This informative post will be posted on Saturday along with my usual writing.  We can all appreciate some of the lesser known facts from around the world.

The term “paparazzi” comes from Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita.”  In the film, Marcello Mastroianni writes a gossip column, and Walter Santesso plays his coworker, a tabloid photographer whose name is Paparazzo.

Albert Einstein’s facial characteristics inspired the look of three popular film characters:  E.T. had Einstein’s eyes, Yoda had his forehead, and Emmett Brown in “Back to the Future” had his hair.

These facts have been discovered in I NEVER KNEW THAT by David Hoffman (2009).

This informative post will be posted on Saturday along with my usual writing.  We can all appreciate some of the lesser known facts from around the world.

Collarless sweaters that button down the front were named for the man who was fond of wearing them–James Thomas Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan.  In addition to starting a fashion trend, Brudenell led the famous Change of the Light Brigade in 1854, during the Crimean War.

“Wicked” author Gregory Maguire chose Elphaba as the name of the Wicked Witch of the West in tribute to “Oz” author L. Frank Baum.  The name is a phonetic take on Baum’s initials, L-F-B.

These facts have been discovered in I NEVER KNEW THAT by David Hoffman (2009).

This informative post will be posted on Saturday along with my usual writing.  We can all appreciate some of the lesser known facts from around the world.

Although often thought to be a contraction for the phrase “Swiss watch,” the name “Swatch” actually stems from “second watch” and the marketing campaign that introduced it as an inexpensive, casual, and disposable accessory.

The white-shingled house that Ari Gold lived in for the first four seasons of “Entourage” was, for nearly thirty years, the real-life residence of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson.

These facts have been discovered in I NEVER KNEW THAT by David Hoffman (2009).

This informative post will be posted on Saturday along with my usual writing.  We can all appreciate some of the lesser known facts from around the world.

The Emmy Award derives its name from the Immy–a slang term for the image orthicon, a tube that was used in television cameras until the 1960s.

Steve Martin honed his talent for crafting balloon animals, a staple of his early stand-up act, while working at Disneyland’s Main Street Magic Shop in the early 1960s.

These facts have been discovered in I NEVER KNEW THAT by David Hoffman (2009).

This informative post will be posted on Saturday along with my usual writing.  We can all appreciate some of the lesser known facts from around the world.

In the twelfth century, modern tennis was born when monks introduced a racquet into the handball game that they played against monastery walls.  The name came later, however, when French nobility latched onto the sport and their servants took to calling “tenez” (which translates to “hold on” or “take heed”) just before the ball was tossed into play.

The man who gave Jack Russell terriers their name was Reverend John “Jack” Russell, an English clergyman who bred dogs as a hobby.  Although he developed the eponymous fox terrier offshoot in the 1800s, the breed wasn’t recognized by the American Kennel Club until 1997.

These facts have been discovered in I NEVER KNEW THAT by David Hoffman (2009).

This informative post will be posted on Saturday along with my usual writing.  We can all appreciate some of the lesser known facts from around the world.

It takes approximately ninety minutes to hard-boil an ostrich egg.

In 1923, Frank Epperson was operating a lemonade stand at an amusement park in Oakland, California, when he set out to market a frozen drink-on-a-stick concoction he called the Eppsicle–a combination of his surname and the words “icicle.”  His kids, however, referred to their dad’s novelty treats as “Pop’s icles,” so when Epperson applied for a patent, he did so under the catchier name, Popsicle.

These facts have been discovered in I NEVER KNEW THAT by David Hoffman (2009).

This informative post will be posted on Saturday along with my usual writing.  We can all appreciate some of the lesser known facts from around the world.

Charles Rushmore was a young attorney sent from New York City to South Dakota in 1885 to check on mining titles in the Black Hills.  When he singled out one of the mountains and inquired about its name, his guide, William Challis, shot back that it did not have one, but suggested they could “just call the damn thing Rushmore.”

Before she found fame as an author and sex therapist, Dr. Ruth Westheimer was trained as a sniper in the Israeli army.

These facts have been discovered in I NEVER KNEW THAT by David Hoffman (2009).