What Would Jane Austen Do?

1. Popeyes (the chicken franchise) was named after the character Popeye Doyle in The French Connection . 2. The Guinness Book of World Records was started over an argument about the fastest game bird in Europe . Duh--an unladen swallow. 3. The original author of the Guinness Book of World Records was assassinated by the IRA . 4. People still listen to heavy metal . 5. People from Newcastle-upon-Tyne are called Geordies . 6. Wikitravel is awesome. 7. Angelina Jolie's paternal uncle (Jon Voight's brother) wrote "Wild Thing." 8. The Black Panthers wanted "all black men exempt from military service ." 9. Rastafarians believe that Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie was the messiah . 10. James Thurber wrote children's books . Photo (apropos of nothing) via Flickr user Neato Coolville .

The triumphant return. 1. David Cassidy was Shirley Jones' real-life stepson . 2. Two ice creams to try: Wild Turkey-Walnut and Lemon . 3. Leonardo's last supper depicts Jesus and the apostles eating grilled eel with orange slices . 4. Robert Rauschenberg made an art car . 5. Teller (of Penn and Teller) started out doing magic at frat parties. He decided to work "silent" because it cut down on the heckling. 6. Looks like the Gap is turning things around (finally) . 7. The American Family Association website automatically replaces the word "gay" with "homosexual" in their news stories. Hilarity ensues . 8. John Adams thought Independence Day would be celebrated on July 2 . 9. Changes in the number of stars on the American flag go into effect on July 4 of the year following the admission of a new state . 10. The Prince of Wales had his Aston-Martin converted to run on bio-ethanol .

I found a clarification of something I listed in 10 Things a couple of weeks ago : The DJIA was created in 1896, not 1882 (which is when Dow Jones & Co. was formed). Charles Dow created his original index of 11 stocks in 1884, and almost all of them were railroads. General Electric was not among those 11 because it was formed by Thomas Edison in 1890. The DJIA was formed with 12 stocks, of which GE was one. It is in the index today, nearly 112 years later, though it was taken out and put back in twice at the turn of the 20th century. Source

Before-and-After Edition 1. Before she was in The Spice Girls, Victoria Beckham was a rich girl. Her dad is a millionaire. (Thanks, E! True Hollywood Story !) 2. Before Vita Sackville-West, gardening was considered a masculine hobby . 3. Before 1995 Hepatitis A was 500% more common than it is now . 4. Before Leona Helmsley was the Queen of Mean, she was a divorcée factory worker with mouths to feed . 5. Before he was a writer, William F. Buckley, Jr. was a spy . 6. Before she won an Academy Award, Marion Cotillard espoused a crackpot 9/11 conspiracy . 7. Before he was a bassist, Flea was a high school trumpet prodigy . 8. After an auto accident when he was 23, Stevie Wonder lost his sense of smell . 9. After he became famous, Andy Warhol bought all of his clothes at Brooks Brothers . 10. After having her twins, J.Lo doesn't want to be called "J.Lo" any more . Aww, Jenifromtheblock takes up so much room. image from Awful Plastic Surgery

1. Berthe Morisot was Fragonard's grand-niece . 2. Mirepoix was named after a French duke . 3. The doctor who identified SARS died from it . 4. General Electric is the only remaining of the 11 original Dow Jones Industrial Average stocks . 5. Somebody is keeping a blog called "What I Learned Today." Oh, it's on like Donkey Kong! 6. Leap Day is also called bissextile day . 7. David Lee Roth wrote a memoir . 8. California got its name from a sixteenth century Spanish novel . 9. Princess (now Queen) Elizabeth's first home as a married woman had only one full bathroom, which dated from the 1870s . 10. The Hell's Angels had plans to assassinate Mick Jagger in 1969 .

Picture via People 1. The Fug Girls wrote a book . Sorry, that's all my brain could manage this week. Fingers crossed for some awesome Fug tomorrow night!

1. Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl's mother wrote homemaking books . 2. Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same day . 3. St. Fiacre is the patron saint of gardeners and taxicabs . 4. Francoise Gilot married Jonas Salk after she split from Pablo Picasso. ( Pink magazine, not online). 5. Billy Joel's wife is a cookbook author. (And, OMG, you should see her closet.) ( Town & Country , not online) 6. The Valentine's Day Massacre remains an unsolved mystery . 7. "I did not have 3,000 pairs of shoes. I had 1,060." -- Imelda Marcos (also from Pink ). 8. In New York, clothing and shoes under $110 are not subject to sales tax . 9. Audrey Hepburn's singing was dubbed in My Fair Lady . 10. But Rex Harrison recorded his songs during the regular filming -- not in the studio beforehand .

1. There is a method to the madness of naming items at IKEA . 2. People who lose their sight sometimes have vivid hallucinations . 3. Robert Frost spent winters in Florida . 4. Lincoln Logs were invented by Frank Lloyd Wright's son, John . 5. Frank Woodruff Buckles is the last surviving American World War I veteran . 6. The Palace of Brussels features a mosaic composed entirely of beetles . 7. Some guy was planning a Super Bowl massacre . 8. Dwight Yoakum has his own line of chicken nuggets . 9. Kool-Aid has a line of tennis shoes out, complete with scented liners . 10. Jack Johnson recorded a song with the Black-Eyed Peas.

1. Chef MIMAL resides in the Midwest: look at the outlines of Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana and you'll see the chef in profile. (HT: Papi and Neogaf ) 2. Sesame Street has won 109 Emmys . 3. Nine-party coalitions are fragile . 4. The word robot is Czech . 5. Jackson Pollock studied under Thomas Hart Benton . 6. Congress paid $23,950 for the 6,000+ volumes in the Thomas Jefferson library in 1815 . 7. San Francisco used to be called Yerba Buena . 8. Sound waves can extinguish flames . 9. Scotty from Star Trek (James Doohan) was in the Normandy invasion on D-Day with the Royal Canadian Artillery. 10. Only the U.S. and the Philippines have commercial bail bondsmen . Image: UC-Denver

1. Jackie Robinson played himself in the movie The Jackie Robinson Story . 2. What a Sullivan Nod is. 3. Artist James Turell was a cameraman for Fiddler on the Roof . 4. Mauve was invented in 1856 . 5. The Von Trapp family emigrated to the United States and set up a lodge in Vermont . 6. People really do turn black when they have Bubonic plague . (For the love of God, do not click that link.) 7. Purple hibiscus are coming to a nursery near you . 8. What the LIBOR Index is . 9. Mr. Whipple (Dick Wilson) made over 500 commercials for Charmin . 10. Tide has a 44% share of the detergent market .

1. Bill Gates is stepping down from his position at Microsoft in July. 2. Prescott Bush, grandfather of the current President, was an early supporter of Planned Parenthood and the United Negro College Fund . 3. Christopher Columbus may have brought syphilis back to Europe from his travels in the New World . 4. Some of his contemporaries believed that Hitler had syphilis . 5. The Library of Congress has a huge archive of photos available on Flickr . 6. You can stage an effective protest with bouncy balls . 7. Until 2000 GPS intentionally broadcast errors to civilian systems as a security measure . 8. "Embodied cognition" is the element of thinking that is inextricably tied to certain types of fidgeting . 9. Linda Gray, a.k.a. Sue Ellen Ewing, was the leg model for the poster for The Graduate . 10. Most universities spend less than five percent of their endowments every year . Image via SDS Universe .

1. As struggling young actors, Robert Duvall and Dustin Hoffman were roommates. 2. They were pals with Gene Hackman . 3. The real-life wife of R2D2 (Kenny Baker) played an Ewok in Return of the Jedi . 4. Fernand Leger made a movie (you can catch it on YouTube ). 5. There is a museum dedicated to barbed wire . 6. Most birds have a poor sense of smell . 7. Woodstock is for sale . 8. The Supreme Court didn't have a permanent home until 1935 . 9. The UN has declared 2008 "International Year of the Potato." 10. Maybe it was supposed to be a rope , not a camel , through the eye of the needle .

1. The U.S. Office of Production Management prohibited the sale of new automobiles to civilians during World War II . 2. Albert Lamorisse, director of the film The Red Balloon , also invented the board game Risk . 3. There are sixteen paintings in the Dogs Playing Poker series by Cassius Coolidge . 4. The peace symbol turns fifty this year . 5. Six of the Food Network's top ten most-searched recipes last year were the creation of Paula Deen . 6. WD-40 dissolves cocaine . 7. Ed LaDou was the pioneer of the gourmet pizza . 8. Tina Brown asked Norman Mailer to write a letter on behalf of her green card application. He apparently obliged . 9. According to some, the living standard in the UK is set to surpass that in the US this year . 10. There is a cheap test available to see if you are a supertaster . image via Jordan's etsy shop .

1. Eartha Kitt wrote a book . 2. W.B. Yeats was a virgin until he was 31 . 3. Stalin was a great singer . 4. Rice University owned Yankee Stadium for almost 10 years . 5. Monosodium glutamate was developed to give umami taste to foods. 6. You can use NORAD to track Santa this Christmas Eve . 7. Blue Iris is Pantone's Color of the Year for 2008 . 8. You can bake cupcakes in jelly jars . 9. Some people harbor a parasite that makes them more likely to be eaten by cats . 10. Cooliris is the shizz .

1. Mary Edwards Walker was a feminist, physician, spy and abolitionist and the only woman to receive the Medal of Honor . 2. Neil Diamond wrote "Sweet Caroline" thinking of Caroline Kennedy . 3. Carolyne Roehm's real name is Jane Smith . 4. "We Can Work It Out" was only released as a single, never an original album track . 5. The Beatles catalogue is still not available in any online format. 6. As of November 2007, the Beatles' solo catalogues are available on iTunes, though . 7. Rube Foster was the first president of the Negro National League .* *Okay, I have to tell you how I learned this. I volunteered to judge the 3rd-5th grade History Fair at school. I was assigned to the third grade individual entries. The little girl who won was far and away the best entry I saw. I talked to her mother (an acquaintance of mine) after the event. She said that he daughter was REALLY into black history (a little surprising, since she's not black, but th...

1. At one point in Sweden, the highest marginal tax rate was 102% . 2. In the year 1000, Cordoba, Spain was the largest city in the world . 3. Sepia dye was originally derived from cuttlefish . 4. Slash's real name is Saul Hudson . 5. Kanye West's mother was an English professor . 6. Kanye West's father was a Black Panther . 7. Stella McCartney designed a one-legged pendant to mock her former stepmother . 8. Bill Watterson fought with Universal Press Syndicate for years to avoid merchandising Calvin and Hobbes . 9. Almost all Calvin and Hobbes merchandise ever sold was unauthorized . 10. In the early days of the Iran hostage crisis, the captors released all women and African-Americans from captivity .

1. Benjamin Franklin was in the crowd of spectators who watched the first humans in flight when the Montgolfier brothers launched their first manned hot air balloon . 2. Pompeii was a resort town. Okay, that's it for this week.

1. Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin, advocated "a good gulp of hot whiskey at bedtime—it's not very scientific, but it helps." (He was Scottish) 2. Nigella Lawson's mother was an heir to the Lyons Company which owned, among other things, Wimpy Bars (past) and Dunkin' Donuts (present) . 3. Eudora Welty was a photographer as well as an author . 4. I missed this before: Ryan Phillippe went out with Ashlee Simpson . But I guess we did already know that Ryan Phillippe has questionable taste. 5. Arthur Miller had a son with Down's Syndrome. ( Vanity Fair , September 2007, print only) 6. Zener cards are used to determine if a person has ESP . 7. 826 Boston, another Dave Eggers project in the vein of 826 Valencia and 826 NYC, will be fronted by a cryptozoology shop . 8. The metal part of a paintbrush is called a ferrule . 9. This American Life is looking for a web manager . 10. You can get blueprints of the Brady Bunch house online .

1. Raymond Chandler was a wealthy oil company executive who lost his job after the Crash of 1929 . 2. Zelda Fitzgerald was a better writer than I previously thought. 3. Alexandre Dumas' grandmother was an Afro-Caribbean slave . 4. The day that Freud met Jung, they talked for 13 hours straight . 5. Bugs Bunny is modeled on Groucho Marx . 6. Finland had Prohibition from 1919 to 1932 . 7. Russia had Prohibition from 1914 to 1925 . 8. Golda Meir changed her name from Golda Myerson when she became Foreign Minister of Israel in 1956 . 9. Henry VIII married Catherine Howard on the same day he had Thomas Cromwell executed . 10. Martin Luther King, Jr. was only 26 years old when he organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott .

1. Nero was a cross dresser . 2. He played the lyre, not a fiddle . I must have gotten really smart -- I was down to only two things I didn't know.