Archive for Rumor
This week’s Rumor Tuesday features little-known facts about the Olympics. Who says I can’t keep up with current events?
Rumor has it… At the first modern Olympics games in 1896 held in Athens, the IOC had waited until only the day before the opening ceremonies to announce that the competitions would not be held in the nude as they had been in the ancient Olympics.
Rumor has it… The International Olympics Committee has never had a medal-winner among its members.
Rumor has it… The torch relay at the 2010 Winter Olympics is set to be the longest relay in Olympic history.
Rumor has it… The words in the Olympic motto “Citius, Altius, Fortius” (Latin meaning “Faster, Higher, Stronger”) have been used as model names for cars, computers, and skateboards.
Rumor has it… 2010 will be the last year for the classic three-tiered rostrum for medal award presentations. All future Olympics will use a single-levelled platform so as not to raise any one competitor above another during the ceremony.
Rumor has it… The mascots for the 2010 Winter Olympics are Miga (a mythical sea bear) and Quatchi (Sasquatch).
Rumor has it… In the entire history of the Olympics, there have been three non-concurrent events known as curling. One is the now-familiar sport using heavy stones on ice. The others were Summer Olympic events: one being a form of lawn tennis using a soft cloth ball stuffed with feathers (1896-1912) and the other being a demonstration event similar to lacrosse combined with bocci (1930-1934).
Rumor has it… Olympic host cities must pass strenuous tests from the IOC regarding air and water quality, siesmic stability, and average intelligence.
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Today’s link is a fun one for science fiction fans. Welcome to the blog of Fred Pohl entitled The Way The future Was. This was the title of his very excellent memoir, and now it’s a blog. This is some pretty interesting reading from one of the original Futurians.
Check it out.
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Today’s Rumor Tuesday takes a look at the ever-popular lottery system in the United States. Welcome to it. Today’s winning numbers are…
Rumor has it… No lottery number in the US has been drawn in which, when all of the numbers are added up, it has equaled a prime number.
Rumor has it… While it’s commonly believed that lottery jackpot winners tend to lose their new-found fortunes quickly, actual studies show most lottery winners not only retain most of their winnings, but have often invested them and doubled or tripled those winnings within five years.
Rumor has it… Hawaii is the only state in the US not to have a state-sponsored lottery.
Rumor has it… The first modern state-level lottery in the U.S. was established in Puerto Rico in 1934.
Rumor has it… More winning lottery jackpot tickets have been purchased in towns or cities named after American presidents than any other.
Rumor has it… Shirley Jackon’s “The Lottery” was partly inspired by Jackson’s experiences living in North Bennington, Vermont. At the time of writing, Vermont had just licensed lottery sales to supermarkets.
Rumor has it… The Baseball scratch instant-win lottery ticket was introduced in the 1970s and is the longest continuously running scratch ticket in the US.
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Today’s link goes to the homepage for the Independent Spirit Awards now enjoying its 25th year. The nominees have been announced and it looks like a good year. Why should you visit? Because the Spirit Awards are like a fun version of the Oscars. Folks really let their hair down for this one. The Spirit Awards should get an award themselves.
Cheers!
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Welcome back to Rumor Tuesday, your one-stop site for interesting factoids–or stuff that sounds like factoids. This week’s edition looks at language–a course of study I was once very devoted to back in my kollege daze. I still enjoy paging through books on the development of language. I heartily recommend Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue (July 1990) for an entertaining little book on the histories and vagaries of the English language.
Anyway, on to today’s “facts”:
The term “mano a mano” does not mean “man to man,” but rather “hand to hand” from the Latin word manu-, meaning hand.
Likewise, the phrase “to man a table” is not an inherently sexist term as it also has its roots in Latin from the verb manus(manere) meaning to handle.
It is commonly believed that the Inuit have over a hundred words for “snow.” In actuality they have very few words for snow, but many modifying additives to the base word forming over a hundred different compound words. The more sensationalist belief stems from an attempt by anthropologists to underscore how environment links to language.
The most common word on Earth is “a” and can mean anything from an indefinite article in English to a shade of blue-green in the Ainu language.
Tobogan has four different systems of writing depending on who the writer is: man, woman, priest, or merchant.
There are more tribal dialects known and spoken in the Amazon region of South America than there are currently existing tribes.
“Twin-speak,” the phenomenon in which twins grow up speaking a secret language, has elements (usually in adverb form) that are common among different sets of twins, even twins who have been raised in widely different parts of the world and among widely different base language groups. Some tests have found that twins raised in Scotland can communicate, limitedly, with twins raised in Burma.
The English language has exported more words to other languages than it has imported. 99% of all exported words came into existence within the past one hundred years and are technology-related. 90% of all imported words are either food, clothing or farming-related. Only a tenth of those were introduced within the past hundred years.
Languages that have no word for “zero” often also do not have a word for “white.”
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In keeping with the above theme, today’s link takes you to the Linguistics Society of America. If you’re an academic or a professional in the language field, it looks like a decent organization to belong to. If you’re an armchair enthusiast like myself, you’ll at least enjoy browsing some of the publications and links.
Cheers!
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Rumor Tuesday returns! Okay, so today is Wednesday, but that’s only because this week’s Rumor Tuesday features JJ Abrams and the TV show Lost with seven things we bet you never knew about the hit ABC drama. Lost’s final season premiered last night. Nothing here is really a spoiler, so read on and remember… you read it here first! Tell your friends.
- All of the scenes that took place on the airplane and in the airport in the season six premiere episode were shot in 2004 during the filming of the first season.
- Ten of the regularly appearing extras are part of a group known in Hollywood as “The Apple Abrams Gang.” Their specialty is getting killed on film and have done so in Alias, Lost, Mission Impossible 3, Cloverfield, Star Trek, and Fringe. They’ve been shot, burned, blown up, crushed, eaten, and dragged underground and underwater.
- One of the Apple Abrams Gang, Henry Piper, is particularly known for being crushed under the same papier mache beam in five appearances: Star Trek, Cloverfield, Alias, and Lost (twice). He has affectionately named the beam “Fuzzy.”
- Nestor Carbonell, the actor who plays Richard Alpert, lost a finger in a fishing accident when a child. He usually wears a prosthesis and covers it up with props or creative camera angling. In the Lost season six premiere, the missing finger is briefly visible in the sand underneath John Locke’s shoe and the actor is clearly filmed with only nine fingers when he is draped over Locke’s shoulders.
- Lost was originally pitched to NBC where network execs wanted to rework Abrams’s concept into a comedy. Abrams wrote three episode treatments as part of a contract agreement, received payment, then promptly offered the original drama concept to ABC. NBC still holds and owns the comedy treatments and have until 2015 before all rights revert back to Abrams..
- JJ Abrams occasionally claims that the inspiration for Lost occurred in the late 1990s when he came across a passage in a copy of Robinson Crusoe which he had borrowed from a hotel library. The passage reads, “I had thought I had lost all but time, but another on this island seeks to take time from me as well.”
- On Lost, the leader of the Temple Others speaks in a Kansei dialect from the mid-16th century Japan. His translator’s eyeglasses are based on an 18th century design by Benjamin Franklin.
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Today’s link goes to the Friends of Attleboro Animal Shelter in Attleboro, MA. This is where we got Daisy and she appears in their Happy Tails section now as one of their many successful placements.
Send them money.
Cheers!
Filed under: Blogosphere, Dog, Humor, Rumor | |1 Comment
With Halloween coming up, this week’s Rumor file features its Spooky edition.
Boo!
Rumor has it… The most haunted building in recorded history is the former asylum for the insane in Vienna which once housed Salieri, a contemporary and rival of Mozart. Reports of piano music, moaning, apparitions, doors opening and closing, strange lights, specftral visions, darkmen, and unexplained screaming have plagued the edifice for generations. Today the building serves as a storage facility for the Austrian municipal park system and is still haunted.
Rumor has it… Ghosts and hauntings are mentioned six times in The Bible.
Rumor has it… According to the International Paranormal Institute, there are twelve documented cases of dogs being haunted, and three cases of of parrots being haunted. Also, while there are countless cases of ghosts being sighted on ships and submarines, there are no documentated cases of apparitions aboard airplanes.
Rumor has it… According to the journal of the pilot of the Mayflower which delivered the Pilgrims to the New World, a sailor who signed on in Denmark was accused of vampirism by a pair of Pilgrims (John and William Water) and thrown overboard. Both men died of dehydration before landing in Plymouth. The incident is not mentioned in any of the colonists’ documents–and there is no mention of anyone, not even wives or children, with the surname of Water.
Rumor has it… Dracula author Bram Stoker was a member of The Golden Dawn, a mystical organization based in Great Britain devoted to magical studies based on esoteric interpretations of the Kaballah and Egyptian mythology. Other members included Eliphas Levi, Arthur E. Waite, and Aleister Crowley. Stoker left the organization after one of is many re-organizations following the creation of the American branch in Chicago.
Rumor has it… In Asia, vampires don’t so much fly as they jump around.
Rumor has it… Vampires fall victim to sunlight, garlic, holy water, and stakes through the heart. Werewolves succumb to silver bullets and wolfsbane. According to legend, a mummy can only be stopped by placing sheets of clean rice paper in its path, then setting the paper ablaze from a flame fed with beeswax and jasmine.
Rumor has it… Speaking of mummies, they were once so prevalent in Egypt that they were often used as fuel in steam engines.
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Today’s link goes to ComicBookScriptArchive.com for a fairly decent collection of MSWord Docs and PDF files of various comic book scripts. If you’re looking for info on how to format a comic book script, this is a good place to check out.
Cheers!
Filed under: Blogosphere, Humor, Rumor | |1 Comment
Sorry I’ve missed the past week of Rumor Tuesdays and Friday Mailbags. The cold had me set on slow for longer than I like and certain things had to get cut out. Now I’m back, tall in the saddle, so tall I’m at risk for a nosebleed. And now we’re returning to our regularly scheduled truths, half-truths, white lies, and total fabrications. This week, we’re going underground.
Rumor has it… The sewers of Paris contain many of the long-lost treasures of the Templar Knights including King Solomon’s crown, a piece of the True Cross, and the actual Shroud of Turin (as opposed to the more famous fake residing at the Vatican).
Rumor has it… At one point in the 14th century, there were more people living beneath Cairo than above it.
Rumor has it… The band The Velvet Underground got its name after Andy Warhol did an exploratory photoshoot in the sewers beneath Greenwich Village and commented that all the moss growing on the sewer walls made it look like “a velvet underground.”
Rumor has it… The story of full-grown alligators being found in the sewers of New York originated from the discovery of dinosaur bones–specifically a Velociraptor mongoliensis which were stolen from The New York Museum of Natural History and stashed there by thieves.
Rumor has it… An underground chamber maintained by the US National Security Agency is so large that a small twin-engine plane can take off on one end, cruise for ten minutes, and land at the opposite end.
Rumor has it… Speaking of sewers, Edgar Allen Poe was a big fan of the Providence’s and once found a route leading from his rooming house to the Athaneum that was nearly all underground. Author H.P. Lovecraft was aware of this route and claimed it as part of the inspiration for his story “The Shunned House.”
Rumor has it… More people are lost and killed in Carlsbad Caverns than are kidnapped and killed by serial killers nationwide.
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Today’s link goes to a short history of the Irish banjo by famed player Mick Moloney. Did you know Irish warriors in the 5th century preferred the Irish tenor banjo as a club? It’s not true, but would’t that be something?
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Tuesday’s Rumor file comes on Wednesday because yours truly is suffering a pretty bad cold. Therefore, this Tuesday’s Rumor file (on Wednesday) features everyone’s favorite maladies: colds and flus…
Rumor has it… “Flu” is one of those rare terms in which the shorter form is older than the longer form. In status-conscious Victorian England, it was considered poor breeding to suffer the same illnesses as the lower classes. Sir Henry Langford of the Royal College of Physicians was the first to coin the term “influenza” as a specific malady similar to the flu, but affecting the upper classes exclusively.
Rumor has it… Despite new virulent strains of flu that appear each year, there are actually fewer active strains of flu now than there were two hundred years ago.
Rumor has it… A child conceived while one parent is suffering a headcold is seven times more likely to be a boy than a girl. If both parents have headcolds at the time of conception, the child will be three times more likely to be a girl.
Rumor has it… The native people of Easter Island, despite frequent contact with the outside world, are the only people on Earth who appear to be immune to colds and flus.
Rumor has it… Wonder if you have a cold or a flu? Weigh yourself. People with colds weigh on average two kilos more than their normal weight while people with flues weigh two kilos less.
Rumor has it… Biggest buyers of homeopathic remedies for cold and flu? Doctors, pharmacists, and employees of pharmaceutical companies.
Rumor has it… To combat colds, child actress Shirley Temple Black recommended two days in bed cutting out paper dolls and drinking peppermint tea.
Rumor has it… Comedian Charles Fleischer could only do the voice of Roger Rabbit while suffering the later days of a cold. He recorded his part in Who Framed Roger Rabbit in the space of the final two days of a headcold and when it came time to do some re-recording during the final edits of the film, Fleischer spent the a week wandering a Los Angeles hospital until he came down with a cold again and could once again do Roger Rabbit’s voice exactly as he had done it earlier in production.
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With all the love I’ve been seeing lately for Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, where’s the love for the little tramp? Okay, Charlie was the biggest for a while and the renewed interest in Keaton and Lloyd’s work is fairly new. Still, today’s link takes you to The Official Charlie Chaplin website where you’ll find all the info you’d ever want on one of the silent era’s biggest comedy stars. Check it out.
Cheers!
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In 1923, pirates off the coast of India hijacked a ship which was carrying a print of the Rudolph Velentino movie The Sheik (1921). This is the origin of the term “pirate” when referring to illegal copies of movies. The most pirated movie on record is Three Men and a Baby (1987).
The infamous line, “Frankly Scarlet, I don’t give a damn.” in the movie version of Gone With the Wind (1939) does not appear in the original novel by Margaret Mitchell. It was added by the studio to beef up press coverage of the film.
During the very opening scenes of The Sixth Sense (1999), Bruce Willis is watching the end credits to Weekend at Bernie’s (1989), a favorite of director M. Night Shyamalan.
A problem with funding for Clerks (1994) almost stopped Kevin Smith’s film career before it began due to flooding in Smith’s home which threatened the comic book collection he was selling to pay for the film.
The most cursed film in history? Conquering Cross (1941) by Sergei Eisenstein in which 189 members of the cast and crew were killed in accidents ranging from electrocution to drowning. The original cinematographer, Alexi Andropov, was killed by a bear at the Moscow zoo a week prior to the production’s start.
From the cutting room floor: In Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) Francois Truffaut slapped Richard Dreyfuss. Kangaroo Jack (2003) had a cameo by John Rhys-Davies as a foul-mouthed Australian hobo. Fire Walk With Me (1992) had a cafe scene filmed in Esperanto. The topless scene in Driving Miss Daisy (1989).
Over 9,000 pounds of soba were used during the filming of the Juzo Itami film Tampopo about a trucker who trains a young widow in the art of noodles.
The theatrical preview for the Coen Bros. movie Blood Simple (1984) was created before the actual film was made. It was filmed with the help of Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell while they themselves were filming Evil Dead (1981).
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In light of a recent conversaion on Facebook, today’s link takes you to He-Man.org. Want to know more about Castle Grayskull, Battlecat, Skeletor, and the Masters of the Universe? Why would you go anywhere else? This is one of the only sites of this type I’ve seen to openly have a download section for videogame ROMs and emulators. Go figure.
Enjoy!
Filed under: Blogosphere, Humor, Movie review, Rumor | movies, Teehan|No Comments
The twelve original internet servers designated for ARPA-net across the United States are still in operation despite having half the processing power of an average modern desktop computer.
Speaking of which, the twelve servers are each named after the Signs of the Zodiac and hold Air Force ranks equivalent to captain. Despite holding Air Force ranks, only Captain Picses, the server located on Eielson Air Force Base outside of Fairbanks, has actually been on a plane. Each of the other servers were transported to their final destinations by truck.
The theoretical concept of the Internet has been described as early as the 1400s as a natural development of the moveable-type printing press.
Hypertext, which is a major component of HTML, was often bundled with early Macintosh computers as a multi-media tool. When the WWW was developed, Hypercard (which utilized the Hypertext language) essentially disappeared to all but Mac historians.
If every e-mail address in existence today were to send a one-word e-mail at exactly the same time (taking time zones into account), 99% of all processing servers across the world would suffer massive overheating resulting in a worldwide shut down of the Internet.
Kevin Steadier of Cleveland, Ohio locked himself in his room on October 31st, 2001 and lives solely through his internet connection–consulting for online security firms for money, pays all bills online, and makes all purchases, including groceries, via various web-based services. He married via webcast in 2005 a woman he met online but has yet to meet in person.
Search engines, prior to the WWW, were named after characters from Archie comics. The most popular ones were called Archie, Veronica, and Grundy.
The first transcontinental e-mail sent was from a Corporal Bell in Nevada to a Leiutenant Watson in London.
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Today’s link, as a nod to one of the above items, takes you to the Official Archie Comics website. Comics. News. Downloadable images. Character blogs… and so much more. Yeah, I’m an Archie fan. Yeah, I still buy those double-digests from the supermarket stands. Okay, I prefer the old school character designs and stories, but this site has ‘em all–old and new.
Enjoy!
Filed under: Blogosphere, Comics, Humor, Rumor, Writing | Archie comics, Internet history|No Comments
Since 1910 when it had a population of just over 200 to today with a population of about 50, the most popular and performed play on Pitcairn Island is the revenge classic Titus Andronicus.
Due to a medical condition similar to dyslexia, Dashiell Hammett could neither read nor write coherently. His first three novels, including The Maltese Falcon were dictated to a family maid. Later novels, including The Thin Man were recorded on magnetic tape and then transcribed. The only surviving tape is half of a story from The Creeping Siamese.
Emily Dickinson’s famous poem “Because I could not stop for Death” was inspired by the US Postal Service.
Sherlock Holmes never consumed alcohol.
John Steinbeck hitchhiked from Bloomington, Indiana to Central Islip, Long Island in approximately 24 hours in the company of a woman he had met in a bar just previous. While Steinbeck refused to confirm or deny it, many scholars believe her to be Spanish artist Susan Rocinante.
Both Heroditus’s The Histories and Pliny the Elder’s Natural History make reference to giant, furry ants who dig up gold dust. It was eventually discovered to be a species of marmot living in the gold-rich Deosai Platueau in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir.
The late-Middle English poem The Squire of Low Degree (1520, Anon.) was also known as Undo Your Door.
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Welcome to the official webpage of Pitcairn Island. A fascinating little place that I highly doubt I’ll ever get the opportunity to visit–but it’s fun to read about. They’re looking for a teacher–so if you’re registered in New Zealand, check it out!
Filed under: Blogosphere, Humor, Rumor, Writing | |No Comments
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