Bathroom Readers' Institute's Blog, page 41

They Didn’t Die the Way You Think They Died

Some celebrities are as famous for their shocking deaths as they were for the work they did during their lives. As it turns out, the collective knowledge of their deaths…turned out to not be true.

JAMES DEAN

Dean was a brooding, charismatic, and magnetic screen presence. His mystique likely grew because he starred in only three (really good) movies—Giant, Rebel Without a Cause, and East of Eden—before his untimely death in 1955 at just 24 years old. Dean was a well-known car enthusiast who dabbled in semiprofessional and amateur auto-racing, and it’s in the pursuit of speed that killed him. He was driving his Porsche Spyder extremely fast on a California highway and crashed into another car. It wasn’t until an inquest in 2005 when it was revealed the accident was more complex. Dean was thought to have been driving around 90 mph and tried to go around a car by laying on the gas, only to crash into it. As it turns out, Dean was going a more reasonable 70 mph…and had actually braked hard to try to avoid that other car.

DAVID CARRADINE

Kung Fu star David Carradine was in the midst of a comeback in 2009, having just starred as the title character in Quentin Tarantino’s two-part epic Kill Bill. That’s when the 63-year-old actor was discovered dead in a Bangkok hotel room—hanging in a closet with a cord around his neck. Authorities ruled that Carradine’s death was by his own hand…but was it? Carradine’s body was found with his wrists tied behind his back, and he was reportedly covered in many cuts and bruises, and there were unidentified footprints in the hotel room.

CASS ELLIOT

Also known as “Mama Cass” during her time in the Mamas & the Papas, Elliot possessed one of the greatest and most versatile voices in rock history, perfect for singing hits like “California Dreamin’” and “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” Elliot was just 32 years old when she was found dead in a London apartment. The first to investigate and determine a cause of death was a medical examiner named Dr. Anthony Greenburgh. He told the press that his initial thoughts, after looking over Elliot and the scene of her death, was that the singer had been eating a ham sandwich while laying down. The media latched on to that detail, and it spread, also functioning as a subtle but cruel joke at the expense of the overweight Elliot—the world believed she died eating. But it’s simply not true. There was a ham sandwich found near Elliot’s body, but it was untouched. Elliot actually died from heart failure.

DOROTHY DANDRIDGE

Dandridge was one of the first African-American movie stars, and the first actress of color nominated for an Academy Award (the musical Carmen Jones, 1954). After she testified in a criminal libel trial against the publisher of the movie magazine Confidential, in 1957, Dandridge’s career suffered—her image was tainted by scandal and there weren’t many good roles for black women at the time. She wound up making a series of unmemorable B-movies until 1965, when Dandridge’s body was found by her manager. A Los Angeles pathologist determined that Dandridge died from an accidental overdose of prescription antidepressants. That conflicted with later findings by the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office, which were ruled to be the more truthful of the two accounts. Dandridge suffered from a rare and bizarre form of embolism brought on by a bone break. A few days before she died, Dandridge fractured her right foot while working out, which caused tiny bits of fat to break off from bone marrow, which lodged in her brain and lungs, cutting off blood flow.

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Constitutional Amendments That Didn’t Work Out

Changing the Constitution is tough business, so there are a lot of rules in place before an amendment can be adopted (it has to pass the House and Senate with big majorities and then approved by a super majority of state legislatures). That means these attempted amendments are doomed to the cutting room floor of history.

Dueling

Certainly the most famous duel in American history took place in 1804, when Vice President Aaron Burr shot and killed Secretary of State Alexander Hamilton (as depicted in the hit musical Hamilton). But lots of people died from this strange form of quasi-legal consensual attempted-murder that in 1828 Congress considered an amendment to ban dueling. Amazingly, it couldn’t get the votes to pass.

Co-Presidents?

With the North and South clashing over many issues in the 1850s—primarily slavery—the Civil War was an inevitability by 1860. That year, a congressman from pro-slavery Virginia named Albert Jenkins was so worried that newly elected anti-slavery president Abraham Lincoln would outlaw the practice that he introduced an amendment that would split the strict and final powers of the presidency to two elected officials. (Jenkins figured that a Southern co-president could keep a Northern co-president in check.)

Voting rights for ‘widows and spinsters’

In 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified, which gave all adult women the right to vote. It wasn’t the first attempt at women’s suffrage. In 1888, Illinois representative William Mason suggested an amendment that would give some women the vote: specifically “widows and spinsters.” The reasoning was that married women had their voting husbands looking out for them.

The United States of Earth

This country is known by a lot of names—America, the United States, the U.S., the U.S.A., and the United States of America, for example. A lot of those would’ve been made moot if Wisconsin congressman Lucas Miller’s 1893 amendment had passed. He wanted to change the country’s official name to “The United States of Earth.” Miller believed that the Republic would naturally and happily spread worldwide and politically encompass the entire planet—the name was just getting ahead of things.

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The Most Cleverly Celebrity-Namesake Cocktails of All Time

True fame isn’t getting your name in lights or your handprints on the Hollywood Walk of Fame—it’s having a drink named in your honor.

Arnold Palmer

Arnold Palmer has two legacies: The late golfer is one of the greatest to ever play the game, with a remarkable 95 professional tournament wins, including the Masters four times. He also has a popular beverage named after him. According to golf (and drink) lore, Palmer was at the 1960 U.S. Open, and went up to the bar and asked for a drink he made for himself at home: an unnamed mixture of iced tea and lemonade. The popularity of the drink (and its name) spread from there. Flash forward about 40 years, and another golfer is tearing up the PGA Tour: John Daly, known as much for his hard drinking and hard-partying ways as he is for his game. (Perhaps more so.) If you go up to most any golf country club bar and order a John Daly, you’ll get an Arnold Palmer…with vodka in it. It’s a drink invented by none other than John Daly.

Shirley Temple

Perhaps during a special night at a fancy restaurant with your parents, you were allowed to order a Shirley Temple from the bar. An alcohol-free drink for kids, it’s named for probably the most popular and famous kid actor of all time: Shirley Temple. That “mocktail” generally consists of ginger ale or 7-Up, grenadine, and a maraschino cherry. But as Shirley Temple grew up, got married, and became Shirley Temple Black, there’s also a drink called the Shirley Temple Black. There are many variations, but it’s basically a Shirley Temple with the addition of things like cranberry juice, as well as vodka, rum, and various liqueurs.

Ginger Rogers

The great screen dancer Ginger Rogers (one half of a legendary duo with Fred Astaire) had a drink invented in her honor during her heyday of the 1930s (which also happened to be the time of Prohibition). It’s a cocktail as much about wordplay as it is taste. It’s a mixture of gin, ginger ale, fresh ginger, as well as mint and lemon juice.

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Big Star, Bigger Flop

Movie stars are movie stars because millions of people want to go see their movies…well, almost all of their movies. Here are some stars and their movie that flopped the hardest.

Sandra Bullock

In 1994, Sandra Bullock became a star thanks to her role in the action classic Speed. The sequel, Speed 2: Cruise Control, released three years later, almost killed her career. In the first movie, Bullock played a regular person who has to save the day by driving an explosives-rigged bus that would explode if it slowed down. In the second, she inexplicably has to fight terrorists on a cruise ship. Speed 2 grossed $48 million, which isn’t good considering that the movie cost a staggering $160 million.

Ben Affleck

Affleck somehow came back from this bomb to play Batman and direct the Oscar-winning Argo. In 2003, he was a tabloid fixture for his high-profile relationship with Jennifer Lopez, his co-star in Gigli, a bizarre crime comedy. Affleck plays a mobster who tries to seduce a gay female gangster (Lopez) while watching over a developmentally disabled man he kidnapped. Somehow it cost $72 million to make Gigli, and it made a paltry $7 million at the box office.

Hugh Jackman

The 2015 movie Pan wasn’t the first time Hollywood made a Peter Pan movie, but it’s the first time Hollywood made a gritty prequel to Peter Pan. Wolverine himself, Hugh Jackman, plays the fearless and fearsome pirate Blackbeard…but maybe if he wasn’t buried under a ton of makeup and prosthetics (and playing the bad guy), more people would have seen the movie. Pan grossed $35 million…but cost $150 million to make.

Reese Witherspoon

Witherspoon starred in hits like Legally Blonde, won an Oscar for Walk the Line, and produced the multiple-Emmy-winning miniseries Big Little Lies, but she couldn’t make How Do You Know? work. This 2010 low-key romantic drama directed by James L. Brooks cost $120 million to produce, mostly to pay its cast: Witherspoon, Jack Nicholson, Paul Rudd, and Owen Wilson. It made only $30 million at the box office.

Jennifer Lawrence

This odd movie about a middle-aged man who talks to his family via a beaver puppet was supposed to a comeback for Mel Gibson after numerous scandals derailed his career. It was also supposed to spotlight Jennifer Lawrence, just after her Oscar-nominated turn in Winter’s Bone, and right before The Hunger Games. Neither Gibson nor Lawrence benefited much. It made less than $1 million in theaters.

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Want To Try This Weird New Beer?

Selling a lifestyle and a brand and customer loyalty…but it only seems to work with the beer itself.

Budweiser Black Crown

Tired and alarmed at how “microbrews” or “craft brews”—strongly flavored, potent, regionally-produced beers—were cutting into their sales, Budweiser introduced its own craft brew-like product in early 2013. Like those upstarts Budweiser Black Crown was high on flavor and had more alcohol content than a standard Budweiser. They also cost more—about $2 a bottle, about the same as a real craft beer. When faced with the option of real craft brews or Budweiser’s imitation craft brew for the same price, consumers skipped the Buds. In 2016, Black Crown was discontinued.

Bud Dry

Budweiser unveiled a massive publicity push in the early ‘90s for a product called Bud Dry. “Dry” beer was a style popular in Europe and parts of Asia, but it was virtually unknown in the U.S., and the many commercials for Bud Dry didn’t even attempt to explain what it was. How can a liquid be dry? In terms of wine and beer, it means simply “less sweet.” The ads didn’t say that. Instead, they curiously discouraged people from wondering what “dry” meant with the catchphrase, “Why ask why? Try Bud Dry.” Not enough people did it, and the product failed.

Bud Ice

If “dry” beer was confusing, then “ice” beer was downright perplexing. Frozen beer? Beer popsicles? Nope, the brewing process ice beer involves lowering the temperature of the brew until ice crystals form. Then the frozen water is removed, leaving a higher concentration of beer, with a slightly higher alcohol content. Several breweries released ice beers in the early ‘90s, and some of them are still around today. Bud Ice might be found today if you look hard enough.

Miller

Of the “big 3” American beer brands—Coors, Budweiser, and Miller—two out of three have long offered both a flagship brand and a “light” version: Coors and Coors Light, and Bud and Bud Light. Miller has sold several offshoots—Miller Lite, Miller Genuine Draft, and Miller High Life—but oddly it went decades without just plain “Miller.” So, in 1996 it launched Miller, “different from any existing premium beer.” They couldn’t break 1 percent market share and it was pulled off of shelves a year later.

Rocky Mountain Sparkling Water

Whenever natural disasters hit, mega breweries will often switch to bottling just plain purified water to ship to those in need. In 1990, Coors decided to release the “pure Rocky Mountain spring water” at the heart of its products to paying customers. Rocky Mountain Sparkling Water confused them, because it had a Coors logo on it, but it wasn’t beer. It lasted until 1992.

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Happy Birthday, The Simpsons!

This week in 1987, The Simpsons debuted in the form of a series of shorts on the young Fox network’s The Tracey Ullman Show. Following a 1989 Christmas special, The Simpsons is still running. Here are some facts about the series on this, its 31st birthday.

Disrespect for authority figures

A big part of Bart Simpson’s character is his unabashed disrespect for authority figures, particularly his father who he disrespectfully refers to by his first name. The only adult Bart seems to like is his idol, local celebrity Krusty the Clown. Creator Matt Groening nearly added another level to Bart’s misplaced adoration—he almost had Krusty the Clown and Homer be the same person, with Bart not being able to recognize (or respect) his own father.

The spinoff that almost happened

The Simpsons is a spinoff itself, but it’s never produced any spinoff. Well, it almost did. In the mid-1990s, Groening wrote a pilot script for a live-action Krusty the Clown series. It fell apart because of stilts. Fox executives said it would be too hard and expensive to film a central element of the show: Krusty moved from Springfield to Los Angeles and lived on a house atop stilts…which beavers kept gnawing on. It would’ve cost too much for either mechanical beavers or trained beavers.

Milhouse

Bart’s best friend—or the kid he pushes around that worships him—is a whiny nerd named Milhouse. He was initially created for a Simpsons themed Butterfinger commercial. The plot called for a friend for Bart to trade lunches with, and Groening used a character from an un-produced school-based cartoon he’d once worked on. Later he was added to the show and named after Richard Milhous Nixon, because Groening thought that would be funny.

The ‘lost episode’, almost starring Prince

There’s a “lost episode” of The Simpsons. Music legend Prince agreed to guest star in an installment where Homer meets a man who believes he’s The Purple One. At the last minute, and after the script had been written, Prince backed out.

How old is Mr. Burns?

Just how old is Mr. Burns, proprietor of the Springfield Nuclear Power plant? Well, he answers the phone “Ahoy-ahoy,” which is how Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, wanted people to say. Bell proposed that in the 1870s.

The tie to Donald Trump

On one of The Simpsons’ many “flash forward” episodes that shows what will become of the family in the future, Lisa Simpson becomes president of the United State. Her predecessor: Donald Trump. The episode aired in 2000, long before Trump’s political ambitions.

Episode 636 airs April 29

On April 29, episode number 636 of The Simpsons will air. What’s special about that, beyond it being an exceptionally high number? With that, The Simpsons will officially become the longest-running scripted show in American TV history. The previous record holder: CBS’s western Gunsmoke, which aired 635 episodes from 1955 to 1975.

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8 Interesting Facts About Scrabble

On this day in 1899, a guy named Alfred Mosher Butts was born. What did he do? He invented Scrabble, the word-forming crossword-like board game that’s been extremely popular for more than 50 years.

The Great Depression

Butts came up with the basic idea for Scrabble—a board game where players took turns drawing letter tiles to form words to score points—during the Great Depression. The artist and architect originally called in Lexiko (as in “lexicon”) and then Criss-Cross Words.

How Butts created the points system

In addition to certain spots on the board affording players “triple letter score,” “double word score,” and the like, each letter tile carries a certain number of points. Butts came up with the system by taking the front page of an issue of the New York Times and counting how many times each letter of the alphabet appeared. He determined that the letters that occurred the most—such as E or T—would only be worth 1 point and be represented on the most tiles. Infrequent and harder to use letters—like Z and Q—were relatively rare, so Butts made them worth 10 points.

The trademark

He didn’t get a trademark for the game until the late 1930s, which is about when he brought on a business partner, a friend named James Brunot. It was Brunot who thought up the name Scrabble.

Made by hand

Brunot also provided the garage where he and Butts made copies of the game by hand for about two decades. But in 1957, when the Macy’s department store chain made a huge Scrabble order, Butts and Brunot sold the operation to game-maker Selchow and Righter…who eventually sold it to toy company Coleco…who then sold it to toy conglomerate Hasbro.

Bingo

Players who use all seven of their tiles to form a single word on one turn get a 50 point bonus. In Scrabble parlance, it’s called a “bingo.” Talk about a bingo, though. The most points possible in a turn of Scrabble: 1,782. To get that, a player would have to form the word oxyphenbutazone (it’s an anti-inflammatory drug) while also hitting three “triple word score” squares.

One third of all homes

Today, it’s estimated that a third of all American homes contain a copy of Scrabble. In the U.K., it can be found in more than half of all households.

The Official Scrabble Dictionary

Words allowed in Scrabble play are listed in The Official Scrabble Dictionary. The 2014 edition added a bunch of new words, including “hashtag,” “selfie,” “vlog,” “mojito,” “chillax,” and “beatbox.” It also reintroduced the word “da,” which appeared in the first Scrabble Dictionary but was deleted in all subsequent editions.

Adapted for TV

In 1984, Scrabble became one of the few board games to be adapted into a TV game show. Here’s a clip from a teen celebrity episode featuring Soleil Moon Frye from Punky Brewster. 

 

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Hope Your Friday the 13th is Better Than These

According to superstition and modern folklore, “Friday the 13th” is a day where weird stuff is destined to happen. There’s no truth to that, of course…or is there?

Lighting Strikes

On Friday, August 13, 2010, a boy was at  the Lowestoft Seafront Air Festival in England. That’s when lightning struck him. He was hospitalized with minor burns and recovered fully. What’s truly weird is that the boy in question was 13 years old, and he got zapped at 1:13 p.m. (or 13:13).

Hernan Cortes captured Cuauhtémoc

On Friday, August 13, 1521, Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes captured Cuauhtémoc. As the leader of the massive Aztec metropolis of Tenochtitlan, this meant the de facto end of the Aztec Empire in North America. Cortes made himself the new leader of the area, which today is known as Mexico City.

A Freak Accident

Daz Baxter of New York City was a superstitious guy—so much so that he didn’t take any chances on Friday, August 13, 1976. Rather than go out into the world and risk something bad happening, he chose to stay home where nothing could go wrong. Except that in a freak accident that day, the floor of his apartment gave way, and Baxter plummeted six stories and died.

The 1989 New York Stock Exchange Crash

On Friday, October 13, 1989, the New York Stock Exchange crashed. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 190 points. At the time, it was the second-biggest fall in history.

Alfred Hitchcock

On Friday, August 13, 1999, Alfred Hitchcock, the master director of films depicting terrifying suspense and misfortune, would have turned 100 years old. (The only thing stopping him was that he died in 1980.)

A Massive Blizzard

While upstate New York certainly gets hit with a lot of snow, October is a bit early for a massive blizzard. But on Friday, October 13, 2006, 22 inches of snow fell on the city of Buffalo, which knocked out power to more than a million people.

The Luck of Twins

Twins being born on Friday the 13th just can’t be lucky. But a pair of the world’s most famous—and wealthiest—came into the world on that fateful day. On June 13, 1986, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen were born.

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Famous Siblings

We’ve got Mother’s Day in May, Father’s Day in June, Grandparents Day in September, and we’ve got this holiday to celebrate brothers and sisters…Siblings DAY! Here are some famous people you might not have known share the same parents.

Imagine the pride if one of your children won an Oscar. Then imagine if two of your kids grew up to win an Academy Award. That actually happened to Ira and Kathlyn Beaty. Their daughter, Shirley MacLean Beaty, who changed her name ever so slightly to Shirley MacLaine, won the Academy Award for Best Actress for Terms of Endearment. The Beatys’ son, and MacLaine’s younger brother, Henry Warren Beaty, also changed his name just a bit and tasted Oscar glory. Warren Beatty, primarily an actor, won Best Director for his work on Reds.

Peter Graves (he died in 2014) was an iconic American actor. For six years he played the unflappable Jim Phelps on the classic spy show Mission: Impossible, and sent up his image as Captain Clarence Oveur in the two ridiculous Airplane! movies in the 1980s. As many actors did back in the day, Graves adopted a stage name—he was born Peter Aurness. His brother was also an actor, and who also adopted a stage name, but all he did was drop a letter. James Aurness, a.k.a. James Arness, starred as Marshal Matt Dillon for 20 seasons on CBS’s Western series Gunsmoke.

Hallie Eisenberg was inescapable in the late 1990s. She was colloquially known as “the Pepsi Girl,” an adorable child actress who starred in a string of ads for the brown sugar water, most memorably one where her voice was dubbed to sound like a mobster. She also starred in the family film Paulie, but doesn’t act as much these days. There’s another actor in the family, however: Jesse Eisenberg, best known for his Oscar-nominated portrayal of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network and for playing Lex Luthor in the latest slew of Superman movies. 

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A Message From the Past (And the Sea)

Sure, finding a message in a bottle is a rare, amazing, once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. Even better: finding the oldest ever message in a bottle.

Wedge Island

In January 2018, a Naceline, Australia, family named the Illmans (and some friends) took off for a beach trip in the western part of the country. They drove on the beach near Wedge Island, but had to stop when their car got wedged in sand. Not quite ready to dig themselves out, Tonya Illman and friend Grace Ricciardo went for a walk on the beach, and, being good citizens, pick up some trash on the way. That’s when Illman found a very old bottle with raised lettering. A little fancier than the average piece of beach trash, Illman thought she could clean it up and use it as a knick-knack.

It wasn’t a cigarette

She got back to the car and gave it to her son’s girlfriend, Bree Del Borrello, for safe keeping while she helped her husband get their car out of the sand. Del Borrello curiously inspected the bottle and found what she thought was a cigarette inside. She shook the bottle and pried out the object, only to realize it wasn’t a cigarette—it was a tightly rolled piece of paper, wrapped in twine. In other words, they’d found the best thing you can ever find at the beach, and the thing you never find at the beach unless you’re a character in a book or a movie: a real-life message in a bottle.

Dry (but not fried)

When the Illmans got home, they took the moist message and place it in their oven on low heat, so as to dry it out. When it was dry (but not fried), they unraveled the scroll. It was about six by eight inches long, and while some of the ink had faded, Tonya Illman could make out the date on the message: 18…something.

Could it really be from the 1800s? At first, the family thought it was a joke—a real message in a bottle, but with a fake date to “seem” old. To make sure, they took it to the Western Australian Museum and talked to Ross Anderson, the museum’s assistant curator of maritime archeology. It didn’t take him long to provide more details about the note, and also to authenticate it.

June 12, 1886

First of all, the date was accurate: Anderson examined the note and found its full date: June 12, 1886. It was more than 131 years old. Anderson also analyzed historical data and found that it had been thrown overboard from a German sailing ship called the Paula as it crossed the Indian Ocean during a journey from Wales to Indonesia. Anderson determined that this message in a bottle was part of a 69-year-long German experiment that involved throwing thousands of bottles into the ocean to research currents. From its drop-off point, the note made its way 600 miles, where within a year it washed ashore in Australia and has been buried in the sand ever since.

Oldest message in a bottle ever found

It’s one of 663 bottles with messages recovered from the German experiment. More notably, it’s the oldest message in a bottle ever found.

 

 

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