Who says Americans are uncultured? Every year on the last Sunday in April, Dedham, Mass., sponsors the James Joyce Ramble, a 10K road race in which each mile is dedicated to a different work by Joyce.
Professional actors dress up in period costume and read from the books as the athletes run by, making this the only theatrical performance where the performers stand still and the audience moves.
Rejected dwarf names considered for Disney’s Snow White (1937):
Only about 3 people in 100 can name the seven dwarfs that were finally used.
When singer Warren Zevon (“Werewolves of London”) was diagnosed with cancer in 2002, he said he just hoped to live long enough to see the next James Bond movie.
He did.
The film was called Die Another Day.
On the original Star Trek, many sets include pipes and tubes marked “GNDN”.
That’s an in-joke among the set designers — it stands for “Goes Nowhere, Does Nothing.”
“There’s just some people you don’t hit with a pie and that’s all there is to it.” — Buster Keaton
Led Zeppelin never won a Grammy.
“He has to retreat into his fanciful world in order to survive. Otherwise, he leads kind of a dull, miserable life. I don’t envy dogs the lives they have to live.” — Charles M. Schulz, on Snoopy
In 1997, retired advertising executive Dan FitzSimons proposed a new cable TV channel called The Puppy Channel: “24 hours a day, seven days a week, footage of puppies fooling around like puppies do, acting the natural comedians and cuties that they are, with no people, no talk, accompanied only by relaxing instrumental music.”
In focus group surveys, 41 percent of respondents said they would prefer watching the channel to CNBC, and 37 percent preferred it to TBS.
In high school, Robin Williams was voted “most likely not to succeed.”
Kermit the Frog spoke at ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s funeral.