Month: October 2016

Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, illustrator Terry Gilliam, and director Ian MacNaughton joined forces to create Monty Python’s Flying Circus, a show that quickly became one of television’s most influential comedy series after making its premiere on October 5, 1969—and remains so to this day, nearly 50 years later.

1. IT WAS INFLUENCED BY SPIKE MILLIGAN.

Spike Milligan created The Goon Show (a favorite of The Beatles), a surrealistic radio program starring himself, Harry Secombe, and Peter Sellers before Milligan moved to television with Q… (1969-1982). The first series, Q5, debuted less than a year before Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and made quite an impact.

“Terry Jones and I adored the Q… shows,” Michael Palin said. “They were filled with surrealism and invention, and [Milligan] took huge risks … When it came to Python, Terry [Jones] and I were so impressed that we looked for the name of the director on the end credits and hired him. That’s how we met Ian MacNaughton.”

2. THERE WERE MANY POTENTIAL TITLES.

A BBC executive originally wanted to name the series Baron von Took’s Flying Circus as a nod to Barry Took, the network’s comedy adviser, who was credited with bringing the Pythons and BBC together. He was also the warm-up comic for the studio audience before the first night of filming. But there were plenty of other considerations for the title, including Owl Stretching Time; Bunn, Wackett, Buzzard, Stubble and Boot; Whither Canada?; Ow! It’s Colin Plint; A Horse, a Spoon, and a Bucket; The Toad Elevating Moment; and The Algy Banging Hour. The BBC, in a state of agitation, was keen on “Flying Circus,” and the troupe added “Monty Python.”

3. THE OPENING THEME WAS JOHN PHILIP SOUSA’S “THE LIBERTY BELL.”

The Pythons chose John Philip Sousa’s “The Liberty Bell” (as played by the Band of the Grenadier Guards) as their theme song, largely for financial reasons: Since it was in the public domain, it was free.

4. THE GIANT FOOT IN THE OPENING CREDITS BELONGS TO CUPID.

The giant foot seen in the show’s opening credits belongs to Cupid, and comes from Bronzino’s painting “An Allegory with Venus and Cupid.” According to The National Gallery, the painting dates back to “about 1545” and was presented to King Francis I of France as a gift. Terry Gilliam saw the painting at The National Gallery in 1969 while searching for some Flying Circus inspiration.

5. IT WAS ALMOST CANCELLED AFTER ONE EPISODE.

According to some unearthed internal memos, BBC1 controller Paul Fox said the troupe went “over the edge of what was acceptable.” Head of arts features Stephen Heast said they “wallowed in the sadism of their humor.” Entertainment chief Bill Cotton thought Monty Python “seemed to have some sort of death wish.” Despite those thoughts, and low audience ratings, the show managed to hang on for three and a half seasons—for 45 total episodes—through 1974.

6. THE PARROT SKETCH WAS ORIGINALLY WITH A CUSTOMER AND A CAR SALESMAN.

Cleese and Chapman penned How to Irritate People, a sketch special which also starred Michael Palin that aired in the United States in January 1969. What would become the “Dead Parrot” sketch originally had Chapman complaining that the car he had just purchased from Palin was literally falling apart, with Palin consistently denying the glaring, mounting evidence. When writing for the first season of Flying Circus, Cleese and Chapman thought about reviving the basic idea for the sketch, but improving it by giving it a different setting, and casting Cleese as the customer instead of Chapman.

7. THE PYTHONS WERE PAID ABOUT $200 PER EPISODE.

In that same aforementioned internal BBC memo, it was revealed that the Pythons were compensated £160 per episode, which would be about $208.78 today.

8. “AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT” CAME FROM REAL NEWS SHOWS.

When two news stories that had no relation to the other were presented back-to-back on BBC TV and radio broadcasts, the anchor would say “And now for something completely different.” That was no longer the case after Monty Python made it popular.

9. JOHN CLEESE GOT A DIRTY LOOK WHILE RESEARCHING THE CHEESE SHOP SKETCH.

“I always remember going into the local delicatessen with this notebook and just standing there writing down the names of all the cheeses in the cheese display cabinet,” Cleese recalled with a laugh. “One of the shop assistants watching me with a very suspicious look.” According to Cleese, he and Palin used almost all of the varieties he had scribbled down. Some, like “Venezuelan Beaver Cheese,” were invented.

10. CLEESE LEFT THE SERIES BEFORE ITS FOURTH AND FINAL SEASON.

Cleese, who had to be persuaded to continue co-writing and co-starring after its first batch of episodes, wanted to move on before the others did. “I wanted to be part of the group, I didn’t want to be married to them—because that’s what it felt like,” Cleese said. “I began to lose any kind of control over my life and I was not forceful enough in saying no.”

11. THE EPISODES WERE ALMOST TAPED OVER.

In 1971, Terry Jones was informed by the BBC that, as was standard penny-pinching procedure at the time, the network was about to erase all of the original Monty Python tapes. Gilliam purchased the videotapes before they were erased.

12. DALLAS WAS THE FIRST CITY TO SHOW IT IN AMERICA.

PBS station KERA-TV had the honor of being the first American city to broadcast the series, thanks to its first chief executive, Bob Wilson, who first saw the show through one of his reporters. It made its American debut on September 22, 1974, in the middle of their final season in England.

13. ABC WAS SUED FOR HEAVILY EDITING SOME EPISODES.

The American Broadcasting Company acquired the American rights to the six episodes of season four, which they wanted to run as two 90-minute, late-night specials. When the troupe saw how ABC put together the first special, they filed for an injunction against ABC running the second one. ABC had removed eight minutes of material from the three episodes, including all of the uses of the words “damn,” “hell,” and “naughty bits” as well as entire characters, and—worst of all—punchlines.

The Pythons sued the network, and Gilliam and Palin appeared in court in New York. The judge watched both versions, and laughed more at the original British cuts, but ruled in ABC’s favor anyway. By the time the U.S. Court of Appeals heard the case in December 1975, the second special had already aired. In a settlement, the rights to those episodes went back to the Pythons, who sold it to PBS.

14. THE SHOW HAS MADE ITS MARK IN THE COMPUTING WORLD.

When Guido van Rossum first implemented his programming language Python, he was reading published Flying Circus scripts.

It’s widely believed that unsolicited emails became known as “spam” thanks to the multi-user dungeon online community back in the 1980s. “Spam” was used to describe pointless data flooding. It was a reference to the classic Monty Python sketch (above).

Pocky sticks appeal to kids and grown-ups alike, but a classy version of the Japanese treat is being marketed exclusively at an older clientele. As RocketNews24 reports, snack manufacturer Glico plans to release a whiskey-flavored line of their beloved Pocky sticks later this month.

The boozy variety, dubbed Adult Amber (Otona no Kohaku in Japanese), looks like the traditional chocolate-covered pretzel stick. The dough has been flavored with malt extract reminiscent of fermented mash and dusted with fine salt that adds a layer of complexity. The final touch is a coating of bitter chocolate infused with a whisky aroma.

The product is designed to pair well with alcohol, and it even comes in a package that resembles a high-end liquor bottle. Adult Amber received its first launch last November before Glico’s inventory quickly ran dry. The snack sticks will once again be available in limited supply this time around (about 300,000 boxes in total) and will be sold exclusively through Amazon Japan starting October 25. The boxes can be preordered for $9.70, which should give snack-lovers ample time to plan the perfect booze and candy tasting menu for Halloween.

[h/t RocketNews24]

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Rats are up there with snakes and spiders when it comes scaring the pants off people. One glimpse of a beady-eyed, yellow-toothed rat scuttling across the basement floor or darting down a city sidewalk is enough to make most people scream. There is much to admire about rats (they are smart, surprisingly well-groomed, and they make excellent pets). But let’s face it: They are also the stuff of nightmares. These facts about the two kinds of rats that love to live around people—brown rats (a.k.a. Norway rats, Rattus norvegicus) and black rats (a.k.a. roof rats, R. rattus)—are drawn from the book Frightlopedia. They will fill you with terror, or awe, or perhaps both.

1 YOU CAN’T KEEP THEM OUT …

A rat can squeeze through a hole the size of a quarter, thanks to its collapsible skeleton. Its ribs are hinged at the spine and can fold down like an umbrella, which means that any hole that’s big enough for a rat’s head is big enough for the rest of him.

2. … NOT EVEN WITH A BRICK WALL.

Rats can chomp their way through thick wood, metal pipes, brick walls, and cement. Their front teeth are long—they grow about 5 inches every year—and also very sharp, with a nifty self-sharpening feature: The edges of the upper and lower teeth rub against each other, having the effect of a knife on a whetstone.

3. WHEN THEY BITE, THEY DON’T MESS AROUND.

Rats will usually only bite when cornered. But then they bite hard—very hard. Their jaws are built like an alligator’s and can exert as much as 7000 pounds per square inch—which means their teeth can easily slice down to human bone, as one biologist for New York State discovered when he picked up an errant lab rat with his hand. “It put its teeth straight through my index finger,” Stephen C. Frantz told Richard Conniff in his book Rats! The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. “The membrane over the bone is quite sensitive, and it was grinding its teeth back and forth. I get chills thinking about it.”

4. THEY ARE SUPERB ATHLETES.

The long claws on a rat’s feet allow it to scale brick or cement walls with Spider-man-like ease. Getting down isn’t a problem, either: A rat can fall 50 feet and land on its feet without injuries. Rats are also phenomenal jumpers; they can leap 2 feet in the air from a standing position. With a running start, rats add another foot to their leaps—which, according to Conniff, is equivalent to a person jumping on top of a garage. According to one study [PDF], rats can lift objects that weigh nearly a pound—more than the average rat’s body weight.

5. YES, THEY CAN SWIM UP YOUR TOILET.

Rats can swim for three days straight (in laboratory conditions), they can hold their breath underwater for up to three minutes, and they can perform their skeleton-collapsing trick while swimming. All of which means that, yes, they can paddle through sewer pipes, squeeze through your plumbing, and pop up in your toilet.

6. THEY’RE SEX MACHINES.

Rats leave rabbits in the dust when it comes to reproducing. “If they are not eating, rats are usually having sex,” writes Robert Sullivan in his delightful book Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants. During a single six-hour period of receptivity, a female rat may mate as many as 500 times, which helps explain how, according to Sullivan, a pair of rats can end up producing 15,000 descendants in one year and why they are the most common mammal in the world.

7. THEY COME IN SIZE XXL.

On average, the brown rat is about 16 inches long (including its tail) and weighs less than a pound. If a rat lives near a steady food source, like a dumpster, it can grow to be 20 inches long and weigh 2 pounds. But that’s tiny compared to the Bosavi woolly rat, which was discovered in 2009 by a BBC expedition to an extinct volcano in Papua New Guinea. The 32-inch-long beast weighed more than 3 pounds and showed no fear of humans. It’s thought to be one of the biggest in the world, and it’s a “true rat, the same kind you find in the city sewers,” mammalogist Kristofer Helgen told the BBC. Don’t worry about meeting it on the street, though: The rat, which is believed to belong to the genus Mallomys, lives only in the area of the volcano.

8. THEY MAY BE LAUGHING AT YOU.

Rats make high-pitched chirping sounds (especially when they’re being tickled by humans) that humans can’t hear, but which scientists think may be the equivalent of laughter.

9. THEY HAVE VERY SENSITIVE TASTE BUDS.

It’s not easy to poison a rat. The animals can detect infinitesimal amounts of poison in food—as little as one part per million. “That’s like being able to taste a teaspoonful of chocolate in 1302 gallons of milk,” Conniff writes. Rats are also cautious when eating unfamiliar foods; they’ll start by eating just a tiny bit to make sure they don’t get sick.

10. RATS PREFER THAT YOU DO NOT WASH YOUR FACE.

Occasionally, where there are heavy infestations, rats will bite people’s faces and hands at night while they sleep, drawn by food residue on their skin. That might be a good time to move to a new town because, once a rat bites you, the rat’s chances of biting another human go way up. It’s like how, after finding a new favorite food, you order it at every restaurant you visit. In 1945, Curt Richter, a biologist at Johns Hopkins University, fed human blood to captured rats [PDF] and concluded that “a strong craving for blood might explain why, once having bitten a person, the rats apparently are apt to bite another.”

11. RATS CAN SURVIVE NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS.

During the 1950s, roof rats living on Enewetak Atoll in the South Pacific confounded scientists by surviving atomic bomb testing. While the details are sketchy, it’s believed that early nuclear testing obliterated the Polynesian rat population, and that the atoll was then repopulated with a different species of rat that burrowed deep down to survive future testing.

Any Halloween lover knows that cobwebs are a staple in haunted houses. When spook-ifying your home, getting just the right dusting of spider webs is key; the only problem is that store-bought webs can be a real pain to put up. From unbagging them to stretching them out, getting a convincing cobweb going can be more trouble than it’s worth. Thankfully, there’s the Webcaster: a handy tool that turns hot glue sticks into beautifully creepy webs.

The device looks and works just like a normal glue gun. Simply load in the special glue stick, connect to an air compressor, and pull the trigger. There are two types to choose from: One attaches to an air-compressor and the other, cheaper option attaches to a shop vacuum. The gun’s sticks come in white, black, and orange. (They don’t come with the gun so you need to buy them separately.) Once you’re finished with your fancy collection of cobwebs, they can be easily cleaned off with a wet towel. 

[h/t Oddity Mall]