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Trivia ~ Man Made
~ The Arts ~
In the old Soviet Union, maps were often made with deliberate errors. Towns, rivers, and roads were placed incorrectly, and entire towns would be missing in some versions. to prevent foreigners and even the Soviet citizens from knowing the details of the geography of the Soviet Union.
The oldest known printed book that can be clearly dated is a copy of the Sanskrit Vajracchedika-prajnaparamitasutra (Buddha's Diamond Sutra), dated by its maker on May 11, 868 AD in China. It is one of Buddhism's greatest treasures.
The first novel written on a typewriter was "Tom Sawyer".
The Grammy Awards were introduced to counter the growing 'threat' of rock music?
Animation artists love inside jokes. In the Disney film Beauty and the Beast (1991), the road signs that Belle's father encounters in the forest show the names of two California cities: one points to Anaheim, while the other points down a dark, sinister-looking path to Valencia. In truth, Anaheim is the site of Disneyland, while the rival Six Flags Magic Mountain amusement theme park is in the city of Valencia.
While the Vatican holds a large collection of erotica, most of it dates from no later than the Renaissance. The Kinsey Institute in Indiana, on the other hand, has about 50,000 modern smutty photographs and 12,000 up-to-date “dirty books.”
But just for the articles....
The Museum of Modern Art in New York City once displayed a painting by Henri Matisse upside down for almost seven weeks before anyone noticed. Now here's the funny part: this particular painting was a realistic portrayal of a sailboat, not an abstract image, as you might suspect. They got it wrong because the painting included the boat's reflection in the water and whoever hung it mistook the reflection for the boat.
How do you suppose they discovered their mistake? Did a pool of seawater collect on the floor underneath the painting?
Although some biographers believe the story of Oz's naming to be as fanciful as the tales themselves, author L. Frank Baum claimed that he was inspired by a file cabinet marked O-Z.
a couple of the fanciful explanations: a variation on Uz, Job's house; a variation of Boz, the pseudonym for Charles Dickens, one of Baum's favorite authors.
Dr. Suess wrote Green Eggs and Ham after his editor dared him to write a book using fewer than fifty different words.
The correct term for the 64th note in music is a hemidemisemiquaver.
Mozart once composed a piano piece that required a player to use two hands and a nose in order to hit all the correct notes.
Animation artists love inside jokes. In the Disney film Beauty and the Beast (1991), the road signs that Belle's father encounters in the forest show the names of two California cities: one points to Anaheim, while the other points down a dark, sinister-looking path to Valencia. In truth, Anaheim is the site of Disneyland, while the rival Six Flags Magic Mountain amusement theme park is in the city of Valencia.
There are two things you should know about Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse. First, he was originally Mortimer Mouse. Now I ask you, how much affection could you have developed for a rodent named Morty Mouse?
The second point is that Disney did not create Mickey by himself. He never could draw a satisfactory Mickey Mouse and instead, relied on his childhood pal and fellow animator, Ubbe Irt Iwerks. I have not yet determined what that name spells backwards, and I swear I did not simply lift it from one of the Star Wars films.
The slang word "yahoo" first appeared in Swift's 1726 book "Gulliver's Travels" as the name of a race of sub-human brutes.
There's been much concern in recent years about the danger posed to peoples health by some of the materials they use at home and in their work. This is also true for artists. But when the British government banned a paint color called Indian Yellow back in 1908, it had nothing to do with protecting artists.
This color was produced by feeding mangos to cows and then collecting their urine, from which were derived the magnesium and calcium salts used to make the paint. (Don't try that at home!) The government banned the color because officials thought it unfair to make cows pig out on mangos.
You've surely seen barbershop quartets on TV or in the movies. You know, four guys wearing straw hats, harmonizing on such Stone Age favorites as "Sweet Adeline," "Down by the Old Mill Stream," or "Sweet Genevieve."
American as apple pie, right? Well, as British as shepherd's pie is more like it. In Shakespeare's time a barbershop was a male hangout as well as a place to get one's haircut. Guys being guys, they indulged in a little Elizabethan doo-wop while awaiting the snip-snip, with someone strumin' and pluckin' on a lute. That's where it all started.
Flash forward to barbershops in the American West in the late 19th century. Substitute a banjo for the lute. Add a little man-talk one wouldn't use at home, a copy of "The Police Gazette" (Playboy with long underwear), and some good harmonizing. The haircut was almost incidental. Next best thing to a bar, hummmmmm.
At the movies I sit through the credits right through to the copyright notice, just before the house lights go on. I mean, if I'm going to pay the prices they charge now, I'm going to see every second. You, too? But until now all I knew about a gaffer was that the word means an old man. Why, then, does every film employ one? To remind the rest of the cast that they won't be young forever?
Actually, the gaffer is the head electrician, who lights the sets for the director of photography. Why do they call him a gaffer? Beats me, but I suppose its better than "wirehead," "bulbbunny," or "filamentphil."
As for the best boy, he hasn't won any popularity contest. Far from it. He's the gaffer's helper, a mere assistant, which makes him a not-quite-gaffer-grade kind of guy. If he's a she, she's called - I dunno, "Ms. best boy?"
There is an unusual encyclopedia called Elements of Mathematics, written by "Nicholas Bourbaki," the pen name for several mathematicians who collaborated on it. What's unusual is that the work devotes 200 pages to the number 1.
That's what I would call a singular achievement.
Snow White's name in Africa is "Flower White".
The original name of the comic strip "Peanuts" was "Li'l Folk."
American composer Stephen Foster had two of his songs adopted as official state anthems:"My Old Kentucky Home" is the state song of Kentucky and "Old Folks at Home" is the state song of Florida.
The great library of Alexandria, founded in 295 BC, held 700,000 books at its peak. But much of it was destroyed by fire in A.D. 47 when Julius Caesar laid siege to the city.
Caesar had been to the city before and had borrowed several books from the great library. Hmmmm
Could one of history's most famous disasters been a cover-up to avoid paying an overdue library fine?
The world's longest work of non-fiction is "The Yongle Dadian", the 10,000-volume encyclopedia produced by 5,000 scholars over a period of 5 years during the Ming Dynasty in China.
Best Picture Oscar winner Dances with Wolves had a full-third of its dialogue spoken in Lakota Sioux. Subtitles were used, unusual for a major Academy Award-winning film.
In 1939, David O. Selznick was ordered to pay a then-whopping $5,000 fine to the Motion Picture Producers Association because he insisted that the word "damn" remain in Gone With the Wind's final script. A perfectionist, Selznick wanted to stay true to author Margaret Mitchell's novel.
The first Gold Record ever was awarded to Glenn Miller for selling 1 million copies of "Chattanooga Choo Choo"
Scientists have discovered the oldest playable musical instrument in the world. It’s a flute carved from a bird’s wing bone more than 9,000 years ago. The flute was discovered with other flutes at an ancient burial site in China
In the 72 years of the Academy Awards existence, only three films have swept all five categories in Best Picture, Best Directing, Best Actor and Actress, and Best Writing. They are 1934’s "It Happened One Night," 1975’s "One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest," and 1991’s "The Silence of the Lambs."
A zarzuela is an operetta of a traditional type, with spoken dialogue and lyrical music. The word is derived from the Spanish after La Zarzuela, the royal palace near Madrid where the operetta was first performed in 1629. A zarzuela is also the name of a seafood stew
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