Love to my parents, John (Jay) and Dorothy (Dot) Wood of Danielsville, Georgia, who will celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary on September 6. Congratulations!
Kara’s parents, George and Fran Kovalchik, will also hit the half-century-married mark next month.
That doesn’t happen very much any longer, does it?
Thanks to those of you who wrote, called, or emailed to let us know that you read the kind article that Julie Hinds wrote about us in The Detroit Free Press or one of the other media sources that ran the interview.
Some of you had little to say other than to point out that we’re overweight (thanks for this; we were under the mistaken impression that all of the mirrors in our home were concave). For some reason, these people had nothing better to do.
On a brighter note, scores of people contacted us to express that the story inspired them with some feel-good vibrations. Others were pleased for us that we’ve managed to attain both personal and professional success as a husband-and-wife team. Thank you; we worked very hard at getting where we are.
Sandy here. I’m not certain why, but this is interesting.
Sandy here. Kara and I are always on the lookout for new places and ways to distribute our work. (Yes, we do more than just trivia. In fact, we have several ideas just waiting to be unleashed on an unsuspecting public.) Feel free to contact us at info@pigpencil.com.
More than a million visitors have taken our Quarter Backs Quiz over at mentalfloss.com. If you’re one of them, thank you! If not… what are you waiting for? You’ll try to identify the states represented by the images on the backs of 20 different coins in the “state quarter” series issued by the U.S. Mint.
We all but guarantee that you won’t ace it!
He’ll forever be remembered for his prowess on the banjo, even though he can barely pick a note.
Besides that infamous backwoods romp, the scene that has become synonymous with the 1972 film Deliverance is that of the somber-faced, banjo-picking boy on the porch swing, who only broke into a crooked smile once he bested the guitar of Ronny Cox during “Dueling Banjos.”
When director John Boorman began selecting actors for the film, he stopped in at Clayton Elementary School in Georgia to check out the local talent. He chose 15-year-old Billy Redden based on his “indigenous” look (not the most flattering remark, considering that the Banjo Boy was described as an “inbred Albino” in the original James Dickey novel).
Redden didn’t know how to play the banjo, and had a hard time faking it, so in the final cut a professional player hid behind the porch swing and stuck his arm in one of the youngster’s sleeves to provide the necessary fingering. Redden would later recall that the main stars of the film were very cordial, except for Burt Reynolds, who kept to himself and rarely spoke to anyone.
Billy was paid $500 for his work, and producers let him keep the banjo as a souvenir. Sadly, his mother (a widow working as a custodian) had to sell the instrument shortly after the film’s release to pay some overdue bills.
Today, Billy Redden co-owns and works at at a café near Clayton, Georgia. Folks stop by regularly to get his autograph, not only because of his Deliverance notoriety, but also thanks to his renewed fame thanks to a cameo in Tim Burton’s 2003 film Big Fish.
- Kara Kovalchik
We thought it was innovative when Broadway Books chose to publish our first book, The Snapple Aptitude Test, as both a paperback and in Adobe e-book format. My, how things have changed in a few years. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Fun FAQs is available from the publisher in no less than three digital formats: Adobe Reader , eReader, and Microsoft Reader. No Kindle edition as of yet, but feel free to ask for one. Maybe they just need some prompting!
Kindle edition of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Fun FAQs now available!
We’re still retroactively adding lots of our material to pigpencil.com. Coming soon: video footage of a few segments we scripted for CNN-Headline News, our clips from the “In America” section of Reader’s Digest, and much, much more.
Here’s a photograph of a milk carton issued by Schneider’s Dairy of Pittsburgh in 2003 or 2004, which included some trivia we wrote for mental_floss. If your information is going to appear on the side of a milk carton, we figure this is the best way to do it … rather than a photo and some “Have You Seen Me?” information.
Of course, the sample they sent us was for Skim Milk. Are they trying to tell us something?
Sandy here. Yes, I may be biased since I grew up in Georgia and was an Atlanta Braves fan from a young age. But if someone could PLEASE explain to my why two-time NL Most Valuable Player Dale Murphy has NOT been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, I’d be eternally grateful.
The man is (and always was) a class act, and I’d still be watching baseball if more players were like him. How can a player have a long and distinguished career such as his and not be a lock for the Hall?
Congratulations to three members of the mental_floss team:
Jason English, the assistant web editor of mentalfloss.com, on the birth of his first child. Jason and wife Ellen welcomed a baby girl, Charlotte, on August 18. The couple rejected our suggested first name for the baby, Pidgin. Oh, well.
Terri Dann Osborne, the assistant art director for mental_floss magazine, on her recent marriage. Terri not only does incredible work for the magazine, but she also designs most of the banners for our quizzes on mentalfloss.com. If you see an ugly one, odds are she had the day off and we designed it. Sorry ’bout that.
Toby Maloney, mental_floss’ vice president of business development (and our personal mentor), for reaching a birthday we can only hope to reach someday. Woohoo!
Kara’s latest feature for mentalfloss.com, “Five Murders and the Movies they Inspired,” was picked up by CNN.com:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/wayoflife/07/11/inspired.movies/
Kara’s article celebrating the 40th anniversary of McDonald’s Big Mac sandwich was linked on the “Laugh Lines” section at NYTimes.com:
http://laughlines.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/09/if-we-didnt-laugh-wed-cry-dept/
Here’s the neatest thing I’ve received in the mail in quite a while… a coupon for 250 White Castle burgers for $99.99.
Yes, it’s a gimmick. A brilliant gimmick. You can click on the picture to see a larger version. Note the credit cards shown at the top, along with the note about the place being open 24/7. Isn’t it easy to picture five intoxicated college students pooling money very late at night to buy this? Granted, they’ll each eat eight or nine of them, throw up, and the rest of the burgers will be crammed into a mini-fridge until they’re thrown out in three or four weeks.
The point is you KNOW it’ll happen. Just like some hungry guy will brag that he really could eat 250 in a sitting and plunk down his $100. He’ll try and fail, but so what? It’s the challenge that matters.
Nice job, White Castle.
Have you ever wondered who uttered the first curse word on prime time television? No? Damn.
Found out who had the potty mouth, along with who to blame for canned laughter and other boob-tube “firsts” in the new edition of Kara’s weekly Confessions of a TV-holic column at mentalfloss.com.
Sandy here. Both WJR-AM radio and The Detroit Free Press have requested interviews with us concerning our latest book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Fun FAQs. Because interviews require focusing on a subject for an extended period of time, we’re understandably hesitant to do them. While developing our trivia chops since the early 1990s, Kara and I have become masters at taking a narrow subject and finding ways to expand it using tie-ins from pop culture, history, literature, whatever.
And, quite frankly, we do so darned much of it that it’s difficult to distinguish one job from another. When interviewers ask about a particular article done six months ago, we find it very tricky, since we’ve filled our minds with thousands of new bits of information since then. It’s like asking a baseball player about a particular pitch from earlier in the season. There have been so many since then that all you can really say is something generic like, “Yes, well, that was challenging, but I did my best.”
I’m happy to talk about our “craft,” but I even draw a blank when someone asks me for a random interesting fact. There are so many swimming through my head at all hours of the day and night that it becomes more and more difficult to pull out one from the batch. We try to FIND things, and we try to PROVE things, and while we’re at it, we do our best to LEARN things. But they don’t all stick.
A few months back, I calculated our output in 2007, and here’s what I came up with:
Combine these with additional things we’ve written (in print, online, and tied to merchandise) and I figure that we ran well over 500,000 words last year alone. Yow. It’s no wonder that the letters keep rubbing off our keyboards. And that doesn’t include the research and fact-checking work that we do for mental_floss, where we have to check every article in each issue for accuracy. That’s a full-time job in itself, with all the checking, reading, calling and digging it takes.
It’s a job that’s usually interesting, sometimes maddening, and often exhausting. But one thing Kara and I both agree on - without hesitation - is that there’s nothing else we’d rather do.
UPDATE: Our interview with Julie Hinds is schedule to run in The Detroit Free Press on Tuesday, August 5. There will be a photo as well, so consider yourselves warned.
