Weekend Open Thread

Congrats CW. This was the closest I’ve ever been.

I was distracted with rage at the Rancid Peaches story!

Besides, if he didn’t know the answer, all he had to do was say so. (It was never established what Dr. Quincy’s first name was, except that it started with an “R.”)

So here, I will disprove Klugman’s comment and earn a couple of bucks, with this week’s trivia! Enjoy.

… the most expensive black-and-white movie ever filmed was made in 1966? Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? had a budget of $7.5 million, quite the sum for its day – it would be $68,954,797 today. Most of that, however, was tied up in the salaries of the stars Richard Burton (1925-1984) and his then-wife, Elizabeth Taylor (1932-2011). Additional trivia note: Schindler’s List, made in black and white in 1994, had a budget of $22 million, but adjusted for inflation, Virginia Woolf was much more expensive.

… a Canadian province has its own time zone? Residents of Newfoundland set their clocks a half hour behind Atlantic standard time. If you’re wondering, Atlantic standard is one hour ahead of Eastern standard time in the U.S. (I guess Newfoundlanders call it “time and a half.” I’ll show myself out.)

… a famous western actor actually knew one of the Old West’s greatest gunslingers? When he was a young man working as an extra on film sets, actor John Wayne (born Marion Morrison, 1907-1979) was enthralled by the tales of one of the legends of the West – Wyatt Earp (1848-1929). Earp was serving as a technical advisor on numerous silent movie Westerns and entertained the people on the set with his stories of his life. Wayne was one of the “gofers” who would fetch coffee for Earp, and later said he listened closely to all of Earp’s tales and worked much of them into the characters he portrayed in his Western films. Wayne was quoted once as saying, “Earp was the man who had actually done the things in his life that I was trying to do in a movie. I imitated his walk; I imitated his talk.” (And you did it very, very well, Duke.)

… you may have a case of dessert stomach? Sure, go ahead and laugh. But it’s a real condition, also called sensory-specific satiety. It means, essentially, that the more you eat of something, the less you like it, so that your senses give you the impression you’re full. But just as soon as you eat something you like – such as dessert – your stomach sends out chemical signals that there’s still plenty of room, so go ahead and indulge. (That explains most of my life, actually.)

… the King of England is related to Dracula? No, not the vampire, but the real “Dracula,” Prince Vlad III Tepes (1431-1476), known to history as “Vlad the Impaler” of Romania. King Charles III (born 1948) is distantly related to the family of Vlad. That makes His Majesty the heir to the real Dracula’s bloodline.

… forks have not always been in vogue? When they were first introduced to dinner tables around the 4th Century AD, they were considered sacrilegious, being seen as artificial hands.

… the phrase “Luck of the Irish” was originally supposed to be an insult? The original meaning of the phrase was, “Only by sheer luck – as opposed to brains – could these people be successful.” It has since morphed into a true compliment to people of Irish descent. (Only they could make a compliment out of that.)

… about three-fourths of all of the world’s fresh water is in Canada? (Nice ice!)

Now … you know!

Pardon, YouTube are wussies…