Uninteresting trivial facts, add yours

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Dr. Frankenstein supposedly lived near the Bavarian town Ingolstadt.

Robert Deniro once played Frankenstein.

Talk about miscasting!

May I Add?

When he played Dracula in the self-titled film Dracula the ironic thing was that he would faint at the site of blood.

Tom Hanks is a descendant to Abraham Lincoln.

I would have to disagree. He played the monster, not the Doctor, and was brilliant. It's a version not seen very much, very close to the original story, and very well acted. There's one scene near the end, where the monster has kidnapped the doctor and is berating him. To just think about it is chilling.

The first film adaptation of the tale, Frankenstein, was done by Edison Studios in 1910, written and directed by J. Searle Dawley, with Augustus Phillips as Frankenstein, Mary Fuller as Elizabeth, and Charles Ogle as the Monster. The brief (16 min.) story has Frankenstein chemically create his creature in a vat. The monster haunts the scientist until Frankenstein's wedding night, when true love causes the creature to vanish. For many years this film was believed lost until a collector announced in 1980 that he had acquired a print in the 1950s and had been unaware of its rarity.

In his later years, Lugosi took any acting job that came along. One in particular left him bitter. He was offered the lead in what looked like a dreadful zombie movie. He worked for $500 in the movie, and was convinced it would quietly flop. Instead it was a hit, and made the producers a lot of money, which he could have had a part of, instead of working for the flat fee. The name of the movie is "White Zombie."

Ooopps. Mea Culpa, trivia fans. White Zombie came early in Lugosi's career, so maybe it was the fact that he wasn't used to the studio system, and took the job cheap.

Or something.

The commercialization of Halloween in America did not begin until the 20th century, beginning perhaps with Halloween postcards, which were most popular between 1905 and 1915, and featured hundreds of different designs. Dennison Manufacturing Company, which published its first Hallowe'en catalog in 1909, and the Beistle Company were pioneers in commercially made Halloween decorations, particularly die-cut paper items. German manufacturers specialized in Halloween figurines that were exported to America in the period between the two world wars.

There is little primary documentation of masking or costuming on Halloween in America, or elsewhere, before 1900. Mass-produced Halloween costumes did not appear in stores until the 1950s, when trick-or-treating became a fixture of the holiday, although commercially made masks were available earlier.

A mole flea of record size - a quarter of an inch - was once removed from a pygmy shrew, Britain's smallest mammal. A parasite of equivalent dimensions crawling over a man and sucking his blood would be the size of a rat.

Yummy...

Peter Lorre was Austrian by birth. It was the Nazi regime that forced the Jewish Lorre to flee to London where he played a charming villain in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much. When he arrived in Great Britain, his first meeting was with Hitchcock and by smiling and laughing as Hitchcock talked, the director was unaware that Lorre had a limited command of the English language. During the filming of The Man Who Knew Too Much, Lorre learned much of his part phonetically.

(Insert Lorre's laugh,"uh,haahh".)

Bears quite possibly have the bets sense of smell in the animal kingdom with Polar bears having the best scenting abilities out of all the bears.

Woodrow Wilson suffered from tension headache and took large doses of a painkiller called phenacetin, a precursor to paracetamol/acetaminophen. This caused damage to his kidneys, so that his blood pressure rose, which finally led to his stroke in 1919.

TNT, trinitrotoluene and TNP, trinitrophenol or picric acid, are very similar in their formulas, though TNP is 20% stronger in performance and can be made out of sulfuric acid, salpeter and aspirin(!)(real aspirin, acetyl salicylic acid)), while TNT must be made through tripple nitration of toluene with different concentrations and ratios of sulfuric and nitric acid at different temperatures. Picric acid is an intense yellowish acid, which was first used as a colouring. The French chemist Turpin showed in 1885 that it could be detonated with a proper blasting cap.

TNP forms unstable salts, picrates, with metals though, and is therefore not more in use in military devices. Potassium picrate has been used in whistle mixes in fireworks.

...And Nicholas Cage is Francis Ford Coppola's nephew.

The blue whale is the biggest creature that has EVER lived. (according to fossil evidence thus far.)

Dynamite was originally made of nitroglycerin and a kind of silicone sand, that Alfred Nobel found in Germany. It had a brownish colour and was rolled to sticks. To size and shape, "nude" dynamite sticks, without paper round them, looked very much like human feces in shape and colour.

Modern dynamite is made of little or no nitroglycerin, but dinitroglycol, which is more stable, stronger in performance and a little less poisonous. No silicone sand is used, but other organic nitrates, which usually make it look like pink marzipan!