The man was Paul Winchell, who is perhaps best remembered for hosting the Winchell-Mahoney Time children’s show in the 1960s with his ventriloquist dummies Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff, the originals of which now reside in the Smithsonian.

Other famed characters and voices done by Winchell include: Dick Dastardly, played in multiple series including Wacky Races and Dastardly and Muttley; Fleegle on The Banana Splits; Clyde and Softy on The Perils of Penelope Pitstop;  Grossey Grossem in Germbusters 3: The Infection on the XBOX 360, replacing Casey Kasem; Fearless Freddy the Shark Hunter on the Pink Panther cartoon and spin-off Misterjaw; Sam-I-Am and his unnamed friend in Green Eggs and Ham; Robonic Stooges as Moe; Zummi Gummi on the Adventures of the Gummi Bears; voice of the Scrubbing Bubbles for the commercials; and various voices on The CB Bears, Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch, and the Blue Racer series.

Starting in The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, Winchell began alternating with voice actor Jim Cummings, who is now the sole voice of Pooh and Tigger since Winchell’s retirement in 2000.

Besides doing voice acting and ventriloquist work, Winchell also was an inventor, holding over 30 patents including: a fountain pen with a retractable tip; a disposable razor; a blood plasma defroster; a flameless lighter; an invisible garter belt (probably the shortest patent application ever) ; garment for hypothermia; a piezo-electric diaphragm; and heated gloves, among others.

On his patent on the artificial heart, which was applied for in 1961 and granted in 1963, it is often claimed that Winchell was the first to patent and artificial heart, but this is incorrect.  However, Winchell’s design for an artificial heart is often cited as a crude prototype of the only artificial heart granted full PMA approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Jarvik-7.  The Jarvik-7 was successfully used in a human in 1982 and was invented by Robert Jarvik more than a decade after Winchell’s artificial heart patent was approved.

Jarvik denies Winchell’s design influenced his own.   However, Jarvik developed his artificial heart at the University of Utah, which was the same University that Winchell donated his patent for the artificial heart, around the same time Jarvik was working on his version.  Thus, it is unlikely Jarvik was unaware of Winchell’s similar design at the time.  Further, as Dr. Heimlich, inventor of the Heimlich maneuver and collaborator of Winchell’s on the design for the artificial heart, said: “I saw the heart, I saw the patent and I saw the letters. The basic principle used in Winchell’s heart and Jarvik’s heart is exactly the same.”

Whether Jarvik intentionally copied Winchell’s work and improved it or simply came up with a similar, improved design independently is under debate.  Jarvik says his design was influenced by designs by Kolff, Akutsu, Liotta, Kwan-Gett, and many others, but not Winchell’s design.  He also states he considers Winchell’s design “crude and impractical”, though that could probably be said about many predecessors to eventual working advanced technologies.

In any event, one of the designs Jarvik said did influence his was Kolff’s.  Kolff was the one who hired Jarvik and who was Jarvik’s mentor at the University of Utah.  Kolff had a very different view of Winchell’s artificial heart.  Upon discovering Winchell’s artificial heart, after discovering from the patent office that Winchell’s heart was prior art to his own design, Kolff invited Winchell to the medical center at the University of Utah and even allowed Winchell to assist in transplants on animals.  While there, Winchell became so impressed with Kolff’s work that he donated his design to the University of Utah so that Kolff and others working there, such as Jarvik, would have no legal problems due to Winchell’s pre-existing patent for an artificial heart that was very similar in design to the ones they were working on, including the one Jarvik patented sometime after Winchell turned over his design to the University of Utah.

Bonus Factoids:

• Winchell’s last performance as the voice of Tigger came in Winnie the Pooh: A Valentine For You.
• Winchell’s first performance as a ventriloquist came in school, when he persuaded his teacher to let him make a dummy as an art project.  According to Winchell, “I didn’t tell anyone that I’d learned ventriloquism during the last few months. I simply picked up the head and began to make it talk. My classmates were astounded and watched in awe as I began to imitate Charlie McCarthy’s voice. . . . I’d never been particularly popular in school, but suddenly I had found my place in the sun.  I recall vividly twin girls who decided to become my bodyguards and acted as though I was their property; wherever I went, they followed to protect me.”
• It was Winchell’s principal who then helped him get on the radio talent show “Major Bowes Original Amateur Hour” at the age of 15.  This turned out to be his big break and, after winning, he spent the next 10 years or so playing various venues before landing spots on TV.
• Winchell also wrote two books: Ventriloquism for Fun and Profit and Acupuncture without Needles
• Winchell sued Metromedia in 1986 over syndication rights to 288 videotapes of his shows.  As a response, Metromedia destroyed the tapes.  This turned out to be a bad move as the courts subsequently awarded Winchell 17.8 million dollars for the loss of the tapes and future revenue from syndication rights.
• Winchell also owned a t-shirt shop; ran a fish farm; worked as a medical hypnotist at the Gibbs Institute as a licensed hypnotist; and was a licensed acupuncturist.
• In 1974, Winchell won a Grammy Award for Best Recording for Children for “Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too!”
• The now famous Tigger catchphrase “Ta-ta for now” was improvised by Winchell.

Sources:

• Paul Winchell
• Henry Heimlich
• TV Ventriloquist, Cartoon Voice, And Inventor Paul Winchell Dies
• Invention of the Artificial Heart
• Robert Jarvik
• Winchell’s Heart
• Winchell’s Heart Patent
• Jarvik’s Heart
• Artificial Heart

ZZ Top was originally formed in 1969, in Houston Texas.  The band, with the original members, is still making records and touring today, which makes them the second longest running band that still has the same members as when they started.  Those members are Frank Beard (drums), Billy Gibbons (lead vocals and guitar), and Dusty Hill (vocals, bass, and keyboards).

The longest running band of all time, that maintained the same members as when they started, is the Four Tops.  The Four Tops played from 1953 to 1997 when band member Lawrence Payton died, effectively ending the streak, which as of today is only 3 years longer than ZZ Top’s still running streak.

Bonus Factoids:

• In 1984, the Gillette Company offered ZZ Top band members Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill one million dollars each to shave their beards.  The two turned down the offer, stating “We’re too ugly without ‘em.”
• Along with still maintaining the same band members, ZZ Top kept the same manager, Bill Ham, from their inception until 2006.
• The name ZZ Top, according to band member Billy Gibbons, came from a tribute to B.B. King.  The band originally were going to call themselves “Z.Z. King” in King’s honor, but then decided it was too similar to B.B. King.  Because B.B. King was at the “top” of the blues world, they changed it to ZZ Top.
• The popular ZZ Top song “La Grange” was written about the famous brothel the Chicken Ranch.  The Chicken Ranch also inspired the musical “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas”.
• Today, along with touring and making new albums with ZZ Top, Frank Beard lives in Richmond, Texas where he runs “Top 40 Ranch” and plays ridiculous amounts of golf, including playing in local tournaments and community events.
• In Back to the Future III, ZZ Top played the Square Dance Band.

Sources:

• Frank Beard
• ZZ Top
• ZZ Top Artist Facts

It turns out, the first movie trailers occurred not at the beginning of the films, as they do today, but rather at the end of the films.  They were called “trailers” because the advertisements would be spliced directly on the end of the reels, so that the movie advertisement’s film trailed the actual film.

The first known movie trailer to appear in a theater was in November of 1913.  It was made by Nils Granlund, advertising manager of Marcus Loew theaters in the United States.  The trailer was for the musical The Pleasure Seekers, which was shortly to open on Broadway.  In this trailer, he included short clips of rehearsals of the musical.   This idea caught on and trailers began appearing routinely after films.  This was particularly the case with cartoon shorts and serials that would often end in climactic situations where you needed to watch the next episode in the serial or cartoon to see what would happen.  Thus, these trailers, in particular that advertised the next episode, made a lot more sense at the end of the serial or cartoon than at the beginning.

However, it didn’t take long for movie studios to realize that full film advertisements would be a lot more effective if they showed up before the movie, instead of after, and by the end of the 1930s the switch had been made.  Despite the industry’s sincerest attempts over the last 60 or 70 years to get the name changed from “trailers” to some form of “previews”, among industry professionals and English speaking audiences the world over, “trailer” is still the generally used term.  Although, this has begun to change very recently among the general public when referring to trailers shown in theaters, which are now synonymously known as “previews”.

Bonus Factoids:

• While the first known trailer to appear in a theater was that listed above, Lou Harris, an executive at Paramount in the 1960s, states that the first trailer ever to show anywhere was at a New York area amusement park in 1912. One of the concessions workers at that park hung up a white sheet and showed the serial “The Adventures of Kathlyn”.  At the end of the episode, Kathlyn is thrown into a lion’s den.  The concessions worker then spliced into the reel some film that showed the text “Does she escape the lion’s pit?”  This simple text is considered to be the first ever rudimentary attempt at a trailer.
• In the early days of film trailers, a company called the National Screen Service began making crude film advertisements from transferred film stills without the permission of the film studios.  They’d then sell these film advertisements to be added on to the endings of films.  Rather than sue this company and have them shutdown for their innovation, as studios would most certainly do today, the film industry chose to embrace this novel format for trailers and began providing the National Screen Service with film footage they could use in these advertisements; this ended up giving the National Screen Service a virtual monopoly on movie trailers for a time.  It wasn’t until the late 1920s that studios began commonly making trailers of their own.
• It is estimated that around ten billion videos are watched online annually.  Of those ten billion videos, movie trailers rank third, after news and user created videos, as the most watched.
• The earliest references to the term “trailer” being used was a passage in the June 2, 1917 issue of the New York Times: “A committee of the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry yesterday began sending films known as trailers [advertising the bonds] to all of the 15,000 or more movie theatres in the United States. These films are seventy feet in length and will be attached to longer films that are shown at every performance.”
• Early trailers typically just showed text explaining plots and then some stock footage of the film.  It wasn’t until the 1960s that this format changed into the format we know today.
• Pioneers in this change of trailer format in the 1960s were such people as Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Lipsett, and Andrew J. Kuehn.  Kubrick introduced the montage format for a trailer.  Kuehn, among other things, introduced the narrator, instead of using text, with his choice for narrator being the young James Earl Jones.  Kuehn’s format was so popular that, by the end of the 1960s, Kuehn’s Kaleidoscope Films were one of the largest and most successful trailer making firms in the world; this is a position they held for over three decades.  Most of the top trailer making companies that exist today are run by former Kaleidoscope Films employees.
• The most common trailer format today is the three-act structure, very similar to the structure of most films and plays.  The most common trailer format is as follows: Act 1, setting up the premise of the story; Act 2, highlighting main plot features of the story; Act 3, generally features a very powerful piece of music accompanied by a visual montage of emotional, suspenseful, action packed, or humorous moments in the film, depending on the film type.
• The maximum allowed length for any movie trailer shown in theaters or on TV is set by the MPAA.  The time limit is two and a half minutes, with one exception; each studio or movie distributor can exceed this time limit once per year, if they feel a particular movie warrants an extended trailer.  Trailers shown on the internet or on home videos have no time restrictions.
• One of the more famous non-montage trailers was one by Alfred Hitchcock who guided viewers through a tour of the Bates Motel, promoting his movie Psycho.  At the end of the trailer, he is in the bathroom where the now famous shower scene took place.  He then throws back the curtain to reveal Vera Miles, who issues a blood curdling scream, and then the title “Psycho” covers the screen.  For you movie buffs, you know that it was Janet Leigh, not Vera Miles who played Marion Crane, who was stabbed in the shower.  Leigh was not available after the filming when the trailer was made and so Hitchcock put a wig on Vera Miles, who played the sister of Marion Crane, and used her as a stand in for the shower scream on the trailer.  This went completely unnoticed until many years later.
• After seeing the shower scene in the movie Psycho, Janet Leigh stated that she no longer took showers unless she had absolutely no other choice, due to the film making her realize how vulnerable people are in the shower.  On the few occasions where she did have to take showers, she would lock the doors and windows in the place she was staying; search the place; and then would leave the bathroom and shower doors open while she showered.
• Today, most music shown on trailers does not appear anywhere in the movie or on the movie soundtrack.  This is because trailers are generally made long before the movie’s release date, often even a year in advance, and one of the last things typically done on any film is to give it to a composer to add the music.
• The standard narrative introduction on movie trailers “in a world where…” was originally used by Don LaFontaine.  LaFontaine is arguably the most famous movie trailer narrator of all time.  By the time of his death in 2008, he had recorded over 5,000 film trailers and hundreds of thousands of television advertisements, video game trailers, and network promotions.  For a several year span, he had a near monopoly on movie trailer narratives done in Hollywood.  LaFontaine also often was a guest narrator on Jeopardy, narrating clues for contestants.

Sources:

• Why are they called “trailers” if they’re shown before the movie?
• Trailer
• Don LaFontaine
• Pyscho

The man was Frank Oz and not only did he do the voice of Yoda and most of the puppetry work, he is also responsible for quite a bit of Yoda’s character as well, including the distinct “Yodic” style of speech (Object, Subject, Verb).

Besides Yoda, Miss Piggy, and the Cookie Monster, Oz did the characters Fozzie Bear, Animal, Grover, Sam the Eagle, and Bert (from Bert and Ernie).  Oz also famously directed The Muppets Take Manhattan; The Little Shop of Horrors; What About Bob?; The Indian in the Cupboard; The Score; and The Stepford Wives, among others.

Bonus Factoids:

• Oz reprised his role as Yoda in The Phantom Menace and was used as the voice of Yoda in Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith, at which point Yoda was completely computer generated; a move that was praised by Oz for the versatility it added to what Yoda could do in the film, but condemned by many critics and fans.
• Yoda’s original name before being shortened to just “Yoda” was “Minch Yoda”.  Lucas eventually decided to leave the first name out along with not giving away many details about Yoda’s past.
• In “The Phantom Menace”, in scenes where Yoda was walking around, Warwick Davis played Yoda, obviously in a Yoda suit.
• Warwick Davis got his first movie role at the age of 11 playing Wicket the Ewok.  Davis was originally cast as an Ewok extra, but the actor who originally was going to play Wicket, Kenny Baker, got sick and Warwick was selected to take over.
• Ron Howard and George Lucas wrote Willow with Warwick Davis in mind to play the staring role, even though he was just 17 when he was offered the role and 18 when the movie was filmed.  This was Davis’ first role where his face was visible.
• Davis is more recently known for his role has Filius Flitwick in the Harry Potter series.  He will also play the Goblin Bank Teller in Harry Potter: The Deathly Hallows, replacing dwarf actor Verne Troyer who played the role in the previous Harry Potters.
• The Ewoks were named after the Native American tribe Miwok.  The Miwok’s lived in the Redwood forest that is the setting for the Endor scenes on Return of the Jedi.
• “Adventures of Luke Starkiller, As Taken From the Journal of the Whills, Saga 1: The Star Wars” was the original title of “Star Wars: A New Hope”
• R2-D2′s name came from the movie-maker lingo “reel 2, dialog 2″.
• George Lucas was so enamored with Oz’s performance of Yoda on Empire Strikes Back that he tried to get Oz an Oscar nomination for “Best Supporting Actor”.
• The voice of Yoda on the radio dramatizations of the Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi was done by John Lithgow.
• Miss Piggy’s full name is “Pigathia Lee”, as revealed on episode 106 and 116 of The Muppet Show.  “Pigathia” is derived from”Piganthius”, which is Greek for “river of passion”.
• Frank Oz officially retired as Miss Piggy in 2002, being replaced by Eric Jacobson.
• Famed Puppeteer Jim Henson aided makeup artist Stuart Freeborn in creating the Yoda puppet used in the films.  It was Henson who suggested to Lucas that he use Frank Oz for Yoda’s voice and as the puppeteer.
• Jim Henson got his first taste of puppetry in an applied arts course in college where he studied Home Economics.  In his early career, he primarily made commercials, including over 300 coffee advertisements using his Muppets.
• Jim Henson’s work on Sesame Street has been called the “spark that ignited” the Public Broadcasting Network.
• Henson and Oz helped produce a series of sketches on the first season of Saturday Night Live using their puppets as the staring characters.
• Henson is one of only two people who appear on the Hollywood Walk of Fame twice.  He appears as Kermit the Frog and himself.
• The Mel Blanc is the other person who appears on the Walk of Fame twice.  He appears as Bugs Bunny and himself.

Sources:

• Yoda
• Frank Oz
• Miss Piggy
• Jim Henson
• The Muppets
• Warwick Davis
• 19 Facts You May Not Have Known About Star Wars

The hand gesture itself is a slight modification of the Hebrew gesture forming the letter “Shin”, which represents the name “Shaddai” meaning “Almighty” (God).  This gesture is still used today by orthodox Jews of the Kohanim, which are priests descended from Ahron by the patrilineal line.  These Kohanim form a subset of the descendants of the priestly Levite tribe.

The Kohanim use the Shin gesture during a blessing ceremony, the nesiat kapayim or the “Priestly Blessing”, that accompanies the prayer service.  The actual Jewish blessing is done with both hands, not just one, extended outward.  In this gesture, the arms are then held at a roughly 45 degree angle, level with the shoulders, as opposed to the completely vertical salute fashion in the “live long in prosper” version of the gesture.

This modified gesture used by Star Trek’s Vulcan’s was originally Leonard Nimoy’s idea.  Though Nimoy is not an orthodox Jew himself, when he was a child, his grandfather would take him to the synagogue.  During his time there, he observed this blessing and subsequent gesture and, according to his autobiography, was very impressed by the ceremony; remembering it later while filming “Amok Time”, which is the first place the now iconic gesture appeared in Star Trek.

In “Amok Time”, Spock was originally supposed to kneel before the Vulcan matriarch, with the matriarch placing her hands on his shoulders in a knighting type gesture.  Nimoy didn’t like this as Vulcan’s were touch telepaths.  Thus, he felt this original gesture would be an invasion of privacy for a Vulcan.   He then drew on his Jewish roots to come up with an alternate gesture.

The hand gesture itself wasn’t the only part that was borrowed from Jewish tradition.  The “live long and prosper” and the lesser known Vulcan traditional response of “peace and long life” was based on the Jewish “Shalom Aleichem” (peace be upon you) and the traditional reply of “Aleichem Shalom” (upon you be peace).

Bonus Factoids:

• The Hebrew Priestly Blessing itself can be found in the Bible in Numbers 6:22: “May the Lord bless you and keep you.  May the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you.  May the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.”
• Nimoy also was the one to come up with the Vulcan nerve pinch.  In the first episode this pinch showed up, Spock was originally supposed to club evil Kirk over the head, knocking him out.  Nimoy thought this was inconsistent with Spock’s personality.  He felt a non-violent nerve pinch would be more fitting with Vulcan’s being able to emit energy from their fingertips; this energy when applied to the correct nerves of a human would then render the human unconscious.
• Jewish worshipers are not supposed to look at the Kohanim while the blessing is being given as this would distract them from the words of the blessing itself.  As a child, Nimoy couldn’t contain himself however and snuck a peak.  As he says, “The special moment when the Kohanim blessed the assembly moved me deeply, for it possessed a great sense of magic and theatricality… I had heard that this indwelling Spirit of God was too powerful, too beautiful, too awesome for any mortal to look upon and survive, and so I obediently covered my face with my hands. But of course, I had to peek.” (From his autobiography, I am Spock.)
• In Act 5 Scene 3 line 42 of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Romeo says to Balthasar, “Live and be prosperous, and farewell good fellow.”
• The actress who played T’Pau, Celia Lovsky, couldn’t do the salute, which was a problem in the filming of “Amok Time”.  In order to get around this issue, they simply filmed with her hands starting below the camera frame; she’d then use her other hand to get the one hand into the proper position, which she could then hold for a couple seconds before losing it.
• Ancient Egyptians had a common phrase that is properly translated today to, “May he live long, prosper, and be in health.”
• After Star Trek was canceled, Nimoy immediately joined the cast of Mission Impossible as an IMF agent.  He played this role in the fourth and fifth seasons of the show.
• Nimoy officially retired in April of 2010, his reasons being his age and his hope that by bowing out,  Zachary Quinto would be able to better enjoy the full media attention of being Spock.

Sources:

• Leonard Nimoy
• The Jewish Origin of the Vulcan Salute
• Vulcan Salute
• Kohen
• Vulcan Salute

In this bustling time, radio was the Bee’s Knees.  On the radio was a series of serials aimed at women aired during the day time.  Dame’s thought these were the cat’s meow and ate up every second of them.  The radio networks themselves decided they needed to think up ways to make more clams off these shows and so came up with the idea of getting companies to sponsor the shows.

Now these dolls were no dumb Dora’s, so the radio networks sought to match the advertisements closely with their target audience to get a good response.  This campaign hit on all sixes and made these shows extremely profitable.

Among the first major sponsors of these shows were soap manufacturers Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, and Lever Brothers.  Eventually, due to the fact that so many of the sponsors were soap manufacturers, the media started calling these shows “soap operas”.  Nifty!

Sources:

• Why are soaps called soap operas?
• Soap Opera
• 1920s
• Robert H Goddard
• Slang of the 1920s

Bonus Factoids:

• Uncle Phil, also occasionally known as James Avery in the real world,  was also the voice of James Rhodes in the 1990s Iron Man series.
• After serving a stint in the U.S. Navy, he moved to San Diego where he began writing television scripts and poetry, eventually winning an Emmy Award for “Ameda Speaks: Poet James Avery”.
• The character of Uncle Phil was ranked number 34 in TV Guides “50 Greatest TV Dads of All Time”

Bonus Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles WTF:

Sources:

• Video Source
• James Avery
• History Makers: James Avery
• Reddit

Now personally, I’m not one to criticize a film for having scientific inaccuracies, so long as they are entertaining.  I mean, that’s the point of movies right?  If a film maker wants to make true “art”, they’ll be sure and always stay consistent with the world they create and things of this nature, but in most cases, they are just looking to entertain and make a lot of money.

That being said, in this case, I’m willing to make an exception due to the amazing number of inaccuracies (168 impossibilities in 150 minutes of film, averaging over 1 per minute; that’s not even talking about the improbables;  just the impossibles) and the fact that it’s a film based in space and about things happening in space.  So it would stand to reason that some part of the plot should actually have something to do with something that could actually happen in space.  I mean, it would be like taking the movie Sleepless in Seattle and randomly having it based in South Africa, then have gravity pull upward instead of down, then instead of breathing air everybody breaths cotton candy, then add about 165 more things just like that randomly and  never address in the plot why any of these things might be the case in this world the writers and directors have created.

Phil Plait said it best “Here’s the short version: Armageddon got some astronomy right. For example, there is an asteroid in the movie, and asteroids do indeed exist. And then there was… um… well, you know… um. Okay, so that was about all they got right.”

The other head scratcher is that many of the impossibilities introduced weren’t necessary in regards to the plot.  So they actually intentionally injected these additional impossibilities into the story for no reason other than to make the film longer and possible to introduce more explosions… in space.  They just added minutes and cost to an already too long film.  This implies a lack of effort on the part of Michael Bay in actually developing the script.  Now granted, it is Michael Bay.  I imagine his script writing sessions tend to go something like:

• Scene 1:  Something blows up… a lot
• Scene 2:  Intro main character who’s little Chihuahua pees on a car tire which then is all wet blows up.
• Scene 3: Main character intros the story (note to self: make sure has nothing to do with the second half of the film)
• Scene 4: Stuff blows up, but you know… BIGGER
  
• Scene 5: Credits
• Future Work:  Write sequel.  Make it exactly like the first movie, but with less dialogue and a lot more explosions.  Definitely more explosions.  And less real characters.  More CGI would be better, easier to make things blow up.

But really Michael Bay?  Really?  You couldn’t have hired a Physics Grad Student from Berkeley for $15 an hour to do a read through of the script and give you some feedback?  Quite a lot of those impossibilities could easily have been worked around or removed from the script and still kept the main thrust of the story.  Then, instead of having a movie that is essentially just a lot of stuff blowing up… in space… for about 2 and a half hours, you might have actually made a quality film. *gets off soap box*

But again, I always have to give props to people who can do something really poorly or stupidly and still make a bagillion dollars off it and in this case it’s doubly impressive because he’s managed to do it about 7 times with two up coming movies that look pretty much like they’re going to make lucky numbers 8 and 9 on that list.  So thumbs up to you Mr. Bay.  There is nobody better at making films that are pretty much 99% about stuff randomly blowing up and pretty much on the strength of that central “plot” alone, making a ton of money off it… over and over again.

Sources

• New Scientist (September 1, 2007), “Feedback” p 72: ISSN 0262-4079
• The Astronomy of Armageddon
• Armageddon

In 1974, Jack Nicholson’s movie Chinatown was opening in theaters;  Time Magazine then chose to do a cover story on Nicholson.  Someone working at Time Magazine called Jack up to verify some facts that would be in the article; among these, was the fact that the person who he’d thought was his sister, June Nicholson, was in fact his mother.  Nicholson knew nothing about this, so denied it.  At this point his “sister” was dead, and so was his “mother”, dying in 1963 and 1970 respectively.

He did however call up his “brother-in-law”, Shorty, the husband of his supposed other sister who was in fact his aunt, to verify that this wasn’t true.  Shorty knew nothing about this, so told him that it wasn’t true and they ended the conversation.  Several hours later though, he got a phone call from Shorty: “Jack, it’s Shorty, I’m gonna put Lorraine on the phone.  I just want to say one thing – she’s been crying all night.  Here she is.”  Lorraine, who he now found out was his aunt, not his sister, then told him his mother was in fact the deceased June, who he had thought was his sister and the woman he had thought was his mother, was in fact his grandmother.

Nicholson was 37 years old at this point and both his real mother and the woman he had thought was his mother, were already dead;  both had chosen not to tell him.  Indeed, he even spent time with his “sister”, who was his mother, at the hospital just before she died.  He was filming one of his first movies at the time and shooting in Mexico, so he had to leave her as he desperately needed the money and it was his first major film.  Her last words to him were “Should I wait?” (as in, should she try to stay alive a little longer) and he said “No” and left.  She died shortly thereafter succumbing to cancer; he got the call when he arrived in Mexico on location.

The initial reason for keeping up this charade was that his mother, June, had gotten pregnant with him at the age of 16 with someone unknown (he still doesn’t know, but doesn’t care to find out either).  June’s mother wanted June to continue to pursue her promising dancing career, thus she would take care of Jack posing as his mother, with June as his sister.

Nicholson is on record actually as saying he’s glad they kept this secret to their graves, “I didn’t have to deal with it with them. They were dead.”; “I am that kind of person-what do I feel-and had the tools to know what I feel. Gratitude. I’ve often said about them: Show me any women today who could keep a secret, confidence, or an intimacy to that degree, you got my kind of gal.”

Bonus Fact:

• The famous singer Bobby Darin had the same type of thing happen to him.  At age 32, he found out the woman he’d thought was his sister was in fact his mother.  He had been contemplating a career in politics, which prompted his “sister” to reveal that she was his mother.

Sources:

• You Don’t Know Jack
• Jack Nicholson Interview
• Jack Nicholson Biography

Boggles the mind that a poorly written story about a young girl who’s trying to choose between necrophilia and bestiality could do so well; especially considering one of the main characters is a 108 year old pedophile who spends his years hanging out around high school aged girls.

But apparently over 17 million young girls and a disturbing number of grown women, seem not to care.  Stay classy ladies.  Stay classy.

Sources:

• Twilight