Hugh Hefner lost his virginity at age 22.
Entertainment
Self-Made Man
Jay Leno has hosted the Tonight Show for 14 years, but he has never touched a cent of his earnings, living off stand-up performances instead.
“My original profession was and still is a comedian,” he says, “not a personality.”
Welcome to Town
The “Hollywood sign” started as an advertisement for a housing development in the 1920s, but a deeper symbolism soon became clear.
In 1932, actress Peg Entwistle committed suicide by jumping to her death from the letter “H”.
Silly Old Bear
Psychological diagnoses of inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood, according to an article published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, 2000:
- Winnie-the-Pooh: ADHD, inattentive subtype; OCD (provisional diagnosis); borderline intellectual functioning (Very Little Brain)
- Piglet: Generalized anxiety disorder
- Eeyore: Dysthymic disorder
- Rabbit: Narcissistic personality disorder
- Owl: Reading disorder
- Tigger: ADHD, hyperactivity-impulsivity subtype
“Pooh needs intervention,” the authors conclude. “We feel drugs are in order. We cannot but wonder how much richer Pooh’s life might be were he to have a trial of low-dose stimulant medication. With the right supports, including methylphenidate, Pooh might be fitter and more functional and perhaps produce (and remember) more poems.”
Cooped Up
Mike Tyson collects pigeons.
Brain Food
Tom’s Restaurant, famous as the diner in Seinfeld, shares a building with the Goddard Institute of Space Studies in Manhattan.
Fallout
Actors who appeared in The Conqueror (1956) and subsequently died of cancer:
- John Wayne
- Susan Hayward
- Agnes Moorehead
- Pedro Armendáriz
- John Hoyt
Director Dick Powell died of cancer in 1963. The movie, in which Wayne played Genghis Khan, was shot in St. George, Utah, downwind of Nevada open-air nuclear testing, and producer Howard Hughes had 60 tons of dirt shipped back to Hollywood for use in reshoots.
By 1981, 91 of the 220 cast and crew had developed some form of cancer, and more than half of them were already dead.
“With these numbers, this case could qualify as an epidemic,” said University of Utah biologist Robert Pendleton. “In a group this size you’d expect only 30-some cancers to develop. … I think the tie-in to their exposure on the set of The Conqueror would hold up in a court of law.”
Naming Rights
Some paleontologists have a sense of humor. When Jenny Clack of the University of Cambridge discovered a fossil amphibian in the bed of an ancient swamp, she named it Eucritta melanolimnetes.
That’s Greek for “the creature from the black lagoon.”
Rubik’s Revenge
Erno Rubik, inventor of Rubik’s Cube, became the first self-made millionaire in a communist country.
Yikes
Lyrics to “Coon! Coon! Coon!”, billed as “The Most Successful Song Hit of 1901”:
Although it’s not my color,
I’m feeling mighty blue;
I’ve got a lot of trouble,
I’ll tell it all to you:
I’m cert’nly clean disgusted
With life, and that’s a fact
Because my hair is wooly
And because my color’s black.
My gal, she took a notion
Against the colored race.
She said if I would win her
I’d have to change my face;
She said if she should wed me,
That she’d regret it soon,
And now I’m shook, yes, good and hard,
Because I am a coon.
CHORUS:
Coon! Coon! Coon!
I wish my color would fade.
Coon! Coon! Coon!
I’d like a different shade.
Coon! Coon! Coon!
Morning, night and noon.
I wish I was a white man
‘Stead of a Coon! Coon! Coon!
I had my face enameled,
I had my hair made straight.
I dressed up like a white man,
And cert’nly did look great.
Then started out to see her,
Just shortly after dark,
But on the way to meet my babe
I had to cross a park;
Just as I was a-thinking
I had things fixed up right,
I passed a tree where two doves
Sat making love at night;
They stopped and looked me over,
I saw my finish soon.
When both those birds said good and loud,
“Coo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oon.”