It’s supposed to be easy: You get up on that stage, sing some songs, and soak up the adulation. But out of the thousands of rock concerts ever staged, a few have taken a turn for the worst. Patti Smith Patti Smith and her band were serving as the opening act for Bob Seger on […]
Hollywood is so closely identified with the “decadent” film industry, that it’s hard to imagine that it started out as a prim Victorian town…but it did. History In 1886, Kansas prohibitionists Harvey and Daeida Wilcox “bought a 120-acre citrus farm in sleepy Cahuenga Valley, a suburb of Los Angeles, for $150/acre.” They built an elaborate […]
Name some musicians, and you immediately think “one-hit wonder,” like Dexy’s Midnight Runners or Toni Basil. Some other artists are downright household names, but the stats don’t lie: Despite being enormously successful, they only ever had one hit single. Don Ho One of the most famous musicians to ever come out of Hawaii (if not […]
Not just anybody can play the Man of Steel. In fact, only a handful of actors have done it. But lots more came close, like these folks. Bruce Jenner The biggest new star of 1976 wasn’t an actor, but an athlete. Before identifying as Caitlyn Jenner, Bruce Jenner won the decathlon at the 1976 Summer […]
We found these stories right under our noses. Why the Long Face? In 2003 Bhupati Das, from the Indian state of West Bengal, announced his plan to break the world record in “mustache weightlifting.” The 48-year-old said he’d been inspired to try it six years earlier when he read about a man who had lifted […]
The Onion isn’t a real newspaper—it’s satire that sends up most all aspects of modern culture. But sometimes they’re so spot on in their mockery that they wind up predicting the future. (1) The Onion: Shortly after the Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional, thereby laying the groundwork […]
A working kitchen needs just a few things to function: an oven, a stove, a fridge, and, of course, an automatic hot dog cooker. Hot Diggity Dogger Cooking hot dogs in the microwave: It takes about a minute for the wiener and 10 seconds for the bun. That’s just so complicated. Fortunately, there’s the Hot […]
Spring has sprung, and so have these silly and obscure “holidays.” April 1: International Tatting Day It’s also April Fool’s Day, and it would be a pretty nasty prank if you convinced somebody that “International Tatting Day” was the day they’re supposed to get a tattoo. In reality, it’s a celebration of something that’s just […]
What better way to pull off an April Fool’s Day prank than with the one thing people take so seriously that they wouldn’t even suspect it? Here are some food-based goofs staged by international fast food chains. On April Fool’s Eve (that’s March 31) back in 1998, Burger King announced its latest addition to its […]
It’s almost time for the baseball season to start up again, so that means one thing for Uncle John: bizarre, delicious, and bizarrely delicious ballpark concession stand items. Poutine is a distinctively Canadian food, but it’s a wonder it hasn’t widely caught on in America, because it’s stuff we all love down here. Traditional poutine […]
Sometimes we like to get a little highbrow here at the Bathroom Readers’ Institute. Salieri vs. Mozart Ironically, Salieri became famous because of the movie about how he wasn’t famous. For the 1984 film Amadeus, F. Murray Abraham won an Academy Award for playing the Mozart contemporary who was overshadowed by Mozart, a musical genius […]
Cell phone towers: They’re a necessary part of today’s world, keeping us all connected and able to access trivia book publishers’ blogs whenever we like. But they’re also an eyesore. Fortunately, some designers out there are doing their best to disguise cell towers as things a bit more pleasing to the eye. Cacti In the […]
We couldn’t find Uncle John’s old Fart Bazooka, but we managed to find some other famous weapons. John Wilkes Booth’s Gun The gun that Booth used to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln now resides in the basement museum of Ford’s Theatre, in Washington, D.C. The gun is a single-shot flintlock, made by Philadelphia gunsmith Henry Derringer. […]
Be kind to animals—the life they save may be…yours. Captain Kangaroo In 2003 Leonard Richards, 52, was checking his Tanjil South, Australia, emu farm for storm damage when a tree branch came crashing down on his head and knocked him out. Luckily for Richards, Lulu, his pet kangaroo who “thinks she’s a dog,” was following […]
Filmmakers are good at making films. Sometimes they aren’t so good at coming up with names for those films, so somebody in marketing has to come up with a better one. Here are some early, working titles of major movies. Annie Hall: Woody Allen tried several different titles, including A Rollercoaster Named Desire, It Had […]
A lot of rock music movies were produced in the 1970s—Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same, the Who’s Quadrophenia, and Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park, for example. But for whatever reason, many more rock movies were planned but never got made. (Perhaps 1970s rock stars were not the most reliable bunch.) After […]
Say hello to Dr. Seuss, a rhymer of rhymes both tight and loose. A BRI favorite he really is; the following story is really his. Vital Stats Born: March 2, 1904 Died: September 25, 1991, age 87 Real Name: Theodore Seuss Geisel He adopted “Seuss” as his writing name during Prohibition, while attending Dartmouth College. […]
How did the rock star born Marvin Aday get his stage moniker? It depends on the day. Aday so hates being asked the question constantly over the years that he likes to, as he says, “just continually lie.” Here are just a few of the multiple stories he’s told about how he got the name […]
