Thirteen Random Facts About Whatever: 2023 Version

[ER]

13 on Dizzie?

1. My oldest daughter, Daisy, authored my one and only lucid out of body experience, while I was having her.

2. She is much smarter than me, and unlike young me, she actually loves school.

3. She played soccer for several years as a younger child, quit playing altogether for a few years, but is now back into it, in high school.

4. Like her sister, she takes after her dad in appearance, something he inordinately gloats over.

5. She wants to be a surgeon and is serious about preparing for medical school.

6. Completely on her own she became a Roman Catholic in her single-digit years, and taking her to church is the only reason I go.

7. She can be bossy to her siblings, and is usually right in what she's telling them, but I generally ask her to ease off.

8. She wanted to move her bedroom downstairs last year, and somehow has taken over the entire lowest floor.

9. Her best friend is my cousin Dana's youngest girl, her eighteen-year-old cousin Bethany Brooke, a relationship which oddly mirrors the one I had with Dana, who is about the same number of years older than me as Bethany is with Daisy, who is going to be fifteen next month.

10. She wanted a pet snake when she was seven, so we got her one. It vanished somewhere in our house, never to be seen again! Her cat Miss Sparkly Feet likewise up and vanished, though probably outdoors.

11. Daisy's insights into me and my life can be dauntingly accurate, though I don't always admit it to her. She thinks it's funny to devil me about one theory in particular which I don't think is funny at all and has actually made me get mad at her when she presses me on it, try as I might to never be mad at my children.

12. She says, "Boys will just get in the way of my life-plans." I always feel like setting off fireworks and playing the Ode To Joy when she does.

13. She read The Silmarillion when she was ten!  Let me repeat that: when she was ten!

[ER]

1. H.P. Lovecraft's wife said he was OK in bed.

2. During WWII doctors in the Pacific used both saltwater and coconut milk as would-be substitutes for blood plasma.

3. Tony Blair said he found Prime Minister's Questions so intimidating he would get digestive upset beforehand.

4. The Great Pyramids are odds-on favorite to be the last manmade objects to remain on Earth.

5. Pope Gregory the Great retroactively declared every cleric who ever belonged to the Celtic Christian Church was in Hell.

6. Penn and Teller stand by the theater doors after every Las Vegas show and personally thank fans for coming.

7. Freddie Mercury had to have his foot amputated in the last months of his life.

8. Spock was originally going to have red skin.

9. My grandparents took me to Claiborne Farms to see Secretariat when I was little, and the man there called him a king.

10. According to Master Chef John Kinsella, many supposed scallops served in restaurants are actually rounds cut out of fish fillets.

11. Microbiologists warn that in using alcohol-based hand squirt we are creating strains of germs resistant to its effects.

12. The US Great Plains are not flat, they are gradually rising thousands of feet in elevation from east to west.

13. The American funeral business has one of the highest "profit versus cost" inflations of any industry in the country.

[ER]

1. Most lightning is hotter than the surface of the sun.

2. The comic strip Peanuts was nearly called Lil Folks.

3. I once saw a ladder bounce off a moving pickup truck, then bounce back in.

4. By custom the British sovereign does not enter the House of Commons.

5. Edgar Allan Poe was an athlete in his student days, and won awards for his feats of swimming.

6. Nowhere in the Bible does it say the devil is in Hell; on the contrary it appears to claim he was given this world for his kingdom. (Thanks, God!)

7. The man who headed the US government's "walk facing traffic" campaign in the mid-20th century was killed by a car going the wrong way.

8. Some historians claim male homosexuality was no more common in ancient Greece than in any other culture, just was something glamorized by those writers whose work has come down to us today.

9. Herman Goering used to throw parties where the main entertainment was watching his prize bull mate with cows.

10. There are far more trees in the world than people.

11. Real raindrops look like the raindrops we draw turned upside down.

12. New Jersey was once predicted to be ground zero of the US movie industry.

13. Slightly more boys are born each year than girls, which is thought to be nature's way of compensating for the fact boys die in childhood more often than girls do. (Boy, nature thinks of everything, doesn't it?)

[Alex]

13. Slightly more boys are born each year than girls, which is thought to be nature's way of compensating for the fact boys die in childhood more often than girls do. (Boy, nature thinks of everything, doesn't it?)

Indeed. Edwin Starr failed to consider this fully. The lack of a major war in Europe for a long time is leading to an increasing imbalance in the numbers of the sexes.

[ER]

13 about my house.

1. It was built in 1920, and the original owner actually named the house and grounds The Stand, which tickled me back when I read Stephen King so much in my early teens.

2. I turned the old cistern into a storm cellar/quiet room/safe room.

3. There is an odd storage area under the floor of the foyer closet that's about four feet deep, five feet long, and three feet wide. Since I can remember it's been called the priest's hole, after the hidden spaces where Catholics would hide priests in Reformation England.

4. Yet despite the "priest hole" when my grandpa bought it in 1965 there was a condition attached to the sale of the house that said it would not be sold to anyone except a WASP. The story varies about whether Grandpa was going to sue over it or that the condition was just ignored.

5. The house and land were left to me in 2000 but I had a years' long legal battle with my cousins' father before I could live in it.

6. Supposedly the main staircase imitates a Tudor design in a house the builder saw in England around the turn of the last century.

7. There is a well here and no attachments to city water have ever existed. They still send us bills though.

8. I find artifacts from past owners, including my grandparents, all the time in the woods. Everything from golf balls to wind chimes to an old ash heap where household trash apparently used to get dumped along with broken plates.

9. The downstairs fireplace is so big I could stand up in it til I was about twelve, without touching the sides.

10. Some of the trees here were planted when the house was built and are a century old, but there are even more venerable ones in the woods.

11. There are apparently no ghosts, unless a weird incident where my half-asleep husband may have seen my late grandpa on a staircase counts.

12. When my grandpa put in the concrete swimming pool out back in 1966, it was still considered such an aberration and oddity that he had to take out an insurance policy on it alone, that cost as much as the policy on the house.

13. The overlook on our hillside has a great river view and I am sure people have stood and gazed out on it for 12,000-plus years.

[ER]

Random facts about the endings of thirteen unidentified works of fiction.

1. The title character loses his nocturnal duel in a park in Japan and is decapitated by a venerable katana.

2. She realizes he has really been the great love of her life, yet even as he leaves her, her optimism in the future remains undimmed.

3. He slices into pieces the wasp stinging his hand, slashing open his own palm, yet feels a great sense of joy about his actions.

4. She died but a number of her children remained behind with her unlikely friend.

5. He travels from one end of America to the other dragging a corpse behind him in order to bury his comrade according to his dying wishes.

6. He came to love the figurehead of his totalitarian nation.

7. It was not an exit.

8. The boats push against the current, which ceaselessly bears them backward.

9. He threw the valuable titular object back into the sea.

10. Radiation kills everyone. Every-one.

11. The boiler exploded and destroyed the primary setting.

12. Dying was by far the best thing he ever did.

13. He was only pretending to be a teenager, he wasn't really her friend, and even knowing it would be the end of her, she got into the car with him.

[RCMerchant]

1. My Ma was born in Nashville, North Carolina.
2. I was born in the Bronx, NYC.
3. I have lived with 4 women. Kerrie Noble for 2 years, Gail (ugh!) for 3, Tara Sue for 5, and Tiana for 10.
4. I have never been married.
5. My mother was adopted.
6. I once jumped out of a car going 60 mph.
7. My brother Mike was in prison for 6 years.
8. My brother Glenn stabbed someone in the face with a screwdriver 8 times and was put in a nuthouse. He escaped and hitchhiked to California.
9. I hitchhiked from Michigan to New York in 1978.
10. I used to sell LSD at a biker bar in the late 80's.
11. My Dad was in the Navy.
12. I seen PLANET OF THE APES (1968) in the theater in 1968.
13. My little brother Richie shot himself in the head.

[ER]

My mom.

1. She was born in County Galway, the Republic of Ireland.

2. She was the oldest of five, three girls, two boys, and spent a lot of her time helping her parents with her younger siblings, even though she wasn't much older than most of them.

3. She married my dad when she was seventeen years old, and as she liked to remind me, a virgin.

4. She had me when she was eighteen, ten and a half months after getting married.

5. Her two youngest children died as babies, my youngest brother, Daniel, in her arms shortly after he was born.

6. She has tremendous musical and artistic talent, but isn't big on reading like my dad and me are.

7. If there is such a place as the fey realm, my mom is reflective of it.

8. She almost never watches movies or TV, but these days goes to church almost every morning.

9. She went from a teenager in Ireland to be married with a child, in a strange country, by eighteen, and then spent her twenties dealing with the fact her husband's job took him away for long and sometimes indefinite periods, often without much warning or her knowing where exactly he was, or being able to communicate with him.

10. When I was sixteen she left my dad and got a civil divorce as a courtesy to him so he could re-marry if ever he wanted to, but considered herself canonically wed to him. They remarried much later, but she eventually left again and is back to living in her birth country.

11. Despite everything she remains the great love of my fathers life.

12. She is one of the most physically beautiful and graceful people I have ever known, with a sometimes piercing gaze.

13. She has had breakdowns in the past, and over the last few years I think her mental health has not been the best.

[RCMerchant]

1. My Ma is dead.
2. My Dad is dead.
3. My girl Tara Sue is dead.
4. My brother Richie is dead.
5. My best friend Larry is dead.
6. Bela Lugosi's dead.
7. Donald Trump is still alive.  
8. Putin is still alive. 
9. Hitler is still dead.  
10. My older brother Mike is still alive.  
11. My step ma Mary Jo is still alive.  
12. I'm still alive.   somehow.
13. God is dead.

[indianasmith]

13 random facts about Abraham Lincoln:

1.  He adored the works of Shakespeare and could quote long passages from memory.
2.  He was a formidable chess player.
3.  He wept when the White House stables burned and the horse that had belonged to his deceased son Willie died in the blaze.
4.  He was a powerful wrestler as a young man, and once defeated the leader of a local gang one on one by knocking him out cold.
5.  At 6 foot 4, he was the tallest President.
6.  He allowed his son Tad to have pet goats in the White House.
7.  He is the only President to hold a patent in the U.S. patent office.
8.  He was so strong he could hold an axe by the end of the handle, parallel to the ground, for a full minute at a time.
9.  He offered Robert E. Lee command of all Union armies at the beginning of the Civil War.
10.  He and his father were not close, and he did not attend his father's funeral.
11.  He was prone to fits of deep depression that might last for weeks.
12.  He also loved to tell funny jokes and stories, and once made the bailiff in a courtroom laugh so hard the judge fined him.
13.  In the early 1850's, he was one of the highest paid trial lawyers in the state of Illinois, despite having only one year of schooling.

[ER]

1. For two centuries Poland was eastern Europe's strongest nation, and would raid both Germany and Russia.

2. Mark Twain joked that Tesla invented a doomsday weapon that created earthquakes, and the story sticks to this day.

3.  Bees vote on the location of new hive sites.

4. Queen Victoria was technically a dwarf.

5. There exists a breed of chickens with black feathers, feet, skin, meat, and bones.

6. Bill Clinton wrote his memoirs with a pencil

7. Elevators are the world's safest means of transportation.

8. George Washington believed the proper title of respect for US presidents should be "Your Mightiness."

9. The concept of a weekend was invented in the 20th century.

10. A steel ball will bounce higher than a rubber ball.

11. Dormice were a common snack in ancient Rome.

12. Stonewall Jackson refused to send a letter if it would be in transit on a Sunday.

13. Antarctica is a desert.

[ER]

1. London's "fog" was primarily a hazardous amalgamation of various pollutants that killed many people every year.

2. To this day the oath of office sworn by Kentucky's governors requires them to attest to the fact they have not fought in a duel.

4. Most shopping cart handles contain more germs than toilet seats.

5. All dogs are descended from wolves.

6. Sammy Davis Jr. and Jim Henson died on the same day.

7. Aldous Huxley, C.S. Lewis, and President John F. Kennedy likewise died on the same day.

8. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson breathed their last on the same day as well.

9. On the other side of the coin, Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln shared the same nativity day: February 12, 1809.

10. The Golden Gate Bridge is not golden, but is, however, among the world's leading spot for suicides.

11. The Aztecs were a hygiene-obsessed people and had a law that fined anyone for habitually smelling bad.

12. According to a coalition of advertisers, attention spans among US adults are said to have fallen thirty-percent since the 1970s, which has led to simpler TV commercials.

13. Shark bite victims generally report sensations of great crushing pressure, not mutilation.

[ER]

1. Tesla had a phobia of round objects.

2. The Gettysburg Address monument is not in the spot where Lincoln made the address.

3. Physician intervention most likely led to the deaths of Lord Byron, Hank Williams, George Washington, and Andy Warhol.

4. Certain CPAP machines have been linked to lung cancer, and the manufacturer recently paid out over $400,000,000.00 to settle a class-action suit.

5. The supposed site of the Battle of Hastings is likewise not in the place where the battle was fought in 1066.

6. I once saw a hawk fly overhead with a live, writhing snake in its talons.

7. The supposed sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird actually pre-dated the writing of the To Kill A Mockingbird.

8. There is a drink called Tequila Mockingbird.

9. Dorothy Parker claimed Joe Kennedy only had affairs with women in order to impress other men with how many women he had affairs with.

10. George Washington's body was disinterred around thirty years after his death, so it could be relocated to its present resting place at Mount Vernon, and his body was said to look "dried but in excellent preservation."

11. My daughter once drew the Easter Bunny a picture of what she thought his poop looked like.

12. A church in Ethiopia claims to possess the Ark of the Covenant.

13. In 2020 The Journal of Medical Ethics concluded babies in the womb can feel pain as early as twelve weeks past conception.

[retrorussell]

13 random facts about game shows:
1. Bill Cullen, "dean of game shows", had polio since he was one and a half.  That's why you usually saw him holding on to his podium or seated at the onset of his shows.  Mel Brooks met him on his show Eye Guess and Bill freely waddled over to greet him.  Mel thought he was doing a silly dance or something and imitated him!  Bill took it in stride completely.
2. Paul Lynde of The Hollywood Squares seemed like all his quips were of his own making, but they were always or almost always completely scripted.  Paul was often an alcoholic, neurotic jerk off the set (and sometimes on).  Right when he was starting to make a serious effort to go sober (as was close friend Dick Van Dyke at the time), he had a fatal heart attack at 55.
3. The flop THE MAGNIFICENT MARBLE MACHINE was quite an expensive one-- the giant pinball machine used in the show's bonus round was 20 feet high and 12 feet long, had a foot-wide gold painted ball, and went through 250 lbs. of nails, 4 miles of wiring, 38 gallons of glue, 23 coiled springs and 10 car windshields worth of glass during its time on the show.  All that, and it lasted less than a year.  The machine took 2 months to put together.
4. Entertainer Alan Thicke composed numerous themes for game shows, including WIZARD OF ODDS (1973-74), THE JOKER'S WILD (1974-75 theme), WHEEL OF FORTUNE (1974-82 theme), and WHEW! (1979-80). 
5. Host Wink Martindale was born Winston Martindale.  A neighborhood kid couldn't say his name right and called him "Wink", and the name stuck.
6. The quiz show scandals of the '50s made it hard for Jack Barry to find work for quite a while, and more so for his partner Dan Enright.  THE JOKER'S WILD in 1972 was Jack's big comeback, though Dan was not given credit as co-producer or executive producer until 1975 (and Jack acknowledged him in the send-off on the final 1975 episode).  Though CBS would end its Joker's Wild run in 1975 it would be picked up for a new run in syndication in 1977.  Likewise, CBS would end its run of Barry/Enright's TIC TAC DOUGH in 1978 and it would also see much more success in syndication, later that year.
7. Michael Larson was an unemployed former ice cream truck driver and heating/AC repairman when he won the big $110,000+ on PRESS YOUR LUCK in 1984.  Taken to court by CBS, it was proved he did not cheat, but had simply taped and studied the board patterns from previous episodes to know when to hit the top prize nearly every time and continue to get spins.  Unfortunately Michael would lose it all to bad real estate deals and a robbery.  He would accuse his wife of stealing money as well and be estranged from his family until his death of throat cancer at 49.  Though he had balding white hair on the show he was only in his mid 30s.
8. The final episode of the short-lived RHYME OR REASON (1975-76) was crazy-- 4 of the celebrity panelists starting destroying the set towards the end of the show!
9. Allen Ludden was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 1980 while hosting PASSWORD PLUS.  He became too ill to continue-- and even complained about it on air at least once-- and had to take a leave of absence while Bill Cullen and Tom Kennedy (who became permanent host) filled in.  Allen slipped into a coma for a brief time and afterwards was hopeful to return (host Tom even mentioned on air that he was "getting better"), but he died in 1981.
10. The cartoon show WACKY RACES was originally going to be a game show!  The winner of the car race was to be bet on by either contestants or a studio audience.  Merrill Heatter and Bob Quigley (Hollywood Squares, Gambit, High Rollers, etc.) were producers of the cartoon.  This prevented Dick Dastardly from appearing in the 1977 cartoon LAFF-A-LYMPICS as Heatter/Quigley still owned the rights to the character at the time.
11. On the final episode of THE GONG SHOW, Chuck Barris himself appeared as a "contestant" playing the song "Take This Job And Shove It", as a f*** you to NBC for canceling the show.  Long time panelist Jamie Farr gonged him!
12. Host Tom Kennedy's real name was Jim Narz.  He was host Jack Narz's brother.
13. Producer Jack Barry was liked by some hosts (Jim Lange, Jim Peck) and rubbed others the wrong way (Wink Martindale, Geoff Edwards) due to a fairly outdated vision of what a game show host should be like.  He told Edwards he "didn't like his voice" and asked him to change it, to which Edwards took great umbrage.  Martindale said Barry wanted him fired because he "made too much money".  Jack had planned to pass the reins of THE JOKER'S WILD to Jim Peck and ease into retirement (he was 66 in 1984) but died suddenly of a heart attack while jogging in Central Park.  Dan Enright chose to instead have Bill Cullen as the replacement host; Bill would also die of smoking-related causes a handful of years later.

[RCMerchant]

1. Bela Lugosi first starred as Dracula in 1927.
2. Bela Lugosi was married 5 times.
3. Bela was an alchoholic and a moriphine addict.
4. Lon Chaney Jr. was an alchoholic, as was John Carradine and Glenn Strange.
5. Peter Lorre was a moriphine addict.
6. Jayne Mansfield had an IQ of 149.
7. Bela Lugosi was once a communist.
8. Boris Karloff's mother was Indian.
9. Karloff's real name is William Henery Pratt, Lugosi's was Bela Blasko, and Lon Chaney Jr.s was Creigton Tull Chaney.
10. Bela Lugosi had only 1 child.
11. Boris Karloff had only 1 child.
12. Lon Chaney Sr. had only 1 child.
13. Christopher Lee's favorite actor was Conrad Veidt.