Daily Dispatch

5 Quick Facts About Hit Pop Songs Not Performed in English

A few weeks ago, we wrote about the Singing Nun, who had an unlikely #1 hit in the U.S. in 1963 with “Dominique,” a song sung in French. Here are some more non-English tunes that topped the American pop chart.

LaBamba• A rock version of the folk song “La Bamba” is Ritchie Valens’ best-known and signature song, but upon its release in 1959, it was only a minor hit. As the B-side of the #2-hit ballad “Donna,” “La Bamba” hit #23. But when a movie about Ritchie Valens life and untimely death (he died in the same plane crash that killed Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper) called La Bamba was released in 1987, a cover version by the band Los Lobos hit #1. It’s the first and only time a song sung entirely in Spanish has topped the charts.

Facts about the Harlem Globetrotters

10 Quick Facts About the Harlem Globetrotters

Stuff you didn’t know about the world’s most famous basketball team.

harlem globetrotters• In late 1926, Abe Saperstein took over as coach of a touring African-American team in Chicago called the Savoy Big Five (they played their games at the Savoy Ballroom). Saperstein renamed them the Harlem Globetrotters because all the players were African-American (Harlem being a predominantly African-American neighborhood).

• The original lineup for the team’s first game in January 1927: “Toots” Wright, “Fat” Long, “Kid” Oliver, “Runt” Pullins, and Andy Washington.

• The team played hundreds of games a year and got so good that they played in a national championship in 1939 against another independent team, the New York Renaissance. The Globetrotters lost, but that same year they discovered that the crowd liked it when they did ball tricks and comic routines. Saperstein told them to do as much of that as possible…provided they’d already established a comfortable lead.

• Over the years, a few famous athletes have played for the Globetrotters. Wilt Chamberlain played for one year, between college and joining the NBA. Future Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Gibson played in the 1950s, before his baseball career. And NBA great Magic Johnson played in a single game.

4 Kinds of TV Shows That Have Disappeared From Television

Tastes in TV change, so TV changes with them. Here are some shows that were once part of the broadcasting landscape…that have since gone off the air.

VARIETY SHOWS

Variety ShowsThese glitzy, glamorous, song and dance spectaculars were dominant TV format in the 1960s and ‘70s. Featuring big production numbers, colorful costumes, comic sketches, and banter between the hosts, extravaganzas Sonny and Cher, Donny and Marie, and The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour dominated ratings. By 1980 they were simply passé, as the garish ‘70s gave way to the sleek ‘80s. In 1987, ABC attempted to revive the variety show with what seemed like a sure thing. The network signed singer/actress Dolly Parton to a two-year, $44 million contract to star in Dolly. It flopped, and the network bought out Parton’s contract and cancelled the show in less than a year.

How to Turn Down the Volume on the Entire World

Quieter living through chemistry.

2D_Noise_Final_Stefanich_130621_Page_15-1110x682-976x600There’s nothing worse than trying to concentrate on a very important project (like, say, a blog post) while struggling to tune out loud neighbors. If you live or work in an area with heavy traffic or other types of noise pollution, you’ve likely found yourself wishing you could grab a remote control and turn down the volume on the world outside your window.

It’s Fact-or-Fake Friday!

FactOrFake Logo 1It’s Friday, and that means it’s time for your weekly fake-out. Here’s how it works: Two of the three following stories are true. One of them we made up. Can you guess which one is the fake? Pick your answer at the end of the article and see if you’re right.

Tallest, Shortest, Biggest, Smallest, Youngest, Oldest: NFL Trivia

More sports statistical anomalies, this time for football.

NFL TriviaTallest: Being taller than 7’0” is routine in the NBA. In the NFL, there’s only been one man. Seven-foot-tall defensive tackle Richard Sligh was drafted by the Oakland Raiders in 1967. He wasn’t put to much use, playing in just eight games and sitting on the bench during Super Bowl II.

Shortest: In the early days of the NFL—when it was essentially a regional, semiprofessional league, a 5’0”-tall guy named Jack Shapiro played in just one game in 1929, as a back, for the now defunct Staten Island Stapletons.

Weird Thanksgiving Stories

It’s almost Thanksgiving—have you bought your robot turkey yet?

weird thanksgiving• In 2003, wildlife conservation officers in Michigan faced a spate of illegal turkey poachers. They didn’t call the Detroit police, one-time employer of Robocop—they brought in Robo Turkey. Several models of the $1,000 animatronic bird were placed in fields and woodlots around the state’s northern counties to protect wild turkeys. Robo Turkey looks like the real thing…from a distance. Officers can operate the bird via remote control to make him move around and shake his tail feathers, in order to attract illegal hungers. Robo Turkey has caught hundreds of poachers in the past decade.

4 Quick Stories About Time Travel

In honor of the 50th anniversary of “Doctor Who,” here are some stories about some people who claimed to have unlocked the secret of time travel…or maybe not.

Time travel• In 2000, a mysterious man named “John Titor” started posting messages on Internet paranormal discussion forums claiming to be a time traveler from the year 2036. He’d been sent back in time by the U.S. government, he said, to fix software bugs that were making computers in the future malfunction. Titor not only showed off pictures of his time machine (a modified 1967 Camaro), but detailed the scary world events between the years 2000 and 2036. For example, from 2004 to 2008, the second American Civil War was waged; that the 2004 Olympics were the last ones ever held; and that in 2015, Russia started World War III by dropping nuclear bombs on China, the U.S., and most of Europe. Three billion people died and all major world governments crumbled. In March 2001, Titor claimed his IT duties were complete and he “returned” to 2036…which means he never posted on Internet forums again. Obviously, you can figure out that Titor’s details of the future history weren’t quite accurate, making this a hoax. But who was behind it? Nobody knows.

It’s Fact-or-Fake Friday! “Stuffing” Edition

FactOrFake Logo 1It’s Friday, and that means it’s time to try to fake you out. Two of three stories about stuff being stuffed where it shouldn’t be stuffed are real…and one we made up. Can you guess which one is the fake? Pick your answer at the end of the article and see if you’re right.

5 Doughnuts From Around the World

If there’s one thing everybody can agree on, it’s doughnuts. It seems like every culture on earth has perfected some kind of sweetened and fried dough. Here are just a few doughnuts from around the world.

doughnuts from around the worldPastry: Beignet

Country: France

Details: French cooks can make even a doughnut—simple dough, cooked in oil—seem fancy. “Beignet” is a deep-fried pastry made out of a versatile dough base called choux. Consisting of little more than butter, flour, eggs, and water, the same dough is used to make other French desserts, including éclairs and profiteroles. A beignet is usually rectangular, served hot, and topped with a mound of powdered sugar.

5 Quick Facts About John F. Kennedy

Some things you probably didn’t know about the 35th president,
who was assassinated 50 years ago this month.

Facts about John F. Kennedy• It’s political lore that John F. Kennedy won the 1960 election on the strength of the first-ever televised presidential debates: Kennedy appeared calm and collected, and wore makeup to look good on TV, while his opponent, Richard Nixon, seemed nervous and sweaty. Kennedy may have won the image game, but the debates didn’t hand him the keys to the White House. Gallup polls throughout 1960 show a very close race…and so did the outcome. Kennedy beat Nixon handily in the Electoral College (303 to 219), but got just 112,000 more votes, out of 68 million total.

It’s World Toilet Day

This funny-sounding idea might be the most important “holiday” in the world. Seriously.

world toilet dayEarlier this year, United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon, along with a coalition from Singapore, introduced a resolution to declare November 19th the first “World Toilet Day.” That sounds lighthearted or silly, but then maybe here in the U.S. we take for granted our widespread sanitation and consistent access to toilets. Worldwide, the lack of sanitation and toilets is a public health crisis. “Sanitation is central to human and environmental health,” Ban said. “It is essential for sustainable development, dignity, and opportunity.” In other words, it’s a basic human right that a lot of humans do not get to enjoy.

5 Facts About PlayStation

The PlayStation 4 just came out, so here’s some trivia about the first three: 5 facts about PlayStation.

facts about playstation• In the late ‘90s, Sony manufactured the audio processors for the Super Nintendo system. Seeing how much money Nintendo was making, the company decided to make its own system. At the same time, it was working with Phillips Electronics to improve CD-ROM technology. Sony figured out how to run data, graphics, and audio from a CD-ROM simultaneously and super-fast. Result: It could put highly advanced video games on discs, a gaming first. Disc games are also much cheaper to manufacture than cartridges, the traditional delivery method for video games.

• Video game industry analysts predicted the PlayStation to fail shortly upon its release in 2000. Why? Because at that point, only software manufacturers like Nintendo and Sega had successfully launched a video game console. Strictly electronics companies, like Sony, had a long history of releasing flop systems, such as RCA’s Studio II, Fairchild’s Channel F, and Magnavox’s Odyssey.

It’s Fact-or-Fake Friday!

FactOrFake Logo 1

Introducing a new feature on Uncle John’s Blog. Each Friday, we’ll give you three bizarre news stories. Two of them are real; one we completely made up. Can you guess which one is the fake? Pick your answer at the end of the article and see if you are right.

4 Actors Who Got to Choose Their Part

Most actors struggle for years, pounding the pavement, going on audition after audition hoping to get their big break. These actors, however, were offered more than
one part at the same time…and had to choose.

Friends_SNLJennifer Aniston

In the 1992-93 TV season, Aniston starred on a short-lived sketch comedy show on Fox called The Edge. Not very many people watched the show (it was cancelled after 18 episodes), but producers at Saturday Night Live must have. Aniston was asked to audition for that show, and she was asked to join the cast for the 1994-95 season. Aniston turned them down, feeling that the pilot she’d just shot for an NBC sitcom called Friends had some promise.

5 Disneyland Knockoffs From Around the World

These unauthorized—and blatant—fakes wouldn’t fool even the dumbest of children.

Fake Disneyland

 

Dreamland (Japan)

In 1959, a group of Japanese investors tried to convince executives at the Walt Disney Company to build a second Disney theme park… in Japan. Disney liked the idea, but not the location and opened a sister park for its Disneyland in California with Disney World in Florida. Undeterred, the consortium decided to move forward without Disney’s blessing and build an exact replica of Disneyland in Nara, Japan. Opening in 1961, Dreamland had all of the amenities of Disneyland, such as replicas of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, The Jungle Cruise, Autopia, the Matterhorn, a monorail, and even a Main Street USA recreating that old timey small town Americana feel for Japanese tourists. Dreamland was the top amusement park in Japan throughout the ’60s and ’70s…until the genuine article Tokyo Disneyland opened in 1983. Dreamland closed for good in 2006.

The Curious History of “666”

Even if you aren’t into heavy metal, you probably know that “666” is a number associated with evil. How come? The devil is in the details. Here is a history of 666.

history of 666The Book of Revelation was written in Greek sometime between 70 and 95 A.D., by an author known only as John. While its most commonly associated with scary, cryptic, or apocolyptic imagery, it’s really only the 13th chapter of Revelation where that’s present. It begins with a letter to the reader, then describes cataclysmic events of the end times John says he saw in a series of visions.

It’s in Revelation (13:8) where “666” is mentioned—the only time in the Bible: “Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.” Doing a bit of quick math, in which a score is 20, the number adds up to 666. Whoever is represented by this number then, the text indicates, is pure evil.

  1. Pages:
  3. ...
  4. 128
  5. 129
  6. 130
  7. ...