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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. |
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. 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. |
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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. 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. |
Bill Nye the Science Guy once cameoed on Mister Roger's Neighborhood!
I mean, you don't expect to see a crossover like that, do you? |
Supposedly the Kakariko Village theme from Zelda was based on "On a Clear Day" from Kiki's Delivery Service!
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) On a Clear Day (Version Two) A comment on the second one references Kakariko Village. Kakariko Village (Ocarina of Time) Kakariko Village (A Link to the Past) 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. Weird. And now for another Kiki-related Amazing Thing That I Learned Today... A ramen company aged up the characters for a commercial. Amazing and bizarre, who could ask for more? |
Today's TATILT comes from today's LGR video...
In the seventies there was technology to remotely operate the technology in your house! 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! |
John Coclios voiced Apocalypse in the '90s X-Men cartoon!
Now that I know that, you can definitely detect hear Kor in there somewhere. |
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 that I'd never heard of before, and then discovery at Wikipedia 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... PS. If you need some of his more obscure jokes explained, there's a site that has annotated his lyrics... |
As a Minnesotan I feel special that my people are the only ones to use "duck duck gray duck" 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 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! |
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. |
I've been a fan of both All Too Flat and Cockeyed (How Much Is Inside) 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!
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The reason Riker propped a foot up on the furniture a lot and often sat down via swinging a leg over the chair back.
Maybe not "amazing", but certainly interesting. |
So today I learned of the existence of bimagic squares. 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. |
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.
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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. 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. |
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Today's Amazing Word That I Learned Today Is "Greeble".
It looks like you pronounce it to rhyme with feeble, but Adam Savage 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. |
Nyan Cat is only from 2011!
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... |
The face of former Canadian Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier is similar enough to Mr. Spock that some people deface Canadian five-dollar bills 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. |
Occasionally Stuart Ashen prefaces a video review of an '80s-related object with a snippet from the song "Secrets From the Night".
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. Amazing... |
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, 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, never having read his solo Trek novel. Diane is a different story entirely. I've read quite a few of her novels and in particular recommend her Rihannsu series if you want to read a different version of the Romulan empire, albeit one that goes completely off the rails of canon. |
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. |
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Not all "amazing" things are good. For example...
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang's Adventure in Tinker Town 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 The Mario cast ride Chitty Brain Blessed as Baron Bomburst on stage I never knew there was such a thing as "steampunk minstrels" either, but there are, so enjoy! Hushabye Mountain cover by Jason Manford Title theme sung in Japanese Title theme on an organ (I can totally see this song being played in a carousel...) Somewhat playful orchestral version of the title theme |
Ocarina of Time has special animations if you hit Bongo Bongo with Ice Arrows!
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. |
So today Ashens released a video review of "Strange Things To Do And Make"...
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 Both books are by Diana Gribble. Don't ask me how my parents got a copy of an Australian kids book in the '80s, I have no idea. |
As a math enthusiast I've long known of the trammel of Archimedes, but today I learned that they're also known as "nothing grinders" or "do nothing machines."
That's Mathologer for you. |
I've had many laptops and other devices that use power cords with C5 connectors in their power bricks. But today's amazing thing that I learned today is that some people actually call them Mickey Mouse connectors because of their shape!
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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), but the amazing thing I learned today is how much more he did... Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, again with Newley Peter Pan (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 (the 1986 Drew Barrymore version, not the Disney one) again with Newley "Goldfinger" from the Bond film, again with Newley "Somewhere in My Memory" 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", with John Williams |
Irish People Try Space Food
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. 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? |
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! It's short, but it's there. |
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.
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So I was wandering around the ephemera of early fiverdom and found "5MV at Con*Cept 2002." The assumption that Enterprise would make it to seven seasons amused me greatly. Maybe not amazing, but good for a laugh.
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LeVar Burton and Adam West guest-starred in the same episode of Murder, She Wrote!
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). |
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). 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. |
D.C. Fontana only died recently!
She was a cornerstone of TOS, writing "Journey to Babel" and "The Enterprise Incident" among others. |
The term "negative space wedgie" is a staple at TV Tropes, but I didn't know it came from the Star Drek parody.
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