Odd Facts

[ER]

John Philip Sousa, the March King, hated for music to be recorded, as he argued that if people could simply listen to music on demand, they would have no incentive to learn to play it themselves in order to hear it, and thus musicians would vanish from the world.

[Trevor]

South Africa only got a TV service in 1976.

[pacman000]

Chevrolet, the American auto company, is named after a famous race car driver from the 1900's.

[LilCerberus]

Yesterday, I found out that Belinda Carlisle was the original drummer for The Germs under the alias Dottie danger, but never got to perform with them after catching mononucleosis....

After doing some more reading, I also found out the story that they just decided to form a group without knowing how to sing or play is only half true....
Turns out Carlisle & Jane Wiedlin started out with two other friends, but they had to leave & were replaced by three girls who "did" know how to play...
Their original name was The Misfits, but had to change it after learning there was already a group by that name....

[pacman000]

Sanyo made their own videotape format, V-Cord, in 1974, a year before Sony released Betamax.

[Trevor]

The Royal Tour of South Africa in 1947 was the first such tour filmed in colour.

[Trevor]

Despite being against the country's policies, Richard Donner's Lethal Weapon 2 and Richard Attenborough's Cry Freedom were huge box office hits locally.

[ER]

The French like to say the Battle of Agincourt was largely lost not because of English longbows but because of French mud, which bogged down the more heavily armed and armored French forces, resulting in many of their fighting men being left immobile in the rain-soaked mire, and then further resulting in chaotic trampling conditions similar to a modern-day crowd disaster, when panicked men surged into a narrow section of field, seeking escape from their own oncoming horsemen.....who were soon also trapped in mud, piled atop their own comrades, easy prey for unarmored English infantry, which set about using knives to slaughter those unable to defend themselves, creating a victory far less about glory than cold-blooded viciousness.

The French are probably right.

[zombie no.one]

only 2 animals can get leprosy: humans and armadillos.

[pacman000]

Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS was filmed on the same sets as Hogan's Heroes.

[Trevor]

If you were caught with an item - book, magazine, movie, music - that the apartheid government had deemed "undesirable", you could be given a hefty fine and/or a jail sentence 

[indianasmith]

Abraham Lincoln's son died the same year my Dad was born - 1926.

[ER]

England's 14th century King Richard II made his nobles sign their names on blank pieces of parchment that he held back to fill out any way he wished, and used this technique more than once to create false confessions of treason.

[chainsaw midget]

On March 12 1981, two different comic strips, with the same name and same general idea were published on the same day, one in the USA and the other in the UK.  The two different artists who created them had absolutely no knowledge of each another. The comic strips are both called Dennis the Menace.

[RCMerchant]

M*A*S*H actor Wayne (Trapper John) Rogers produced the Z movie ASTRO ZOMBIES (1968)