Of interest, perhaps:
- The Boll Weevil Monument of Enterprise, Alabama (The only known monument to an agricultural pest.)
- Abracadabra (It actually means something!)
- The “Lost Chapter” section of the page on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (It tells of a golden ticket winner omitted from the final version of the book: Miranda Piker, a teacher’s pet who is apparently ground into powder.)
- The category page for LGBT Supervillains (Considering how long comics have been around and how central spandexed muscle is to the superhero genre, the list is surprisingly short.)
- The Fennec Fox (Which in addition to being adorable on a supernatural level is also the only species of fox that can be kept as a pet.)
- The page for “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” (This is the proper spelling for the Sly and the Family Stone song. Who knew?)
- Talespin (The old Jungle Book-associated Disney series seems to be loosely based on a bygone ABC series, Tales of the Gold Monkey, which had a remarkably similar premise. Who knew?)
- Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead (A play that imagines what the Peanuts characters might be like as teenagers. Who knew? It features a neat little name trick in that the Peppermint Patty analogue is called Tricia York.)
- The “Foreign Versions” section of the page on Golden Girls (British version: Brighton Belles. Russian version: Bolshie Devochki, or “Big Girls.” Greek version: Chrysa Koritsia, or “Gold Girls.”)
- The section on the Wikipedia page for the music interval known as the tritone in which the alleged Satanic implications of this compositional element are discussed.
- The page on Japanese sound symbolism (I have no idea why the page is not titled Japanese onomatopoeia.)
- Eastern Airlines Flight 401 (A real-life doomed plane that inspired a bad movie I once saw involving a haunted plane.)
- The page on the 2003 film The Room (Infamously terrible and aired on Adult Swim this year as an April Fools joke.)
- Guy Burgess (Gay British double agent and all-around interesting guy.)
- Aokigahara (Also known as the Sea of Trees, this is a forest at the foot of Mt. Fuji famous for being a confusing maze in which many hikers get so lost they die. Others just commit suicide there.)

- Domovoi
- George Peppard
- The obscure Wizard of Oz character Betsy Bobbin
- Yourba religion
- The disaster film Rollercoaster
- Goetic demons in popular culture
- Off-brand superhero series Femforce
- the video game Arm Wrestling, a little-known spin-off of the Punch-Out!! games
- Ontotheology
- Ingmar Bergman’s 1960 film JungfrukÀllan, or The Virgin Spring
- Devo spin-off group Devo 2.0
- The 1941 Chinese animated film Princess Iron Fan
- Suits (as in, like, cards)
- Rheum (that is, eye cripsies)
- Prawns
Wikipedia's wrong, the origin of "abracadabra" is unknown. Altho it might be from Semitic, evidence is lacking
ReplyDeletehttp://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-abr1.htm
Onomatopoeic words describe sounds, but not all of those Japanese words describe sounds. The more general term is ideophone.
ReplyDeletehttp://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=64
It's nice to see that someone else "appreciates" "The Room." For even more enjoyment, watch it with the rifftrax commentary.
ReplyDeleteYou've been randomly bookmarking my youth. First, I owned and loved John G. Fuller's book "The Ghost of Flight 401" when a kid. And not only is "Rollercoaster" one of the few films made in Sensurround, I saw it on a family vacation in Wildwood, NJ, or down the shore, as we'd say.
ReplyDeleteOh, it seems you favorited the Talespin page : that's nice, I'm a fan of the show :)
ReplyDeleteActually if you want to learn more, you can check this page, where the two creators of the series are answering to many questions :
Talespin questions / interviews