Quote
"Home is the nicest word there is."
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Joke
Today at the bank, an old lady asked me to help check her balance. So I pushed her over.
Fun Fact
Four babies are born every second.
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Every second, we welcome four new babies into our overall population. Do a little math and you'll find out that means there are approximately 250 births each minute, 15,000 each hour, and 360,000 each day. In a full year, there are around 131.4 million babies born on Earth, according to the Ecology Global Network.
Reading Fact
John Green foolishly promised to personally sign every pre-ordered copy of The Fault In Our Stars. He ended up having to sign every single copy of the first print run. He even polled the public as to what colour Sharpie he should use, and divvied up the 150,000 copies according to the proportion of the vote that each colour received.
History Fact
Witches Weren't Actually Burned at the Stake In Salem
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The witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, lasted between February 1692 and May 1693. Nearly 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft, including the homeless, the elderly, and a four-year-old girl. The majority were jailed, and some were hanged. But none of these people ever got burned alive.
Movie/TV Trivia
Despite Courtney’s (unsurprisingly) batshit claims (see #72) Kurt Cobain did thank Quentin Tarantino in the liner notes to In Utero, allegedly due to the musician’s love for Reservoir Dogs. QT returned the favour in the Pulp Fiction soundtrack notes by thanking Nirvana. Sadly, the timing of the release meant the thanks were followed by ‘RIP Kurt’.
Movie/TV Quote
"I wish I knew how to quit you."
Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Heath Ledger hated the homophobic memes. "He was extraordinarily serious about the political issues surrounding the movie when it came out, Jake Gyllenhaal told Out for a 10th anniversary oral history of Ang Lee's romance classic. A lot of times people would want to have fun and joke about it, and he was vehement about being serious, to the point where he didn’t really want to hear about anything that was being made fun of." It makes sense: The mainstream "gay panic" humor of the '00s was so prevalent that The New York Times devoted a whole article to Brokeback parodies in 2006, highlighting the popular trailer mashups on "curatorial video sites -- including youtube.com, gorillamask.net, and dailysixer.com." Clips with wink-wink, pun-y titles like "Brokeback to the Future" could go viral by suggesting that Doc Brown and Marty McFly were actually lovers, playing on viewer expectations with mildly clever editing and music cues, and treating lines from Lee's movie as punchlines.
Conversation Starter
What was the worst book you had to read for school? How about the best book you had to read for school?
Writing Prompt