This is the thread for unusual details in wikipedia articles.

"Buddy Holly is gay"

But he has also "resigned as an operations manager at a Nashville delivery company as a result of the debacle".

OVERREACT MUCH? WTF am I missing something here?

ha ha I love cranks with an axe to grind.

Ha, the guy who tracked him down is a notorious crank... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Brandt

Wikipedia Watch is a website critical of Wikipedia. It is owned by Daniel Brandt, the leader of the Southwestern chapter of Aryan Nations and an Internet activist.

The first such article I read was published by Salon.com and can be found here (http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/08/29/google_watch/print.html). This article isn't so bad as the others, the author does expose Brandt's motives:

Brandt is not a disinterested party; the dispute between Daniel Brandt and Google is personal. He has spent thousands of hours building a Web site that he believes is both useful and important, and Google, in its algorithmic blindness, has given Brandt a lower page rank than he thinks he's entitled to. Brandt finds it genuinely hard to believe -- and even personally insulting -- that Google won't give him more credit.

However the article does paint Mr. Brandt in a friendly light, and so it lends credibility to his cause - a cause which most if not all search engine professionals would regard as absurd.

The crux of Brandt's argument can be summed up with these paragraphs from the Salon.com article.

When you type "NameBase" into Google, Brandt's site comes up first, but Brandt is not satisfied with that. "My problem has been to get Google to go deep enough into my site," he says. In other words, Brandt wants Google to index the 100,000 names he has in his database, so that a Google search for "Donald Rumsfeld" will bring up NameBase's page for the secretary of defense. For some reason, though, all of NameBase's deep pages -- its pages with specific names and citations -- have a low Google page rank, which causes them to show up low in the search results. Search for "Donald Rumsfeld" in Google and in the first five pages you get a lot of .mil and .gov sites, some news stories, and some activist sites. Namebase's entry on Rumsfeld doesn't come up. (It is in Google's database, but to find it somebody would have to first wade through hundreds of results.)

Why is a Nazi collecting people's names and citations?

One criticism of the Tribune Company is that they are responsible for the Cubs' perpetual losing. The Tribune Company discovered that the Cubs are more profitable fielding a poor team, rather than spending big on free agents. The Chicago Cubs are located in a trendy area of Chicago, causing them to have great attendance at home games, even when the team is doing poorly.

If the Tribune Company is so unhappy about this, why don't they just edit it?

ROFFLE

Plus, all the slang...

Track listing

1. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (Cobain/Grohl/Novoselic) - 5:02
2. "In Bloom" (Cobain/Nirvana) - 4:15
3. "Come As You Are" (Cobain/Nirvana) - 3:39
4. "Breed" (Cobain/Nirvana) - 3:04
5. "Lithium" (Cobain) - 4:17
6. "Polly" (Cobain/Nirvana) - 2:56
7. "Territorial Pissings" (Cobain/Nirvana) - 2:23
8. "Drain You" (Cobain/Nirvana) - 3:44
9. "Lounge Act" (Cobain/Nirvana) - 2:37
10. "Stay Away" (Cobain/Nirvana) - 3:33
11. "On a Plain" (Cobain/Nirvana) - 3:17
12. "Something In The Way" (Cobain/Nirvana) - 3:51
13. "Endless, Nameless" (Hidden track) (Cobain/Hongro/Nirvana)

it appears to have been edited again, not by me:

"Endless, Nameless" (Hidden track) (Cobain/Hongro/Cuomo/Urkel/Nirvana)

Portions of the name sound like vulgarities in English and Spanish, leading to its use in various jokes. Titicaca is the lake that Cornholio, alter-ego of Beavis of MTV's animated series Beavis and Butt-head, claims to come from although he believes the lake is located in Nicaragua.

The word 'Trekdom' is used interchangeably with 'Fandom' when referring to Star Trek Fandom or their fans and has been in use by fans of Star Trek fans for several decades.

After the recent cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise, the future of Trekdom is still uncertain, though it has been scaled back to its own core. Some may believe that Trekdom might die off, or it might be extinct at the onset of such conflicts such as World War III.

"Plus, all the slang..."
But shouldn't the 81 be called a 010?

Was what I found at the top of the page when I checked wikipedia a few weeks before starting a class on the Reformation.

First go here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discontinued_gay_pornography_awards

Go to the Probe / Men in Video Awards section.

Click on the 1995 recipient of the "Best Bottom" award.

Note the expression on his face.

LOL

Cultural imperialism at its WTF-est:

Kay Rala Xanana Gusmão GCL (born José Alexandre Gusmão, on June 20, 1946) is a former freedom fighter who became the first President of East Timor since independence from Indonesia.
(...)
His nickname, "Xanana", is taken from the name of the 1970's rock and roll/comedy group Sha Na Na.

On a radio interview, Trina said that the relationship was more of a "brother-sister" relationship. Later, on Victoria's RapBasement, Lil Wayne said he knew nothing of the rumors. During Wayne's childhood, he mistakenly got thought of as a gay guy but late he dismissed all these claims by watching naked gun 33 and a third.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lil_Wayne#Personal_life

And in the next chapter:

"Lil Wayne and Trina have recently ended their porno relationship, which was stated by Lil Wayne, himself, on BET's 106 and Park."

Did someone misspell "promo"?

"During the peak of her career, she was acclaimed as Pennsylvania's top female Jewish rapper."

In late December 1992, Coca-Cola Co. president Doug Ivester told a gathering of New York reporters that Tab Clear was being positioned as part of the "mainstream of diet soft drinks" and was "not a new-age beverage".[6] He declared:

Consumers want an alternative new soft drink with a lot of flavor. A new-age label would doom it. It would be aiming too low to go up against Crystal Pepsi and Clearly Canadian.

honestly the whole article reads like it could easily be a sophisticated forgery (i've never heard of this beverage). it's pretty fucking hilarious.

In the US and UK, Coca-Cola launched a heavy ad campaign for TaB clear with Chain of Mystery[10] and Sinister Connections,[11] linking TaB Clear with unintentionally being the cause of various historical events with the slogan "Suddenly everything is clear". Several radio ads were created as well, such as an ad about TaB Clear being an "eternal paradox"[12] and an ad where "Drink TaB Clear" is discovered when a song is played backwards. A very different ad campaign was created in Japan with ads mostly unrelated to each other and either featuring or voiced over by a Japanese spokesman.

Unlike most other "clear" soft drinks, Tab Clear contained caffeine[1] and, according to the company, had the flavor of cola.[3][4]

there's also echoes of the New Coke conspiracy theory:

In his 2011 book, Killing Giants: 10 Strategies to Topple the Goliath in Your Industry, Stephen Denny published an interview with former Coca-Cola Chief Marketing Officer Sergio Zyman that stated the formation and subsequent failure of Tab Clear was a deliberate move to destroy Crystal Pepsi, capitalizing on the public's lack of understanding of Pepsi's heavily marketed product. Tab Clear was marketed as a diet drink, which were less popular than traditional colas, and the Tab brand in general was seen as an inferior product to flagships like Coca-Cola or Pepsi. With Tab Clear being placed in such close proximity to Crystal Pepsi, the image of both brands would be damaged in what Zyman called a "kamikaze" strategy. "This is like a cola," Zyman explained, "but it doesn't have any color. It has all this great taste. And we said, 'No, Crystal Pepsi is actually a diet drink.' Even though it wasn't. Because Tab had the attributes of diet, which was its demise. That was its problem. It was perceived to be a medicinal drink. Within three or five months, Tab Clear was dead. And so was Crystal Pepsi."[18]

good job on Zyman for killing the "goliath" that was Crystal Pepsi, though.

ah yes, the Tommy Wiseau strategy ("actually it was a comedy!").

https://i.imgur.com/Lx9ClBx.jpg

I miss those stubby little glass bottles.

Inspired by the surprise ending of the supernatural thriller film The Sixth Sense (1999), the strings-led, dramatic contemporary R&B ballad is about a woman who is confused with her partner's recent change in behavior and goes into denial about it.

According to an interview with Yoshimitsu Banno by the Japanese magazine Eiga Hi-Ho, Hedorah's eyes were modeled after vaginas.[2]

Mister Meringue's name comes from mister and meringue, a type of desert.

wow crazy, i have the same origin story

"Because Tab had the attributes of diet, which was its demise."

Enjoying this sentence

I still remember the taste of Tab. I would argue that it's one of the reasons anything "diet" was associated with things tasting horrible.

It was all my mom drank in the 80s and when I was allowed to have soda that was it so I absolutely love it. I still buy it any time I see it. Would love one right now.

"casino desert" sounds like a sonic level.

"the attributes of diet" sounds like catholic theology.

the main thing i think of when i think of tab is its use in "back to the future", which almost seems to be a film whose 1985 pop-culture reference points were deliberately designed to be ephemeral and age poorly - stuff that's held up about as well as mrs. wagner's pies. i'm not sure it was deliberate, given that the screenwriter went on to write "tattoo assassins", which was bad, but which i don't think was deliberately designed to be, no matter what sergio zyman says.

I miss those stubby little glass bottles.

― pplains

i talk with my girlfriend sometimes about how actually seeing the past would be so different from what we remember it. like, for instance, when we remember 1982, we tend to think of 1982 stuff, but for me, 1982 involved a lot of leftover 1970s stuff, old bicentennial tat and so forth. and my girlfriend points out, i think she's right, that one of the first things we'd notice about 1982, aside from everything smelling like cigarette smoke, is all the glass bottles. styrofoam, too, i think you'd probably see a lot more styrofoam.

maybe there are some '80s tv shows that are put together like that, but i don't think people would enjoy that aesthetic a lot. strict realism doesn't necessarily translate to media that's enjoyable to experience.

I like seeing 70's shows with brand new cars like Broncos - I was so used to seeing 70's car rusted and falling apart in the late 90's

Kate, your last point was delved into in this thread:

In every 70s US home ever

If I could quote myself from that...

This is an important point, that the '70s - like any decade - were still heavily characterized by the immediately preceding decades. When I think of the '70s I remember a lot of stuff of a design reflecting the '60s Laugh-In aesthetic of bright Day-Glo colors, flowers, op-art, funny slogans. Also lots of graphic reproductions of Robert Indiana's "LOVE" sculpture. Stuff like this gradually went out of fashion in the early '70s but it didn't all just suddenly disappear, it remained in people's houses for a while. I also remember in the early-to-mid '70s there will still lots of cars with fins on them parked on the street.

Stranger Things does a pretty decent job of capturing (my recollection of) the mid-80s aesthetic.

yah, one thing I liked about it was how the Winona Ryder house in particular captured that sense of stuff bought in the 70s and still predominating. very much matched most of the houses i was ever in as a kid in the early/mid 80s.

"the attributes of diet" sounds like catholic theology.

Ha, exactly what I was thinking

Weldon's work designing album art spans over 30 years and several genres including classic rock, 70s funk, and modern cult-indie rock. Weldon designed a large percentage of the album covers released in Canada between 1971 and 1974. Weldon's work includes cover art for the 1972 release of 's . His cover work for 's 1974 would lead, thirty years later, to the Rush-influenced NYC indie-rockers commissioning Weldon to do the cover art for their 2005 eponymous debut LP, which bears a similarity to the original Rush record.

Weldon's designs often incorporates found materials (comic book clippings, dollar bills, science photos).

Four Star Playhouse, an anthology series, did not utilize a laugh-track or audience on its occasional comedy episodes, with co-producer David Niven calling the laugh track "wild indiscriminate mirth"

The music on this album is the most overtly Celtic music Mike Oldfield has produced. The album was originally recorded using only acoustic hand-played instruments. After the daughter of a Warner Music exec said it sounded boring, Oldfield added synthesizers and more instruments to the album.[3]

I'd never looked much into Timothy Leary, so about 3 or so minutes into reading his wiki I started thinking "there's no way the Grateful Dead didn't cross paths with him." Sure enough:

Although he considered her the "great love of his life", Leary and Barbara divorced in 1992; according to friend and collaborator John Perry Barlow, "Tim basically gave me permission to be her lover. He couldn't be for her what she needed sexually, so it made more sense for him to anoint someone to do that for him."

classic Tim

During an interview with Howard Stern, Martin said that his dislike of "Speed of Sound" stems from the fact that he "forgot the banana lyric for the song. A banana lyric is a staple in every song we've made and somehow I forgot to write one for Speed of Sound."[8]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/timeline/6wi1wqnnvpbxpcwlqad4tjtzqamo6ku.png

"Jeff Dahl"

opening with a 1944 quote from Joseph Goebbels: "The enemy (invading German territory) will be taken in the rear by the fanatical population, which will ceaselessly worry him, tie down strong forces and allow him no rest

New Line Cinema rejected this idea due to the film Little Nicky (2000) having been partially set in Hell while also being a box-office bomb, deterring the company from producing another film set in Hell at that time.[22][23]

Peach is a prominent mango on the social media platform TikTok

"Dr. Gay Hitler" redirects here. Not to be confused with Gay Hitler.

"the attributes of diet" sounds like catholic theology.

Ha, exactly what I was thinking

― jmm, Saturday, November 4, 2023 7:09 AM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol, yes, amazing

An improperly managed human defecation resulted in a tomato plant taking root, which was also destroyed.

Ed Begley Jr. arrived on set unprepared for his first day of filming as a tennis pro, explaining that he had no idea how to play tennis, resulting in the director shooting around Begley's inability to play the sport, and the actor was also difficult to costume, because, as a dedicated environmentalist, Begley would not wear any animal-based clothing such as leather.

She starred in Nazi propaganda films during the Third Reich, which she wrote about in a 1949 memoir I Was Hitler's Mickey Mouse.

lmao at the Ed Begley Jr bit

Some Dutch fans were forced to take off their trousers branded with the logo of Bavaria beer, as Budweiser was the official beer of the tournament.[44][45] Rather than leave the stadium, they proceeded to watch the match in their underclothes.

Sidney Edmond Jocelyn Ackland was born in North Kensington, London on 29 February 1928,[3] the son of Major Sydney Norman Ackland (died 1981), an Irish journalist who had been sent to England to live with an aunt by his parents for seducing their maid, but subsequently seduced his aunt's maid, Ruth Izod (died 1957), whom he married.[4][5][6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liam_Kelly_(footballer,_born_1996)

(The unusual detail being that someone called Liam Patrick Kelly played for Rangers for 12 years).

Love how either E.O. Wilson or Stephen Jay Gould has chipped in on the page about the 2000AD character Nemesis the Warlock, with this:

Warlocks are a sexually dimorphic species of aliens who are capable of sorcery. Both males and females are horned, fire-breathing and of demonic appearance; females have a centaur-like quadrupedal morphology while males are bipedal but have unusual combination plantigrade / digitigrade leg joints, somewhat resembling satyrs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_the_Warlock

i was having a friendly argument with friends. i was telling my brother about the truly superb manga Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (finally being published officially in English), a slice-of-life manga about a lesbian robot running a little country coffee shop after the apocalypse. my brother was disappointed. "that's not a robot," he said. "that's an android."

"wouldn't that be a gynoid?", one of my friends asks. it's true, "android" is a gendered term. "gynoid", though, as a term that's hardly better than "fembot". at best, "gynoid" makes me think of Hajime Sorayama, creator of the "Sexy Robot" series of art books that were all the rage in certain circles when i was younger, and at worst with, well, just plain robot sex dolls.

my argument was that the characters in the novel refer to themselves, and are referred to, as human robots, that this term is perfectly fine, and that using "android" should be deprecated as the default term for a human robot. just out of curiosity i looked up "gynoid".

“Sweetheart”, shown with its creator, Clayton Bailey; the busty feminine robot (also a functional coffee maker) created a controversy after it was displayed at the Lawrence Hall of Science at University of California, Berkeley. The robot's creator, a professor of art at California State University, Hayward called this "censorship" and "next to book burning".

just as heinrich heine said: where they burn books they will, in the end, burn coffee too

Awards and honors
1984 – U.S. Patent #4440390 awarded for a "Novelty Cup for Forcibly Ejecting Liquid."
1998 – Celestial Seasonings, Inc. "A Loose Interpretation III," Boulder, CO, Received Honorable Mention for creation of Celeste, the Robot Teabag

i'm assuming here that celeste, in fact, a robot teabag and not a gynoid teabag

not shown: bailey's truly ludicrous mustache

Humanoid would suffice surely?

hmmm, i guess technically... does that mean that the player character in "berzerk" (by the way i've read all 5,632 chapters of the manga and the video game is a _terrible_ adaptation) is a human robot? i guess it's possible... the title character of "humanoid woman" (a terrible dub of the excellent film _per aspera ad astra_ is a robot, right? i did, when i was young, think of the "berzerk" video game as being about robots hunting down the last human or whatever. kinda makes it less dramatic if it's just robots hunting other robots imo.

also, if you're an android or a gynoid or whatever you _are_ a robot, right? so it's just wrong to say "that's not a robot, that's an android".

anyway i have this idea in my head that "humanoid" is also what robots call humans sometimes. i don't know if that's true or not.

one of my friends suggested "enboid" but noted that robots are all technically binary. binary gender, that's, like... dimorphic gender, right? so like even if i was binary i could be non-dimorphic just because i think the gender binary is bullshit. so "non-gender-dimorphic" doesn't really work either. god. language is complicated.

by the way if i search "humanoid woman" i get youtube videos talking about "female humanoid robots". i think that might just be even more degrading than "fembot". maybe it's just because TERFs describe women like we're all robots. ADULT HUMANOID FEMALE ROBOTS. or something.

anyway.

Baba Lamunade (Voiced by Takeshi Kusao): Lamunade bears a good resemblance to his father, since he is his son and the hero of the series. He is different from Ramune as he is less interested in video games than his father, but nevertheless amazed by them. He falls in love with more than one girl; apart from Parfait he develops sentimental feelings for Drum. He has the same catch phrase that his father uses ("I'm feeling incredibly hot blooded!!! RIGHT NOW!!!) and sometimes states a fact by saying that it is written in his DNA.

the whole wikipedia series of entries on this anime is fucking gold, honestly.

fyi while the OP to the anime in question is awesome it is _not_ "baby lemonade" by syd barrett. i'll give them a pass on that though.

Hall is the cousin of U.S. Army officer David N. McKenna. He still owes £700 for a car he bought from his friend, Owen Thomas.

According to the September 12, 2007, study by the Blacksmith Institute, Dzerzhinsk is one of the worst-polluted cities of the world and has a life expectancy of 42 years for men and 47 for women, with the 2003 death rate exceeding its birth rate by 260%.[12] Environmental action groups such as Greenpeace attribute such low life expectancy to high levels of persistent organic chemicals, particularly dioxins. The Blacksmith Institute also names sarin, lewisite, sulfur mustard, hydrogen cyanide, phosgene, lead, and organic chemicals among the worst pollutants.[12] Parts of Dzerzhinsk's water are contaminated with dioxins and phenol at levels that are reportedly seventeen million times the safe limit.[12]

Dzerzhinsk's environmental agency estimates that almost 300,000 tons of chemical waste were dumped in the city between 1930 and 1998.[citation needed] The Ecology Committee of the Russian State Duma also considers Dzerzhinsk among the top ten cities with disastrous ecological conditions.[13]

Dzerzhinsk's City Administration, however, asserts that the Blacksmith Institute report is false, stating, for example, that since sarin had never been produced in the city (seems to be credible according to Fedorov, p262, Table 7.1),[14] it cannot be one of the major pollutants. Also, according to the city's health department, the average life expectancy in the city was 64 years in 2006. Askhat Kayumkov, the head of the Dront public ecological organization, which was quoted as a source by the Blacksmith Institute, states that his organization never provided the Blacksmith Institute with data of any kind. Furthermore, he does not believe that Dzerzhinsk is one of the most polluted cities in Russia, much less in the whole world.[15]

In the end, however, despite the ecological situation in the city being at its best in the previous 80 years (mostly due to bankruptcies and closures of the polluting factories), several locations in the city pose a tangible ecological risk. These sites include the 110ha Igumnovo landfill, toxic waste burial grounds, and a so-called "White Sea", composed of disposed chemical wastes.[16] These sites are kept under constant ecological monitoring.[citation needed]

seems like a perfectly lovely place to live, i trust entirely the city administration of the town named for the first head of the soviet secret police

Sights

Shukhov Tower on the Oka River, the unique architectural construction—the 128-meter (420 ft) steel lattice hyperboloid tower built by Soviet engineer and scientist Vladimir Shukhov in 1929—is located near Dzerzhinsk on the left bank of the Oka River. There used to be two towers, but one was stolen for scrap metal in 2005.

go see shukhov tower, before the other one gets stolen for scrap metal

The Allmusic review by Lindsay Planer awarded the album 4 stars stating

"the real pleasure lies in the experience of hearing it"

Hedwig Kiesler (age 19), later American movie actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr, married Friedrich Mandl (age 32), businessman and Austrofascist, in the tiny chapel of this elaborate church on 10 August 1933. With over 200 prominent guests attending, Kiesler wore "a black-and-white print dress" and carried "a bouquet of white orchids."[4]

In 1974, Glick worked as Telly Savalas's personal assistant. Savalas was mean, so Glick embezzled $85,000 from him. He was caught on his way to Ecuador and served a four-month hard labor sentence in Mississippi.[3]

Margaret Rutherford

Rutherford's early life was overshadowed by tragedies involving both of her parents. Her father, journalist and poet William Rutherford Benn, married Florence Nicholson on 16 December 1882 in Wandsworth, South London. One month after the marriage, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was admitted to Bethnal House Lunatic Asylum. Released to travel under his family's supervision, he murdered his father, the Reverend Julius Benn, a Congregational Church minister, by bludgeoning him to death with a chamber pot, before slashing his own throat with a pocket knife at an inn in Matlock, Derbyshire on 4 March 1883.[1][2]

Following the inquest, William Benn was certified insane and removed to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Seven years later, on 26 July 1890, he was discharged from Broadmoor and reunited with his wife. He legally dropped his surname.

Margaret Taylor Rutherford, the only child of William and Florence, was born in 1892 in Balham, South London. Margaret's uncle, Sir John Benn, 1st Baronet, was a politician, and her first cousin once removed was the Labour politician Tony Benn. Hoping to start a new life far from the scene of their recent troubles, the Rutherfords emigrated to Madras, India, but Margaret was sent back to Britain when she was three years old to live with her aunt Bessie Nicholson in Wimbledon, South London, after her pregnant mother hanged herself from a tree.

Mike Flanagan would like to buy the option