Bathroom Readers' Institute's Blog, page 118

5 Other TV Prequels

Better Call Saul, a prequel to AMC’s Breaking Bad, debuted this week. And while it’s rare that a spinoff switches genre—from dark drama to comedy in this instance—the idea of a prequel series is nothing new.

Bates Motel

Have you ever wondered exactly how Norman Bates became the titular psycho of Psycho? This A&E series depicts Norman’s teen years…including those spent with the still living mother he’d become much more obsessed with in death. (Vera Farmiga, as Mrs. Bates, was Emmy nominated for her role.)

Ponderosa

Bonanza ran for 14 seasons and 430 episodes, so one would think there wouldn’t be too many more stories to tell about the Cartwrights’ Nevada ranch. But in 2001, the Pax Network commissioned this show about when the Cartwrights first moved to the ranch—Adam was a teenager and Little Joe was even littler. 9It ran for just 20 episodes.)

Hannibal

The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, and Hannibal Rising are a dark trilogy of movies, based on Thomas Harris’s books and focused on cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter. NBC’s critically-acclaimed TV series, about to enter its third season, is even darker, but a cinematic, pensive take on Hannibal when he was a psychiatrist, but before he was in prison (but still killing and eating lots of people.

The Carrie Diaries

The idea of a prequel to Sex and the City, aimed at teens, focused on teens, seems like a hard sell. But this ran on The CW for two seasons, focusing on the pre-sex crazed world of Carrie Bradshaw of the iconic HBO series.

Gotham

Fox’s Gotham offers all the excitement, fun, and atmosphere of a Batman movie…without Batman. Instead, it’s about the early police detective career of the man who will eventually be Commissioner Gordon fighting criminals who will eventually be come the Penguin, the Joker, etc. Despite the lack of Batman, the show is one of the biggest new hits of the TV season.

The post 5 Other TV Prequels appeared first on Trivia Books and Facts | Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

6 Strange, Weird, and Interesting Trivia Facts About the Academy Awards

It’s Oscar season, and we’ve got your fun Oscar interesting trivia facts.

In years past, the 19 acting nominees who are not Meryl Streep have amassed between them 19 Academy Award nominations, and two wins. With her Best Supporting Actress nod for Into the Woods, Streep now has 19 nominations by herself. (And she’s already won three times.)


Whiplash is nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, even though it isn’t based on a preexisting work. Director Damien Chazelle filmed a single scene of the movie to drum up funding for the full-length movie. It ultimately worked, but Chazelle liked the sample scene so much that he shopped it around on the film festival circuit as a standalone short film. Because that film was publicly released, the Academy considers the full Whiplash to be based on the short Whiplash, even though the short Whiplash is just a portion of the full Whiplash.


25 percent of this year’s acting nominees are British. While it may seem like esteemed English performers dominate the Oscars, they don’t—17 percent of all acting nominees since the Oscars began have been from Great Britain. (Percentage of American nominees: 72 percent.) The British did dominate in the mid-1960s, scoring half of the acting nominations between 1965 and 1967.


A movie studio will spend about $10 million to promote a movie to a Best Picture nomination. Prestige can’t really be quantified, but a Best Picture win works out to only about $3 million more at the box office.


Demographics of Academy Award voters: 94 percent are white, 77 percent are male, and the median age is 62.


Were the Academy Awards created in the 1920s to bestow laurels on artistic merit in film? Not exactly. Studio boss Louis B. Mayer conceived of the awards ceremony to stifle a growing unionization movement in the film industry. By creating the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, he could have an organization to handle contract disputes between studios and actors (with the studios almost always winning). He also thought he could distract actors by “hanging medals all over them,” Mayer once said. “If I got them cups and awards, they’d kill themselves to produce what I wanted.”

The post 6 Strange, Weird, and Interesting Trivia Facts About the Academy Awards appeared first on Trivia Books and Facts | Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

Impossible Questions: The Champion of Champions (Answered!)

Have you guessed the answer? Keep reading to see if you nailed it.

What man has been a part of a World Series, Super Bowl, Stanley Cup final, and NBA Finals?

Zelig. Forrest Gump. Al Michaels. Except unlike the first two, who have a knack for being present whenever history happens, being around for when history happens is part of Al Michaels’ job. (Also, he’s a real person.)

We might have purposely tried to trick you with that question. The man, and as far as we know, only person, to have been a part of a World Series, Super Bowl, Stanley Cup, and NBA Finals isn’t some Bo Jackson-like, quadruple-sport athlete who was on a winning team of all of those events. It’s Michaels, a veteran sports broadcaster, who has worked all four major North American team sports championships.

Last weekend, Michaels provided play-by-play for NBC Sports in its coverage of Super Bowl XLIX. It’s the ninth Super Bowl that Michaels has called. He’s done three now for NBC, but he was previously employed by ABC, and anchored Monday Night Football for years, in addition to six Super Bowls. Michaels was still with ABC when the network won the rights to broadcast the NBA playoffs, and he provided the play-by-play for the Finals in 2004 and 2005. In the 1980s, ABC and NBC alternated coverage of the World Series, and Michaels called the games in 1981, 1983, 1985, 1987, and 1989. (The Stanley Cups were Michaels-fronted from 2000 to 2002.)

But despite all of that, Michaels is probably most famous for coming up with one of the most memorable calls in sports history, when the U.S. Olympic hockey team unexpectedly defeated the team from the Soviet Union.

 

Need more impossible questions? Check out Uncle John’s Impossible Questions.

The post Impossible Questions: The Champion of Champions (Answered!) appeared first on Trivia Books and Facts | Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

Random Facts: All Your Questions About Tickling Answered

Random facts about, hey, look over there! Ah, we almost got you.

Why can’t you tickle yourself?

Because the sensation of tickling relies on the concept of surprise. The cerebellum is aware of movements you are about to make before you make them, and prepares the brain for it by canceling the response of the rest of the brain to the tickle. Unless you’re psychic, the brain can’t cancel the response of a tickle coming from someone else because it isn’t away it’s going to happen.

Why are humans ticklish?

Believe it or not, there are two technical terms for tickling. A light moving touch across the skin is called knismesis, and makes you feel more itchy then it does compelled to laugh. It makes you look at the skin to assess what’s tickling you—and it could be a spider or a bug. And that is precisely why humans feel ticklish.

The other kind of tickling—the silly, laughter-inducing kind—is called gargalesis. Scientists theorizes that tickling is a bonding act between parents and their babies, and it’s also a way to increase a young one’s agility and dexterity.

If it’s a natural response built up over years of evolution, how come some people are not ticklish?

Everyone is ticklish—some people have just learned to become very good at sensing when they are about to be tickled. This forces the body to tense up and the brain to cancel the “surprise response” discussed earlier. In other words, non-ticklish people are just lying to get out of being tickled.

The post Random Facts: All Your Questions About Tickling Answered appeared first on Trivia Books and Facts | Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

Impossible Questions: The Champion of Champions

Think you know the answer to this question? Think you can get it? Good luck…and come back tomorrow to see if you’re right.

What man has been a part of a World Series, Super Bowl, Stanley Cup final, and NBA Finals?

Want more impossible questions? Check out Uncle John’s Impossible Questions.

 

 

The post Impossible Questions: The Champion of Champions appeared first on Trivia Books and Facts | Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

Youngest, Oldest, Longest, Shortest: ‘SNL’ Edition

As Saturday Night Live prepares to celebrate its 40th anniversary, here are some “not ready for prime time” superlatives.

Youngest performer

The youngest was also already well known before joining SNL. 1980s “Brat Pack” actor Anthony Michael Hall of The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles joined SNL in 1985 at age 17. (Previous record holder: 19-year-old Eddie Murphy.)

Oldest performer

Current featured player Leslie Jones joined the cast at age 47, slightly older than when established actor Michael McKean joined the cast in 1994 at age 46.

Most times hosting

Alec Baldwin has guest-hosted SNL 16 times. In second place is early-seasons favorite Steve Martin with 15 (although he’s made 12 more cameo and guest appearances).

Most frequent musical guest

Paul Simon has been the listed musical guest nine times, but he’s not the most frequent musical performer. That would be Dave Grohl, who has appeared on SNL 11 times. With his band Foo Fighters, Grohl has appeared seven times, but he previously guested twice as the drummer for Nirvana, once with the supergroup Them Crooked Vultures, and once as a guest drummer for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Former cast member most times hosting

More than 30 former cast members have back to guest host. The most frequent was Chevy Chase, who, after leaving the show in the first season for a movie career, has hosted eight times.

Longest tenure

Darrell Hammond joined the series in 1995 and is most memorable for his impressions, particularly that of President Bill Clinton. He stayed with the show for a record 14 seasons. (He returned at the beginning of the 2014-15 seasons to be the show’s announcer, replacing the late Don Pardo.)

Shortest tenure

Writer/performer Emily Prager was hired toward the end of the 1980-81 season. She was listed in the opening credits of one episode, but didn’t appear in the show at all, and that would turn out to be the last episode of the season, due to a writers strike. Prager wasn’t asked back the next season, leaving her SNL tenure at a single episode.

The post Youngest, Oldest, Longest, Shortest: ‘SNL’ Edition appeared first on Trivia Books and Facts | Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

A Night(mare) at the Museum

Museums can be boring, but not when their employees really mess up.

King Tut’s Close shave

King Tutankhamun’s burial mask is one of the most iconic artifacts in history. Its estimated value? Priceless. Alas, this wasn’t enough to stop five curators at Cairo’s Egyptian Museum from trying to fix it with a tube of cheap epoxy in January 2015. When the mask’s beard was knocked off by two employees replacing a ligh tbulb, their colleagues tried to glue it back on before the museum opened for the day. Worse yet, they later attempted to remove the dried epoxy with a spatula. The damages to 3,300-year-old artifact may be irreversible.

A Fake Tornado Turns Real

Things took a nasty turn during a routine demonstration at Reno’s Terry Lee Wells Nevada Discovery Museum in September 2014. One of the museum’s presenters was teaching a group of children and their parents about what causes tornadoes. When it came time to use several chemicals to create a miniature whirlwind in a glass jar, the presenter messed up and poured alcohol on a cotton ball dusted with boric acid. Instead of creating a brief, small, and controlled tornado, she wound up five-second explosion that filled a large portion of the room. Thirteen people were injured; the presenter was placed on administrative leave.

The Kunsthal Museum Heist

Management at this art museum in the Netherlands figured they could save a few bucks by firing their after-hours security guard and replacing them with a supposedly foolproof automated system. Unfortunately, the new system wasn’t powerful enough to prevent thieves from breaking into the museum in October 2012. Before the police arrived, the culprits managed to escape with valuable works by Picasso, Monet, Gauguin, Matisse, and Lucian Freud collectively worth more than $100 million. The alleged thieves were tracked to Romania and were arrested, but the artworks have yet to be recovered. Olda Dogaru, the mother of one of the culprits, told authorities that she destroyed each one in her fireplace but she later retracted her statement. They could still be floating around somewhere…

The post A Night(mare) at the Museum appeared first on Trivia Books and Facts | Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

You Gotta Fight For Your Right to Pee (While Standing Up)

For many men, peeing while standing up is one of life’s great joys. It makes heeding nature’s call quick and easy…but it can also get a bit messy. This unfortunate drawback is what led to one of the most ridiculous court cases of all time in Germany.

In January, Judge Stefan Hank ruled on a case between a landlord and a former tenant in the district court of Dusseldorf. The landlord argued that the tenant had destroyed an expensive floor in the apartment of the bathroom he was renting. He claimed that, because the tenant peed while standing up, countless amounts of urine droplets had corroded the marble around the toilet.

After the tenant moved out, the landlord refused to refund $2,100 of his $3,300 deposit, claiming that the floor would need to undergo extensive repair work. During the ensuing trial, the landlord’s lawyer called in a “technical expert” to confirm that the urine had, indeed, messed up the floor.

Nevertheless, Hank ruled in favor of the tenant. While rendering his verdict, the judge acknowledged that the urine had definitely caused the damages but that the tenant couldn’t be held responsible for them. Hank contended that the landlord should have warned him about the floor’s “sensitivity” before he moved in.

“Despite the increasing domestication of men in this regard, urinating while standing up is still widespread,” Hank added, “anyone who still practices this formerly dominant custom has to expect occasional clashes with, especially female, flatmates. But they don’t have to worry about corrosion to the marble floor.”

Hank’s verdict, which later captured headlines around the world, furthered an ongoing debate in households all across Germany and beyond, particularly his remark about a “formerly dominant custom.” Being overly clean is a German stereotype, and in recent years, there’s been a movement to encourage men to be tidier whenever they use a toilet. It’s now common to find signs everywhere from public restrooms to guest bathrooms in private homes asking male visitors to behave like sitzpinkler (men who pee while sitting down).

Despite the efforts of proponents, many German men stubbornly remain stehpinkler, or guys who pee while standing up. In fact, sitzpinkler has emerged as an epithet to be used against someone deemed un-masculine.

The post You Gotta Fight For Your Right to Pee (While Standing Up) appeared first on Trivia Books and Facts | Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

Fake-or-Fact Friday: ‘The Onion’ Predicts The Future

The Onion is a satirical, comic newspaper. It does not report on real stories, or at least it doesn’t on purpose. Two out of three of the following news stores were created by The Onion only to later come true in reality. The third story is made up, false through and through. Can you guess which Onion story didn’t come true? Answer is at the end of the post.

A.

In 2013, The Onion ran an article with the headline “Overstock.com Announces Plans To Develop Original Programming.” The piece poked fun at the just-announced idea that Amazon.com, an online merchant that peddles everything from clothes to toilet paper, would soon be making TV programming to distribute online. (Overstock.com, a competitor of Amazon, is a wholesaler and bargain reseller.) And in early 2015, a competitor of Amazon announced plans to produce its own programming. That competitor? Overstock.com.

B.

The Onion periodically runs an article about a fictional version of Vide President Joe Biden, imagining him as something of a degenerate who hangs out with bikers, loves to get drunk, and set off fireworks. One 2009 article reported that Biden kept trying to get White House visitors to go up to the roof with him to drink a six-pack of beer. In 2011, Biden really did ask Japanese prime minister Naoto Kan to check out the White House roof.

C.

In 2004, The Onion ran a mock editorial by James M. Kitts, the CEO of The Gillette Company, recklessly announcing that the company was following up its Mach3 three-blade razor by skipping ahead to an absurdly complex five-blade razor. In 2010, Gillette announced a new razor breakthrough. It wasn’t five blades, though. It was six.

 

Loading…

 

Want more fakes? Check out Uncle John’s Fake Facts. (Really!)

 

The post Fake-or-Fact Friday: ‘The Onion’ Predicts The Future appeared first on Trivia Books and Facts | Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

Youngest, Oldest, Most Seen, Least Seen: Super Bowl Trivia

Here are some facts you should know about the Super Bowl. Enjoy these sports statistical anomalies , this time for the Big Game.

Youngest player

Baltimore Ravens running back Jamal Lewis was part of the Super Bowl-winning squad in 2001, capping his rookie season. He was 21. (The youngest Super Bowl-winning quarterback is Ben Roethlisberger, who in 2006 won it all for the Pittsburgh Steelers at age 23.)

Oldest player

The first points put on the board in Super Bowl XLIV in 2010 were a field goal from Indianapolis Colts kicker Matt Stover, who turned 42 a week before the game.

Least attended

Not surprisingly, it was Super Bowl I in 1967. The game wasn’t yet the unofficial national holiday it is now, and pro football still enjoyed mostly regional popularity in the Midwest and Northeast. Just under 62,000 fans gathered in Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles to watch the Green Bay Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs, 35 to 10.

Most attended

Not all stadiums are the same size, and a game of the Super Bowl magnitude requires a big one. The 1980 Super Bowl, between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Los Angeles Rams was held at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, in front of a whopping 103,985 people.

Biggest blowout

Super Bowl XXIV in 1990 pitted Joe Montana and the San Francisco 49ers against John Elway and the Denver Broncos. Expected to be a shootout between two of the best quarterbacks ever, it was…but only on Montana’s part. He threw five touchdowns, three of them to wide receiver Jerry Rice. Final score: San Francisco 55, Denver 10, the most lopsided Super Bowl ever.

Closest game

Late in the fourth quarter of Super Bowl XXV in 1991, New York Giants kicker Mark Bahr hit his second field goal of the day to give his team a 20 to 19 lead over the Buffalo Bills. After both teams then failed to score, the Bills got the ball back on their own 10 yard line with 2:16 left. They advanced the ball to about midfield, and with eight seconds left, Bills kicker Scott Norwood attempted a field goal, and it was less than a yard wide. The Giants won 20-19, a one point margin.

Rainiest

Since the Super Bowl is almost always played in a roofed stadium, or outdoors in places like Arizona or Florida, weather has never interfered with the game. The only time it rained during a Super Bowl was in 2007, held in Miami. (It drizzled during the 1975 Super Bowl in New Orleans.)

For more sports facts you should know, enjoy Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Sport Spectacular.

The post Youngest, Oldest, Most Seen, Least Seen: Super Bowl Trivia appeared first on Trivia Books and Facts | Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.