Dooood…

Goofy Tatoos, anyone?

There’s 2 kinds of people in this world…

Oscar scam: 50 Million Dollar Legs

I have always marvelled at the Oscars.  What is the figure?  1.5 Billion people will tune the show in?  Take a step back.  What is really happening here? 

What Exit, Liberty?

 

Mrs. Pinetar and I went to Princeton, NJ today just to look around and shop and see what there was to see. It’s a unique and historic American town (and it’s in New Jersey–no “exit” jokes, please~) I liked this marker placed by the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Dark Side of Oz

Click to see how it’s done

This may be old news to some. I had read of this at least 5 years ago but recently came across a site (linked above) devoted to it. I am almost proud to say that I have never done it or even thought about it but I want to throw it out to the readers, as we have a (ahem) “mix” of readers here at The Pinetar Rag and someone may know something. Has anyone done this? Results? Just random coincidences? It sounds like someone had a lot of time on their hands and it shouldn’t be a big deal but it just continues to have legs so I wonder. This website even offers presynched DVD’s (Copyright, anyone?) of Wizard set to Dark Side (if anyone has one, can you burn one for me?)

I once bought a 4 movie boxed set on ebay for the original, silent, Wizard of Oz. I never knew the original story was a long series (of books, I think) and so I picked them up for like 5 bucks. They were beyond bad. Unwatchable and didn’t even really make sense actually.

My favorite Wizard of Oz myths are that Buddy Ebsen got the part for the Tin Man but was allergic to the silver makeup. And I shudder to think of what that stuff was. Hey, in 1939, they’d have coated you in asbestos to get a shot, I’m pretty sure it was a good break for Buddy.

These and other myths, especially the ones that people embarrassingly forward out in mass emails, are all explained, verified and or debunked beautifully on the website snopes dot com, which is linked in the blogroll at right top. If you haven’t been to this site, you probably should hit it, especially if you’re an email forwarder of the “Microsoft will send you money for forwarding this to ten friends” variety.

The college myths are amazing too. I had personally heard several in my college days. The engineers didn’t figure the weight of the books and the library was sinking was heard all over University of Delaware (Snopes didn’t tackle the other UD library legend which was that the 3rd floor was a place George Michael would have frequented) .

I also recall hearing that the head janitor in our dorm complex was the head monkey in The Wizard of Oz and then was amazed to read that in the snopes college legend section. Yea, I bought that one and probably repeated it myself. Shame on me. –fog

Bullet Proof Man

For anyone who watched “The Prestige” and wondered if turn-of-the-century vaudeville magicians really died in tricks-gone-awry, the answer is yes. While reading the Houdini bio recently, I came across the story of “The Bullet Proof Man”. His act was wearing a suit filled with pockets of ground up glass and having a guy from the audience come up and shoot him with a gun and he’d “take” the bullet and not get hurt…er…until a wiseguy shot him in the groin (where the suit didn’t protect him) and he died. When Houdini went to London for the first time, he took the Bullet Man’s vacated spot on the bill. (And no, none of the tricks in The Illusionist ever went wrong, but I still liked it much more than The Prestige) — fog

Sacred Treasures: Russia’s Pink Floyd (it’s like I’m living in Dr. Zhivago)

Recently, in my boredom with everything I own musically, and with some fearless clicking, I turned up

“America’s Sweetheart” was Canadian!

About five years ago, I saw a piece on the History Channel on Mary Pickford. In it, they said that she was the first woman in the world to make a million dollars a year.