkin' to me?'" Scorsese later remembered. "He just kept repeating it, kept repeating it. … It was like a jazz riff. Just like a solo." The end result was one of Hollywood’s most iconic scenes and, for De Niro, a lifetime spent listening to well-intentioned and less-talented imitators throw the line back at him.

 

2. The Necklace Scene in “Pretty Woman”

It's a small and relatively unimportant moment in Pretty Woman, yet nonetheless provided a hint that its fresh-faced female lead was going to become a huge star. Intending to shoot footage for a gag reel, director Garry Marshall told Richard Gere, as businessman Edward Lewis, to snap a jewelry box shut as Julia Roberts, playing call girl Vivian Ward, reaches for the necklace inside. Roberts responded with her now well-known whopper of a laugh, drawing a sheepish chortle from Gere, and Marshall was so happy with the sincerity of the interaction, he wound up leaving it in the movie.

 

3. The Quickly Dispatched Swordsman in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”

One of the funniest moments of Raiders of the Lost Ark comes when Indy, facing off with a fearsome sword-fielding foe on the streets of Cairo, simply pulls out his gun to shoot the guy. As originally conceived, this was meant to be "the most definitive 'whip against the sword' fight," in the words of director Steven Spielberg. However, after coming down with a case of dysentery that all but kept him tethered to the nearest restroom, star Harrison Ford began examining whether an extended fight sequence was really necessary at this point of the story. Ultimately, Spielberg agreed that the narrative would be better served by a quick, physical punchline, with the added bonus that the change suddenly left his production ahead of schedule.

 

4. The Uncredited Cat in “The Godfather”

The opening scene of The Godfather, in which Vito Corleone opines on the meaning of friendship to a justice-seeking Amerigo Bonasera, was part of the script. The friendly cat nestled into star Marlon Brando's lap? Not so much. Director Francis Ford Coppola recalled he "saw the cat running around the studio, and took it and put it in [Brando’s] hands without a word." But while the feline's presence helped magnify the tension of the scene, its incessant purring reportedly drowned out much of Brando's distinct mumbling, forcing sound editors to redub the dialogue.

 

5. “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat” in “Jaws”

Well before Jaws set the standard for summer blockbusters and scared a generation of vacationers away from the beach, it was a production marked by logistic challenges that threatened to sink the fortunes of everyone involved. One of its problems was an overloaded equipment barge, and the way-too-small support boat that failed to adequately steady its larger companion. Eventually the phrase, "You're gonna need a bigger boat," became a running gag among the set workers, inspiring co-star Roy Scheider to slip the line into a few of his takes. Although they were mostly excised in the final cut, editor Verna Fields wisely kept the line when Scheider's Chief Brody (and the audience) gets the first good look at the underwater killer.

 

6. Willy Wonka’s Introduction in “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”

When we finally meet the titular candy kingpin of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, he inches toward the crowd with a pronounced limp and falls over, before somersaulting back to his feet with a burst of joyous energy. This was entirely the brainchild of star Gene Wilder, who devised the dramatic entrance of his character after sensing "something missing" from the original script. When asked for his motivation behind this particular introduction, Wilder explained that it would serve to keep audiences on their toes: "I knew that from that time on no one would know if I was lying or telling the truth."

 

7. The “Cinderella Story” in “Caddyshack”

The juvenile humor of Caddyshack isn't for everyone, but even the harshest of critics can applaud Bill Murray's improvised performance in the "Cinderella story" scene. Provided minimal instruction — the script simply reads, "The sky is beginning to darken. CARL, THE GREENSKEEPER, is absently lopping the heads off bedded tulips as he practices his golf swing with a grass whip" — Murray proceeded to narrate an imaginary broadcast about an underdog who wins golf's prestigious Masters Tournament with a miracle finish. If not quite as powerful as, say, Sidney Poitier's "You don't own me" speech from Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, the monologue encapsulates the delightfully goofy mindset of Murray's minor but memorable character.

 

8. “I’m the King of the World!” in “Titanic”

Yet another entry on the list of "endlessly quoted movie lines that were made up on the spot" comes courtesy of Titanic, when Leonardo DiCaprio's Jack gazes over the doomed ship's bow, throws out his arms, and declares, "I'm the king of the world!" This time, it's director James Cameron who takes credit for the last-minute addition; after shooting the scene several times with alternate lines that didn't seem to be landing, Cameron finally told the actor, "All right, I got one for you — just say, 'I'm the king of the world.'" DiCaprio allegedly was puzzled by the choice, but he committed to its delivery, producing an indelible moment in the record-breaking film that transformed him into a bona fide movie star.

 

 

Source: Famous Movie Moments That Weren't in the Script