If you have any connections to Egyptology or mummies at all (work in a museum? Have an archaeologist ancestor?), be careful on Sunday. Sunday is the anniversary of the day King Tutankhamen’s tomb was opened, unleashing a powerful curse upon all who dared disturb his eternal slumber.

I mean, if you believe in stuff like that. Here are nine people who might make you believe, and one who should have been a direct recipient of Tut’s wrath but got off with nary a scratch. Now, like any good urban legend, the tale of Tut’s curse has expanded to epic proportions over the years. Some of these are probably exaggerated versions of what really happened… but that’s part of the fun, isn’t it?

1. Lord Carnarvon, the man who financed the excavation of King Tut’s tomb, was the first to succumb to the supposed curse. He accidentally tore a mosquito bite open while shaving and ended up dying of blood poisoning shortly thereafter. This occurred a few months after the tomb was opened and a mere six weeks after the press started reporting on the “Mummy’s Curse” that was thought to afflict anyone associated with disturbing the mummy. Legend has it that when he died, all of the lights in the house mysteriously went out.
2. Howard Carter, who discovered the existence of the tomb, gave a paperweight to a friend, Sir Bruce Ingham, as a gift. The paperweight, appropriately (or inappropriately, I suppose) consisted of a mummified hand wearing a bracelet that was supposedly inscribed with “Cursed be he who moves my body.” I’m sure “and severs my hand to use it as a trinket” was implied. Ingham house burned to the ground not long after receiving the gift, and when he tried to rebuilt, it was hit with a flood.

3. George Jay Gould was a wealthy financier who visited the tomb of Tutankhamen… and fell sick almost immediately afterward. He never really recovered and died of a high fever a few months later.

4. It’s said that Lord Carnarvon’s brother, Audrey Herbert, suffered from King Tut’s curse merely by being related to the financier. Herbert, having had no such problems before, became totally blind. It was mistakenly believed that his rotten, infected teeth were somehow interfering with his vision, and had every single tooth pulled from his head in an effort to regain his sight. Needless to say, it didn’t work. He did, however, die of blood poisoning as a result of the surgery, just five months after the death of his cursed brother.

5. Hugh Evelyn-White was so terrified of the curse that he killed himself before Tutankhamen could. Supposedly – I’ll tell you that I couldn’t find a super credible source to back this one up, so it’s possible that the story of his death has been embellished over the years. Evelyn-White was an archaeologist who helped during excavation. After seeing death sweep over his fellow crew members in 1923, Evelyn-White wrote “I have succumbed to a curse which forces me to disappear,” and hanged himself. One account says he wrote this in his own blood, but take it with a grain of salt.

6. American Egyptologist Aaron Ember was friends with many of the people who were present when the tomb was opened, including Lord Carnarvon. Ember died in 1926, when his house burned down – he could have exited safely, but was trying to save a book he had been working on: The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Spooky.

7. Richard Bethell, who was Howard Carter’s secretary and the first person behind Carter to enter the tomb, died in 1929. Seven years later seems like a stretch to include in the curse, but given that he apparently died of respiratory failure at the young age of 35 does make you wonder…

8. Proving that you didn’t have to be one of the excavators or financers to fall victim to the curse, Archibald Douglas Reed merely X-rayed Tut before he ended up in the Museum of Cairo. He got sick the next day and was dead three days later.

9. Another famous Egyptologist, James Henry Breasted, was working with Carter when the tomb was opened. Shortly thereafter, he allegedly returned home to find that his pet canary had been eaten by a cobra… and the cobra was still occupying the cage. Since the cobra is a symbol of the Egyptian monarchy – one that kings wore on their heads to represent protection – this was a pretty ominous sign. Breasted himself didn’t die until 1935, although it was immediately following a trip to Egypt.

10. Howard Carter himself? Perfectly fine. Never had a mysterious, inexplicable illness and his house never fell victim to any natural disasters. He died of cancer at the age of 64. If you ask me, I have a theory about this. Howard Carter loved archaeology and Egypt and would have been deeply respectful of his subjects. His tombstone even says, “May your spirit live, May you spend millions of years, You who love Thebes, Sitting with your face to the north wind, Your eyes beholding happiness.” So, if the curse is indeed true, I hypothesize that those who died did or said something to insult the memory of the mummy.

What do you think – is the curse something to be feared, or would you totally dismiss it if you had the opportunity to check out the tomb? Share your opinions in the comments. And have a good weekend!

Earlier this year, you proved you know the Clue characters as surely as if Mrs. White was your kindly old granny and Colonel Mustard was your eccentric uncle. But are you as sharp on the rooms Mr. Boddy may have been killed in? As with the characters quiz, we’re talking originals—no rooms from the revamped versions have been included. Good luck!

Take the Quiz: Name the 9 Clue Rooms

It was 19 years ago this week (can you believe it’s been that long?) that the Milli Vanilli lip-synching scandal came to a head – the duo were stripped of their Grammies after it was revealed that they didn’t sing a single note on the Girl You Know It’s True album. But they were hardly the first to pull one over on the music-minded: hoaxes and trickery have been going on since

1. Platinum Weird. It’s the greatest band that never existed. In 2004, Kara DioGuardi (yep, the American Idol judge) and Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics got together to write some songs for the Pussycat Dolls. Somehow, it resulted in songs that sounded like Fleetwood Mac. You can see how two wouldn’t exactly mesh. Instead of scrapping the whole thing, Interscope Records chairman Jimmy Iovine told them to forge ahead with what they were doing. This involved creating a band to go with the songs and a making a whole backstory about what the band did in the ‘70s and how they eventually collapsed. A bunch of artists were in on the joke as well, recording clips reminiscing about the greatness of Platinum Weird. Contributors included Ringo Starr, Mick Jagger, Stevie Nicks and Christina Aguilera. When Rock Legends, a Behind the Music-type show, appeared on VH1, the network came clean about the band’s origins (or lack thereof).

2. The Masked Marauders. Can you imagine a supergroup of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger? Rolling Stone editor Greil Marcus could, so he created it for a review. Except none of the real artists were actually involved, and the record wasn’t actually made. The review was hysterical, noting that Paul McCartney jammed with himself on the bass and piano simultaneously, and Bob Dylan had developed a killer bass voice which he displayed by singing “Duke of Earl.” People freaked out and the letters started rolling in – when would the album be released? So, naturally, an album was created. Impersonators were hired and The Masked Marauders LP was released in November of 1969. It spent 12 weeks on the charts and sold more than 100,000 copies. The public was let in on the joke (if they hadn’t already gotten it) when they bought the album – several references were made to the sham in the liner notes and in one of the songs.

3. Grunge speak. In 1992, The New York Times ran a piece about the proliferation of grunge music, and asked a Sub Pop Records sales rep if there was some grunge slang that they should know about. Irritated by the question and the attitude toward grunge (kind of like the Times was checking up on a remote tribe that the world didn’t know about), the sales rep made up a string of words off the top of her head, including “big bag of bloatation,” “cob nobbler,” “lamestain,” “swingin’ on the flippity-flop” and “wack slacks.” She said they meant, respectively, drunk, loser, uncool person, hanging out and ripped jeans. You can read the whole list (and the whole article) here (The Times got her record label wrong).

4. An Incomplete History of the Art of the Funerary Violin. According to this book, the funerary violin was an musical genre that was ousted by the Vatican in the mid-19th century and has rarely been spoken of since. It’s a work of fiction – there is no such thing as that particular genre – but it’s hard to categorize it as such, since it’s written like a dissertation on the subject. And the author is quick to defend his work, saying that it’s not necessarily a hoax, but that he intended to “expand the notion of musical composition to encompass the creation of an entire artistic genre, with its necessary accompanying history, mythology, philosophy, social function, etc.”

5. Adélaïde Concerto. No doubt if an undiscovered piece by Mozart suddenly turned up – especially a 10-year-old Mozart – it would cause great excitement in the musical world. And it did. Too bad the piece was actually written by Marius Casadesus. He even forged a title page that showed “Mozart” had dedicated the piece to Madame Adélaïde de France, King Louis XV’s daughter. It was suspected that Casadesus was behind the work for many years (he had claimed that he merely ‘edited’ it) but it wasn’t confirmed until he admitted it himself in 1977.

6. The Handel Concert and the J.C. Bach Concerto. Um, no wonder Marius Casadesus forged the Mozart piece – it ran in the family! His brother, Henri Casadesus, wrote these pieces and claimed they were by Handel and Bach (and there’s a third unconfirmed piece as well).

7. Leck mir den Arsch fein recht schön sauber. If someone told you that Mozart wrote a little ditty whose title translates to something like, “Lick (or Kiss) me in the ass fine well and clean,” I bet you would think they were putting you on. But it’s true. Mozart had a bawdy sense of humor. But it’s still part hoax – or part misunderstanding, perhaps. Although Mozart likely wrote the lyrics, scholars have uncovered that the tune itself was probably written by Wenzel Trnka.

I considered some of the more recent lip-synching incidents of late – Britney, of course, and Ashlee Simpson on SNL. But those girls didn’t hire someone else to do the singing for them entirely, so I decided they didn’t count. If you can remember another scandal of Milli Vanilli-like proportions, be sure to remind us of them in the comments!

Everyone knows the asterisk, the pound sign and the “at” symbol, but what about their lesser-known cousins? See how well you fare when you try to match up the obscure and semi-obscure punctuation marks with their names.

Take the Quiz: “$#@!”

I don’t know about you, but I’m super sick of tabloids combining the names of celeb couples to create a new word, like Brangelina (succinct, isn’t it?) and TomKat. Of course, these are some of the most well-known celebrity pairings. There are some out there that might surprise you – past and present. And if you know of any other somewhat obscure couplings, be sure to let us know in the comments!

1. Carrie Fisher and Paul Simon. Perhaps this is common knowledge to some, but it quite surprised me when I learned about it. They were married for just a year from 1983 to 1984 after Simon proposed to her after a Yankees game. Even after the divorce, they continued to see each other for a while and she is referenced in several of his songs. Afterward, she got engaged to Dan Aykroyd, who proposed on the set of The Blues Brothers. They called it off when she got back together with Paul Simon.
2. John Malkovich and Glenne Headly. You may not know Headly by name, but you no doubt know her – she was Tess Trueheart in Dick Tracy, Janet Colgate in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Iris Holland in Mr. Holland’s Opus. The two of them met in college, where she introduced him to acting – and Gary Sinise. Sinise and Malkovich helped form the Steppenwolf Theatre Company together, which Headly also joined. They (John and Glenne, not John and Gary) were married from 1982-1988 and split up when Malkovich had an affair with Michelle Pfeiffer on the set of Dangerous Liaisons. To which I say, really?!

3. Elisabeth Moss and Fred Armisen. Fred Armisen you probably know from Saturday Night Live; Elizabeth Moss plays Peggy Olsen on Mad Men. This is a couple I’m both surprised and delighted by. The two actually met on SNL when Jon Hamm (Don Draper) hosted the show and Moss showed up for a skit.

4. Michael Emerson and Carrie Preston. This is another couple whose names you may not know but whose characters are probably in your frame of reference. Emerson plays Ben Linus on Lost (and, incidentally, is from Iowa) and Preston plays the delightfully redneck waitress Arlene on True Blood. They met in a stage production of Hamlet. Lost fans can catch a glimpse of her on the show in a bit of stunt casting – she’s briefly shown as Emily Linus, Ben’s mother (slightly weird).

5. Dennis Hopper and Michelle Phillips. Dennis Hopper is currently on his fifth marriage, but his union with Michelle Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas has the distinction of being the shortest – eight days. Phillips said they were the happiest eight days of her life. “Seven of those days were pretty good,” Hopper countered. “The eighth day was the bad one.”

6. Janet Jackson and James DeBarge. James DeBarge of the ‘80s family singing group DeBarge, of course. “Rhythm of the Night”? The two were childhood friends and eloped rather suddenly in 1984. The marriage was annulled in 1985.

7. Martin Scorsese and Isabella Rossellini. Scorsese, also on marriage #5, was married to actress and model Rossellini from 1979-1982. But there were no hard feelings about the divorce, according to Rossellini: “The mentality was you married an interesting man, because an interesting man would provide you with an interesting life. Marty, for sure, is the perfect husband for that. He’s an absolute genius. Fantastic mind. Great sense of humor, great sense of adventure. You could live just as Marty’s wife and have a fantastic life. But, I was too naive and old-fashioned for Marty as a wife. I wasn’t used to the roughness of American lifestyle. I wasn’t used to street life, to rock ‘n’ roll. I was the naive girl from Europe, so it couldn’t have lasted.”

8. Sam Elliott and Katherine Ross. These movie veterans have been married since 1984. The two of them were actually in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid together but never met on the set. Instead, they met nearly 10 years later on the set of the film The Legacy. Katherine has kept a low profile in the movie industry for a while, but she starred in Butch Cassidy, The Graduate and The Stepford Wives, among other things. Elliott has been in every western made since 1969 (OK, I may be exaggerating), and most recently, The Golden Compass and Ghost Rider.

9. Michael C. Hall and Jennifer Carpenter. They’re not really brother and sister, they just play them on T.V. The two met playing siblings Dexter and Debra Morgan on Dexter.

10. Rob Lowe and Melissa Gilbert. This was in the ‘80s – the bad boy and the girl from Little House, what could have been better? But it was bound to go awry, and it did. This relationship was a mess. The two started dating after they met at a red light. They dated until 1984, which is when Lowe filmed The Hotel New Hampshire and had an affair with Nastassja Kinski. Gilbert found out and retaliated by cheating on him with his best friend, John Cusack. The crazy kids worked things out, but then Lowe started dating Princess Stephanie of Monaco and dumped Gilbert… only to propose to her the following year. Before they could get married, Gilbert announced she was pregnant and Lowe dumped her again. She miscarried two days later.

So there you have it – some you may have known about even though they’re under the radar, and some that should have totally shocked you (Carrie Fisher and Dan Aykroyd, I just can’t get over that one. I don’t know why). Let us know which ones you were surprised by – and share any I left out – in the comments!

It’s Friday the 13th again! Anyone see any black cats? Walk under any ladders? I don’t really subscribe to the theory that Friday the 13th is unluckier than any other day, but superstitious people may have good reason to stay in bed on days like today. Here are 10 reasons the number 13 is unlucky.

1. There were 13 people at the Last Supper. It’s said that Judas Iscariot – the one who betrayed Jesus – was the 13th man to take his place at the table.
2. Similarly, there’s a Norse legend that has 12 gods sitting down to a banquet when the 13th (uninvited) god, Loki, showed up. Loki killed one of the other gods, which led to events that eventually resulted in Ragnarök – the death of a bunch of gods, a slew of natural disasters, and the eradication of everything on earth save for two human survivors. There’s a lot more to the story than that, but you get the general idea.

3. Traditionally there used to be 13 steps leading up the gallows. There’s also a legend that a hangman’s noose traditionally contained 13 turns, but it’s actually more like eight.

4. Apollo 13 is the only unsuccessful moon mission (intended to get men on the moon, anyway) thus far. An oxygen tank exploded and the survival of the astronauts on board was pretty touch-and-go for several days, but they did all come home safely in the end (but you already knew that).

5. There was a mass arrest and execution of the Knights Templar on Friday, October 13, 1307.

6. According to Mr. Krabs on Spongebob Squarepants, there are 13 dirty words. Squidward must be a George Carlin fan, because he responded with “I thought there were only seven?” “Not if you’re a sailor,” Mr. Krabs replied.

7. Although a “coven” is now just considered to be a group of witches (or vampires, if you’re into a certain young adult series about vampires), it was once believed that a coven was made up of exactly 13 members.

8. There’s an old superstition that says if you have 13 letters in your name, you’re bound to have the “devil’s luck.” Silly, yes, but slightly more convincing when you consider that Charles Manson, Jack the Ripper, Jeffrey Dahmer, Theodore Bundy and Albert De Salvo all contain 13 letters (I know, I know, what about their middle names?).
9. Kids officially become teenagers at the age of 13, and we all know that’s a scary phase.

10. In numerology, the number 12 is considered to be the representation of perfection and completion. So it stands to reason that trying to improve upon perfection by adding one is a very bad idea indeed – your greed will be rewarded with bad luck.

And here’s a bonus fact for you today. In the late 1800s existed a group called The Thirteen Club. Their purpose was to debunk the legend that 13 people at a table would result in the death of one of them within a year. They met on the 13th of the month and had dinner 13 people to a table, and to make matters worse, they purposely spilled salt on the table without throwing it over their shoulders. The horror! They also fined members who showed up late – 13 cents, of course. Members of the 13 Club included five U.S. presidents – Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt and Chester A. Arthur. I’m not sure if it’s worth noting that two of these presidents were shot – one fatally, of course – but I’ll mention it anyway. And, if you’re keeping track, Chester A. Arthur only became president because he was vice when Garfield was assassinated.

Be careful this evening, _flossers! If you find yourself at dinner this evening and notice that there’s a baker’s dozen of you at the table, keep your eyes peeled for assassins. And for goodness’ sake, don’t knock the salt shaker over.