Fun facts!

  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account

I'm willing to accept his claim that he regrets this and is no longer the kind of violent bigot who did this, but if he weren't a hot shit star, it would never have been expunged. He should have had to live with it on his record.
 
713435
 
Not related to the above:

The kid who played Georgie in the recent version of It, the kid at the start with the drain, burst into tears one day on set, because he'd been told that he'd get to see Pennywise. But there'd been a rescheduling, and so he was crying because he hadn't gotten to meet the clown that, y'know. Murders him.
 
The Chicago Pile-1 was the first nuclear reactor to go critical. Enrico Fermi, the lead scientist, would read childrens books to improve his English so the instrumentation was named after characters like Piglet, Tigger, and Kanga.
 
In Star Wars universe there is a musical genre that is literally named "jizz". You can hear jizz being performed at the cantina where Luke meets Han Solo in "A New Hope".
 
After the release of the first Nightmare on Elm Street movie there was a plan for a prequel written by the guy who played Nancy’s father in the original. In the prequel the story would involve Nancy’s older sister Betsy running away to join a hippy commune in the 60’s and then returning after a few years. In the story Freddy was meant to be the therapist that treats Betsy after she returns home, only for her to end up being brutually murdered after a few months of her treatment. Freddy would’ve been the main suspect because of his sessions with Betsy, but he ends up getting burned alive by the parents of elm street in his own home before he can face trial. The twist would’ve been that Kruger was actually innocent, with Betsy being murdered by Charles Manson, the leader of the “hippie commune” she joined, for abandoning his family, and thus it set up Freddy’s motivation for the ensuing films being an act of hateful vengeance from beyond the grave.

It was actually considered for a while, but in the end they decided that it clashed with Wes Craven’s original idea to have Freddy simply be an irredeemable piece of shit from the start, and they realized that it would be hard to spin that angle into a franchise.

Edit to add: this idea was also briefly considered for the remake a few years ago, and you can actually see some traces of it in the first half of the movie, since its initially implied that Nancy and the other kids at the preschool made up he accusations and the story spiraled out of control until it resulted in Kruger getting lynched. But with everything in the shitty remake that had some potential the quickly abandoned it and went with “lol yea he totally did it. We got you didn’t we?”
 
Last edited:
Before a proper measuring system was conceived, people used to measure things in improvised units based on everyday items. For example, people would describe someone as “a chair and a half” tall, or say that a tree was about 25 rocks tall.

It wasn’t a particularly accurate or convenient system, but it is interesting to think about.
 
Speaking of units of measurement, it's a bit strange that there's an old-fashioned one still in use, exclusively used for horses: the "hand".

A hand is just four inches, so a 60" horse is 15 hands tall. But measurements that aren't divisible by four add the extra inches after a decimal, so you get like:

60" = 15 hands
61" = 15.1 hands
62" = 15.2 hands
63" = 15.3 hands
64" = 16 hands

Because 15.4 would equal 16, so you'd just jump to 16.
 
After the release of the first Nightmare on Elm Street movie there was a plan for a prequel written by the guy who played Nancy’s father in the original. In the prequel the story would involve Nancy’s older sister Betsy running away to join a hippy commune in the 60’s and then returning after a few years. In the story Freddy was meant to be the therapist that treats Betsy after she returns home, only for her to end up being brutually murdered after a few months of her treatment. Freddy would’ve been the main suspect because of his sessions with Betsy, but he ends up getting burned alive by the parents of elm street in his own home before he can face trial. The twist would’ve been that Kruger was actually innocent, with Betsy being murdered by Charles Manson, the leader of the “hippie commune” she joined, for abandoning his family, and thus it set up Freddy’s motivation for the ensuing films being an act of hateful vengeance from beyond the grave.

It was actually considered for a while, but in the end they decided that it clashed with Wes Craven’s original idea to have Freddy simply be an irredeemable piece of shit from the start, and they realized that it would be hard to spin that angle into a franchise.

Edit to add: this idea was also briefly considered for the remake a few years ago, and you can actually see some traces of it in the first half of the movie, since its initially implied that Nancy and the other kids at the preschool made up he accusations and the story spiraled out of control until it resulted in Kruger getting lynched. But with everything in the shitty remake that had some potential the quickly abandoned it and went with “lol yea he totally did it. We got you didn’t we?”

Reading your post I was reminded of the remake and how the only interesting thing in it was the thread where Freddy might be innocent and was just a poor janitor. Getting lynched and burned alive by the parents and then disposed of instead of buried is a good hook for a dream demon.

Orion Pictures was founded by former United Artists executives; both of their film libraries are now owned by MGM.

United Artists went bust because of Heaven's Gate and the new creator/director driven idea in movie making where the studio provided the money and didn't meddle with the movie.

Where did the creator/director driven revolution come from? What made the studios get on board with that? Deer Hunter was a big part of it, it won Oscars and director/screenwriter had done his own thing wit it, so maybe it wasn't such a bad idea to let the director fulfill his original vision unhindered...

The director of Deer Hunter then started his next project, Heaven's Gate, and afterwards the studios put everyone on a precautionary leash.

Before a proper measuring system was conceived, people used to measure things in improvised units based on everyday items. For example, people would describe someone as “a chair and a half” tall, or say that a tree was about 25 rocks tall.

It wasn’t a particularly accurate or convenient system, but it is interesting to think about.
Speaking of units of measurement, it's a bit strange that there's an old-fashioned one still in use, exclusively used for horses: the "hand".

A hand is just four inches, so a 60" horse is 15 hands tall. But measurements that aren't divisible by four add the extra inches after a decimal, so you get like:

60" = 15 hands
61" = 15.1 hands
62" = 15.2 hands
63" = 15.3 hands
64" = 16 hands

Because 15.4 would equal 16, so you'd just jump to 16.

Imperial is still like that. An inch is a thumb, a foot is a foot, a fathom is from one hand to the other with outstretched arms, the speed knots is knots on a rope being pulled into the water from a moving ship(the faster the knots gets pulled, the faster the ship is moving), a yard is step and twenty stone is the average weight of a british woman.

It's not a dumb system like some say, it 's just old. Looking at it it makes sense in several different ways for different professions.
Inches can, just like anything else, be divided into halves and quarters and there are twelve inches in a foot. Twelve can be divided by 2(6"), 3(4"), 4(3") 6(2") and still return integers, very useful and very natural for carpenter math where dividing 1 decimeter into anything other than 2 or 5 returns something with decimals which in addition to being a slightly more complex numbers also complicates quickly jotting numbers down with a carpenters nub. Dividing inches themselves creates a friendly 1/4" or 1/6", easy to read and easy to write.

Adding and subtracting integers is also something people have an easier time getting their head around even though there should be no reason for them having trouble with decimals getting involved here and there, but that's partially a mental block. It can also be seen in old gamblers who can't do math for shit but if they encounter the same numbers and equations at a poker table they're suddenly super computers, it's applied math at that point instead of something purely abstract.
 
It's not a dumb system like some say, it 's just old. Looking at it it makes sense in several different ways for different professions.
Inches can, just like anything else, be divided into halves and quarters and there are twelve inches in a foot. Twelve can be divided by 2(6"), 3(4"), 4(3") 6(2") and still return integers, very useful and very natural for carpenter math where dividing 1 decimeter into anything other than 2 or 5 returns something with decimals which in addition to being a slightly more complex numbers also complicates quickly jotting numbers down with a carpenters nub. Dividing inches themselves creates a friendly 1/4" or 1/6", easy to read and easy to write.

The worst goddamn unit in somewhat-common use in the US system is the "mil," which is a sort of a metric inch (1/1000 of an inch). I see it commonly used in CNC/machining and to describe sheet thicknesses (plastic bags/sheets are often "1 mil" "5 mil" etc.) This unit infuriated me because, well, if you want the convenience of the metric system, just use the fucking metric system. Not a stupid-ass metric inch, especially when "mil" can get used as a synonym for a millimeter or milliliter.

Another stupid-ass wannabe-metric unit that is far less common is the Rankine, which is basically Fahrenheit adjusted to absolute zero. Absolutely stupid. I've only encountered it in chemical engineering stuffs (hello, 40 different units for pressure and humidity).

Continuing the units-related autism streak here, I'm not particularly fond of the parsec, either. It, the AU on which it is based, and the light-year are all originally defined off of the Earth's orbit (time or radius). Unlike the light-year, however, the definition is far more convoluted:

A parsec is defined as the distance at which one astronomical unit subtends an angle of one arcsecond,[1] which corresponds to 648000/π astronomical units. One parsec is equal to about 3.26 light-years or 31 trillion kilometres (31×1012 km) or 19 trillion miles (19×1012 mi).

The unit is on the same order of magnitude as the light-year, making it really no more useful in my mind. I imagine it makes some calculations more straightforward, but I sure as hell haven't seen why.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom