The world of entertainment

The following text is originally lifted from the trivia section of The Jakarta Post dated Sunday, 24 February 2008.

~Compiled from various sources~

• Oscar Wilde served two years at hard labour after being found guilty of homosexuality.
• Dracula is the most filmed story of all time, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is the second and Oliver Twist is the third.
• Chocolate syrup was used for blood in the famous shower scene in the Hitchcock classic Psycho.
• The famous split-fingered Vulcan salute is actually intended to represent the first letter ("shin", pronounced "sheen") of the word "shalom". As a small boy, Leonard Nimoy observed his rabbi using it in a benediction and never forgot it; eventually he was able to add it to Star Trek lore.
• Spot, Data's cat on Star Trek: The Next Generation, was played by six different cats.
• The first word spoken by an ape in the movie Planet of the Apes was "Smile".
• Of the six men who made up the Three Stooges, three of them were real brothers (Moe, Curly and Shemp).
• More than 150 spiders were used in the laboratory scene in the Spiderman movie. An assistant-auditioned spider actors, picking the ones with the most predictable behaviour, as the Humane Society looked out for their welfare.
• Per several sources, Rose Wilder Lane worked as a ghostwriter much of the Little House series attributed to her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder. Rose also worked as a journalist, travelling throughout the world, and wrote the first biographies of Henry Ford, Charlie Chaplin and Jack London.
• Margaret Mitchell, who wrote Gone With the Wind, never wrote a book before that, and never wrote a book after that. Her original title for the book was Tomorrow is Another Day, her publisher changed it to Gone With the Wind. The publisher also changed the heroine's name from Pansy O'Hara to Scarlett O'Hara.
• 101 Dalmatians and Peter Pan are the only two Disney cartoon features with both parents that are present and don't die throughout the movie.
• Mystery writer Agatha Christie acquired her extensive knowledge of poisons while working in a hospital dispensary during World War 1.
• Poet/writer Edgar Allan Poe was expelled from West Point, the US Military Academy, because he showed up for a parade in his birthday suit.
• Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the first American to have plumbing installed in his house in 1840.
• Rudyard Kipling would only write when he had black ink in his pen.
• Shakespeare referred (in Love's Labour Lost, Act 5 Scene 1) to a game called "flap-dragon", in which the players snatched raisins from a dish of burning brandy and extinguished them in their mouths before eating them.
• Mark Twain referred to the accordion as the "stomach Steinway".
• Playwright William Wells Brown was the first black American to write a play in the United States. Escape, or A Leap for Freedom, was written in 1858.
• Mozart once composed a piano piece that required a player to use two hands and a nose in order to hit all the correct notes.
• Only one person walked with Mozart's coffin from the church to the cemetery for its burial in an unmarked pauper's grave.
• The French philosopher Voltaire owned 80 canes. His contemporary, Jean Jacques Rousseau, owned 40.
• The famous 19th-century bullfighter Lagarijo, born Rafael Molina, killed 4,867 bulls.
• In 1910, magician Harry Houdini purchased a Voisin biplane in Germany. He had the plane dismantled and shipped to Australia, where he planned an extended tour. His plane was the first flown to Australia, and he was the first to pilot a plane there. Interestingly, he taught himself how to drive a car during that time, so that he could get out to the airfield. Houdini abandoned the plane and coincidentally, also never drove again.