Each year, when the last flight of the summer field season departs the U.S. research station at the South Pole, the remaining staff gather to watch The Thing.
The next flight won’t arrive for eight months.
Each year, when the last flight of the summer field season departs the U.S. research station at the South Pole, the remaining staff gather to watch The Thing.
The next flight won’t arrive for eight months.
Pianist Pete Brush was waiting for his wife outside a midtown department store when a woman with a violin case approached him and asked, “How can I get to Carnegie Hall?”
He said, “Go uptown to 57th Street and make a left to 7th Avenue.”
In 1990, weary of repetitive interviews, Phillies pitcher Don Carman posted this list of responses on his locker. “You saw the game,” he told reporters. “Take what you need.”
Beetle Bailey and Lois Flagston, of Hi and Lois, are brother and sister.
Both comics were created by Mort Walker.
Though it’s three and a half hours long, Lawrence of Arabia contains no credited speaking roles for women.
Two weeks after Fleer released its 1989 baseball cards, the company received a call from a Baltimore sports reporter seeking a comment on card number 616. When managers looked up the card they saw a photo of Orioles second baseman Billy Ripken holding a bat on his right shoulder. On the knob of the bat were the words FUCK FACE.
The company halted distribution immediately, but this elevated the card from a novelty to a rarity, and the frenzy increased. By January its price has risen to $100; an unopened case could fetch $1,700. Ripken himself signed a few at a Jersey City card show, and the autographed cards became more valuable still. (“If people are crazy enough to spend that kind of money on a card,” he said, “it doesn’t concern me.”)
How the obscenity had made its way unnoticed through Fleer’s production process remains a mystery. The photo had been taken in Boston before an Orioles-Red Sox game in 1988; Ripken eventually admitted that he’d written the expletive himself to identify a practice bat, but he insisted that its appearance in the photo had been an accident.
See Inverted Jenny.
On Aug. 4, 1982, Mets center fielder Joel Youngblood had driven in two runs against Cubs pitcher Ferguson Jenkins in an afternoon game at Wrigley Field when he was traded in mid-game to the Montreal Expos.
He left the game and flew to Philadelphia in time to take up a position in right field at Veterans Stadium at the bottom of the sixth in an evening game against the Philadelphia Phillies.
In the top of the seventh he singled against Steve Carlton. That makes Youngblood the only player in history to get a base hit for two different teams in two different cities on the same day — and he did it against two future Hall of Famers.
Groucho Marx hated Harry Cohn, a producer for Columbia.
At one showing, when the words “Columbia Pictures Presents” appeared on the screen, he turned to Chico and said, “Drags, doesn’t it?”
As the computer HAL is being shut down in 2001: A Space Odyssey, it begins singing the song “Daisy Bell”:
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do,
I’m half crazy, all for the love of you.
It won’t be a stylish marriage–
I can’t afford a carriage–
But you’ll look sweet upon the seat
Of a bicycle built for two.
That’s poetic, in a way. During a visit to Bell Labs in 1961, novelist Arthur C. Clarke had witnessed the first singing computer — physicist John Kelly had programmed an IBM 704 to sing using a speech synthesizer.
The song it sang was “Daisy Bell.”