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

Courtesy of the Straight Dope forum...


There's actually a word for what MacGyver does!


Bricolage

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.

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.

I presume by now everyone knows of the Italian Titanic knockoff movies (if not, you can watch the Nostalgia Critic reviews here and here), 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 (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?

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.



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

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 (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.

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...

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.


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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ma...as_&_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."

Matt Jeffries lived until 2003!


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.

Yahtzee Crowshaw is younger than me!


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

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


A Dr. Demento playlist.



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

The Star Wars Kinect song "Princess in a Battle" is actually a "cover" of Christina Aguilera's song "Genie in a Bottle."



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.

The Barenaked Ladies once had their own day on Kids WB, 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.

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.

Nontoxic sawdust is possible!


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.

You can make candy with saltine crackers!


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

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.

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

Well, that's weird...

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

The highest-grossing franchise of all time is Hello Kitty!


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.

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

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.

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

source: file 770

Why blocks of butter are different in the western and eastern US.


Eastern sticks are longer and narrower than western sticks.


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?

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.

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! Is that why he doesn't like to make toys, he's not actually an elf? Mind blown.

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. You remember Fuller from his work on Buckyballs, of course.

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

Tori Bellaci and Grant Imahara worked on special effects for Van Helsing!


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

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/...-egg-problems/

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

People modify their shoes to better play 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.

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."

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...