It just wouldn’t be Christmas without the stockings hung by the chimney with care, a punch bowl full of eggnog, and the game where you slap your friends on their backside. That one, and many others, are once steadfast yuletide traditions that slowly disappeared. Aluminum Christmas Trees In the 1950s and 1960s, any sort of […]
Need a vacation from Christmas Vacation? Don’t think It’s a Wonderful Life is so wonderful anymore? Then check out one of these, well, quirky, holiday movie recommendations from Uncle John. All American Christmas Carol (2013) It’s the umpteenth adaptation and variation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, in which the Scroogey central character learns the […]
Who’s the most popular musician on the radio today? Well, it’s December…so it’s Bing Crosby. His recordings of Christmas songs are perennial classics, so much so that nowadays he’s pretty much exclusively celebrated with the holiday. But in the mid-20th century, there was nobody bigger than Bing. White Christmas According to pre-computerized sales tracking systems, […]
You know the songs, but you probably didn’t know these fun facts about them. When the carolers hit your house, regale them with some trivia about their tunes! “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” The song is built around a joke that’s never completely explained, but that most listeners understand: A child witnesses his mother […]
How your favorite candies got their names. Kit Kat The current and most famous form of Kit Kat consists of a bar of four “fingers” of cookie wafers covered in chocolate. That’s a bit different from the first iteration of food sold under the name. The Kit-Cat Club was a place where late 1800s London […]
The sport is called “football,” even though only one player regularly actually kicks the ball: the kicker. Here are some guys who joined the NFL because of their kicks…but had a hard time kicking it. The extra point or “point after touchdown” is so named because it’s basically a free point. A team scores a […]
Watch out for the windmill, don’t swing your club too hard, and enjoy this trivia about mini golf. Ladies’ Putting Club of St. Andrews One of the oldest miniature golf courses in the world is located right next to one of the oldest and most storied regular golf courses in the world. At St. Andrews […]
Being a movie star is pretty sweet work if you can get. So are the perks. Roger Moore James Bond is a gentleman who enjoys gentlemanly things, such as martinis that are shaken instead of stirred. James Bond portrayer Roger Moore also liked the finer things – so much so that when he agreed to […]
Readers sometimes ask if we’ll ever run out of things to write about. No way. Origins are a good example: as we recently discovered, even lowly snack foods can have fascinating (and delicious) origins.
Babies: Cute little bundles of joy…or bizarre creatures from another planet? Bones An adult human has exactly 206 bones. Babies, however, have as many as 300. When they’re born, a lot of what will eventually harden and fuse into solid bones are individual pieces of soft bones, or cartilage. Knees But some bones adults have […]
Celebrities: They’re beautiful, talented, and they even invent words and phrases! Courtesy flush As purveyors of the world’s finest and largest books of trivia read in the bathroom, we like to keep up with all the slang terms and phrases related to everything that goes on in what we call “the reading room.” One phrase […]
At the recently held consumer electronics show E3, Microsoft enraged cash-strapped gamers with an announcement that its latest system, the Xbox One X will cost nearly $500. That’s actually par for the course, because video games are two things: fun…and expensive. MAGNAVOX ODY$$EY The first widely available video game system in the U.S. came out […]
If you’re from the area near a college or went there, you probably know why your quirky team name is what it is, but for the rest of us, let the truth be told. Stanford Cardinal Look closely — the prestigious California university’s team name is the Cardinal, not cardinals. That refers to the shade […]
We’ve fallen “behind” with our word origins posts lately, so let’s get to the “bottom” of things. Make sure to read to the “end”! Tush Linguists say this one only dates back about 50 years. It’s also a specifically American slang term. It’s an all-American Englishification and shortening of tukhus, or tokhes, which is a […]
Today’s consumers are more sophisticated than ever, and they’re hip to the often wily ways of advertising. That means in order to get noticed and sell their wares, companies have to get a lot more creative…and strange. Here are some companies that promoted their products by making other, bizarre products. Pizza Shoes Are $300 basketball […]
Yes, there are (somehow) even more holidays coming up this month. December 2: Earmuff Day Some places get so cold in the winter that the regular get-up of coat, hat, scarf, and gloves just isn’t enough — earmuffs must be worn over the old hearin’ flaps to keep them warm. Early December is when a […]
The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, isn’t just for players, managers, and other people who made baseball great. “Centerfield” The playing of John Fogerty’s 1985 baseball-themed hit “Centerfield” is as much a part of a baseball game as peanuts and the seventh-inning stretch. In 2010, the Baseball Hall of […]
Doughnuts (or donuts) have been around for ages. But where did they come from? Oily Cake When Dutch settlers arrived in what’s now New York in the 17th century, they brought with them something called olykoek, or “oily cake.” They were much like today’s doughnuts in that they were fried balls or discs of sweetened […]
