John Gushue . . . Dot Dot Dot

Five-fact Friday

One of the most famous phrases in A Christmas Carol - "Tiny Tim, who did not die" - was not in Charles Dickens's original manuscript. Dickens added the phrase, among many other changes, in handwritten notes and revisions before the instant classic was published. [I was disappointed that Robert Zemeckis dropped the phrase from the otherwise applaudable animated version of A Christmas Carol that came out last month.]

The Airbus A400M, which had its inaugural flight today in Spain, has a range of as much as 6,400 kilometres, or about 4,000 miles. It has about double the cargo of older aircraft like the C-130 Hercules aircraft, not to mention significant budget overruns.

Greg Lake wrote Lucky Man, the best-selling song for Emerson Lake and Palmer, when he was only 12 years old. ELP recorded it only because they needed a short song to fill one side of their first record, and had a day to do it.

Amazon allows publishers to set their own prices for Kindle-ready digital editions of their books, but keeps 65 per cent of the revenue.

Bobby Vinton not only remains a symbol of pre-Beatle America, he holds the distinction of having held the No. 1 chart spot before the British Invasion. His rendition of the David Mann song There I've Said It Again was bumped from the top by I Want To Hold Your Hand in 1964.

Five-fact Friday

The cabinet in Nepal donned oxygen tanks today for an event billed as the world's highest cabinet meeting ever. The meeting was organized to draw attention to the environment of the Himalayas. 

The Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan owns the hand-written manuscript of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, but has only put one page per year on display for public viewing. This year, though, it allowed the New York Times to make high-quality scans of the manuscript - showing some judicious editing on Dickens's part - online. You can see some details here; this link should take you to the full text, although I and other readers have been getting compression error messages.

The name of Tiger Woods's yacht is, fittingly, Privacy.

A Montreal study that set out to compare men in their 20s who watched pornography with those who did not had to readjust, after researchers could not find a single subject in the second category.

 

The characters of Sheldon and Leonard on the comedy The Big Bang Theory are not randomly named. Creator Chuck Lorre named the physicists after the late, great Sheldon Leonard, the actor, writer and a producer of the Dick Van Dyke Show, among many other programs. 

Five-fact Friday

 
 

The first musical instrument played in space was a harmonica, which astronaut Wally Schirra smuggled aboard a Gemini space mission in 1965. The instrument (like some sleigh bells that Schirra and a collegague also took aboard) is held at the Air and Space Museum in Washington.

The Daily Show, which has made a stock in trade in lampooning TV news programs, keeps track of things with the help of no less than 13 Tivos.

In 1996, Rush became the first Canadian band to be named collectively to the Order of Canada.

Finland leads the world's wealthiest nations in terms of most paid days off, according to a 2007 survey. Finnish law sets aside 30 days of annual leave for workers, and the country has an additional 14 statutory holidays.

Bruce Swedien, the legendary sound mixer who has worked with many jazz luminaries and on numerous Quincy Jones productions, made 91 different mixes of Michael Jackon's Billie Jean before the final version was picked: the second one Swedien had done.

Five-fact Friday

British author and actor Stephen Fry remains one of the most influential people on Twitter. This week, he told a convention in London that he advises a website in advance that hes's going to recommend them, lest they crash. Fry, a notorious early-adopter of technology since the early 1980s, commented, "If I do recommend a site it has to be capable of something like 1,000 hits a second ... It's like a DOS (denial of service attack) on people's servers and it's terrible." As of this morning, Fry's Twitter account had just over 990,000 followers.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which launched earlier this week, seems set to top sales records for videogames. In its first 24 hours on the market, the game sold 4.7 million copies - which works out to about 3,264 copies per minute.

John Hodgman, who plays PC in Apple's long-running "I'm a Mac" campaign, is in fact a longtime Mac user himself. The author and Daily Show contributor nonetheless gets accolades from Windows types. In an interview this week, he told the Miami Herald, "The flip side is I am also approached by people who use PCs, and to them I'm a folk hero. . . . I'm a little sheepish about it. I want to ask, `You understand who's paying for these ads, right?' ''

Nitrous oxide had been known for more than 70 years to make people giddy and foolish at parties before anyone thought about it as an anasthetic. A dentist at a party in Connecticut in 1844 observed that a man who suffered a gash on his leg was literally feeling no pain. 

Watch out, jellyfish: researchers working on a dive in the Red Sea found evidence that coral consume jellyfish. Their findings are published in the journal Coral Reefs. Mmmm ... jellyfish.

Five-fact Friday

What country boasts the highest coffee consumption? It's Finland, where per capita consumption (that includes the kids) is a hefty 12 kilograms per year. Canadians rank 11th, with 6.5 kilograms per person per year. [The image above is from JcOlivera's Flickr stream.]

Until this week, I did not know that the spooky, banjo-inflected music used as the theme song for Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the BBC radio show from the Seventies, that is) was performed by the Eagles. The song is called Journey of the Sorcerer, and appeared on the 1975 album One of These Nights.

Ringtones are ubiquitous, and profitable: The downloadable tunes account, astonishingly, for close to 60 per cent of all the wireless data revenue generated in the U.S.

The Batmobile, as portrayed in the 1960s television series, was actually built by hand in Italy in the 1950s for the Lincoln line of Ford cars. The prototype was never developed, but became iconic after it was tweaked to be a TV fantasy car.

Otto, a Dachshund terrier living in Shropshire, England, has been named the world's oldest dog. He's 20 years and eight months old. You can read about it on this BBC News report ... although the phrase "put down" is perhaps not the best word choice.

Five-fact Friday

Back-to-school sales have reignited the advertising wars for computers. Apple has been continuing its "I'm a Mac" campaign, which is credited with rapidly increasing the Mac share of the market. Last year, Apple outspent Microsoft's TV advertising by 71 per cent; in the first half of this year, however, Microsoft has more than doubled Apple's spending on commercials, in an attempt to win back customers.

Ted Kennedy grew up in the shadow of older brothers who seemed far more destined than he to gain the public spotlight; he also grew up on the move, attending 10 different schools by the time he was 11 years of age. 

If the 2010 Ikea catalogue looks a little bit different, look closely at the flag on the front cover. For the first time in a half-century, the Swedish manufacturer of build-your-own furniture has stopped using a stylized and very familiar type of Futura as its font. Instead, it has customized Verdana, which font geeks like myself know was invented for use on the web. Why? Verdana can be adapted to other alphabets, and Ikea wanted a consistent look online and in print, all over the world.

Duncan Jones, who is earning acclaim for his new, 2001-inflected film Moon, was better known decades ago by another name: Zowie Bowie, one of a series of oddball names rock stars gave to their children. The son of David Bowie, he went by Zowie until he was 12, when he changed his first name to Joey, and later Joe. As an adult, he's been known as Duncan Jones - the surname matching David Bowie's original name, David Jones. 

Speaking of unusual names, there's evidence that having one raises the odds you'll wind up in trouble with the law. Check out a Freakonomics posting on that here. 

Five-fact Friday

Five not terribly important things that you may not have known yesterday. Here we go: 

Avon originally was founded to sell books, not cosmetics. Founder David McConnell used perfume only as an incentive to help sell books.

Easter will be celebrated on the same day in 2010 in both the western Christian churches and in the Eastern Orthodox church. Because the churches use different methods to calculate when Easter falls, coinciding dates happen only a few times every century. (Easter will be on April 4, by the way.)

Chindu Sreedharan, 36, a lecturer at the Media School in Bournemouth University, England, has undertaken an ambitious project with his Twitter account. Through @Epicretold, he is tweeting, in segments of up to 140 characters, the contents of the world's largest poem, the Mahabharata.

Genius of Love by Tom Tom Club - the side project founded by husband-and-wife Talking Heads Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth - features a famous and much-sampled bassline ... but Weymouth didn't actually play it. Round-the-clock recording (they could afford only three days of studio time) left Weymouth unable to close her hand at one point, forcing her to teach the basslines to a technician. You can play the video below.

Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas casino mogul, has a surname that fits the gambling business, and by no accident. His father, a compulsive gambler who owned bingo halls, changed the family's name from Weinberg to a new identity. That detail is included in a recent 60 Minutes profile; click below to watch it.

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Five-fact Friday

Henry David Thoreau, apart from being a writer, was also a talented pencil-maker, through his family's business. Thoreau is credited with making "significant technological innovations, including figuring out a way to inject lead directly into the hollowed-out pencil."

May Day is not just a holiday on May 1 in some places, it's the name of one of the more stylish villains in the James Bond film canon. Singer Grace Jones played the role in the (otherwise iffy) 1985 A View to a Kill.

The ever-stranger Billy Bob Thornton says he is "right on the verge of having full-blown agoraphobia," and also a phobia involving "really old stuff," including 18th century French furniture and "big old heavy silver flatware." (You can't make this stuff up, although, then again, maybe he just did.)

Paula Abdul, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, thought that Sacha Baron Cohen's character Bruno was a real person.

Carol Ann Duffy is the first woman to be Britain's poet laureate, after 341 years of writers holding the distinction.

Five-fact Friday

Bobby Driscoll, the voice of Disney's Peter Pan and the child star of Treasure Island, fell hard after child stardom. Although he won a juvenile Oscar, he lost his Disney contract (apparently because of severe acne), and slid down. He wound up in prison, was a drug addict, and was found dead at 31 in New York City. He was buried as an anonymous pauper and his remains were not identified until a year after his death.

Recession winner: Yum Foods, the parent company of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and other fast-food mainstays, is benefiting from the downscaling of the eating-out consumer. The company's U.S. profit was up seven per cent in the first quarter, and its stock surged Thursday on news it is moving on with an ambitious international growth strategy.

Peter Gabriel's first four albums were named Peter Gabriel, although the fourth carried a sticker with the "Security" tag. For the record, the first three are known, respectively, on Gabriel's site as Car, Scratch and Melt.

Ja'Net Dubois, who memorably sang the Jeffersons theme song (listen here), had never sung professionally when she belted out the vocal. She also co-wrote the song with former Ellie Greenwich collaborator Jeff Barry. 

Attendance at the Art Gallery of Ontario has been about 30 per cent less than what was anticipated since the Frank Gehry-designed gallery opened five months ago. The King Tut exhibit coming in November will probably change that.

Five-fact Friday

I always think of T.S. Eliot at this time of year, particularly as the opening line of The Waste Land tells us that "April is the cruelest month." I wonder how the poem would have fared if Eliot had stuck with his original thought to title the work, He do the Police in Different Voices. That's an allusion to a line in the Charles Dickens novel Our Mutual Friend.

In 41 years of collaborations, including the odd extended hiatus, Elton John says he has not once had an argument with Bernie Taupin. John made the comment to Elvis Costello, for the latter's series Spectacle. (Actually, it's the former's series, too, as John is one of the producers.) I suspect the lack of confrontation may also be related to their method of collaboration: famously, they don't work together at the same time. Taupin writes the words, sends them to Elton, and that's that. The method gave rise to the name of the tribute album in their honour, Two Rooms.

Seth Grahame-Smith, who wrote the unexpectedly bestselling Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (it's technically a co-authorship, as much of Jane Austen's original is there ... the parts without flesh-eating zombies, etc), will be mashing up genres again. A six-figure deal announced this week will see Grahame-Smith tackle Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

Hector Berlioz's works are still widely performed; curiously, he is one of the few classical composers who couldn't play the piano. (He did learn guitar and flute as a child.)

Apple is expected to make its one billionth (with a b) sale from its apps store on Saturday.