Amazing Things I Learned Today!

[Nate the Great]

Hey, a new forum game! The title is pretty self explanatory.

Drumroll please!

The Amazing Thing I Learned Today Number 1 is...

The Barenaked Ladies sang the theme song for Big Bang Theory!

[Nate the Great]

TATILT #2

Barclay actually appeared in more episodes of Voyager (6) than NextGen (5)!

[Nate the Great]

TATILT #3

The movie "The Last Unicorn" can be considered a hybrid of anime and Rankin/Bass. This combination strangely works.

See MarzGurl's review on YouTube. (She calls herself the Nostalgia Chick because she was a contender for that title using this as her submission, but she didn't earn that title)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1c5cnsjJwIQ

[Nate the Great]

TATILT #4

http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2009/06/11/300000_price_sets_record___for_parking/

A man paid $300,000 for a parking space. And this isn't even a parking space in a secure heated lot and security guards, this is a parking space On. The. Street.

Dude! If I had that much money I'd move to another apartment that had free parking spaces. Or maybe move to another city that had cheaper parking!

[Nate the Great]

TATILT #5

As I was driving today I was reminiscing about ''The Princess Diaries 2," and I started pondering where else I saw the actor who played Nicholas. It was really nagging me, then it hit me like a ton of bricks: that guy was Chris Pine, our newest Captain Kirk!

Wow. Just wow.

[Nate the Great]

TATILT #6

"Mary Sue" is a term invented in a Star Trek fanfic. Or maybe I already knew that, and the information's just been buried under all the other junk rattling around my head. Whatever.

[Nate the Great]

TATILT #7

Alan Rickman was in Die Hard! I've never seen the movie, but I saw this in the Nostalgia Critic's newest video...

http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/videolinks/thatguywiththeglasses/nostalgia-critic/14801-ncchlist11

[Nate the Great]

TATILT #8

Diagon Alley from Harry Potter is a pun on "diagonally." It is physically painful that in ten years I've never figured that one out.

[MaverickZer0]

Please tell me you got 'Knockturn Alley' (nocturnally).

[Nate the Great]

TATILT #9

The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny and the Potter Puppet Pals have the same creator, Niel Cicierega AKA Lemon Demon!

Wow. Just wow. This one is understandable, as I've always seen the name "Niel Cicierega" attached to PPP and "Lemon Demon" attached to TUSOUD. I never knew they were the same person, however.

P.S. Watch the Potter Puppet Pals!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx1XIm6q4r4&feature=related

[Nate the Great]

TATILT #10

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Clean

Mister Clean's first name is Veritably!

Ugh. Just ugh.

[Nate the Great]

TATILT #11

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Giacchino#Film_and_television

The same guy did the score for The Incredibles, Speed Racer, and Star Trek 11!

[Nate the Great]

TATILT #12

I've long known that Ron Wasserman was responsible for some of the classic Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers music, but I just learned that he also worked on some music for the Sailor Moon dub!

http://www.linkedin.com/in/ronwasserman

[Nate the Great]

TATILT #13

I'm a big fan of both Ranma 1/2 and X-Men Evolution, so I was surprised to learn that they share a few voice actors!

Venus Terzo=Jean Grey and Female Ranma
Richard Ian Cox=Quicksilver and Male Ranma

Now that TVTropes has pointed it out, I'm having one of those slap my own forehead moments. Of course those voices are the same!

[Nate the Great]

TATILT #14

For complicated reasons I stumbled upon my old Yahoo account. I haven't signed into that account for at least five years. It's so old that it still listed the Five-Minute Stargate site (the GeoCities one) and the 3Sygma version of Five-Minute Voyager, plus Sev Trek from the days when the entire archive was still free. Seriously, an amazing thing I learned today!

[Nate the Great]

TATILT #15

There may be justice in the world after all!

Fan-game The Silver Lining (the unofficial King's Quest 9) was shut down a few months ago by the rights owners, but the overwhelming fan support and petitions have reopened negotiations!

http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2010/05/04/activision-in-discussions-to-greenlight-fan-made-kings-quest-sequel/

[Nate the Great]

TATILT #16

There are actually Skeeball leagues! Skeeball has always been one of my favorite games in that category of arcade games.

http://unitedsocialsports.com/

[Nate the Great]

This one will take a little setup. I'm a fan of Hayley Mills' early Disney movies (Pollyanna, The Parent Trap, etc.), so I was delighted to discover someone had actually written a fan song about her...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Csg9f0TXSK4

It's a relatively obscure song, so...

TATILT #17

Someone actually reworked it to be a fan song for the Beatles!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDMAES4utqg

[Zeke]

Here's something amazing I learned today: I'm not the only one who's joked about illegal Klingon immigration (http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&client=opera&rls=en&q=%22illegal+klingon&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=). I do seem to be the only one who came up with it unprompted, though.

[Zeke]

The best way to get two hexagons out of a square is actually <a href="http://s616.photobucket.com/albums/tt243/CZeke/?action=view&current=hexfit.jpg">simpler than you might expect</a>.

[Nate the Great]

TATILT #18

The actress Kaley Cuoco was in both 8 Simple Rules and The Big Bang Theory. Wow. Just wow.

[Zeke]

What's so "wow" about that?

I guess I'll start numbering mine. Here's ATZLT #3:

There's a show called The Thick of It (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_thick_of_it) which has a character named Malcolm Tucker. And there's another one named Reeder!

(On the off chance someone reading this doesn't get the point, Enterprise has a Tucker and a Malcolm Reed.)

[Nate the Great]

It's wow because I hadn't noticed it, and the two characters seem quite different from each other.

[Grayvorn]

That as of today August 20th, I am the same age as current Doctor Who Matt Smith!

Getting older ain't all bad :)

[Tate]

Oh, uh... happy birthday!

...I'm too late, aren't I?

[Grayvorn]

Just a tad, but meh............ta!

Today I learned..........um........well nothing really, but it does the brain good to rest now and then :D

[PointyHairedJedi]

There's a show called The Thick of It (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_thick_of_it) which has a character named Malcolm Tucker. And there's another one named Reeder!

Malcolm from The Thick of It says "fuck" an awful lot more than the other one does. Peter Capaldi actually came to the island for an event a month or two back, it's was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the arts centre. I did not go, it was a fundraiser and thus the tickets were unfortunately quite expensive.

I don't think I've learned anything amazing recently, but I do think it's pretty neat that we've directly imaged the first exoplanet recently (as opposed to more indirect methods of detection). I also learned that the ancient Greeks really were not people you'd want to hang out with, Athenians especially. I probably could have guessed that before though, to be fair.

[Sa'ar Chasm]

Apparently you can buy deuterated, HPLC grade acetonitrile by the litre.
The price is "please inquire".

To put this in perspective, HPLC-grade solvents are generally more expensive than regular solvents because extra effort has gone into removing the impurities. You can generally buy this in 4L bottles.

Acetonitrile saw a spike in price because the industrial process that produced it as a byproduct went belly-up during the economic meltdown. The Great Acetonitrile Shortage is over, but I think the price is still hovering above where it used to be.

Deuterated solvents have had all their Hs replaced by deuterium (the stuff that makes the Enterprise go), a rarer isotope of hydrogen and the stuff that makes heavy water heavy. These are typically sold on a much smaller and can go for $30-$50 for 10 grams (about 10-10 mL).

Putting all that together and then selling it by the litre must be monstrously expensive, as is the HPLC-NMR instrument that requires it. If you want to use it for an experiment, it has to be really important.

[Nate the Great]

TATILT #19

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.233732-Pi-1337-42-My-mind-is-blown

1337% (LEET, natch) of pi is 42.

13.37*3.14159=42, give or take.

Yeah, yeah, it's all a coincidence and you could find similar examples all over, but I was still tickled by it.

PS: "Natch" is lifted directly from editorial comments in old Marvel Comics. "We last saw Villain X escape from Hero Y in Issue Z, natch."

[Nate the Great]

TATILT #20

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6235040.html

Yahtzee is a fan of Spoony!

[Nate the Great]

TATILT #21

Jonathan Frakes used to play the part of Captain America in public appearances.

Check it out!

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://external.ak.fbcdn.net/safe_image.php%3Fd%3Dd909d9b5880a050a485c848a860a2 a00%26url%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.plaidstallions. com%252Fmarvel%252Fcaptainamericaad.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.facebook.com/note.php%3Fnote_id%3D10150208294625455&usg=__YBsNIc-w_SfJhR3P_dytwShS-f4=&h=1018&w=750&sz=118&hl=en&start=8&zoom=1&itbs=1&tbnid=7ekkshi09EwkoM:&tbnh=150&tbnw=111&prev=/images%3Fq%3D%2522jonathan%2Bfrakes%2522%2BAND%2B% 2522captain%2Bamerica%2522%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfi refox-a%26hs%3DN3k%26sa%3DG%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26prmdo%3D1%26tbs%3Disch:1

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.plaidstallions.com/marvel/capgoblin.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.plaidstallions.com/marvel/index.html&usg=__5B9aCIIe7iH1z0qlnFedNoDQWgg=&h=384&w=700&sz=42&hl=en&start=1&zoom=1&itbs=1&tbnid=ZAE_TVeqnQaQ4M:&tbnh=77&tbnw=140&prev=/images%3Fq%3D%2522jonathan%2Bfrakes%2522%2B%2522ca ptain%2Bamerica%2522%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26hs%3Djg5%26sa%3DX%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26prmdo%3D1%26tbs%3Disch:1%26prmd%3Do

[Nate the Great]

TATILT #22

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelatin_dessert#Gelatin_shots

There's an urban legend that Tom Lehrer invented the jello shot!

[Nate the Great]

TATILT #23

Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens (of Schoolhouse Rock and Ragtime fame) wrote the songs for Anastasia!

[Grayvorn]

TATILT # 24

Zooey Deschenal was in one of my favorite films ever 'The New Guy'. I'd watched it dozens of times and never realised until now.

[Nate the Great]

TATILT #25

The city of Cape Suzette from TaleSpin was a joke based on a real dish called the Crepe Suzette.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cr%C3%AApe_Suzette

[MaverickZer0]

Oh man, Crepe Suzette. Those are good. Really, really good. Anyone who hasn't tried one should.

[Nate the Great]

TATILT #26

I'm reading a compilation of Isaac Asimov science essays, and after mentioning the scientist Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky he uses a footnote to mention Tom Lehrer's song. Furthermore, he was a fan of Lehrer.

Listen to the song on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQHaGhC7C2E

[Nate the Great]

TATILT #27

The same guy voiced the Teeny Little Super Guy on Sesame Street AND Mr. Glitch in Square One.

His name was Jim Thurman, and he passed away in 2007.

[NAHTMMM]

TATILT #28

Paul Simon and Carrie Fisher were married at one point (only for a year or two). That's kinda weird and kinda, well, amazing.

[Nate the Great]

TATILT #29

The Captain Kirk Internet Meme "I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am" came from a quote from a fiver!

[Katy Jane]

Yep, Kira and 5MV even get credit on icanhazcheezburger's meme encyclopedia...

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/im-sorry-i-cant-hear-you-over-the-sound-of-how-awesome-i-am

:D

I didn't learn this today but I learned it recently... On Farscape, Pilot is voiced by the guy that plays Captain Crais. I watched the entire series and never even began to suspect. IMBD even credits the actor with both but I assumed that had something to do with the body switching episode because it seemed so unlikely that they would be the same actor.

[Sa'ar Chasm]

Yep, Kira and 5MV even get credit on icanhazcheezburger's meme encyclopedia...

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/im-sorry-i-cant-hear-you-over-the-sound-of-how-awesome-i-am

The worst part about that article is despite that fact that the online pseudonym is a female character, and despite the fact that the quoted fiver has "Copyright Carolyn" at the bottom, apparently Kira is a him.

"The line was written in February 2005 by Kira in his rewrite[1] of the 1967 episode “The Return of the Archons.”"

Also, rewrite?

[Zeke]

<a href="http://www.fiveminute.net/forums/showthread.php?p=75974">You're</a> <a href="http://www.fiveminute.net/forums/showthread.php?t=1428">getting</a> <a href="http://www.fiveminute.net/forums/showthread.php?t=1422">forgetful</a> <a href="http://www.fiveminute.net/forums/showthread.php?t=1456">in your</a> <a href="http://www.fiveminute.net/forums/showthread.php?t=1145">old age</a>, Nate.

[Nate the Great]

Don't remind me. I should put forth a quote from that episode where Bashir turns thirty, if only I could remember a quote or the title.

[Zeke]

"Distant Voices". One of my personal favourites, though like many S3 eps, it's more like TNG than DS9. (Several TNG writers had just come aboard, and they took time to adapt.) It ends with a classic Garak line: "To think, after all this time, all our lunches together, you still don't trust me. There's hope for you yet, Doctor."

I turn 30 this December, so I feel your pain.

[Sa'ar Chasm]

I turn 30 this December, so I feel your pain.

Quitcher whinin', young'n. I've been saying I'm 29+ for a few years now.

[evay]

Quitcher whinin', young'n. I've been saying I'm 29+ for a few years now.

All y'all can sod off. I was delighted to turn 30; it was like I was officially an adult. I didn't have to take anybody's shit any more, I didn't have to give anybody shit anymore, I was out of the shit business.

Forty is even better. There are sooooooo many things you realize that are just not worth the effort of wasting time and energy on. I mentioned this to a friend and her face lit up with an evil grin, and she said, "Now imagine what fifty is like."

[Sa'ar Chasm]

All y'all can sod off. I was delighted to turn 30; it was like I was officially an adult. I didn't have to take anybody's shit any more, I didn't have to give anybody shit anymore, I was out of the shit business.

Forty is even better. There are sooooooo many things you realize that are just not worth the effort of wasting time and energy on. I mentioned this to a friend and her face lit up with an evil grin, and she said, "Now imagine what fifty is like."

Yeah, well, turning 30 with a career is a bit different than turning 30 and still being in grad school with no hope that you might ever finish.

[evay]

Yeah, well, turning 30 with a career is a bit different than turning 30 and still being in grad school with no hope that you might ever finish.

Sigh. I loved school. I do miss it sometimes.

[Nate the Great]

http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2007/02/08/comic-book-urban-legends-revealed-89/

The same radioactive stuff that turned Matt Murdock into Daredevil created the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (at least in the original black-and-white comics)!

[Nate the Great]

On TaleSpin they based Baloo and Rebecca's relationship on Sam and Rebecca's relationship from Cheers! In retrospect the similarities are obvious.

http://www.animationsource.org/talespin/en/questions/&numg=109315

[Nate the Great]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6atcCMmVa8

The Japanese Sailor Moon Christmas album contains the song "When the Saints Go Marching In." What this song has to do with Sailor Moon OR Christmas is beyond me.

[Nate the Great]

On August 10th Michael Ansara died. Not only was he Kang in Star Trek, but the voice of Mr. Freeze in Batman the Animated Series.

The amazing thing I learned today was the joining of these two facts. I had already associated "Ansara" with "Kang" and "Mr. Freeze", but hadn't actually connected the two.

[Nate the Great]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9GIMaNwUEM&list=SPJtitKU0CAehsdcybehbPFHObmWsKtQcY&index=19

Mythbuster's own Adam Savage is a fan of Hayao Miyazaki, and even made a No Face (from Spirited Away) costume!

[Nate the Great]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSuUQHoJsuw

Bing Crosby, Donald O'Connor, and Fred MacMurray were once in the same movie! A very young Donald and a younger Fred than I've ever seen, but there they are!

[Nate the Great]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go9XT2S1bF4

If you touch a loose fluorescent tube to an active plasma ball, it lights up!

[NAHTMMM]

Corn was originally a generic term for any old cereal grain, and even today some British types will say "corn" to refer to whatever the local crop happens to be.

[Nate the Great]

The reason they're called "upper case" and "lower case" is because printers would put the metal type for "lower case letters" in a place that's easier to get at, because they're used more often.

[Nate the Great]

The same guy, Jim Thurman (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1235514/), voiced both Mr. Glitch on Square One (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMFtaj8F6Qo) and the Teeny Little Super Guy on Sesame Street (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rq7PrsITTnc)!

[Flying Gremlin]

King Abdullah II of Jordan is so much of an awesome ruler, he reportedly dropped bombs on ISIS from a F-16, personally went to a family and swore to avenge the loss of the son whom was burned alive, and did a non-speaking cameo on Voyager.

[Nate the Great]

The episode "The Lights of Zetar (http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/The_Lights_of_Zetar_%28episode%29)" was co-written by Shari Lewis and her husband Jeremy Tarcher. Yes, Shari Lewis (http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Shari_Lewis) as in Lamp Chop's Play-Along. You can't make stuff like this up. Definitely an amazing thing I learned today.

[NAHTMMM]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate_chip_cookie

Nobody thought to invent the chocolate chip cookie until the 1930s
Even then, it was probably either an accident or just making do with damaged ingredients
They were originally known as "Toll House cookies" after the restaurant of origin

[Nate the Great]

Well, not a "fact", but an interesting hypothesis.

One of Wesley's "acting ensign" uniforms looked like this (http://i.imgur.com/gdLeT.png).

Note the three colored stripes: red, yellow, and turquoise. In watching SF Debris' review of "The Battle" again today I noticed these stripes and suddenly wondered if they represent the three divisions of Starfleet: command, science/medicine, and operations/security. Others on the net have also noticed this, and have wondered if this is because Wesley hasn't chosen his division yet.

[Nate the Great]

Today I learned what Charlie Chaplin's voice (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug8KiS0W85Y) sounded like.

I'd only seen him in clips from silent movies.
If you want the non-Melodysheep version, here it is (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7GY1Xg6X20).

[Nate the Great]

Today I learned that one of my oldest friends is also a fan of How It Should Have Ended. It's a small web after all.

[Nate the Great]

Malcolm McDowell is Alexander Siddig's uncle! (http://www.cracked.com/photoplasty_2284_42-famous-people-who-hung-out-before-they-were-famous_p4/)

At least Cracked says so. And when have they ever made a factual error? ;)

[Nate the Great]

I've long been a fan of the joke "If a tree falls on a mime in the forest, does anybody care?" Well, today I discovered that this comes from the comic strip The Far Side. I was and still am a fan of the comic, but the mime strip isn't quite as immediately "That's from the Far Side!"-memetic as other classics like the Thagomizer, or the idiot pushing on a pull door, or Cow Tools, or so forth.

[Nate the Great]

Why one side of aluminum foil is shiny and the other side is matte. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6plHOj7kvLA)

[Nate the Great]

Not really amazing, but I wanted to drop by and say that the Arrowverse is now part of the Westphall Multiverse (https://www.dropbox.com/s/qrv15i19ypzxgwn/Crossovers_2016.png?dl=0). I'm glad that people are still adding shows. Yes, according to strict logic the whole thing is unwieldy, self-contradictory, and all-around-impossible, but I still have fun with the idea.

[Nate the Great]

Happy National Science Fiction Day! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Fiction_Day)

I only learned today that Isaac Asimov's birthday of January 2nd is National Science Fiction Day.

I confess to minimal knowledge of "hard" scifi fiction. I own a book of time travel stories, and have read a bit here and there elsewhere, but can hardly call myself a serious fan of the genre. My fandom of Asimov comes from his nonfiction, especially his science essays.

(P.S. My boxes upon boxes of Star Trek novels really don't qualify has "hard" scifi, do they?)

[Nate the Great]

My old h2g2 page still exists! (http://h2g2.com/user/U171140)

I thought it was lost years ago when ownership moved to the BBC. I didn't even know that the BBC aren't the owners of the site anymore.

Definitely an Amazing Thing I Learned Today.

Ah, dialup, how I don't miss it.

PS. How many of you remember when I called myself Infinite Improbability on this forum? Well, h2g2 is where I used that name for the first time.

[Nate the Great]

So I'm watching the TNG episode "Transfigurations" and I was surprised that not only was O'Brien's kayaking hobby already present in Season 3, but he wears a wetsuit of similar design. Apparently random diagonal pastel stripes is the kayaking fashion in the 24th century.

Just compare the TNG wetsuit (http://tng.trekcore.com/hd/albums/3x25/transfigurations_hd_161.jpg) (1990) to the DS9 wetsuit (http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/5x25/inthecards_726.jpg)(1997)! Amazing!

[NAHTMMM]

I confess to minimal knowledge of "hard" scifi fiction. [...] My fandom of Asimov comes from his nonfiction, especially his science essays.
Likewise. :)

(P.S. My boxes upon boxes of Star Trek novels really don't qualify has "hard" scifi, do they?)
Also likewise.

[Nate the Great]

You have boxes upon boxes of Star Trek books too, NAHTMMM?

[NAHTMMM]

Well, three. They do take up disproportionate space for how often I read them nowadays. I was also agreeing that they aren't hard sci-fi.

[Nate the Great]

Ah yes, I have that problem. I got lots of old TOS books at about 15 cents each at a fundraiser sale a few years ago. I doubt I'll read them more than once each, but I can say I'm getting 15 cents worth of enjoyment from each one.

[Nate the Great]

The Lion is still in his cage at Helen Newman Hall!

Okay, a little background is needed. In 2002 the pranksters at All Too Flat (http://www.alltooflat.com/pranks/lion/) noticed an empty and unlocked speaker cage at their college basketball court. They went to Kmart and bought a stuffed lion to stick into the cage. They also printed up a few posters to put under the cage, the joke being along the lines of a single animal zoo.

It took eight months for the school to find the card with their website on it, because it took that long for them to need to open the cage (to put in a new speaker). With permission from the All Too Flat crew they moved it to the empty cage at the other end of the court. They updated their site every few months for awhile to confirm that the lion was still there, but eventually they graduated, got married, and abandoned the site.

Fast Forward to 2014. Someone read about it and asked on Reddit whether it was still there (https://www.reddit.com/r/Cornell/comments/1vl3ki/a_few_minutes_ago_i_read_about_a_prank_by_all_too/). Someone confirmed that it was and posted a new picture (http://imgur.com/2rDe0gu,QFDMqck#0).

It was a nice thing to discover. I was a major follower of All Too Flat ten years ago when they were still active and still make regular pilgrimages to their corner of the Net. I have mentioned them before, but I'll just repost the Pi Song. YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BwKZEp2K_0) and lyrics with guitar tabs (http://www.alltooflat.com/about/personal/ton/pi.html).

[Nate the Great]

The same guy played Decius and Stonn! (https://www.longroom.com/discussion/385210/lawrence-montaigne-dies-star-trek-vulcan-was-86)

Decius (http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Decius) was like the number three Romulan in "Balance of Terror", after Mark Lenard's character (who some call Keras) and the centurion (who some call T'Auethn).

We all know who Stonn was. The actor's name was Lawrence Montaigne. He died on last Friday.

[Nate the Great]

Part of the inspiration of TaleSpin was the manga that later inspired Porco Rosso! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TaleSpin)

Of course it was also inspired by Cheers, Jungle Book, etc.

[Nate the Great]

One of my favorite children's book illustrators is Robert McCloskey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_McCloskey). Not only did he write and illustrate the two Homer Price (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer_Price) books, but he illustrated the first four Henry Reed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Reed_(character)) books. (I recommend all of these, by the way)

Well, I've always pronounced his last name "Mac-Closs-Key." Well, today I learned on Antiques Roadshow that it's really "Mc-Cluss-Key." I also learned that his book "Make Way For Ducklings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Way_for_Ducklings)" is the official children's book of Massachusetts.

Hey, "amazing" isn't synonymous with "important"! I was amazed, so I came here to dust off the thread.

[Nate the Great]

Edward Bulwer-Lyton did more than just coin the phrase "it was a dark and stormy night", he also coined "the pen is mightier than the sword", "pursuit of the almighty dollar", and "the great unwashed." He also wrote "The Last Days of Pompeii" which I know only by reputation.

Secondary "amazing things" (if completely pointless trivia):

"The Last Days of Pompeii" was based on a Russian painting, and the novel in turn inspired an American sculpture called "Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii". Lyton himself was British, of course.

[Nate the Great]

So I'm watching a Cutthroat Kitchen rerun featuring tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. This is a traditional combination, but I suddenly found myself wondering why it's so....

TATILT: The reason (https://www.someecards.com/life/food-drink/why-grilled-cheese-served-with-tomato-soup/).

In the post-war years school cafeterias had to find economical ways to meet the new nutritional requirements on a budget. Combining tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches piles up enough nutrients to be a viable and less expensive alternative to meat.

Plus, I guess people found that this combination tastes good.

[Nate the Great]

There was once a Mathnet/Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego crossover! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geHhVis0R-Q&t=10m33s)

Ah, PBS in the '90s...

[Nate the Great]

So I'm watching the Quark/Garak root beer scene again and one of the comments mentions that a lot of Europeans don't like root beer. I decided to investigate (or as Ashens might put it, I spent ten seconds and Googled it)...

Root beer contains an ingredient that is present in many medicines. (http://www.lextrait.com/vincent/rootbeer.html)

You'll recall that in its earliest days carbonated beverages were medicinal, not recreational. Therefore root beer had this methyl salicylate stuff added to make it smell like medicine.

So I suppose modern Americans drink this stuff enough as a child so that the particular scent is associated with "root beer" and not "medicine." And if Europeans in general don't drink it, that switch isn't flipped and so they hate it.

[Nate the Great]

Bill Nye the Science Guy once cameoed on Mister Roger's Neighborhood!
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1CAmeJLpM4)
I mean, you don't expect to see a crossover like that, do you?

[Nate the Great]

Supposedly the Kakariko Village theme from Zelda was based on "On a Clear Day" from Kiki's Delivery Service! (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097814/movieconnections)

Personally, besides a general similarity of meter and melody I can't really see it. I'll let you be the judge.

On a Clear Day (Version One) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmI73zwGzpI)
On a Clear Day (Version Two) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCWJH0tNRtE)

A comment on the second one references Kakariko Village.

Kakariko Village (Ocarina of Time)
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4foK5iJ5mcE)Kakariko Village (A Link to the Past) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjJzFqsfPpo&t=17s)

Remember that Kiki was made in 1989, A Link to the Past was 1991, and Ocarina of Time was 1998.

Another forum thread mentions this theory. (https://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=1525415) Weird.

And now for another Kiki-related Amazing Thing That I Learned Today...

A ramen company aged up the characters for a commercial. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFrzSLa7YRs)

Amazing and bizarre, who could ask for more?

[Nate the Great]

Today's TATILT comes from today's LGR video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm33KB2Th9M)...

In the seventies there was technology to remotely operate the technology in your house! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10_(industry_standard))

Furthermore, it wasn't radio waves or infrared, it was sending radio signals through the house's electrical network, allowing for each module to talk to the others!

[Nate the Great]

John Coclios voiced Apocalypse in the '90s X-Men cartoon! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY69luBqUhI&t=0m12s)

Now that I know that, you can definitely detect hear Kor in there somewhere.

[Nate the Great]

I think the fact that Isaac Asimov was a fan of Tom Lehrer was something that I knew, albeit stuck way way back in the dustiest archive of my memory, but when I found a Lehrer song on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goJ0QIaXZ-w) that I'd never heard of before, and then discovery at Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Lehrer) that Asimov remembered Lehrer singing it, well, I thought it was time to shill Lehrer again. By the by, he's still with us at age 89, and the world will be a darker place when he's gone.

Now let's celebrate by poisoning the pigeons in the park (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhuMLpdnOjY)...

PS. If you need some of his more obscure jokes explained, there's a site that has annotated his lyrics (http://graeme.50webs.com/lehrer/index.htm)...

[Nate the Great]

As a Minnesotan I feel special that my people are the only ones to use "duck duck gray duck (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck,_duck,_goose)" instead of "duck duck goose". As an aside, we have it so much better because we can insert humor with "red duck", "orange duck", etc.

But why was it just us? The Straight Dope (http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3371/why-does-everybody-in-the-world-play-tag) has the answer as usual. We say gray duck because the Swedish immigrants who came here said gray duck (or rather "anka, anka, gra anka."

Yes, the anka anka gra anka thing was on Wikipedia, but I found it today at The Straight Dope.

So now you know. And Knowing is Half the Battle (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c71nqMqmiaw)!

[Nate the Great]

As a big fan of the Doctor Doolittle books I thought I knew about all of the stories (although I'm still looking for a couple of them to complete my collection), so imagine my surprise when I learned that Hugh Lofting wrote a short story featuring Doolittle for an anthology back in 1925.

Read Doctor Doolittle Meets a Londoner in Paris here (http://www.childrensbooksonline.org/The_Flying_Carpet/pages/057_The_Flying_Carpet.htm).

[Nate the Great]

I've been a fan of both All Too Flat (http://alltooflat.com/) and Cockeyed (How Much Is Inside) (http://www.cockeyed.com/body.html) ever since college, and I've shilled for both in the past. But today I've discovered that not only is Cockeyed even older than I thought, but in fact the All Too Flat guys are fans of it, and they did a spoof of the How Much Is Inside concept (http://www.alltooflat.com/geeky/etc/inside/)!

[Nate the Great]

The reason Riker propped a foot up on the furniture a lot and often sat down via swinging a leg over the chair back. (https://www.themarysue.com/riker-sits-down/)

Maybe not "amazing", but certainly interesting.

[Nate the Great]

So today I learned of the existence of bimagic squares. (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/BimagicSquare.html) That is, a magic square where, if you square all the entries, results in another magic square.

The smallest true bimagic square (the sum of all rows, columns, and both diagonals are the same) is 6X6. If you relax the requirement on the diagonal sums you can drop to 5X5.

[NAHTMMM]

Lorenzo Music (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenzo_Music), the voice of Garfield, also volunteered for suicide hotlines. Also from his page: imagine Garfield being voiced by the same person who voiced Winnie the Pooh. It could have happened.

[Nate the Great]

Traditionally water is not a beverage. (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/beverage)

Mind. Blown.

[Nate the Great]

As a child I had a toy robot that could transform into a cap gun. I've been looking for it off and on for years, but I could never find it.

Until today. (https://www.ebay.com/itm/GOBOTS-1984-ARCO-ROGUN-TOY-CAP-GUN-ROBOT/192572265876?hash=item2cd6339594:g:L4wAAOSwK1da~E~ E)

TATILT: I had no idea it was a GoBot. That's because I didn't know what GoBots were until much much later. As I may have mentioned, I only had cursory knowledge of G1 Transformers at the time, so what chance did GoBots have?

I have no idea how I got this toy or what happened to it. But the shape of the head stuck in my mind, so when I stumbled upon it on Reddit it instantly connected.

[Nate the Great]

George C. Scott was married (twice!) to Colleen Dewhurst! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_C._Scott)


Mind. Blown.

[Nate the Great]

Today's Amazing Word That I Learned Today Is "Greeble (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeble#In_science_fiction_films_and_television)".


It looks like you pronounce it to rhyme with feeble, but Adam Savage (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dncRHH9f6MI) pronounces it more like "greeb-lee", so I'm not sure.


A greeble is a piece of a plastic model kit that you use as a pointless texturing element on another model. Or more generically, any pit of pointless texturing added to the surface of a model.

[Nate the Great]

Nyan Cat is only from 2011! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyan_Cat)

I mean, yikes. I thought it was one of those early 2000s Newgrounds-era flash video memes.

You really do learn something new every day...

[Nate the Great]

The face of former Canadian Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier is similar enough to Mr. Spock that some people deface Canadian five-dollar bills (http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/03/03/264A402900000578-0-image-m-127_1425418993263.jpg) to make Laurier look like Spock.


The government even changed the picture of Laurier on the bill to a less Spock-like version in response. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_five-dollar_note)

[Nate the Great]

Occasionally Stuart Ashen prefaces a video review of an '80s-related object with a snippet from the song "Secrets From the Night". (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb6hs6Nckq0)


Given that there are many '80s songs I'm not familiar with, I thought it was legit. But no....


It was made specifically for the video to sound like an '80s song.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFUew8zrQgg)


Amazing...

[Nate the Great]

I've known about most of the Star Trek/Gargoyles connections for years, but today I stumbled upon a new one...


Eliza's parents, Peter and Diane Maza (http://www.gargoyles-fans.org/reviews/ep08.htm), are named after married couple Peter Morwood and Diane Duane, both writers for both the Gargoyles series and Star Trek novelists in their own right.



I confess to knowing little of Peter (http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Peter_Morwood), never having read his solo Trek novel. Diane (http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Diane_Duane) is a different story entirely. I've read quite a few of her novels and in particular recommend her Rihannsu series (http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Rihannsu_(novels)) if you want to read a different version of the Romulan empire, albeit one that goes completely off the rails of canon.

[Nate the Great]

Today's new word is "Disneybounding": dressing in the clothes of a Disney character without it being a complete cosplay. No makeup, no masks, no props, just clothes.


You can do your own image search, there's some real creativity out there.

[NAHTMMM]

I confess to knowing little of Peter (http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Peter_Morwood), never having read his solo Trek novel. Diane (http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Diane_Duane) is a different story entirely. I've read quite a few of her novels and in particular recommend her Rihannsu series (http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Rihannsu_(novels)) if you want to read a different version of the Romulan empire, albeit one that goes completely off the rails of canon.
Peter's is fairly good on the ST novel scale, and of course Diane was one of the very best before I stopped reading new ST novels some 15 years ago.

[Nate the Great]

Not all "amazing" things are good. For example...

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJ_wfExHYOk)Chitty Chitty Bang Bang's Adventure in Tinker Town (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJ_wfExHYOk)

As a diehard Chitty fan, I am appalled.

I know it's not the Link thread, but here are some links anyway...

Chitty as a Transformer (https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fpre00.deviantart.net%2 Fdad9%2Fth%2Fpre%2Fi%2F2011%2F188%2Ff%2F1%2Ftfc_or iginal_chitty_bang_by_pariahexilewrath-d3lb8xd.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.deviantart.com%2Fparia hexilewrath%2Fart%2FTFC-Original-Chitty-Bang-217195249&docid=BnWV7Lmdax9AGM&tbnid=Fq7cqOvv3fL9GM%3A&vet=10ahUKEwiQ_MSE_I7eAhWHxFQKHerDDBAQMwguKAYwBg.. i&w=774&h=1032&safe=active&client=firefox-b-1&bih=778&biw=1173&q=chitty%20chitty%20bang%20bang%20fanart&ved=0ahUKEwiQ_MSE_I7eAhWHxFQKHerDDBAQMwguKAYwBg&iact=mrc&uact=8)
The Mario cast ride Chitty (https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fc7.uihere.com%2Ffiles% 2F465%2F931%2F785%2Fcartoon-drawing-chitty-chitty-bang-bang-clip-art-bang-cliparts.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.uihere.com%2Ffree-cliparts%2Fjareth-fan-art-deviantart-chitty-chitty-death-bang-4334522&docid=q1ol0ugklx7wsM&tbnid=Sosut9dnIpCQyM%3A&vet=12ahUKEwjYvoq3_I7eAhXnxlQKHXPXDC84ZBAzKDgwOHoE CAEQOQ..i&w=728&h=516&itg=1&safe=active&client=firefox-b-1&bih=778&biw=1173&q=chitty%20chitty%20bang%20bang%20fanart&ved=2ahUKEwjYvoq3_I7eAhXnxlQKHXPXDC84ZBAzKDgwOHoEC AEQOQ&iact=mrc&uact=8)
Brain Blessed as Baron Bomburst on stage (https://geraint-lewis.photoshelter.com/gallery-image/CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG/G00008M3YAYwTgGk/I0000cWHDPHkDu0U/C00001K1oYRHnbww)
I never knew there was such a thing as "steampunk minstrels" either, but there are, so enjoy!
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1S4DfYUwb8)Hushabye Mountain cover by Jason Manford (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9uALeQqBPE)
Title theme sung in Japanese (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=catiLn1qcTM)
Title theme on an organ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7opGk9wHfA) (I can totally see this song being played in a carousel...)
Somewhat playful orchestral version of the title theme (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8HNcqlHerU&list=PL7UuNnvYPeGRLIRyfEEFIsZc_8t-2zG_I&index=27)

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8HNcqlHerU&list=PL7UuNnvYPeGRLIRyfEEFIsZc_8t-2zG_I&index=27)

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8HNcqlHerU&list=PL7UuNnvYPeGRLIRyfEEFIsZc_8t-2zG_I&index=27)

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8HNcqlHerU&list=PL7UuNnvYPeGRLIRyfEEFIsZc_8t-2zG_I&index=27)

[Nate the Great]

Ocarina of Time has special animations if you hit Bongo Bongo with Ice Arrows! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iso2fRjLFfo)


Twenty years later, I'm still learning things about this game...


If one part of his body is frozen by an Ice Arrow, Bongo Bongo will stop attaching you and start punching the frozen part of himself until the ice shatters.

[Nate the Great]

So today Ashens released a video review of "Strange Things To Do And Make"... (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX_L_z4X2x0)


That's not the amazing thing. The amazing thing is that I recognized the art style from a book I had as a child...


Cover Up: Things to Put On Yourself (https://www.librarything.com/work/6596950)


Both books are by Diana Gribble (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Di_Gribble). Don't ask me how my parents got a copy of an Australian kids book in the '80s, I have no idea.

[Nate the Great]

As a math enthusiast I've long known of the trammel of Archimedes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trammel_of_Archimedes), but today I learned that they're also known as "nothing grinders" or "do nothing machines." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Fn-26Jmi5E)


That's Mathologer for you.

[Nate the Great]

I've had many laptops and other devices that use power cords with C5 connectors in their power bricks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_60320). But today's amazing thing that I learned today is that some people actually call them Mickey Mouse connectors because of their shape!

[NAHTMMM]

There exists a "rock opera" treatment of War of the Worlds. (https://twitter.com/PulpLibrarian/status/1073985497075236865)

Uh. Well then.

[Nate the Great]

It's Leslie Bricusse day in the Amazing Things thread!


Who's Leslie Bricusse, I hear you ask. Why, he's only one of the best unsung lyricists and musical composers out there.


I know him best through his collaboration with Anthony Newley for the soundtrack of the Rex Harrison Doctor Doolittle movie (fan video with Doctor Who clips, just because (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ8MZzJFZIE)), but the amazing thing I learned today is how much more he did...



Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcpDdWIaAuE), again with Newley
Peter Pan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubivbpIkk-g) (the 1976 version, not the Mary Martin version you're more familiar with. Mia Farrow as Peter Pan, Danny Kaye as Captain Hook, etc.)
Babes in Toyland (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-BKqdh4tgA) (the 1986 Drew Barrymore version, not the Disney one) again with Newley
"Goldfinger (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6D1nK7q2i8I)" from the Bond film, again with Newley
"Somewhere in My Memory (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFvCshTdq1Y)" from Home Alone, with John Williams (I linked to an orchestral version, I watched Home Alone as a child so many times that I'm rather sick of the movie now, but the song is still nice)

"Christmas at Hogwarts (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOzB4Fh5R18&list=PLC7772485117447D4)", with John Williams

[Nate the Great]

Irish People Try Space Food (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gYFGvqebzs)


The important part is the mint chocolate chip freeze dried ice cream. It occurred to me that I haven't seen this combination called "peppermint bon bon" lately, so I looked it up.



"Peppermint bon bon" is a Minnesota/Wisconsin thing. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mint_chocolate_chip)


Don't ask me where we got the name, maybe it was the same guy that decided that we should play "duck, duck, grey duck" instead of "duck, duck, goose."


Informal PNQ: Does your area have a local nickname for a common food that's not derived from a local brand?

[Nate the Great]

I may have mentioned a few times how much I like the DuckTales Moon theme...



The new show includes a callback to the moon theme when looking at the moon! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru7iyvUHJx4)


It's short, but it's there.

[Nate the Great]

Over at the Straight Dope forum they used the Alex Trebek announcement as an opportunity to discuss who will be the next "big" celebrity to die. The amazing thing was the number of celebrities that I didn't know were still alive, Kirk Douglas and Doris Day especially.

[Nate the Great]

So I was wandering around the ephemera of early fiverdom and found "5MV at Con*Cept 2002 (http://www.fiveminute.net/features/concept.html)." The assumption that Enterprise would make it to seven seasons amused me greatly. Maybe not amazing, but good for a laugh.

[Nate the Great]

LeVar Burton and Adam West guest-starred in the same episode of Murder, She Wrote! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daa-HYVMfBQ)


My mother was the MSW fan, I know Angela Lansbury more for her work at Disney (oh, and her early musical work such as The Harvey Girls and Till the Clouds Roll By, of course).

[Nate the Great]

ZFG (I remember when he was still ZeldaFreakGlitcha, FYI) shows us that in Ocarina of Time the Song of Time doesn't just make Time Blocks disappear, it actually sends them to the other time period (adult to child or child to adult). (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkwrucXKI_w)It's not a trigger to make something go away, it's a trigger that toggles a temporal teleportation.



And since (in normal play) you don't find Time Blocks until after the time skip and you have access to both time periods, there's no paradox. Yikes. You learn something new every day.

[Nate the Great]

D.C. Fontana only died recently! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._C._Fontana)


She was a cornerstone of TOS, writing "Journey to Babel" and "The Enterprise Incident" among others.

[Nate the Great]

The term "negative space wedgie (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NegativeSpaceWedgie)" is a staple at TV Tropes, but I didn't know it came from the Star Drek (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtU_FZAcCZo) parody.

[Nate the Great]

Yesterday would have been Isaac Asimov's 100th birthday!

[Nate the Great]

Courtesy of the Straight Dope forum... (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=888719)


There's actually a word for what MacGyver does!


Bricolage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricolage#Television)

[NAHTMMM]

In the foreword to one of the 1970s volumes of the complete Peanuts, Billie Jean King talks about her friendship with Charles Schulz. He was a good tennis player and a supporter of women's sports, and they held each other in high regard. Anyway, whenever he wanted to talk to her, he'd mention her in Peanuts, knowing she'd see it and call him up.

[Flying Gremlin]

Billy West, in addition to being the voice of Fry (and others) in Futurama, has been the voice for the red M&M in commercials since 1994.

[Nate the Great]

I presume by now everyone knows of the Italian Titanic knockoff movies (if not, you can watch the Nostalgia Critic reviews here (http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOryKlcI8qA) and here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zz1jTYOd_xs)), but the amazing thing is that Italy went on to make a TV series about the characters living in the restored Titanic on Fantasy Island (http://www.mondotv.it/scheda-singola-fantasy-island.html) (which looks like the Isle of Namboombu).


Do the Italians really not know that the Titanic was a real disaster and think that it was a Cameron-created fairytale?

[Nate the Great]

When it comes to Dr. Seuss I will always have a fondness for And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street.



Well, today I discovered that back in the forties someone turned it into a stop-motion short (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHmZAs_VLlU).



In today's world of CG and digital paint I think fewer and fewer people appreciate a good stop-motion "cartoon."

[Nate the Great]

The soundtrack of "The Muppet Christmas Carol" has a few songs that were never filmed, but what I didn't know is that the extended version of "Marley and Marley" was actually filmed (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnZVY-ZdTHs&feature=youtu.be&t=1m12s) (without full effects, but still).


What I find great is that part of the cut footage includes a fourth wall-breaking line from Scrooge: "Please, can't we go back to being funny?" Of course the odd part is that the soundtrack version skips this line but includes the Marleys' response of "Funny?" "Funny?" which doesn't make much sense.

[Nate the Great]

Speaking of Isaac Asimov's 100th birthday, today I made an amazing discovery. Recently I acquired an Asimov book from 1968, and today I found within it a newspaper clipping about the independence of Belize (1981).



And the amazing thing I learned today #2 is that I was wrong and books aren't in fact "antique" at 50 years old. No, just like other things you need 100 years for "antique", books are merely "vintage" at 50 years. So I paid a couple bucks for a book that might be worth ten to the right buyer. Oh well...

[Nate the Great]

The fans of the cartoon 6teen have been waiting for a reunion show for years (it'll never happen, I know), but today I found out they made one in 2018 to encourage people to vote (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Th_-odJs3ck).


It's so weird seeing Jonesy in a MAGA hat, especially since I could swear 6teen took place in Canada...

[NAHTMMM]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mamas_and_the_Papas#1966:_The_Mamas_&_the_Papas

That weird "I saw her . . . I saw her again last night" in "I Saw Her Again" was just a mistake made when someone was mixing the recording. Paul McCartney's reaction was: "That has to be a mistake: nobody's that clever."

[Nate the Great]

The same guy voiced Alfred in Batman TAS and Doc Ock in Spider-Man TAS! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOjBupCyFvU)

[Nate the Great]

Matt Jeffries lived until 2003! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Jefferies)


I thought he died way earlier than that.



I found this fact on a YouTube white noise video of E-D background noise. Here's the TOS bridge version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7P0q7rdBZc&list=PLQYDaVdtS_2qhqYpp-KQzIU7RML4a2mTG).

[Nate the Great]

When the Autobot Ark was redesigned for Beast Wars some elements of the U.S.S. Defiant were mixed in. (https://transformers.fandom.com/wiki/Ark_(G1))

[Nate the Great]

Yahtzee Crowshaw is younger than me!


I find that incredibly depressing. "Amazing" doesn't always mean "good", after all.

[Nate the Great]

Dr. Demento is from Minnesota! He didn't live their long, but he is from Minneapolis.


A Dr. Demento playlist.
(https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE1InrZfsJQmzE4Cq8OTDGzr0dPvpsn8d)


Of course Star Trekkin' and Star Drek are in there, but also more obscure Trek tracks like Spock Rap.

[Nate the Great]

The Star Wars Kinect song "Princess in a Battle (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmMItLni318&t=172s)" is actually a "cover" of Christina Aguilera's song "Genie in a Bottle (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIDWgqDBNXA&list=RDCLAK5uy_nvu_HUY0DPNpbB_V0moUfs9s5zABAF8xQ&index=28)."



Yikes. I don't pretend to be the biggest fan of Christina Aguilera, but I like her enough to think that I'd at least heard of her major singles. I guess not.

[Nate the Great]

The Barenaked Ladies once had their own day on Kids WB (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uytIb4SQ9p0&list=PLGWJQhDc2stVrxErhNsE_xSRGvRUJoogu&index=10), only they had to be called BNL because of censorship!


That's just weird. I also question the point of it, because I doubt that the BNL fanbase and Kids WB fanbase really overlapped much.

[Flying Gremlin]

I also question the point of it, because I doubt that the BNL fanbase and Kids WB fanbase really overlapped much.

I was a fan of Barenaked Ladies since the release of Gordon, and I was 11 at the time. Not so much of a stretch, considering they've always been a fun band.

[Nate the Great]

Nontoxic sawdust is possible! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKDal51f5LU)


Some people altered the rice crispie recipe to gradually replace more and more rice crispies with sawdust to see what happened.



Just your daily dose of weirdness.

[Nate the Great]

You can make candy with saltine crackers! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ykVtXAWOnI)


I'd never heard of this "Christmas Crack" stuff. Then again, I'm not really a toffee fan anyway.

[Nate the Great]

Alice Faye was married to Phil Harris!


I know Alice from her late '30s/early '40s films, and Phil Harris from his animation voice work later, not his earlier films. Not much overlap there if you're not a fan of radio variety shows.

[Nate the Great]

Today I learned that there are people who never heard of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. That's not just amazing, it's sad and makes me feel old. There was a time when the poster was everywhere, I still have one and can see it from where I sit.

[DrWho42]

Today I learned that there are people who never heard of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. That's not just amazing, it's sad and makes me feel old. There was a time when the poster was everywhere, I still have one and can see it from where I sit.

i remember it was referenced in the santa claus conquers the martians episode of mystery science theater 3000

[Nate the Great]

Well, that's weird...

[Nate the Great]

In the MCU Hawkeye's wife is played by Linda Cardellini, who played Velma in the first two Scooby-Doo movies!

[Nate the Great]

The highest-grossing franchise of all time is Hello Kitty! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media_franchises)


TATILT #2: Winnie the Pooh has outsold Pokemon for #2!
TATILT #3: Cars has made more money than Lord of the Rings!


Star Trek is down at #42. Only 10.6 billion as opposed to Star Wars' 63.7 billion.

[Flying Gremlin]

Star Trek is down at #42. Only 10.6 billion as opposed to Star Wars' 63.7 billion.

"A tale of love, of loss, and the foresight to retain international merchandising rights..."

[Nate the Great]

Cloris Leachman only died yesterday!


She was 94. I thought she died years ago.



I remember her from various projects with Disney and the Muppets.

[DrWho42]

yesterday was the anniversary for the lost in space episode "war of the robots"!

source: file 770 (http://file770.com/pixel-scroll-2-9-21-id-like-a-pixel-scroll-reservation-for-tuesday/)

[Nate the Great]

Why blocks of butter are different in the western and eastern US. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53SzYSjIlG4)


Eastern sticks are longer and narrower than western sticks. (https://www.midwestfarmreport.com/2016/07/20/the-shape-of-your-butter/)


Truly this is an issue that demands rioting in the streets. :rolleyes:

While I have moved farther west, I still see "eastern" sticks of butter. The discovery that amazed me is the existence of half sticks of butter.



Of course when I was a young'n we didn't have money for such highfalutin' extravagances like butter instead of margarine. Butter was for special occasions, particularly to put on fresh corn on the cob.



How many of you know of the pink margarine debacle?

[Nate the Great]

As a child I was a fan of the Encyclopedia Brown mystery books. Today I was amazed to learn that the series continued until 2012.

[Nate the Great]

In the Rudolph TV special, Hermey has blond hair, we all know this. But today I saw that he doesn't have pointed elf ears either, he has normal human ones! (https://christmas-specials.fandom.com/wiki/Hermey) Is that why he doesn't like to make toys, he's not actually an elf? Mind blown.

[Nate the Great]

I already knew about "impossible" assemblies of sticks and strings that use tension in the right directions to make seemlingly impossible "levitating" structures, but today I learned the word "tensegrity" and that Buckminster Fuller coined the term (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51lVelN0Kq4). You remember Fuller from his work on Buckyballs, of course.

[Nate the Great]

The name for the group of self-checkouts with one manned station is a "bullpen."

[Nate the Great]

Peanuts once made a Harry Potter reference! (https://peanuts.fandom.com/wiki/November_1999_comic_strips)

[Nate the Great]

Tori Bellaci and Grant Imahara worked on special effects for Van Helsing! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpBcxEY8BEc)


Van Helsing is a guity pleasure of mine. It's not a great movie by any definition, but it's a fun movie.

[NAHTMMM]

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii-chicken-and-egg-problems/

There is code in Windows 95 specifically added to avoid a Sim City bug.

[Nate the Great]

People modify their shoes to better play hacky sack (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacky_sack)!


I'm not nearly flexible enough to play the game, but my brother enjoyed it in our youth. When a group does it it's really impressive.


I miss '90s fads sometimes.

[Nate the Great]

As a math fan I've heard of Paul Erdos, but today I learned that his last name isn't actually pronounced "Err-dose", it's "Air-dish."

[Nate the Great]

One of my favorite DS9 episodes is "The Sound of Her Voice", and the amazing thing that I learned today is that the Olympia has never been assigned a starship class, even in the expanded universe.



Memory Alpha says that the wreckage reuses parts of the exploded Enterprise from Search for Spock. However, it seems unlikely that the Olympia was meant to be refit Constitution-class (I still like to call this the Enterprise-class from Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise, but it's hardly canon).



The only Constitution-class we see in the 24th century is a wrecked hull at Wolf 359. The image of the wrecked Olympia reminds me of the Oberth class, but I can't see such a small ship being sent outside the Federation for eight years. Maybe it's meant to be Excelsior-class, who knows...

[Nate the Great]

I thought I knew about all the mainline Mario games and their ports, but today I learned about Super Mario Bros. Special (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txcEMPakkPg).


It's sort of a port of Mario 1 for the PC-8801 (an 8-bit computer made in Japan in the early '80s).



I guess it can stay in the dustbin next to Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj4HJkeQSg0).

[Nate the Great]

Steven Spielberg is making a new version of West Side Story! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZhAdfMCb9s)


I don't know how to feel about this. Was the original movie so good that it can't be improved on? No, of course not. Will Spielberg take the story in new directions that will take it away from the West Side Story identity? I'm afraid the answer will be yes.

[Nate the Great]

You can only survive in a Bag of Holding for ten minutes before you suffocate!


So the D&D nerds have actually discussed what happens if you put living objects in a BOH, or pull one over your head, or whatever.



And they've decided that if you put a BOH inside another BOH you'll create a rift that will suck everything within ten feet into another dimension.

[Nate the Great]

My parents were big fans of MASH, so of course I knew about the spinoff AfterMASH. The amazing thing that I learned today is that Rosalind Chao was one of the stars of it, and she married Klinger!

[DrWho42]

apparently laurie anderson wanted to make an opera based on the thomas pynchon novel gravity's rainbow?? :confused:

Mister Heartbreak (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Heartbreak)

[Nate the Great]

For some reason Picard has two versions of a Shakespeare omnibus in his ready room. (https://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/database/shakespeare_books.htm#other)



And he gave one of them to Data only to get it back.

[DrWho42]

amanda palmer covered a momus song.

[Nate the Great]

So I'm a big fan of turn-of-the century alt rock, but today I learned that there's actually a distinct term for this: minivan rock. YouTube playlist (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL58_vF3UdqpRKsHJsrwv3UNXlZpR5TPo1).

[DrWho42]

i learned club penguin rewritten exists

[DrWho42]

The Cotard delusion is when someone believes they are dead, do not exist, or lost important internal organs:

Cotard delusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotard_delusion)

[Nate the Great]

So I'm watching the CinemaSins review of The Fugitive (one of the few R-rated movies that I've seen, mainly because I didn't know it was R-rated at the time), and this "Sykes" character looked familiar. It turns out I was right, it's the actor (Andreas Katsulas) who played Tomalak. The amazing thing is that he also played G'Kar on Babylon 5!



Granted, I haven't watched much B5, but G'Kar is quite a memorable character. I wonder why I never made the connection.

[Nate the Great]

So I've seen those little gnomes with their hats covering their eyes before, but today I learned that the holiday variety have been deemed "Gonks."



I'm not a fan of them, at least in a holiday context. They're supposed to be simple fanciful creatures, not the sort of thing to be coded "Christmas-themed."



Furthermore, "gonks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonk)" already have a meaning: balls of fur with eyes and shoes.



There are more definitions of gonk (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gonk) than I thought. I don't think I've ever used the word before, but if I did I would use it as a synonym for "blockhead."

[Nate the Great]

Brad Jones AKA The Cinema Snob turned 40 on the 20th!


I thought he was years older than me, not mere months.

[DrWho42]

apparently "kiss alien" brings up a funny response in space quest i

[Nate the Great]

Why is the hook on the end of a tape measure always loose?


Today I found out. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9kMAM7nIKs) Consider my mind blown.

[Nate the Great]

How Pokeballs work. (https://www.cracked.com/article_32567_pokemon-legends-arceus-finally-reveals-how-pokeballs-work.html)


Like many others, I always assume that the things simply held Pokemon in a state of transporter suspension.



But no, the things are just for containment. All Pokemon have the ability to shrink themselves to fit inside.


I understand that the early manga and concept art implied shrunken Pokemon, and there have been times that Pokemon have summoned themselves. But this is still ridiculous.

[Nate the Great]

They actually made a movie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marry_Me_(2022_film)#cite_note-4) out of the webcomic Marry Me (https://web.archive.org/web/20121114052044/http://marryme.keenspot.com/d/20120730.html/) starring Jennifer Lopez!


From the Wikipedia summary they changed almost everything except the inciting incident of "guy holds up a 'Marry Me' sign at a concert and the singer accepts." So...was the name "Marry Me" that essential that they had to buy out a webcomic author?



So yeah, won't be watching the movie. I recommend the webcomic though.

[DrWho42]

finally learned what peter coffin is infamous for

[Nate the Great]

There's been a vaccine for chicken pox for over twenty years!


As someone who suffered through it, this is a shock to me.

[Flying Gremlin]

Duolingo has Klingon lessons (https://www.duolingo.com/course/tlh/en/Learn-Klingon).

I'm not sure if that bird is less or more scary speaking in Klingon.

[Nate the Great]

For TV Tropes reasons I was wandering around Memory Alpha looking at guest stars who portrayed both human and alien characters. What did I discover? Phil Morris (https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Phil_Morris) (Thopok ("Looking for Par'mach"), Third Remata'Klan ("Rocks and Shoals"), and John Kelley "One Small Step")) also played one of the Onlies in "Miri"!

[Nate the Great]

Characters from the Land of Make Believe (Mister Rogers) cameoed on Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7pKiKzWQo0)


So if Mister Rogers coexist with Carmen Sandiego and Sesame Street and Captain Kangaroo...that's one weird shared universe.

[Nate the Great]

The Blackberry range of cellphones was named because the keys looked like the drupelets of a blackberry.



And the second amazing thing that I learned today is the word "drupelet", meaning a small fruit surrounding a seed, found in clusters.



Amazing thing #3 is that the technical difference between a blackberry and raspberry is that when you pick the berry off the stem the torus (the part of the stem that the drupelets surround) sticks with the plant leaving a hollow berry (raspberries) or breaks off with the berry (blackberries).


I had remembered that the term "drupe" was attached to peaches, but it was deep in my memory. Drupelets are smaller than drupes.



Amazing thing #4 is the technical definition of "berry", a fruit that doesn't have a stone or pit. We would consider this definition too broad, as it also includes stuff like grapes, tomatoes, and eggplants that we don't consider berries.

[Nate the Great]

Frank Drake of The Drake Equation only died a few days ago!


The Drake Equation calculates the number of interstellar civilizations in the galaxy. The real version is


https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/08459525b4c05af9b9e1748406e26ad869d9462d



When writing the pitch for Star Trek Gene didn't remember the real equation, so he created the completely nonsensical


https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/png/d3f9432c21979d3548ff08e4545055a47ff023f4


Whatever Gene's talents, mathematics wasn't one of them. Why raise things to the first power?

[Nate the Great]

Weird Al picked Daniel Radcliffe to play him in the biopic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXePG4PAUlA) because of Radcliffe's performance of "The Elements Song. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSAaiYKF0cs)"



Tom Lehrer was an inspiration to later generations of humorous musicians, and he's still alive at 94.


I'm willing to give Radcliffe a chance, but he just doesn't seem wacky enough to play Yankovic.

[Nate the Great]

Kai Winn was only in 14 episodes! (https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Winn_Adami)


That was a shock to me. Furthermore, she wasn't in a single Season 4 episode.

[Nate the Great]

I didn't know that Year Without A Santa Claus was originally a poem. Well, it was, and one time Boris Karloff narrated it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPQImLIl6XI).


It's also amazing how much of the poem Rankin and Bass managed to fit into the special. And to answer your first question, the Miser Brothers weren't in the poem.

[Nate the Great]

As a Rankin-Bass fan I was shocked to learn that Bass only died this year! (Rankin died in 2014).

[NAHTMMM]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshower

A lot of cultures have a lot of inventive ways to refer to a sunny rainfall.

[Nate the Great]

Glynis Johns is not only alive but she turned 100 yesterday!

You will of course remember her as Mrs. Banks in Mary Poppins.

[Nate the Great]

TOS costume designer William Ware Theiss invented the "Cochrane Delta" Starfleet emblem!
(https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/who-created-the-star-trek-logo-what-do-its-variations-represent/ar-AA1hyTm7?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=8ef25d9637dc4bf880f0dad604e05273&ei=25)
Amazing. If you had asked me before I would've guessed that Matt Jeffries invented it.

[Nate the Great]

Ron Dante is still alive! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Dante)

Who's Ron Dante? He's the songwriter and lead singer for The Archies!

YouTube playlist
(https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQgH3Q5GBOr4z6SQJTB07quGZcBTwzFyr)

When it comes to Archies music far too many people focus on "Sugar, Sugar" and ignore the rest. Well, there are a lot of songs in there that are worth remembering, at least to me.

That being said, here are some "Sugar, Sugar" covers:

The Workout Mix (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF4BbXCNOU0). Dubstep and techno combine to make a version of the song that certainly demands your attention if nothing else.

The Sixties Mix (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geJJ-nI4fYk). Interesting idea, but the sound mixing is terrible. The drums and clapping are too loud.

The Riverdale Cast (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtQhqGr8Za0). It must be heard to be disbelieved.

Ron Dante performing it last summer. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQ4_5-sF4Os)

So in 1990 there was this TV movie called "Return to Riverdale". And in it the actor playing Jughead tries doing a hip-hop version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBojt6fDVvw).

[Nate the Great]

"DeForest" is Kelly's middle name, his real first name is Jackson! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeForest_Kelley)

[Nate the Great]

Jim Henson performed "Mahna Mahna" on the Ed Sullivan Show! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb47CstE7R4)


I've also never seen Bip Bippadotta (no seriously, that's his name) wink before.


It's nothing special, The Muppet Show version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbZ_hTEOKZc) is better.



I also never realized that a completely different Bip Bippadotta puppet was used for the Sesame Street version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5W60VwDkas).



I also learned that Sandra Bullock performed the song with the Snowths (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nMAbc2jftY) on Muppets Tonight.

[Nate the Great]

In the Pokemon manga Ash named his Pikachu "Jean Luc Pikachu"! (https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Ash%27s_Pikachu_(EToP))


This might be a massive troll, but it still amused me. Who knew the Japanese were so willing to make puns using Western characters?

[Nate the Great]

I'm older than Prince William!


Only by a few months, but still...

[Nate the Great]

Adam Savage is only 15 years older than me! I would've sworn it was a lot more...

[NAHTMMM]

All that eyebrow burning makes him look older. ;)

[Nate the Great]

Today I learned about a new word and geometric shape: scutoid.


I'll let ViHart explain (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lryZpWsktRg).

[Nate the Great]

Apparently there was a scene cut from Generations where Data would finally mourn Lal. Frankly I think this would've been a great scene for the novelization, but not the movie. You have to cast a wide net for movie viewers, and while little fanservice bits in the background (like the Kurlan Naiskos) is okay, having actual dialogue to recap "The Offspring" and let Data mourn would've been too much.


In any case, someone on Facebook made fanart of this scene (https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=887964130124105&set=a.386229456964244).

[Nate the Great]

They were actually going to make a Power Rangers animated movie (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T45QZPXnlss)


Yeah, um...I'm not sure what to say about this.

[Nate the Great]

I like to watch OOT randomizer videos. Well, today's is special...


Someone hacked the randomizer ROM to insert a palette-swapped Dark Magician Girl to replace Link. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBebakTgcJQ)


Talk about bizarre...

[Nate the Great]

Not only was John DeLancie a regular on Days of Our Lives, but his character was married to Arleen Sorkin's (the inspiration and original voice of Harley Quinn)!


I confess that except for LeVar Burton and Scott Bakula I really didn't know about prior roles for Trek stars. I don't follow post-Trek roles that much either.

[Nate the Great]

The National Archive has lots of old documents written in cursive that they need volunteers to transcribe, since apparently the ability to read cursive is now a rare superpower. (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2025/01/15/national-archives-is-seeking-citizen-archivists-who-can-read-cursive/77716490007/)


Apparently a majority of schools these days don't even teach cursive anymore. I find this annoying. People should at least know how to read cursive even if they're never taught to write it.


And if the archive can't find staff to read this stuff, they should pay for new staff that actually can.

[Nate the Great]

So I was watching the Mickey's Three Musketeers version of Three is a Magic Number, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpkhiPAxLek) and a comment told me that they did a cover for Spider-Man No Way Home (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plEmMJ0EkSs) as well.


It must be heard to be disbelieved.



I think it's a crying shame that Disney hasn't done anything with Schoolhouse Rock lately. I realize that the original creators can't make more shorts (and Earth Rock proves it), but that doesn't mean that they can't use the property in other ways.

[Nate the Great]

The same actress plays Bashir's great-grandmother Lieutenant Watley in "Trials and Tribbleations" and the woman who propositioned Picard for Jamaharon in "Captain's Holiday!" (https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1381651937299352&set=a.1065373335593882)

[Nate the Great]

Stomp once appeared on Mr. Rogers Neighborhood! (https://www.misterrogers.org/videos/stomp/?platform=hootsuite)


Stomp was never a big part of my childhood, but I definitely knew about them. So of course I was amused when Whose Line did their own take on it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8p-SohDRso).

[NAHTMMM]

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/sticky-rice-mortar-view-space-and-more-fun-facts-about-chinas-great-wall-180962197/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_rice_mortar

China used sticky rice in mortar, including for the Great Wall. Amylopectin makes it extra-effective.

[Nate the Great]

Not only is there a Tom Lehrer song that I've never heard of (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFTKYsbBgjw), but it's a parody of a song by Phil Harris (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1tKZ3flZZY) (voice of Baloo/Little John/Thomas O'Malley/etc.)!

[Nate the Great]

Rich Little is still alive! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Little)


I have Rich Little's Christmas Carol on VHS, but of course you can find it on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aauPd1KKOMw) as well.


Of course he was on The Muppet Show as well. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCzmvVVmdN0)

[Nate the Great]

Tomorrow Dick VanDyke turns 100!

[Nate the Great]

Bjo Trimble is still alive! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjo_Trimble)


Real Trek royalty here, folks.

[NAHTMMM]

Wow, I figured she was gone long ago.

Her husband only passed last year too.

[Nate the Great]

Franz Joseph actually made a drawing of the Enterprise bowling alley! (https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1530224124905100&set=gm.10162570778796989&idorvanity=99866081988)

[Nate the Great]

Amazon Prime actually had the gall to stream a version of It's A Wonderful Life that cut out the entire Pottersville/alternate timeline sequence! (https://www.the-sun.com/entertainment/15691311/)


Without that sequence, what's the point of watching the movie?

[Nate the Great]

So I'm filling out a job application. The form lets you click an icon to add Jr., Sr., III, etc. to your name. Odd, but fair, but there are also options up to VII! Yes, John Doe VII can apply for a job with this company without typing out the VII after their last name.


Do any of you even know a John Doe III? Do people with VII after their name exist outside of royalty?

[Nate the Great]

I'm not sure how many of you watched the Netflix Carmen Sandiego reboot. It was...okay. Anyway, there was an interactive game, and a secret ending features the cast singing the original Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z44o2c0JaYQ), made famous by Rockapella for the PBS show (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozYg8vDTmkc&list=RDozYg8vDTmkc&start_radio=1).

[Nate the Great]

So in Monty Python and the Holy Grail the cops are after the Knights of the Round Table because a knight on a horse killed the famous historian...


Today I read a YouTube comment that pointed out something I never realized: the murderer couldn't have been one of Arthur's knights because he had a horse and they use servants with coconuts!

[Nate the Great]

On Reddit I read a Trek theory that never occurred to me!


What if the reason it took so long for Voyager to leave Kazon space is because they weren't going in a straight line? What if they were staying near Neelix's trade routes in order to fortify the ship for the coming journey? Increasing their power production capabilities, fabricating spare parts, etc.

[NAHTMMM]

That would be a sensible thing to do.

[Nate the Great]

The same actress played Kilana ("The Ship") and Dala ("Live Fast and Prosper")! (https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Kaitlin_Hopkins)

[Nate the Great]

So I was writing about Mortimer Harren in the PNQ thread and visited his Memory Alpha page. He's played by Jay Underwood, not just the original Human Torch from the Corman film but also Chip in the Not Quite Human series!

[Nate the Great]

The Care Bears did Star Trek parodies! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_pYuglkn84)


I mean...what?

[Nate the Great]

James Doohan has a son that looks like Mr. Belvedere! (https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=931345082988331&set=a.149320467857467)


Anyone remember Mr. Belvedere?