Thursday, October 22

It feels like Friday...

... but for reasons beyond my control, its not. Therefore I am left to make a list of 3 random things you never needed to know.



3) The Walt Disney Company does not own the copyrights to the music for Snow White or Pinocchio. Those first two films were made during a time when Disney didn't have money for his own studios so he traded the publishing rights of the songs to the recording company in exchange for their services. After seeing the killing the copyright owners were making by selling sheet music of "When You Wish Upon A Star," Walt wised up. Still, one would think that Disney could have scrapped together the money by now to buy the rights (after all they just spent $8 Billion buying Marvel), but apparently the owners aren't interested in selling. (Go figure). Over the years there have been several deals made that allow WDC to use the songs in conjunction with movie footage and in TV commercials.

2) One of my favorite literary facts is that Dickens is estimated to have created thirteen thousand characters - an astounding number – that’s always taken as evidence of his extraordinary energy and indefatigable imagination. Every now and again, though, you start to wonder whether it’s not some form of incontinence. For example, he introduces fourteen new characters between pages 209 and 214 of my Penguin edition of Great Expectations – fifteen if you count Mrs Pocket’s deceased father, who gets a couple of pages more or less to himself anyway. Do the Pockets have to have seven children? And two nurses? And two lodgers? And a quirky next-door neighbour? There’s something almost animal about this level of production – this is Dickens as seahorse, popping out tiny creatures apparently uncontrollably, and with very little effort. It’s not his best passage of writing, understandably, those six pages. Maybe someone should have taken him discreetly aside and told him what precautions were available for great novelists.


1) One fact I have found to be incredibly disturbing is that bubblegum is made out of plastic. I learned this from the TV show, How Its Made. Apparently the natural gum from trees they used to use was replaced long ago by modern science. So when you pop a piece of gum in your mouth you are really just chewing on a sugar coded piece of plastic that has been died pink. I don't know why this fact bothers me as much as it does. I chew on pens all day long and they aren't even covered in sugar. I guess I had just always associated bubblegum with candy, and therefore, a cousin of the food family. After all this time, to learn that its more like pen's long lost half cousin once removed is a bit of a blow.

4 comments:

JWebb said...

or the neice/nephew of a barrel of crude!

Jo said...

Wow, what an interesting post...!

I read somewhere that margarine is one molecule away from being plastic as well. It certainly tastes like it.

Does it feel like Friday yet? It is Friday. And it's payday too. Yay!

Have a fabulous weekend. :-)

Iota said...

I've just told my kids about the bubblegum thing. Something for them to think about... They think it's gross.

Katy said...

Iota - My daughter was watching that episode with me and had the same reaction. She hates gum now. :)