Trivia Bits from Creators Syndicate

RELEASE: FEBRUARY 18, 2012 for 02/18/2012

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Tim Harper was a campus reporter for the Drake University Times-Delphic in Iowa, when he broke the biggest story of his career on Sept. 17, 1969. Except that none of it was true. That year, Paul McCartney was out of the public eye, as he mulled the pending dissolution of the Beatles. Rumors spread that he had died. Soon, fans were finding "evidence" in the band's album cover art and l ...

Updated: Sat Feb 18, 2012

RELEASE: FEBRUARY 17, 2012 for 02/17/2012

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Henry James proofread the galleys for the 1903 edition of "The Ambassadors," which had been serialized in North American Review. Unfortunately, NAR had edited it down, and James wanted to restore the original version for the book. In the ensuing chaos, he didn't notice that the publisher had accidentally switched chapters 29 and 28, a mistake left uncorrected for nearly half a century ...

Updated: Fri Feb 17, 2012

RELEASE: FEBRUARY 16, 2012 for 02/16/2012

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

British post-punk group Joy Division's music wasn't especially joyful. And the origin of the name is even less so. As the story goes, the Nazis plucked the prettiest women from concentration camps and employed them in brothels for preferred soldiers. This was known (supposedly) as the Joy Division. After lead singer Ian Curtis hanged himself, the remaining members of the band reformed themselve ...

Updated: Thu Feb 16, 2012

RELEASE: FEBRUARY 15, 2012 for 02/15/2012

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Before Mickey Mouse — and before he knew much about intellectual property laws — Walt Disney created Oswald the Lucky Rabbit in 1928 for Universal. When he and Universal parted company, Disney lost Oswald, which always rankled the company he founded. But in 2006, Al Michaels wanted to be released from his contract at ABC, owned by Disney, to join NBC, owned by Universal. So Disney t ...

Updated: Wed Feb 15, 2012

RELEASE: FEBRUARY 14, 2012 for 02/14/2012

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Today we look at the unhappy history of celebrity stalkers. Robert Bardo became obsessed with young actor Rebecca Schaeffer. He hired a private investigator to find out where she lived and shot her to death, leading the LAPD to set up a Threat Management Unit to deal with stalkers. Bardo was inspired by Arthur Jackson, a stalker who used DMV records to find Theresa Saldana, whom he stabbed repe ...

Updated: Tue Feb 14, 2012

RELEASE: FEBRUARY 13, 2012 for 02/13/2012

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Some TV and movie stars sing on hit records. Others have criminal records. For example, in 1970, Suzanne Somers was arrested for passing bad checks. Larry King was accused of larceny after siphoning off cash intended to fund the New Orleans DA's office investigation of the JFK murder. And in 1977, Tim Allen

sold $43,000 in cocaine to an undercover agent in Kalamazoo. He served a reduced ...

Updated: Mon Feb 13, 2012

RELEASE: FEBRUARY 11, 2012 for 02/11/2012

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Charlie Chaplin was a great artist, but he was also consumed by a form of pedophilia called phebophilia, which is an overwhelming attraction for teenage girls. He married and divorced two underage girls. One of them, Lita Grey, he married because she was pregnant. Their divorce proceedings revealed many of Chaplin's minor kinks. And he nearly went to prison over Joan Barry, a woman in her early ...

Updated: Sat Feb 11, 2012

RELEASE: FEBRUARY 10, 2012 for 02/10/2012

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Gary Coleman's death in 2010 was another sad chapter in the history of the ?Diff'rent Strokes? kids. Robbed blind by his parents, he ended up working as a security guard and launched a quixotic run for the California governorship. His co-star, Todd Bridges, had a series of problems with guns, drugs and the law, having been accused of trying to kill an Los Angeles drug dealer. And Dana Plato end ...

Updated: Fri Feb 10, 2012

RELEASE: THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2012 for 02/09/2012

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Heath Ledger won an Oscar for playing the Joker, a role that has traditionally offered actors a license to chew scenery like it was bubblegum. Jack Nicholson devoured the screen in the first Batman movie, and Cesar Romero played him on TV, but there was also a cartoon version of Batman. And there, the Joker was voiced by Mark Hamill, most famous as Luke Skywalker. In fact, Hamill has had someth ...

Updated: Thu Feb 09, 2012

RELEASE: WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2012 for 02/08/2012

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

People are very particular about the people who play Sherlock Holmes, even more so than they are about the various James Bonds. No doubt, for some people, Robert Downey Jr. will be the definitive Holmes, or perhaps even the wonderfully named Benedict Cumberbatch. But for most us, the real Sherlock Holmes is Jeremy Brett, who played him from 1984 to 1994. He also auditioned twice for the role of ...

Updated: Wed Feb 08, 2012

RELEASE: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2012 for 02/07/2012

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Although Hamlet is considered one of the great roles of the theatre, Laurence Olivier is the only person to win an Oscar for playing Hamlet. But there have been many other versions. A recent one, starring Ethan Hawke, even set the "to be or not to be" speech in the "action" section of a Blockbuster Video, which is pretty clever. Incidentally, many of the men who have played ...

Updated: Tue Feb 07, 2012

RELEASE: MONDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2012 for 02/06/2012

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

You know that Denzel Washington played Malcolm X in the movie of that name. In that film, Al Freeman Jr. played Elijah Mohammad, Malcolm's mentor. And as it happens, Freeman played Malcolm X himself in the TV mini-series "Roots: The Next Generations." Malcolm X was also played by Morgan Freeman on TV in 1981's "Death of a Prophet" and by James Earl Jones and Mario Van Peeble ...

Updated: Mon Feb 06, 2012

PAUL'S TRIVIABITS (TM) - Daily for 02/06/2012

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Monday, February 6

PAUL'S TRIVIABITS (TM) - Weekly for 02/06/2012

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

FOR RELEASE: SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2012 for 02/04/2012

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Saint Christopher was sometimes depicted as a dog-headed cannibal, perhaps because dog-headed deities were sometimes seen in the ancient world. Egypt's Anubis was a good example. Dog-headed-ness is called cynocephalus, by the way. As for St. Christopher, he is the saint who supposedly carried Jesus across the river when Jesus was posing as a very heavy child.

What Wild West figur ...

Updated: Sat Feb 04, 2012

FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2012 for 02/03/2012

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

In Roman numerals, an I is a 1, a V is a 5 and an X is a 10. But there is no Roman numeral for 0 because Romans never thought of 0 as a number. Europeans had no 0 at all until the Arabs exported the idea, and they in turn got in from India. As you can imagine, this represented a revolution in mathematics. Interestingly, one other culture had the 0: the Mayans.

What TV show used t ...

Updated: Fri Feb 03, 2012

FOR RELEASE: THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2012 for 02/02/2012

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

When Stephen King wrote "Carrie," about a telekinetic teenager in Maine, he was in fact teaching teenagers at Hampden Academy in Maine. King had already written three novels, none of which he could get published. Worse, he almost didn't hear about the book's being accepted for publication, because he had to have his phone disconnected to save money. And as for Carrie, he finished it o ...

Updated: Thu Feb 02, 2012

FOR RELEASE: WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2012 for 02/01/2012

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Graffiti artist Shepard Fairey hit the big time with his "HOPE" image, depicting Barack Obama. Before this, he was known mostly for the "OBEY" stickers, featuring Andre the Giant, but the "HOPE" image seemed to be everywhere in 2008. Sadly, it seems that the image was based on an Associated Press photo, so, naturally, the AP sued, leading to a debate over the limit ...

Updated: Wed Feb 01, 2012

FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JANUARY 31, 2012 for 01/31/2012

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Richard Pryor's first film was going to be "Uncle Tom's Fairy Tales," about a white man on trial for raping a black woman. Yikes. Not surprisingly, the film, directed by Penelope Spheeris, never saw release, and it may be gone forever. Pryor's first wife apparently shredded most of the only negative, although a small bit of it appeared in a 2005 retrospective when the Directors Guild ...

Updated: Tue Jan 31, 2012

FOR RELEASE: MONDAY, JANUARY 30, 2012 for 01/30/2012

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

You often get shots in your ginglymus, which is doctor-speak for your inner elbow. Actually, it's any hinge joint that allows motion in only two directions. The word also applies to your ankle. Another body part you never knew had a name is your acnestis. It's the part of your back you can't reach to scratch, right between your shoulder blades. In fact, the name is literally from the Greek for ...

Updated: Mon Jan 30, 2012