This is the thread for unusual details in wikipedia articles.

not only lol but good piece of trivia that i did not know!

Osment was cast in the film after the casting director noticed him in a Pizza Hut commercial.

The song is heard briefly in Space Jam: A New Legacy, which is a sequel to the original film, during the scene where Sylvester the Cat tries to summon Michael Jordan to help the Tune Squad win the game against Al-G Rhythm and the Goon Squad, only to find out that it is the actor, Michael B. Jordan instead.

You know, I really need to check out these Space Jam movies at some point.

Not wikipedia, but this message board anecdote should be added to David Lean's entry:

When we were working at Warner Hollywood, he complained about the state of the only bathroom in our area of the building, and finally hand-wrote a (quite lovely) sign requesting that the ”gentleman with the exceptionally short penis, either attempt to take better aim…

or be seated.”

Maybe he had two streams of pee goin on

Hersh attended Salve Regina University, majoring in archetypal psychology and philosophy, and the Rhode Island School of Design, but dropped out shortly before graduating to establish the band in Boston, Massachusetts, where they had been playing on weekends. While at Salve, Hersh befriended film actress Betty Hutton, who was attending the school in her 60s; Hutton also attended several early Throwing Muses shows in Newport.

The idea of Betty Hutton going to early Throwing Muses shows is absolutely mindblowing to me lmfao.

that is fantastic

Rat Girl is great reading

e.g. they really had a fish nailed to a cross on their apartment wall - can't verify if it quoted Kafka tho

The 9th World Festival of Youth and Students was held from 28 July to 5 August 1968 in Sofia, capital city of the then People's Republic of Bulgaria. The festival attracted 20,000 people from 138 countries.Initially, the event was planned to be held in Algeria in the summer of 1965, but due to the military coup in that country the date was postponed, and Bulgaria became the new venue for the festival.

The Beatles offered to play at the festival, but the band was turned down by the organising committee.

I'm not a total Beatle maniac, but this kinda sounds like bullshit to me

This probably should go in the "things you were shockingly old when you learned" thread, but w/e

At the time of his death, Bangs appeared to be listening to music. Earlier that day he had bought a copy of Dare by the English synth-pop band The Human League, according to Jim DeRogatis's well-sourced biography Let It Blurt. Later that night, Bangs's friend found him unresponsive, lying on a couch in his apartment. "Dare was spinning on the turntable, and the needle was stuck on the end groove", DeRogatis wrote.

In the late '70s, Broadrick's mother and stepfather were members of Anti-Social, a band infamous for live shows involving blood and faecal matter, as well as for soliciting people to commit suicide via guillotine live on stage.

their final gig (at the Kingshurst Labour Club) ended with drummer Harrison playing a drum solo on an audience member's head, an offense for which he was later arrested and charged.[

I love Betty Hutton, Throwing Muses fan

Speaking of Throwing Muses— I was reading “Ramona” by Helen Hunt Jackson, and I stumbled upon an answer book to it about “The Real Ramona”

https://archive.org/details/realramonahelen00hufgoog

It is a space disco song that features various sound effects akin to those from the film, such as the noises of R2-D2, the "pew-pew" gun sound and humming from a lightsaber, giving the song an electronic atmosphere.[17] As the album was not a licensed project, the sounds had to be re-made using synthesizers;[6] as it was primitive equipment at this stage, it took Meco eight hours to achieve an effect resembling R2-D2.[7]

In the Star Wars series, part of R2-D2's beeps and whistles are Burtt's vocalizations, also made using an ARP 2600 synthesizer, as are some of the squawks made by the tiny holographic monsters on the Millennium Falcon spacecraft. In Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005), Burtt's provided the voice for Lushros Dofine, captain of the Invisible Hand cruiser. The heavy breathing of Darth Vader was created by recording Burtt's own breathing in an old Dacor scuba regulator.[citation needed]

Today (after a round of Travle) I learned that Botswana and Zambia share the shortest border in the world, 135 meters

In 1997 Martin invented and filed a patent application for a drum with a three-part rim that could be used to make three different rimshot sounds. He received patent 5,834,667 on this drum on Nov 10, 1998; the patent was issued to him under his legal name, Walter M.D. Midkiff. In 1997 Dewey was inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame along with Buffalo Springfield.

Although Davis admitted to disliking the song, finding it too saccharine, it became his only number-one hit, spending three weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart starting 10 June 1972, and two weeks at the top of the easy-listening chart.[3]

“Google, what is Bebe Neuwirth’s real name?”
“Beatrice “Bebe” Jane Neuwirth.”
“Yes, but what is her REAL NAME”

o-levels (uk equiv of sats roughly) had a logo.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:OLevel.svg

i'm seeing Obituary for like the 7 millionth time Saturday, so I'm bored and reading their Wikipedia pages, and I come to the one for their live album Dead, and one of the songs "Rewind" is attributed to some bizarre dude with the last name Klavinger. Ain't never been nobody with that name in the band, and Google turns up nothing for his name and Obituary other than the Wikipedia article. The song is also officially credited to the band on the studio album it appears on. Dude is also listed as a one-time touring guitarist from 1999 on their page, but only in one place.

I figure it was someone's recent cute vandalism. through some digging, I found out this motherfucker added his name to the page and changed the songwriting credit to his name back in *2007* and the vandalism has remained there for 15.5 years, even through several revisions.

well, until now at least.

I added a friend's name to a Spanish variety show on wikipedia once as an inside joke. It got corrected but not before imdb copied the info, and there he still is.

Lol that's awesome

it's not so much unusual, but nowadays I've become fascinated by wikipedia pages that must be heavily monitored by the subject in question - i.e. Robbie Robertson

https://i.imgur.com/q2VICVk.jpg

I once updated the page for Ally McBeal (the character not the show itself) to state she was known for fighting for her client, wearing sexy miniskirts, and being self-reliant. It stayed for about a year.

wikipedia pages that must be heavily monitored by the subject in question - i.e. Robbie Robertson

Haha, I've never looked him up, but I can only imagine. Serves him right.

"I thought most wikipedia pages were created and edited as a group effort?"

"Not this one."

"Take Me Like I Am" was written by Peter "Spunk" Willis and Sterling Jarvis in 1988 but released somewhat accidentally in California radio markets in 1990 where it received airplay.[2]

the critical reception section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gate_at_the_Stairs (which I have checked out on the coffee table to read next after Anagrams)

Most of the players believed they would be back on the field by Labour Day (celebrated on the same date in the U.S. as Labor Day) at the latest.

Quite the sentence here.

Whilst being way beyond over the limit from some sheer violence is scary in some matches, hardcore technician gimmicks are also another popular choice for gimmicks, due to the fans being over with getting used to watching sheer violence as they don't shy away from it either.

new user name just dropped

lol

It doesn't really belong in this thread maybe but I'd never heard of "cargo cults" before, until last night, when reading up on active volcanoes

whoa!

Yeah, there’s a very-long-standing active cone on Tanna in Vanuatu, and a particular cult (John Brum I think?) is associated with it. Fascinating stuff, I was like, why haven’t I read about this before? Then I clicked the “in popular culture” section and it said “what, you haven’t seen The Gods Must Be Crazy?” and I replied “I did when I was a kid and it seemed like a weird problematic fantasy, not like something that had any basis in reality”

less an 'unusual' detail than a fucked-up one

Disregarding her daughter's desire to go to Oxford, her mother arranged an encounter with Donald Ferguson, her mother's former lover. Helen Emily Woods married him in 1920, a few months before he took a position with the Railway Company in Burma.

RE: Cargo cults, I've read a few articles about that tribe in Papua New Guinea that 'worshiped' the late Prince Phillip, kind of a cool story

https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article10357477.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/princephilip-group.jpg

Not unusual, necessarily, but I admire the attempt to summarize the sheer zaniness that is the video for El Debarge's "Who's Johnny?"

The music video features El DeBarge singing in a courtroom, where a judge is presiding over the trial of Johnny 5 (the robotic protagonist of Short Circuit). A representative of NOVA, the government defense contractor that created Johnny, sits at the prosecutor's table as El DeBarge sings his testimony from the witness stand. Stephanie Speck (Ally Sheedy) and a cardboard cutout of Newton Graham Crosby, Ph.D. (Steve Guttenberg) are also in attendance as adversarial witnesses for the prosecution, implying that El Debarge is playing the co-lead role of Ben Jabituya, played by Fisher Stevens in the film. The prosecutor's sole question during these examinations is the titular line of the song "Who's Johnny?" She plays a VHS tape, labeled "Short Circuit", containing various clips from the movie. Meanwhile, Number 5 wreaks havoc in the courtroom (only his robotic hand is visible to the viewer) with various hijinks, including giving the prosecuting attorney a pair of funny nose glasses, turning up the ceiling fan to create a windstorm of papers, swapping the judge's gavel for an exploding one and calling the fire department, resulting in the judge being sprayed with water. Stephanie and El DeBarge sneak out of the courtroom at the end, covering the camera with a slate on their way out. The prosecutor, still wearing the trick glasses, pops up to deliver the last "Who's Johnny?"

A classic! See this discussion from a while back: This is the thread for unusual details in wikipedia articles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moroder

Bruno Jean Cornil Metsu (After believing to Islam change his name to Karim)

Today I learned that Christopher Nolan split at least some of his childhood between London and Chicago (where his mother was from), with him spending more time in London and his younger brother spending more time in Chicago. Jonathan (who I guess used to go by Jonah?) Nolan apparently even has an American accent.

From a botanical point of view, the strawberry is not a berry but an aggregate accessory fruit, meaning that the fleshy part is derived not from the plant's ovaries but from the receptacle that holds the ovaries. Each apparent "seed" (achene) on the outside of the fruit is actually one of the ovaries of the flower, with a seed inside it.

Sheard portrayed Adolf Hitler five times in his career: in Rogue Male (1976), The Tomorrow People (1978), The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission (1985), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) and the documentary Secret History: Hitler of the Andes (2003).[10] He also portrayed Heinrich Himmler three times, in The Death of Adolf Hitler (1973), The Bunker (1981) and Space (1985). Although Sheard never played Hermann Göring, he did play Göring's double in the 'Allo 'Allo! episode Hitler's Last Heil.

Godard remains a busy and creative artist, but no more popular (or better) than he was 40 years ago.

xp Anyone know if Rogue Male is any good? I quite enjoyed the book (via NYRB Classics) but have trouble seeing how the climactic standoff would translate to film.