Yearly Archive: 2011

Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt ask the musical question with guitar and ukelele.

What did Colonel Sanders have in common with Bruce Springsteen? That ever-lovin’ pink Cadillac.

When his head is pasted onto another guy’s body (and horse), that’s when.

The Prince was airlifted to Papworth Hospital after having chest pains at the Royal estate at Sandringham. Then came a visit from Stenta Claus.

We have a new favorite headline of the day, and possibly of the month and year.

Kim Jong-un is Swiss-educated, a four-star general, and apparently the next ruler of North Korea. All this and he’s still under 30. (Maybe). What else do we know about Kim Jong-il’s favorite son?

Well, yes, he did.  He also called her “a fraud” and “a wizened, shriveled old lady.” We trace thse amazing quotes back to their source.

He may have written the song Ain’t Misbehavin’, but Fats Waller is obviously planning mischief in this photo from 1938.  God bless the collections of the Library of Congress.

With 4,487 Americans dead and somewhere over 100,000 Iraqis dead (including Saddam Hussein), the American war in Iraq formally ended on Thursday.

“A laugh, a laugh! My kingdom for a laugh!”

How many Poles does it take to play Tchaikovsky on a set of crystal glasses?

Here comes Hollywood’s unneeded, unwanted, and pointless remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The hit novel was already made into a terrific movie, by Swedes, and it’s not going to get any better than Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander.

Indiana vs. Kentucky, buzzer-beaters, and students flooding the court: college basketball season is here.

Test your knowledge of the famous people who died in 2011. How many can you name from our short descriptions?

Diego Rivera is the subject of a Google Doodle today.  It’s his 125th birthday, Google tells us. But who is Diego Rivera?

What fascinating comments do you overhear when an NFL quarterback is miked during the game?  

Alexander Payne and George Clooney have terrific track records. The reviews are spectacular. But I just don’t want to see this movie. Does that make me a bad person?

“You won’t have Pikachu to kick around any more, gentlemen.”

The 93-year-old evangelist has pneumonia. But we hereby wager that he’ll be around to greet president #13 in 2013 or 2017.

Scientists at Dartmouth have developed a top-secret tool that can show how much celebrity photos have been digitally altered.  The question is, how much do you want to know?

Jazz composer Billy Strayhorn wrote “Lush Life,” “Take the ‘A’ Train” and “Satin Doll” — all while looking like a big kid.

Why is a really great new Sherlock Holmes novel still so elusive? And why do so many authors keep trying to write it?

 What’s it like being a rock and roll icon?  Noel Gallagher has a classic tale from his days with Oasis. Plus, he calls George Michael “mad as custard.”

How well do you know your Secret Service nicknames? Lots of people know the famous ones — Lancer and Lace were JFK and Jackie, yes. But what about Rosebud, Timberwolf and Driller?

David Beckham and the LA Galaxy have won the MLS Cup in Beckham’s fifth and (probably) final year with the team. Which has given the British papers got one more chance to snicker, chuckle, and sneer at Beckham and American soccer. Well played, lads!

A British author is claiming that Jane Austen may have died of arsenic poison.  The symptoms: splotchy skin, a loss of energy, and the desire to sell a new crime novel about how Jane Austen might have been poisoned with arsenic.

30 years after actress Natalie Wood died in a mysterious yachting accident off Catalina Island, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office has decided to reopen the case — apparently after hearing that the yacht’s captain has more to say.

From 1986: “In an era of college football in which it seems everybody’s hand is in the till or balled up in a fist, Paterno sticks out like a clean thumb.”

“It’s three agencies of government when I get there that are gone: Commerce, Education, and the, uh… uh, what’s the third one, there?”

It was the “Fight of the Century” that really may have been the fight of the century.   And Joe Frazier wasn’t washed up yet.

The fifty states wimped out when it came to biographical quarters, but the District of Columbia delivered a winner.

Can you match the celebrity with the bushy chin? 

In Louisiana and Argentina, two improbable candidates won reelection this weekend with more than 50% of the vote.

And not from the Franklin Mint, mind you — from the United States Mint itself.

Amanda Knox is headed home to Seattle: an Italian appeals jury found her not guilty of murder.

The Amanda Knox trial just got that much crazier. Her lawyer, speaking solemnly in court, compared her to Jessica Rabbit.

Siegfried and Roy kicked off Oktoberfest last week. Nice to see Roy out and about!

Here’s a photo of actor Kyle MacLachlan on the set of the TV comedy Portlandia, the creation of SNL’s Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein (formerly of the rock band Sleater-Kinney).

Country music star Roy Acuff was born on this day in 1903. Let’s puzzle over the confounding lyrics to his big hit, “The Great Speckled Bird.”

From the blog Thought Patterns, a photo of Peter Lorre and Vincent Price. The photo is part of a collection, “Audition for a Black Cat,” photos of people in line waiting to audition their cat for a part in a movie.

Is Rafael Nadal the most gracious, yet still proud, loser in the history of professional sports?  We say yes.

 Charles DeGaulle was “that egomaniac,” Martin Luther King “a phony,” and Indira Gandhi “a real prune — bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman.” So says Jackie Kennedy in a fascinating seven-part interview from 1964, to be released this Wednesday for the first time. 

The Greatest Generation are getting into their 90s now, and it just won’t be the same without their obituaries in the British papers.So while you can, meet Air Commodore ‘Dim’ Strong, the pilot who “enjoyed an all-night party with his Luftwaffe captors before being sent to Stalag Luft III.”

Itching to read a good brisk funny 829-word 74-year-old Eastern European short story?  We have just the tale for you.  Plus a bonus connection to Kevin Bacon!

New York Representative Anthony Weiner has resigned from office, after announcing that he was going to announce his resignation.
You can read the details here, in the New York Times. The Times avoids puns and titillating discussion, of course. They summarize the story — about Weiner’s use of modern technology to network socially (wink, wink). About as racy as it gets is when they refer to Weiner’s “tight-fitting underpants.”

The wonderful, spend-all-day-there site The Art of the Title Sequence has a great feature on the opening credits for the new TV mini-series Game of Thrones. The sequence, presented here, …..

“Here is a sharp looking Who 2 bull calf!” says a new posting on SteerPlanet, the Online Community for the Cattle Enthusiast. And I must say, we’re quite flattered by the tribute. 

Photo from the Flickr stream of Barbara Messner.

Like Nim Chimpsky, I was raised almost like a human in the 1970s. I feel a certain kinship with Nim. I’m not even jealous that he’s the star of Jim Marsh’s new documentary, Project Nim.
I wrote about Nim earlier in this post about Marsh’s film.
Inspired by Nim’s story of being raised as an un-chimped people during the 1970s, I scrawled out this artist’s rendering of what his life might have been like: