It’s Day II of Quiz Week!! (the week so exciting one exclamation point isn’t enough), and we’ve got a new one for you: The Movie Timeline Quiz, from David Israel. How well do you know classics like When Harry Met Sally… or The Wizard of Oz. Have a go it. And be sure to come back and let us know how you did in the comments below.

If you haven’t been paying attention to QuizWeek!! it’s not too late to catch up. Here’s the Monday recap. Just click on any of the links below to play.

Reference Books

Get ready for some serious volume control as we introduce you to the legends behind the Encyclopedia, the Dictionary, and the Thesaurus.

The Encyclopedia

“Encyclopedia” is a strange word. It goes back to Greek for “the things of boys/children in a circle,” which makes about as much sense to us as it does to you. The first encyclopedia actually predates the word itself – it was written in 1270 B.C.E. in Syria – and the concept seems to have also occurred to the Romans; Pliny the Elder was renowned for attempting to compress all the scientific knowledge of his time into 37 volumes. Much later, in 1408 during the Ming Dynasty in China, the Emperor Yongle oversaw the writing of one of the largest encyclopedias in history, at 11,000 volumes and 370 million characters, all handwritten. (Only about 400 of the volumes still exist.) But the idea of an encyclopedia doesn’t seem to have translated to English until 1768, when three Scots started setting down the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, one pamphlet at a time. It’s not even remotely recognizable as the encyclopedia we have today. Horse diseases got 39 pages, and the editors also made a point of calculating the number of species on Noah’s ark (177). The word “woman,” on the other hand, got just four words: “the female of man.”

Samuel Johnson and the Dictionary of the English Language

When Johnson published his seminal work in 1755, it wasn’t just a dictionary – it was the dictionary, and it pretty much held on to the title until well over 100 years later, when the Oxford English Dictionary finally overtook it (see below). A few English dictionaries had been published before, but none was nearly as comprehensive. Nor did any use quotations to illustrate how the words should be used. Of course, during the nine long years he spent writing it, Johnson didn’t necessarily have any way of knowing how important his dictionary would turn out to be. Certainly, no one else seemed to know either. The only patronage Johnson could get for the book was the measly sum of ten pounds from one Lord Chesterfield, who realized his mistake only when he saw early drafts of the finished work. Trying to make up for slighting Johnson (and perhaps also trying to get future editions of the book dedicated to himself, as they would have been had he supplied more money in the first place), Chesterfield wrote several glowing reviews of the dictionary in popular magazines of the time. Johnson was not amused and wrote the Lord a nasty note, containing several chestnuts includ-ing the famous line, “Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a Man struggling for Life in the water and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help?” Zing!

Webster, Roget and more all after the jump…

(more…)

Waverly Hills Sanatorium has been a TB hospital, a nursing home, a failed religious monument, and now a paranormal investigation site.

Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Louisville, Kentucky opened in 1910 to treat tuberculosis patients. In 1911, the new City Hospital relocated all of their TB cases to Waverly Hills, which had erected tents on the grounds to accomodate the overflow. Buildings were added to the institution in 1912, 1916, and 1926. A dedicated staff worked with thousands of TB patients, often contracting the disease themselves. After World War II, the need for a TB sanatorium waned until the hospital closed in 1961.

Estimates vary, and records have been destroyed, but there may have been as many as 64,000 deaths at Waverly Sanatorium. Tuberculosis, also known as consumption, or “the white plague”, had a high mortality rate before streptomycin was introduced as a treatment in 1943. The most common treatment at the time was sunlight, fresh air, and nutritious food. Surgical intervention, including removal of ribs and/or parts of the lungs, was reserved for patients close to death. However, many people owe their lives to the care they received at Waverly Hills.

More Waverly Hills haunted history, after the jump.
(more…)

It’s time for another whimsical Tuesday Turnip search wherein I type a random phrase and we see what kind of interesting factoids “turn-up.”

Today I typed in “the number of blogs” unearthing the following stats from a few different sites. [Most of these numbers date back to April 2007]:

• There are 70 million weblogs on the web
• There are about 120,000 new weblogs created each day, or 1.4 new blogs every second
• There are 3000-7000 new splogs (fake, or spam blogs) created every day
• Bloggers create 1.5 million posts per day, or 17 posts per second
• Japanese is the #1 blogging language at 37%; English is second at 33%; Chinese third at 8% and Italian fourth at 3%
• Farsi a newcomer in the top 10 at 1%
• One interesting item to note in April 2007, the number of blogs in the top 100 most popular sites has risen substantially. During Q3 2006 there were only 12 blogs in the Top 100 most popular sites.
• In Q4, however, there were 22 blogs on the list — further evidence of the continuing maturation of the Blogosphere. Blogs continue to become more and more viable news and information outlets. For instance, information not shown in our data but revealed in our own user testing in Q1 2007 indicates that the audience is less and less likely to distinguish a blog from, say, nytimes.com — for a growing base of users, these are all sites for news, information, entertainment, gossip, etc.

Night Of The Killer Lamp: 23 Ridiculous Horror-Movie Adversaries. A vending machine! A bed! Rabbits! The horror of it all!

Frogs and toads: sheer, untold awesomeness. Anurans show more diversity than I ever imagined, but they’re still funny.

Crazy game-winning football play. Can you count the lateral passes?

WikiPediaVision is a visualization of edits to the English Wikipedia, almost the same time as they happen. I am almost ashamed to admit how much time I spent watching this.

How the Hell’s Angels conquered Canada. A violent American export you probably weren’t aware of.

Quiz Week!! continues with a graduate-level Elvis exam. This installment comes from a past issue of mental_floss magazine, and it’s really, really hard. I’m not sure Lisa Marie would break 60%. But if you’re an Elvis aficionado, test your knowledge of the King’s co-stars.

Take the quiz: All the King’s Co-stars.

And if you’re not an Elvis fan, we’ve got plenty of other quizzes for your amusement.

Every weekday until Halloween, I’ll be offering up trivia treats about sweets you’re likely to encounter on October 31st. Today we’re giving away facts about M&M’s.

1) M&M’s stands for Mars & Murrie’s, after founders Forrest Mars, Sr., and Bruce Murrie – son of Hershey executive William Murrie. (The younger Murrie would eventually quit the company in frustration; it would seem Mars only needed Bruce for his family connections.)

2) Company legend goes like this: During the Spanish Civil War, Forrest Mars, Sr., encountered soldiers who were keeping their energy up by eating bits of chocolate encased in sugar. The sugar casing stopped it from melting (melts in your mouth, not in your hand, you know).
(more…)

Halloween is nearly upon us… and there’s no better time to take a look at one of the most famous horror stories in literary history: Frankenstein!

In this two-part article, we’ll discover some truths (and dispel some myths) about Dr. Frankenstein and The Monster. Tomorrow, in Part II, we’ll focus on Mary Shelley’s novel. Today, everything else!

ON FILM:

Q: When was the Frankenstein story first made into a film?

A: Way back in 1910, when the Thomas Edison Company produced a one-reel film simply titled Frankenstein. The original negative was apparently destroyed in a fire in 1914, and the movie was thought to be forever lost. More than 60 years later, Wisconsin film collector Al Dettlaff discovered that his archives included a nitrate print of the rare movie.

And here it is.

Honestly, this film has it all. Suspense, special effects, overacting… and this was 1910! Nearly a century later, how far has Hollywood really come?

Q: Did Thomas Edison himself produce, direct, or have other involvement in the film?

A: No, other than being owner of the company that made it. Frankenstein was filmed at Edison Studios in the Bronx, New York.

Q: Which horror movie legend played The Monster: Lon Chaney Jr., Boris Karloff, or Bela Lugosi?

A: The answer is “yes.” Karloff played the character in the famous 1931 film Frankenstein, while Chaney took the role for The Ghost of Frankenstein and Lugosi played it in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.

Q: Who played Victor Frankenstein and Igor in the classic 1931 film?

A: Nobody. Those characters didn’t exist in that film. The doctor’s name was Henry Frankenstein (although he’s never referred to as “doctor”), and his assistant was Fritz. Victor Moritz was the name of the doctor’s friend (who seemed much more interested in Elizabeth than Henry).

Q: So when did Igor come about?

A: Ygor, as he’s properly known, first appeared in the 1939 sequel Son of Frankenstein.

Beatles references, Blackenstein, Playgirl magazine and why everyone was scared of Franken Berry cereal, all after the jump…

(more…)

Growing up, a trip to the library was usually doomed to be frustrating because I could never decide which books to check out; hence (and with Sunday School visions of King Solomon’s, er, radical problem-solving techniques still in my head), I removed any agency I had in the matter & plucked books at random, careful to avoid reading the spines–I even carried this contrivance all the way to the check-out, staring at my nail beds while the books were swiped, bagged, and shoved my way. I’d finally allow myself to look at them when I was safely outside the library and could revel in the unique pleasures of the grab bag–somber but resigned to find a CAD manual or two, and elated whenever I discovered some author it might have otherwise taken me another decade of connecting-the-literary-dots to discover.

It’s in this same vein of library hijinks that I’d like to dedicate this week to a kind of alternative (well, is there any other kind…?) divination: I’m going to go into a different bookstore everyday, locate the largest dictionary present, and select a word. As in: close my eyes, flip, and point–a game as old as time, and also perhaps indebted to David’s Tuesday Turnip. I’m not endorsing this as any kind of mental_floss prophecy–it’s just something different. I’m not promising that the selected word is going to be particularly interesting, humorous, or obscure, but I will be honest in posting my first selection, and if there’s a way in which it applies to your day, please share. And if it doesn’t speak to your day, then feel free to relate how it applies to your life experiences or beyond; in general, just have fun & free associate in the comments to your heart’s content or until this post slides off the page…

THE BOOKSTORE: Housing Works, NYC

THE DICTIONARY: Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, 1986

THE WORD: “showmanship”

We’ve got 100 years of coins on display, and we’re guessing you can’t spot the real ones from the fakes. Test your aptitude for change right here with our brand-new coin quiz. Oh, and be sure to post your scores in the comments below!