Editor Ira is here this week to talk dinos and animation history!

One of the first indicators that I was fated to be a trivia professional came in second grade, when my teacher told us to make a list of all the dinosaurs we knew by name. By the time Mrs. Hogan called “pencils down,” my dino list was at least three times as long as anyone else’s, and still growing.

I couldn’t have been prouder, but this was also one of the first times I had to face a fundamental truth of being good at trivia: unless you’re in the company of other trivia nerds, nobody cares, not even a little bit.

Still, this exercise was a valuable illustration of the division between general and specialized knowledge, a fundamental element of writing trivia. My classmates were unimpressed that I could identify coelacanths (yes, I know they’re not technically dinosaurs) and titanosaurs because they had no earthly reason to value that knowledge. All they needed to know was the default roster of dinosaurs. In the 1980s, that included Tyrannosaurus rex, triceratops, stegosaurus, ankylosaurus, pterodactyls (yes, I know they’re also not technically dinosaurs), and, of course, brontosaurus.

While T. Rex was the flashiest and most popular of the ’80s dinosaurs, the brontosaurus was more like the default. When we heard the word “dinosaur,” these long-necked, long-tailed, quadripedal herbivores were the first things that popped into our heads. The appeal of the other top-tier dinosaurs was fairly obvious. They all had killer teeth, bad-ass horns and spikes, body armor, or wings. Compared to those dynamic beasts, brontosaurus was hopelessly basic. In the nomenclature of my rural Wisconsin upbringing, they were the Holstein cows of the dinosaur world.

So what made these large but otherwise un-flashy monsters the standard-bearer for dinosaurs? As with most things, pop culture had a lot to do with it. During the Great Dinosaur Rush of the late 1800s, bones belonging to sauropods like brontosaurus were some of the most plentiful paleontological finds. As the public’s fascination with these so-called “Bone Wars” grew, sauropods were among the most frequently assembled skeletons in museums, and thus among the most frequently depicted in the media.

(This period also spawned the first debates over what they should be called, “brontosaurus” or “apatosaurus.” Whether these are two distinct dinosaurs, two names for the same dinosaur, or one real and one nonexistent dinosaur is a complicated issue, sparked by paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh possibly contradicting or reduplicating some of his own discoveries. It was still a hotly debated topic when I was a juvenile dino enthusiast in the ’80s and it remains a point of contention to this day. Even though a 2015 study declared the independent existence of the brontosaurus, “apatosaurus” is probably the more demonstrably correct term. But “brontosaurus” is more fun to say, so that’s what I’m sticking with for the purposes of this article.)

The popularity of the brontosaurus grew along with the rise of new forms of mass media in the early 20th century. Dinosaurs were still a topic of public fascination. They made frequent appearances in early comic strips, a wildly popular genre of entertainment in the days before broadcast communication. That made them a natural subject when cartoonists and filmmakers began developing animation.

Winsor McCay was a pioneer in both fields. He broke through on the comics pages in 1904, launching both “Little Sammy Sneeze,” about a kid whose poorly timed sneezes wrought all manner of havoc, and “Dream of the Rarebit Fiend,” an anthology of nightmares brought on by eating cheesy toast. The kinetic physicality and surrealist landscapes of these strips instantly identified McCay as one of the true artistic visionaries of early comics, and his next big creation confirmed it beyond a doubt.

“Little Nemo in Slumberland” followed the nightly wonders and horrors that populated one little boy’s dreams. It’s a visually gorgeous strip that captured the public’s fancy and made Winsor McCay a star. In the 120 years since its debut, “Little Nemo” has spawned multiple reboots, a wide range of merchandise, several stage plays, an anime series, an opera, and even a Nintendo game. It was also likely the first comic ever to get adapted into an animated film, and here’s where we start veering back toward dinosaurs.

Beyond his considerable successes as a comic creator, Winsor McCay was keenly interested in the brand-new field of animation. In 1910, he assembled thousands of hand-drawn sketches on rice paper to create a 92-second-long film adaptation of “Little Nemo.” He’d been performing various feats of art as part of a vaudeville touring act for several years. McCay incorporated the new film into a stage show that saw him interacting with his own fictional characters, much to the crowds’ delight.

The show was a hit and McCay officially caught the animation bug. He painstakingly crafted 10 animated shorts over the next decade, including an exploration of mosquito motivations, a series of “Dream of the Rarebit Fiend” adaptations, and a dramatization of the sinking of the Lusitania. His biggest impact, however, came with 1914’s “Gertie the Dinosaur.”

McCay originally developed “Gertie” as another interactive stage show, but his boss William Randolph Hearst decided his cartoonist should be focused on cartooning and eventually banned him from performing. To keep the film feasible, McCay added a metatextual story about viewing a brontosaurus skeleton in a natural history museum with fellow cartooning legend George McManus. McCay bets McManus that he can bring the dinosaur back to life and sets to work drawing “10,000 cartoons.”

The result is Gertie, an extroverted brontosaurus who performs tricks for the audience in response to McCay’s onscreen commands. She dances, devours a tree, weeps when scolded, and gets in a fight with a mischievous mammoth. Despite her lack of speech and limited range of motion, she’s an immediately lovable and indelible character who embodies the wonder of early animation. The film was a hit with critics and audiences (Hearst’s performance ban ironically extended Gertie’s reach to moviegoers who wouldn’t have had access to McCay’s stage show), helping to cement dinosaurs in general and sauropods in particular as pop cultural touchstones.

Different takes on brontosaurus-like dinosaurs turned up in movie theaters as quickly as the industry came up with new ways to portray them. Thomas Edison’s production company put out a stop-motion dino comedy in 1917. Buster Keaton’s character used a clay-animation sauropod as a crow’s nest in 1923’s “The Three Ages.” A brontosaurus vs. T. Rex battle marked the climax of the 1925 sci-fi epic “The Lost World.”Felix the Cat and Betty Boop both tangled with sauropods in their early animated adventures. A crew of big-game poachers matched wits with a fog-obscured brontosaurus in the original 1933 “King Kong.”The age of dino-themed entertainment was upon us. It’s never really left since, as Hollywood’s determination to make audiences care about the “Jurassic World” franchise demonstrates.

“Gertie the Dinosaur” is now justly regarded as one of the most important works in the history of not just animation, but cinema as a whole. Walt Disney readily acknowledged McCay as a major inspiration, paying tribute to Gertie with the “Rite of Spring” section of 1940’s “Fantasia.” A 1955 episode of the TV program “Disneyland” featured McCay’s son Robert re-creating his father’s old stage show with Gertie, giving the film its first national exposure to a new audience of young viewers. And to this day, visitors to Disney’s Hollywood Studios can always cool off with a stop at Dinosaur Gertie’s Ice Cream of Extinction, a brontosaurus-shaped vending stand that pays homage to one of the true foundational figures of America’s obsessions with both animation and prehistoric life.

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In this week’s Friday Know-It-All, Private Events Manager Greg takes us on a dive into a bit of American mascot lore that runs deeper than you might expect.

Baseball is a sport of storytelling. From every inning, to every game, to every series, and every season, the language of baseball lends itself well to the film medium. It’s a push-and-pull game of tension, pained facial expressions, anguish, and triumph. There isn’t anyone that emphasizes the cinema of baseball better than John DeMarsico, Emmy-winning broadcast director of the New York Mets. DeMarsico, a former college athlete, studied film at North Carolina State and grew up as a Mets fan in North Carolina because his parents are from New York.

Now, DeMarsico works with the highly acclaimed SportsNet New York broadcast team to bring a cinematic experience in watching the game at home. DeMarsico has gained a bit of a cult following among cinema and baseball fans alike for his keen ability to recreate iconic scenes in film within his broadcasts. In an interview, DeMarsico outlines his methodology for crafting compelling shots for SNY:

“In other sports, you stick a camera at the center of the court or the center of the field, you pan left, you pan right. You cover a ball going into an end zone or a basket or a net. Hockey, basketball, football, and baseball, the action is produced. We start on a camera in center field to cover the pitch, and then when the ball is put in play, we cut 180 degrees to the other side of the ballpark to a high home camera to cover the ball in play. If we want to show runners scoring, we have to cut low to the low cameras showing runners rounding third base. It’s one of the only sports where a lot of the points or runs are scored away from the ball. There are a thousand decisions that our group has to make on any given play to produce the action.”

The flexibility in deciding what to broadcast lends itself well to many split-focus diopter shots, à la Brian De Palma. Directors like Edgar Wright have taken notice of the homages to cult classics like “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.” Split screen shots serve as cinematic signatures, and they usually arrive at a high point of tension in the game. Check out this absolutely inspired homage to 1968’s “The Thomas Crown Affair.” Some of my favorite shots involve taking a handheld camera and going into the stands to show the viewer at home what the people at the ballpark are seeing. The cinematography and references truly make Mets games must-see baseball (and I absolutely, 100 percent despise the Mets in ways I can’t even begin to get into right now). I have curated a small selection of Mets games in recent history, and what follows are my own personal “movie reviews” of these games:

August 7, 2022: Atlanta Braves/New York Mets

Mets pitcher Jacob deGrom made his season debut after being sidelined for much of the 2022 season. A rare and intimate sequence of deGrom warming up with Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man” playing on the PA set the stage for deGrom pitching a perfect game into the sixth inning, striking out 12 batters along the way. I forgot who won but it doesn’t matter. ⭐⭐⭐⭐

September 30, 2024: New York Mets/Atlanta Braves

Mets and Braves faced off in a doubleheader to determine who will be in the playoffs; winning Game 1 of the doubleheader would get you in. With the game tied at the bottom of the eighth, perennial All Star Francisco Lindor hit a two-run home run to put the Mets ahead. Mets win and punch their ticket into the NL Wild Card series. I think about this game like, once a month. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐♥️

April 14, 2025: New York Mets/Minnesota Twins

Unremarkable. Colors were drab and washed-out because it was freezing and raining at Target Field. Felt like I was watching a boring war drama. Twins lost. ⭐⭐

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Editor Megan is here this week to bridge a generation gap with her guide to contemporary pop music by way of dad rock icons.

The headline from The Onion that I have always identified with the most reads “Cool Dad Raising Daughter On Media That Will Put Her Entirely Out Of Touch With Her Generation.” In particular, my cool dad raised me on the sounds of the local classic rock radio stations, the punk rock stylings of The Ramones and The Replacements, and the vastly underrated ’90s power pop group Jellyfish (seriously, check them out. They put out two perfect albums and then split). In the last few years, we’ve gone to The Zombies, Air Supply, and ELO (technically, “Jeff Lynne’s ELO”) concerts together. We even texted each other at the same time when Tom Petty died. 

While I am chronically online and absorb a lot of current pop music through osmosis, when I pick what I’m listening to it’s usually not from this century. This spring I wanted to challenge myself to write the questions for our Pop Girlies of the 2020s theme night (there are still a couple more chances to play live in the Twin Cities!), so I dove head first into the world of 2020s pop music. 

Whether you’re a dad who wants to understand his Gen Z daughter’s music taste, a daughter who was raised by a “cool dad” and wants to understand her peers, or anywhere within that spectrum, this is the Unofficial, Incomplete Dad Rock Guide to Pop Girlies of the 2020s.

For Fans of Elton John… Try Chappell Roan! 

This may be the one comparison you could see coming. Chappell Roan’s meteoric rise to fame began last year, with hits like “Pink Pony Club,” “Hot to Go!,” and “Good Luck, Babe!” — all of which I’m sure your daughter has blasted throughout the house. Like Elton John, she’s become known for over-the-top costumes which include lots of sequins, feathers, and head pieces. While the two have larger-than-life stage personas, you can’t deny their raw musical talent and killer songwriting. Vibes wise, I think the sound of Elton John’s “Levon” is similar to Chappell Roan’s “Casual.” I’m not saying “Pink Pony Club” is the new “Tiny Dancer,” but I’m not saying it’s not!

For Fans of Bee Gees… Try Sabrina Carpenter!

With an overall soft and sweet sound and soaring vocals along with many disco-inspired concert outfits, Sabrina Carpenter could fit right in as a long-lost family member. Fair warning, her lyrics just happen to be a little more… risqué than the apolitical brothers Gibb. Whether your favorite Bee Gees hit is “How Deep If Your Love” or “More Than a Woman,” I think you’ll enjoy the sound of “Bed Chem” and “Slim Pickins.”

For Fans of Devo… Try Charli XCX!

Charli was everywhere last summer, with the release of her album “Brat.” Her music has more of an electronic, dancey feel, very reminiscent of Devo’s new wave synth sound. If your favorite Devo song is “Whip It,” try listening to “Apple.” If it’s “Uncontrollable Urge,” I’d recommend “Everything is romantic.”

For Fans of Fleetwood Mac… Try Haim!

The Haim sisters have been putting out albums since their 2013 debut “Days Are Gone.” While they don’t have the romantic connections that’s palpable in Fleetwood Mac’s music, they do have a familial tie that blends their voices beautifully. Both groups mix pop and rock with funky guitar licks and percussion moments. The emotions of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” run through Haim’s “Hallelujah,” and Fleetwood Mac’s more upbeat “I Don’t Want to Know” feels like a cousin to Haim’s “The Steps.”

For Fans of Elvis Costello… Try Gracie Abrams!

Gracie Abrams, daughter of J.J. Abrams and up-and-coming singer-songwriter, is making a name for herself in the music scene. She’s got a bit of a brash quality to her voice in the best way possible, not unlike that of Elvis Costello. Her “Saturday Night Live” performance debut this past December made far fewer headlines than Elvis’ December 1977 “SNL” debut, though. In terms of sound, I’d compare his “Veronica” to her “That’s So True,” and his “Alison” to “I Love You, I’m Sorry.”

For Fans of Bruce Springsteen… Try Taylor Swift!

Do they sound alike? Not in the slightest. But you can’t deny that T-Swift is the new Boss. There’s gotta be something to that.

I’ve turned this guide into an official companion playlist on Spotify here! Hopefully this guide will help you find some common ground with fans of the music you don’t quite understand. 

I’ll leave you with some excellent intergenerational videos that are essential viewing in my opinion:

• Chappell Roan and Elton John performing “Pink Pony Club” together 

• Olivia Rodrigo performing “Burning Down the House” with David Byrne

• Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please” featuring Dolly Parton (not exactly “Dad Rock,” but intergenerational nonetheless)

• Miley Cyrus’ excellent cover of “Heart of Glass”

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Better clear your schedule, because Editor in Chief Aaron is here this week to tell us about some unique events being held around the world this Pride month (and beyond).

Happy Pride, all you Trivia Mafioids out there!

Not that drag brunches, karaoke, dance parties, and parades aren’t awesome, because they are — and many of us are lucky enough to have events like that in our own backyards. But because Pride, at its heart, is about gathering disparate threads to celebrate our differences and our commonalities in all their messy, imperfect beauty, I thought this week we’d look beyond the conventional. Here are a few of the more offbeat, unique events being held across the globe and the country this year during Pride:

• Up first, the biggest one: São Paulo, Brazil, holds what most — including Guinness World Records — consider to be the world’s biggest Pride parade. Three to five million people descend on the famously LGBTQ+-friendly city for weeks of events leading up to the parade, and the events bring in more money than freakin’ Carnival. It’s a big, big deal. This year’s parade falls on June 22.

• Amsterdam is home to over 60 miles of canals, so naturally, they throw their parade there instead. Every year, I find myself browsing through the many, many photos of the event, because it’s one of the most visually stunning parades there is, full stop. Things begin there July 26.

• Closer to home, there’s of course NYC Pride, one of our country’s biggest and oldest, in the very same locale that brought us the Stonewall uprising. But if cramming in among the two-million-plus crowd isn't your thing, might I suggest a nice quiet historical walking tour through that very Greenwich neighborhood? The hour-long tour has stops at Christopher Park, Stonewall Inn, the visitor center, and “all other sites of LGBTQ historical significance.” It goes year-round.

• Do you love rodeo? Kinda? Then you’ll love gay rodeo! Since the ’80s, the Colorado Gay Rodeo Association has been hosting the Rocky Mountain Regional Rodeo in Denver. They’ve got rodeo events you’d expect, like barrel racing and steer riding, plus more niche interests, like the Wild Drag Race, and something called Goat Dressing, which involves putting a pair of underpants on a goat. As you might expect, they’ve also got just the best collection of vintage event posters. It’s going on July 11 to 13.

• Grand Rapids, Michigan, claims the World’s Smallest Pride Parade, whose route last year was a single alleyway in the Creston neighborhood. This gathering seems to have gained steam in the last year, with actual sponsors, a roster of drag performers, and a brass band expected for 2025. (Journalistic integrity demands that I tell you that Creston’s “World’s Smallest” claim is contested; there’s an identical assertion made by organizers in England, who have their own 80-meter route in Batt Close, Rochberie Heights, Rugby, Warwickshire, West Midlands — which is an actual place, and not just something from a British fever dream.) Creston’s parade is September 8.

• I was a little disappointed to find that a quick Googling for “PRIDE BAKE OFF” only produced one real result. (And zero chili cook-offs!) So, hats off to State College, Pennsylvania for giving the people (me) what they want (bake-offs). That’s June 21, part of the greater Centre County Pride slate of events, which also includes…

• …Pet stuff! Centre County is holding a Pets + Pride photo contest, and while this is the first event of its kind I’ve come across, Pride Pet events are poppin’ off everywhere — as they should be, because they’re adorable. Just a few of the cities where they’re happening are Berkeley, Chicago, D.C., Indianapolis, Manhattan, and Puerto Vallarta.

• On its surface, there’s nothing terribly unusual about the Pride events going on in Bisbee, Arizona: there’s a parade, an Elton John impersonator, a pool party, and a doggy drag show (more pets!). Bisbee itself is a weensy little mining town of fewer than 5,000 people in southeastern Arizona, about 10 miles from the Mexican border. What’s interesting about it is that Bisbee was the first town in Arizona to pass a civil union ordinance, several years before nationwide marriage equality, and during the extremely anti-LGBTQ+ regime of governor and cartoon villain Jan Brewer, whose attorney general also threatened to sue the city in response. Good for Bisbee! Stuff is happening there this weekend.

• If most Pride events are just too dry-land for your liking, check out Ft. Lauderdale’s Floatarama, which bills itself as “America’s Largest On-Water Pride Fundraiser,” benefiting South Florida LGBTQ+ Youth. It really does look like a lot of fun, and it’s definitely the only place I’ve seen the words “flotilla” and “tea dance” mentioned in the same paragraph. It’s happening June 21.

• Where geeks and Pride collide, you’ll find Sacramento’s “Queer Multiverse,” a cosplay-friendly night market for the fantasy, sci-fi, anime, and gamer crowd. In my experience, there are few subcultures as fervently LGBTQ+ friendly as the geeky ones, so here’s a place for your inner bisexual tiefling bard to sip on some wine and check out vendors and collectibles. It’s going on June 27.

• And who says Pride events have to include club bangers and sweaty crowds? For the more serene among you, and closer to Trivia Mafia World Headquarters, there’s Nature Gays in the Woods, a day of bushwacking through Battle Creek Regional Park to learn about animal spoor, foraging edible mushrooms and plants, and all things woodsy. It’s coming up next Tuesday.

• Finally: Disney adults, don’t think I’d forget you! On the official side, Disneyland After Dark throws two Pride Nite events on June 16 and 18. Unofficially, Gay Days has been going on since 1991, when LGBTQ+ folks organized groups to descend on the Magic Kingdom wearing red shirts in order to stand out and call attention to their numbers. Orlando’s Gay Days was this past weekend, but Anaheim’s fall in September, so there’s still time for you to don red, yank on those Mickey ears, and get out there.

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In the course of writing trivia, we come across interesting information that’s too esoteric to become a question. Enter: the Friday Know-It-All. Here we go!

Edythe Eyde started the first lesbian zine in her downtime at work. It seems that she wasn’t aware she could become a felon if someone decided to enforce the Comstock Act on her until a friend warned her several issues into her run. She wrote under the pen name Lisa Ben, an anagram of “lesbian.” She also performed gay parody songs she wrote herself at private parties. It seems like she was a real delight! She passed away in 2015 at the age of 94. 

That’s the beginning of lesbian zines, but not the end of queer zines, which continue through the present. Zines are generally self-published (like, on a photocopier) booklets, most frequently used to distribute ideas that don’t get the attention of traditional publishers. You can find archives of queerzines from the past and present. The Twin Cities have our own zine fest; your city probably does too.

On the topic of art and preservation, I was super interested to learn about this study from a few years ago showing the history of air pollution through the color of sunsets in paintings from hundreds of years ago. Air polluted with volcanic ash produces redder sunsets, even if the ash isn’t otherwise visible to the naked eye. Besides being very cool, this helps create models of climate fluctuations from times before data were collected. Art! 

I wrote a round about Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders who did nonfiction writing, and what you might have learned if you read it. This was in part borne out of my search, still unfulfilled, to find the original writing for which the first Asian American won a Pulitzer. Gobind Behari Lal was part of a group that “the [Pulitzer for Reporting] for their coverage of science at the tercentenary of Harvard University,” according to Wikipedia, and also every other source I could find. What did they write about? What was happening at Harvard’s tercentenary that deserved this level of coverage? Why isn’t the specific article or series of articles findable anywhere? If you have academic access to the 1937 Scripps-Howard archives and want to send me whatever it is he wrote about Harvard, please do. I really want to know!

In my quest to find out, I read about half of this book-length interview conducted with Lal by Suzanne Riess. It’s a fascinating look at the first person to have “Science Reporter” in his byline, starting with his childhood in India, his relationship to Indian and American politics, his experience as often the only immigrant and only person of color in a lot of rooms, and his interviews with everyone from Albert Einstein to Mohandas Gandhi. Lal comes across as thoughtful, engaging, and a really fun hang, especially for a guy who was 92 at the time. If you’re at all interested in any of those topics, I really recommend perusing it.

In 2007, reporter Billy Baker accidentally discovered that his wife Lori’s Tetris skills, which he thought were merely pretty good, were actually world class. I recommend reading this article about her subsequent attempt to break the world record, but it really got me thinking about the secret skills that people have in their lives. Writing trivia is often a search for superlatives — firsts, mosts, and so on — but all we can report is what’s documented. Maybe the biggest zucchini ever grown never made it to the state fair. Maybe the first four-minute mile was run completely out of sight. Getting more subjective, maybe the drawings in your sister’s sketchbook she doesn’t show anyone would make you cry with how good they are. Maybe your neighbor invented a new kind of rose and hasn’t told anyone. Possibility abounds!

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Private Events Manager Greg is back this week to help you dive into summer with a splash in the punch bowl for this week’s Friday Know-It-All!

Hey folks, Private Events Manager Greg here for another edition of our recurring feature “Greg’s Grog Blog,” in which we pilfer a page from the “Jeopardy” archives and splash in for a deep dive on some Potent Potables. Has it been since 2022 since the last one? Can a feature you haven’t read in three years be called recurring? We’re explorers of the furthest regions of experience; who can say?

As of today we’re bringing our big Grad and Prom season to a close in our Private Events department. This turned my mind toward the ubiquitous fixture at such events: the punch bowl!

Punch has a centuries-old history (as most drinks do — hydration is important) but came westward via employees of the East India Company in the late 17th century. The name “punch” is said to source from the Hindi for “five,” reflecting the five traditional ingredients: water, sugar, juice from a lemon or lime, spices, and booze. English documents first record the word in 1632, where it is used to refer to wassail. There is dispute over the name’s origin, though, as there’s not much documentation of the drink’s existence in India. Many source the name to puncheon, which was the name of a barrel size (still!) used to transport rum.

A recurring quote from the first Greg’s Grog Blog emerges once again from the history of grog, and can be quickly memorized so you can get your party proportions right every time: “One of Sour, Two of Sweet, Three of Strong, Four of Weak.” That’s fruit juice, sugar, booze, and water. Spices don’t get to go in the rhyme because it’s hard to find a rhyme for cinnamon and nutmeg, I guess.

As punch sloshed its way through culture, it necessitated a new category of drinking accessories. Fancy punch bowls became status symbols, and the centuries-long history of the drink has led to countless variations that are still highly prized by some collectors today. Personally, I’m partial to the Marty Moose set inspired by “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.”

If you’ve spent any time in a church basement (or fellowship hall, if you’re fancy) your first association with punch might be a frothy film on top from a floating ring of sherbet. Get ready to bring this article full circle! Pun richly intended.

“Sharbat” is a Hindi and Farsi word used to describe citrusy cordials made from macerated citrus peels and sugar. They can also be called “oleo saccharum,” reflecting the oil and sugar of the mixture. The resulting concoctions are often added to punches as the fruit/sweet ingredient. So, when you plop in a dozen scoops of rainbow sherbet (or sherbert if you’re nasty) you’re participating in a centuries-old culinary tradition.
Thanks for reading, and if you’re getting folks together for a gathering around a punch bowl of any size, don't hesitate to reach out to book a Private Event!

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In this week’s Friday Know-It-All, Editor Andrea weighs in on a place Filipino and Minnesotan cultures meet: the mall.

The rare instances of people speaking Tagalog to each other in Minnesota that I encounter often are at the Mall of America. The Mall feels familiar to me in that way. While it is the biggest tourist destination in the state, there’s something to be said about the enduring appeal of malls distinctly in Minnesota and in the Philippines. The Mall of Asia, located in Bay City, Pasay, Philippines is the sixth largest in the world (for context, the Mall of America doesn’t even make the Top 10 list of the world’s largest malls). That mall has an indoor ice skating rink and quick access to the biggest IKEA in the world. It might seem surprising to see the success of malls in 2025, given the rise of online shopping, economic uncertainty, and the strange internet phenomenon of romanticizing dead malls, but, in both Minnesota and the Philippines, malls have held — and in many ways, continue to hold — a unique cultural, economic, and social significance.  

Victor Gruen, a Jewish refugee who had fled Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938, is credited with conceptualizing the mall that we know today. He was labeled the “Father of the Shopping Mall,” but he eventually came to despise this title. In 1978, two years before his death, he said, “I would like to take this opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all. I refuse to pay alimony to those bastard developments. They destroyed our cities.” Gruen envisioned the mall as a sustainable, walkable public space, instead of a car-centric beacon of consumerism. Gruen’s vision lives on in the Philippines where malls serve as more than mere retail hubs — they are public commons that offer safety, stability, and predictability amid harsh external environments. The mall culture in these two places shares intriguing parallels shaped by community needs and consumer behavior while also reflecting deeper histories of consumerism and globalization.

In Minnesota, the mall boom of the late 20th century mirrored postwar economic prosperity and suburban expansion. Similarly, right before the EDSA Revolution in 1986, an event that would depose President Ferdinand Marcos, Filipino businessman Henry Sy opened his first mall: a “supermall” called SM City North EDSA. Soon, foreign investors saw the political instability happening in the Philippines as an opportunity to capitalize on cheap real estate and investment in development opportunities. The result is a whopping 850 malls in the Philippines, and their ubiquity shaped urban infrastructure in the country.

Malls in the Philippines offer shelter, connection, and identity in ways that go beyond retail. It’s not uncommon for people in the Philippines to take their dogs on walks in an air-conditioned mall or to see people getting their passports renewed at a municipal office located inside the mall. In addition to restaurants and retail stores, malls in the Philippines are likely to include small amusement parks, ice skating rinks, government and utilities offices, daycare centers, medical and dental offices, and churches. Here in the U.S., in an era of the vanishing “third space,” malls still remain spaces for people to gather. The CDC officially encourages mall walking as a weather-immune physical activity. An estimated 32 million people visit the Mall of America each year, many of whom use the space in a similar way. Up until 2022, you could get married in the Mall of America. Up until COVID shutdowns, you could visit the DMV. You can still get a tattoo there. However, I’m still waiting for a Muji, a Uniqlo, and especially a JOLLIBEE in the Mall of America.

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In this week’s Friday Know-It-All, Editor Ira explores the life of the first Asian American U.S. senator, Hiram Fong.

When people learn I’m a professional trivia writer, they tend to ask a lot of the same questions. “Is that actually a job someone can have?” “What’s your favorite all-time trivia question?” “Is your wife rich or something?” “What’s the hardest question you ever wrote?”

I’ll answer the first three questions at the end of this article and use the last one as a convenient segue into today’s Friday Know-It-All topic. A lot of folks assume that a trivia writer’s goal is to stump the players. On the contrary, in a good night’s game of trivia, most of the answers will be gettable for most of the people in the room. Some of them will just be gettable for a few more people than others. If we wrote questions looking to stump people, it would stop being fun for all but the most hardcore of trivia nerds.

The challenge for a trivia writer is finding answers that fall somewhere in between obvious and obscure. For example, “Who was the first Asian American politician to be a major U.S. party’s presidential nominee?” would be too obvious. On the other end of the spectrum, “Who was the first Asian American politician to receive a delegate vote to be a major U.S. party’s presidential nominee?” would be far too obscure.

Well, hey, would you look at that. Seems I’ve come to a convenient (if not graceful) segue into today’s Friday Know-It-All topic. Senator Hiram Fong is indeed too obscure an answer for a regular night of trivia, but he’s just right for the FKIA.

Hiram Fong was born in Honolulu in 1906, the seventh of eleven children of two Chinese immigrants. His mother worked as a maid and his father was an indentured servant on a sugar plantation. Hiram was put to work early, harvesting feed for cattle at age 4, shining shoes by 7, and graduating to fishing, crabbing, food delivery, and golf caddying.

Young Hiram’s extraordinary work ethic served him well, securing him a space at Harvard Law School after he graduated the University of Hawaiʻi a year early. He held down multiple jobs at a time throughout his schooling, taking years-long pauses between studies to save up for more. He received his Doctorate of Jurisprudence from Harvard in 1935 and returned to Honolulu to work as a deputy attorney for the city.

Fong co-founded the successful law practice of Fong, Miho, Choy and Robinson in 1938, partnering with lawyers of Japanese, Korean, and Hawaiian descent in order to reflect the city’s diverse cultures. That same year he married his wife Ellyn and not only won his first election to Hawaiʻi’s Territorial House of Representatives, but pulled together a bipartisan coalition that voted him Speaker of the House. He turned 31 that year.

That knack for bipartisanship would be one of Fong’s greatest assets in his political career. Although he was a staunch lifelong Republican, he fostered close working relationships with colleagues of all stripes. Harkening back to his childhood on the sugar plantation, he was instrumental in passing the “Little Wagner Act,” legislation that allowed Hawaiian agricultural workers to unionize for the first time.

The attack on Pearl Harbor put Fong’s political career on hold. He entered the United States Army Air Corps in 1942, reaching the rank of Major as a Judge Advocate during WWII. He went on to spend 20 years as a reserve officer and retired from service as a Colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve.

After losing his House seat in 1954, Fong turned to finance, quickly building a reputation (and a fortune) as one of the island’s most visible real estate and investment players. Politics, though, was in his blood. Fong was a major backer of Hawaiian statehood throughout the 1950s, arguing before the U.S. congress and serving as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1952. Those efforts came to fruition in 1959. Hawaiʻi became a state and Fong won election as one of its first two United States senators, as well as the first Asian American elected to the U.S. Senate.

Throughout his senate career, Fong was a strong advocate for civil rights and Hawaiian infrastructure. He pushed hard to get Honolulu’s H-1 freeway built and helped to establish the University of Hawaiʻi’s East-West Center, focused on improving diplomatic relationships between the U.S. and Pacific nations. Other signature achievements included legislation to safeguard voting rights for ethnic minorities and to remove U.S. immigration barriers for Asian citizens.

Fong’s work on behalf of Hawaiʻi made him consistently popular at home, even as the state’s political leanings began to tilt decidedly Democratic. In 1964 the Hawaiian delegation to the Republican National Convention nominated Hiram Fong for president as a “favorite son” candidate. The nomination was mostly symbolic, of course — nobody was going to derail a charisma train like Barry Goldwater — but it was history-making nonetheless.

Hiram Fong retired from the U.S. Senate in 1977. He turned his focus to his business empire, which fell on hard times and internal discord in the ’80s. In 1988, he launched the popular attraction Senator Fong’s Plantation and Gardens on a 725-acre Oahu banana plantation. The banana fields were transformed into a tourist-friendly botanical garden featuring five tropical zones, each named for one of the presidents Fong served under. It’s still open today, although it’s now a private wedding and event space.  

Hiram Fong died in 2003 at the age of 97, leaving a legacy as one of the true foundational figures in his state’s history and, to this day, the only Republican senator ever to represent Hawaiʻi.

And that’s all there is to know this week! — Editor Ira

Answers to the questions from the top of the article:

1. Yes! Or at least it’s a job that I, specifically, can have.

2. I will never tell you, but the answer to it is “Scott Skindeep.”

3. No, but she does have good insurance.

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Let’s dive into today's Friday Know-It-All, where Editor Ira explores the impressive life of Olympian Sammy Lee.

The more of these Friday-Know-It-All profiles I write, the more I understand that truth really is stranger than fiction. If I came across a character in a novel who was an Olympic gold medalist as well as a military combat veteran, a working doctor, and a civil rights pioneer, I’d likely scoff at the author for making their protagonist virtuous to the point of ridiculous. But that’s exactly the real-life person I’m about to describe to you.

Growing up in Great Depression-era Los Angeles, Sammy Lee couldn’t have seemed like a likely candidate to pull off any of those achievements. He was the working-class child of Korean immigrants who ran a restaurant and market, not an easy springboard to success in the 1930s. When the Olympics came to L.A. in 1934, though, young Sammy found his calling. He was mesmerized by the competition and decided to make himself an Olympic-caliber diver.

Before he could do that, though, he had to find a place to practice. That wasn’t an easy task in an era of segregated pools and beaches. The nearest “public” swimming pool only admitted non-white swimmers on Wednesdays — not coincidentally, the day before the facility’s weekly draining and cleaning. In a classic bit of vintage brand-washing, the day when children of color were allowed to submerge themselves in leftover water was billed as “International Day” at the pool.

Not to be deterred, Sammy found himself a coach and a hole. He procured the assistance of diving coach Jim Ryan, a legendary mentor with Olympics experience and a chip on his shoulder. Ryan had coached Egyptian diver Farid Simaika at the 1928 Olympics, where Simaika initially won a gold medal. That was withdrawn when the judges belatedly decided that he had been edged out by white American diver Pete Desjardins. Simaika later told Lee that the incident had outraged Ryan, who swore that he would be back to coach another diver of color to victory.

To that end, Ryan pushed Lee to his limits, having him dive over and over in a water-filled backyard sandpit that wasn’t beholden to discriminatory laws. At least one historian credits that makeshift practice facility for some of Lee’s future success. Biographer Pauline Yoo notes that the lack of a diving board eventually “gave him stronger leg muscles, which is why he was able to jump so high and perform those beautifully executed triple-somersault dives.”

In between his diving practices, Sammy was also studying medicine at L.A.’s Occidental College, as per his family’s wishes. He excelled in both areas. In 1942, he became the first person of color ever to win a U.S. National Diving Championship, taking home top awards in both the 3- and 10-meter platform events. He continued racking up awards for the next several years, although WWII canceled what likely would have been his first shots at the Olympics.

In 1947, Sammy graduated with an M.D. from the University of Southern California and also enlisted in the Army Reserves to help pay off his college debt. He was a medical corpsman by the time he made his Olympics debut at the 1948 games in London, where he made history and vindicated Coach Ryan by taking home the bronze in 3-meter springboard and the gold in 10-meter platform diving. That made Lee the second Asian American athlete to win an Olympic gold, after his close friend and fellow diver Vicki Draves won gold in the same events days earlier.  

When the U.S. entered the Korean War, Lee expected to be sent overseas. Instead, his superiors told him to focus on the upcoming 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, telling him, “Major Lee, we’ve only got one doctor who can win an Olympic gold medal. We’ve got hundreds of doctors who can repair the wounded. You can go, but you better win.” And he did, bringing home his second gold.

Major Sammy Lee did see time overseas following his last Olympic excursion, serving in the Medical Corps in Korea for two years. Upon returning to California, he and his wife Rosalind attempted to buy a home in the town of Garden Grove, but were blocked due to the area’s racist housing laws. Lee worked with reporters at the San Francisco Chronicle to expose a network of blatantly discriminatory policies that meant that even a citizen as unimpeachable as an Olympic hero/war veteran/medical doctor could be barred for his skin color.

Lee’s efforts paid off eventually. Garden Grove did away with its segregationist housing policies and Dr. Sammy Lee became one of Orange County’s most celebrated citizens. He spent 35 years as a practicing ear, nose, and throat doctor and maintained an active side gig as a diving coach. He served as a mentor to Hollywood stunt performers as well as Olympic medalists such as Bob Webster, Pat McCormick, and Greg Louganis. He died in 2016 at the age of 96 and kept up a regular swimming schedule almost ‘til the end. Unlike his award-winning dives, I think it’s safe to say that Dr. Lee… made a sizable splash.

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In this week’s Friday Know-It-All, Social Media Coordinator Mia kicks off Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month with a look into some recent Asian American cinema!

Happy Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month! Weird to think about the fact that we’re already a quarter of the way through the 21st century — but man, have these past two-and-a-half decades produced some incredible Asian American film. There have been plenty of great Asian stories told on screen for decades, of course, but over the past 25 years, we’ve really seen an uptick in personal stories actually told by Asian and Asian American directors. From queer romances to adoptee stories, the films we’ve gotten to see in recent years from diasporic directors have really been creating a window into these different vignettes of the Asian American experience, in a way that even I, as an Asian person, have been able to learn a lot from.

No bias here, but some of my all-time favorite romcoms have been directed and written by Asian American filmmakers, and more now than ever, also feature majority Asian principal casts. Of course, you’ve got everyone’s go-to in-flight movie, 2018’s “Crazy Rich Asians,” but that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

“Fresh Off the Boat” creator Nahnatchka Khan’s 2019 film directorial debut “Always Be My Maybe” may be the perfect movie. Starring comedy powerhouses Ali Wong and Randall Park, the latter of whom Khan previously worked with on “Fresh Off the Boat,” the film also features an excellent supporting cast including James Saito, Daniel Dae Kim, Michelle Buteau, and Karan Soni. It has the perfect combination of funny and heartfelt moments, a killer ’90s soundtrack (its title is a play on Mariah Carey’s hit single “Always Be My Baby”), and an incredible self-parodic appearance from everyone’s favorite wasian king, Keanu Reeves.

The 2020s in particular have been a huge time for queer Asian romcoms. Of course, it’s not like they were invented in the past five years — Alice Wu’s lesbian cult classic “Saving Face” came out back in 2004, and one of the best films of the year so far, Andrew Ahn’s “The Wedding Banquet,” is based on Ang Lee’s 1993 film of the same name.

“The Half of It,” only the second film from Wu after the release of “Saving Face,” is one of the most underrated movies you can find on Netflix. Released in May 2020, it was in my heavy rotation during the pandemic lockdowns; the film follows small-town Washington teen Ellie Chu who ghostwrites essays (and eventually love letters) for her classmates to help her single dad pay the bills. It’s one of the admittedly semi-common modern retellings of the Cyrano story, but with a queer twist — when Ellie finds herself falling for the girl she’s supposed to be helping her friend Paul woo.

Even solely 2025 has been a big moment for queer Asian cinema; April alone saw the releases of both “A Nice Indian Boy” and “Fire Island” director Andrew Ahn’s aforementioned remake of “The Wedding Banquet.” Ahn’s adaptation of the latter completely modernizes the tale with a star-studded cast including Lily Gladstone, Bowen Yang, “Saving Face” star Joan Chen, and Academy Award winner Youn Yuh-jung. The cast’s incredible chemistry and physical comedy, coupled with an impressive screenplay really allows the film to shine, and is a stellar follow up to 2022’s Austen-inspired “Fire Island.”

I think South Asian stories aren’t talked about nearly enough in APA discussions, and “A Nice Indian Boy” so totally deserves all of its flowers. From “The Resident” co-creator, filmmaker and actual physician Roshan Sethi, it tells the story of a gay Indian man (played by “Always Be My Maybe”’s Karan Soni, who’s also Sethi’s real-life husband) as he falls in love with an Indian-parent-raised, transracially adopted white man played by Tony Award-winner (and, more importantly, “Glee” star) Jonathan Groff. Of the adoptee diasporic films to come out in recent years, I think it puts a really fresh spin on the trope by featuring a transracially adopted white character and the exploration of the social implications of that relationship on interracial dating, and Soni and Groff both put in fantastic comedic and emotional performances.

Speaking of adoptee stories, 2023’s “Joy Ride” remains one of my favorite comedies while also topping the list of films that made me cry the most. The feature directorial debut of “Crazy Rich Asians” writer Adele Lim, its core quartet features some of the best up-and-coming talent across theatre, comedy, and film — comedians Sherry Cola and Sabrina Wu, and Broadway stars Ashley Park and Stephanie Hsu (the latter of whom was robbed of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” but that’s neither here nor there). Quite a ways raunchier than the other films mentioned here, “Joy Ride” (charitably watered-down from the original working title of “Joy F*** Club”) has been described as “the Asian ‘Bridesmaids,’” and certainly lives up to the hype. For all of the strong R-rated comedy, it also has surprising emotional depth as Ashley Park’s adoptee character searches for her birth mother abroad.

There are plenty of other great Asian American films you can watch this month — and all year long! — but these are just some of my personal favorites.

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In today's Friday Know-It-All, AV Expert Davis is back with the segment called “Make a Name for Yourself (And Your Trivia Team),” exploring the names and branding of Minor League Baseball teams and beyond.

We’re back to the mostly-wacky world of Minor League Baseball to give you inspiration when naming your next trivia team! Let these stories of the team names and branding inspire you, and as a bonus to all of this, you can learn a lot about areas of the U.S. that you may never visit — or if you do, you can impress the locals with your extensive regional knowledge.

We start in the New England area. We don't care about the stats or the players on the teams, we only care about the branding. This is Making a Name for Yourself (And Your Trivia Team).

Option 1: Name your team after the local fauna

The New England seal population is projected to be between 75,000 to 100,000. There have been plenty of seal-named teams, most notably the San Francisco Seals,  But Portland, Maine, wanted to make it weird, just like the similarly named city on the west coast, so they went with the Portland Sea Dogs — not the cryptid or the name for your fellow sailor, just a slang term for a seal.

Alternate Inspiration: Mostly food, but bowling honored, too

Each minor league team will play as alternate nicknames. These are always nods to local or regional aspects of their area and fandom. Rapid fire inspiration from the Sea Dogs alternates.

• The Maine Whoopie Pies: Two round chocolate cake-like cookies with a sweet creamy filling or frosting in the middle. Quite a few places claim to be the maker of the whoopie pie in New England. Maine named it the official state treat in 2011.

• Maine Red Snappers: An iconic hot dog in Maine that is known for its color, red, and its natural casing that “snaps” as you take a bite. Another delicacy that has been around for over 100 years in Maine. They’re not named after the fish, like I thought.

• Bean Suppahs: A centuries old New England tradition on Saturday nights of feeding and gathering communities at churches and grange halls. Usually baked beans and a hot dog, or red snapper, and brown bread.

• Clambakes: Native American New England tradition that include lobster, clams, corn on the cob, potatoes and blueberry cake and served over layers of seaweed in a pit oven. The Wabanaki Tribe called the area Ah-bays’auk (“clambake place”).

• Candlepins: Candlepin bowling is a variation that is unique to New England and the Canadian Maritime provinces. It’s been a popular sport amongst Mainers since the 1880s. Candlepin bowling is played with a handheld-sized ball and tall, narrow pins that resemble candles.

Option 2: The people who came before you, but not in a good way

One of the lamer, or ignominious (I had to use a thesaurus for that), things a minor league team can do is name themselves after their parent club. While this is the case for the Worcester Red Sox, known as the Woo Sox, they at least have different branding that tells a story about the area.

The Woo Sox use a smiley face in their branding. That’s because the original smiley face was created in the town of Worcester in 1963 by Harvey Ball.

State Mutual Life Insurance Company of Worcester purchased another insurance company. The merger created low company morale. Ball was employed to come up with a symbol to increase morale. The sunny yellow circle with two asymmetrical eyes and a smile was put on a button and sold more than 50 million buttons by 1971.

The origins are somewhat disputed, but that didn’t stop the Worcester team from adopting the smiley face.

Alternate Inspiration: The punk scene

• Wicked Worms: Worcester is often known as “Wormtown.” In the late ’70s, local DJ Leonard B. Saarinen, known as L.B. Worm, described the underground punk rock music scene as “Wormtown,” since it was so underground.

Option 3: Animals are the names for a lot of teams

Yes, okay, this one’s an animal too. In the area of New Hampshire lives the fisher cat, an animal that doesn’t fish primarily, nor is it a cat. The name comes from the French and Dutch people that first colonized the area and thought the animal looked like a European polecat, which they called the pelt fichet (pronounced fee-SHAY). Thus, the New Hampshire Fisher Cats.

The name, while being slightly uninspired, really came from an emergency, according to logo creator Dan Simon. New Hampshire usually kicks off the long and arduous presidential election with their primaries.

The team wanted to honor that by going with the nickname New Hampshire Primaries. It was so unpopular that they pivoted quickly to Fisher Cats under the guise of a “Name the Team” contest.

Alternate Inspiration: Food, aliens, and big hills (mountains)

• New Hampshire Space Potatoes: Potatoes have been the official vegetable of New Hampshire since 2013, honoring early Scots-Irish settlers that planted the first American white potato in Derry, New Hampshire. In 1961, there was one of the first widely reported alien abductions of Barney and Betty Hill. Why not honor both in one team name?

• Manchester Chicken Tenders: The Puritan Backroom Restaurant in Manchester, New Hampshire, claims to be the originator of the chicken tender back in 1974. Food is always good inspiration for an alternate team name, as every team — and fan — tends to use it.

• New Hampshire Mountain Men: That “Name the Team” contest comes around again to the alternate that didn’t win. This brand honored the Old Man of the Mountain in the nearby Cannon Mountains, and dressing the mascot up as a Revolutionary War soldier is also a nod to New Hampshire being the first state to declare independence from Britain. Rhode Island claims this too. We’ll let them fight over that.

Option 4: Name your team after a popular form of transportation

Hartford, Connecticut, had an old railroad yard in the city as part of the New Haven Railroad. A team from New Britain in the same state decided to move to Hartford and needed a new home.

They chose to build their stadium on that old rail yard and honored their town’s train history in naming their team the Hartford Yard Goats.

“But wait, that’s an animal! Look at their goat logo,” you yell at your screen.

First of all, stop yelling. Secondly, a yard goat is a small engine in the railyard that switches a train to get it ready for another locomotive to take over.

The logo designers, Brandiose, decided a goat was better for the logo than a little train. They were probably right.

Alternate inspiration: food, tourism, and wacky “laws”

• Steamed Cheeseburgers: Ever had your cheeseburger steamed? Well, it’s pretty normal in central Connecticut thanks to Jack’s Lunch, the supposed creator of this delicacy, and Ted’s Restaurant, the most famous restaurant that still serves it.

• Bouncing Pickles: In 1948, Sidney Sparer and Moses Dexler were arrested for selling pickles “unfit for human consumption.” The Connecticut Food and Drug Commission stated you could “drop (a pickle) one foot and it should bounce.” This started a whole rumor that there is a law that pickles need to bounce in Connecticut. There is no law, but the Yard Goats honored that rumor.

• Leaf Peepers: According to the team, 10 million people every year come to New England just to watch the leaves change color. The Hartford squad wanted to honor this bump in tourism by donning the Leaf Peepers moniker.

• Thunder Chickens: A slang term for turkey. Connecticut finds itself with an estimated 35,000 wild turkeys. The electrified poultry will find itself on their jerseys and hats for the first time in 2025.

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In this week’s Friday Know-It-All, Editor Ira explores the life, legacy, and misfortunes of  creature designer Paul Blaisdell.

I'm a cinephile in my mid-40s, which means I've spent roughly 30 years complaining about the state of movie effects these days. You've heard the whole spiel before, if not from me then from somebody who might as well be me: “All these new action movies are so green-screened they’re basically cartoons.” “No computer-generated Godzilla is ever going to have the impact of the old rubber suits.” “God, those flames look phony compared to when they’d just set a stunt guy on fire.”

It's a tiresome diatribe, even if I’m right (and I am). But I’m not so naive as to think the Good Old Days were actually all that great for the people who had to live and work in them. Case in point: today’s Friday Know-It-All subject Paul Blaisdell, an artist who built a legacy in a field that eventually reduced his life’s work to a literal pile of ashes.

For a certain type of film fan, costume designers and makeup artists are celebrities almost on par with actors and directors. Artists like Tom Savini, Milicent Patrick, Eiji Tsuburaya, Carlo Rambaldi, Jack Pierce, Ruth E. Carter, and Ray Harryhausen all have their own dedicated followings today.

That category includes the lesser-known but still revered Paul Blaisdell, a New England-born artist who got his start drawing technical designs for Douglas Aircraft while contributing artwork to various science fiction magazines. The latter eventually caught the eye of magazine editor, literary agent, and B-movie historian Forest J. Ackerman. That relationship led to Blaisdell’s first work in Hollywood, as creature designer for a sci-fi horror film called “The Beast with a Million Eyes,” produced and co-directed by legendary low-budget filmmaker Roger Corman.

Like many Corman productions, “The Beast with a Million Eyes” was something of a bait-and-switch. While the title and movie poster promised a creepy evening in the company of an all-seeing space dragon, the titular “eyes” were a metaphor for the unseen alien antagonist’s psychic abilities. Late in the production, Blaisdell was paid a flat fee of $200 to design a spacecraft and its extraterrestrial pilot who were added at the last minute so as not to send the audience home completely un-monstered.  

With his square jaw, wiry frame, and pencil moustache, Blaisdell looked the part of a working artist in 1950s Hollywood. He accordingly went on to design a number of weird creatures that would eventually rank among the most iconic of his era’s genre filmmaking. In the moment, though, his role probably couldn’t have felt much less essential. He worked for Z-grade productions cranked out by budget studios, mostly the Corman-affiliated American International Pictures (AIP). These studios put a premium on getting things done quickly and cheaply. That meant not only that he was usually rushing to assemble a reasonable-looking monster with limited resources, but also that his designs were frequently cannibalized for future, even cheaper movies.

Blaisdell worked with some of the biggest names in 1950s trash cinema — that is, directors cherished by creeps like me and totally unknown to better-adjusted members of society — on a bunch of movies with perfect titles. He worked directly under Corman on “Day the World Ended,”“It Conquered the World,” and “Not of This Earth.” For former Friday Know-It-All subject Bert I. Gordon, he built miniature props for “The Amazing Colossal Man,” giant props for “Attack of the Puppet People,” and massive tarantula legs for “Earth vs. The Spider.” The assorted aliens he designed for Edward L. Cahn’s “It! The Terror from Beyond Space,” “Invasion of the Saucer Men,” and “The She-Creature” helped define the look and vibe we associate with ‘50s sci-fi today.

Beyond designing the costumes, Blaisdell frequently did double-duty on the inside. Whenever one of his adorably lumpy, barely mobile creatures appears on screen, there’s a good chance that the man under the foam rubber suit is the designer himself. That’s fitting, as Blaisdell seems to have had a genuine affection for bringing his grotesqueries to the best imitation of life the budget would allow. His performances as the cone-shaped vegetable creature in “It Conquered the World” and the titular “She-Creature” — an impressive costume that Blaisdell affectionately named “Cuddles” — in particular have become the stuff of B-movie legend.

There’s a cliche in writing that says as an author, you need to be willing to kill your darlings.

That means recognizing and cutting sentences, phrases, and characters that don’t serve the greater purpose of your story, even if you’re proud of your work on them. Paul Blaisdell’s creature designs were his darlings, and he eventually grew tired of watching other people kill them. His costumes, props, and puppets were routinely altered and repurposed by other filmmakers, with bits and pieces resurfacing in dozens of other low-rent productions. His “She-Creature” suit alone had featured roles in at least four movies. That’s one more movie than James Dean!

The disposability of his craft began to make Blaisdell disillusioned with the creature effects game, a feeling that came to a head with 1958’s “How to Make a Monster.” It’s a kind-of clever little meta-movie starring Robert H. Harris as a disgruntled Hollywood make-up artist who employs his old costumes while he murders studio executives who did him wrong. Those costumes were pulled from AIP’s closet and included a number of Blaisdell’s original designs.

In the film’s climax, Harris’s studio burns down with him and his beloved creatures trapped inside. The cheapest way to accomplish that effect? Just going ahead and actually burning all of the original costumes, of course! While Paul reportedly gave the OK for some of his work to be thus destroyed, other items he’d intended to preserve were immolated as well. That makes the final moments of “How to Make a Monster” a real conundrum for a trash fan like myself. While it’s grim to know I’m watching history go up in flames, the onscreen destruction itself is also a kind of cinematic history.

That was only the most proactive defilement of Blaisdell’s work. Most of his other designs were left to decay in the studio’s insufficiently protective storage facilities. His original “Beast With a Million Eyes” alien prop was on display in Forest J. Ackerman’s home, but it was eventually reduced to dust due to constant exposure to direct sunlight. By the time he cut ties with AIP in 1959, the only keepsake Blaisdell had to show from his prolific decade in Hollywood was his mutilated “She-Creature” body costume, the mask having been sacrificed on the altar of “How to Make a Monster.”

By 1960 Paul Blaisdell was mostly out of the monster-making business. His friend Ackerman had found success with his (still-running!) horror movie magazine “Famous Monsters of Filmland,” so Blaisdell followed suit by launching a more insider-focused publication called “Fantastic Monsters Of The Films” along with film archivist Bob Burns III.  Paul contributed a regular creature design how-to column called “The Devil’s Workshop.” The magazine was well received, but — and here’s where I start to suspect Paul Blaisdell did something to anger the gods — it was discontinued after a suspected arson at the print shop burned up all of the materials for its would-be eighth issue.

That was, understandably, the last straw. Blaisdell quit show business altogether and pivoted to carpentry and property management for the rest of his working days. Eventually, though, he found himself something of a hot commodity again.

Turns out one of the bonuses of making profit-minded cinema is that people keep finding new ways to profit from it. Much of the AIP film catalog was licensed out for syndicated TV airings by tongue-in-cheek horror hosts like Svengoolie and Morgus the Magnificent. That introduced a new generation of film lovers to the homemade charisma of Paul Blaisdell’s creature designs.

Fans and filmmakers began seeking him out for his perspectives on the glory days of B-movie monsters. When the hugely influential horror movie magazine “Fangoria” launched in 1979, one of their first orders of business was to run an extensive, two-part interview with Blaisdell. Hobby companies introduced model kits of classic Blaisdell creatures. Up-and-coming exploitation  legend Fred Olen Ray even tried to commission some new designs for his late ‘70s monster films, but by this time Blaisdell was unfortunately too sick to follow through. He died of cancer in 1983 at the age of 55, having lived long enough to see the world start to appreciate the artistry it once seemed determined to obliterate. So it goes.

As for Paul Blaisdell’s beloved “She-Creature” costume, you can view it today in a pristine restoration at… Nah, I’m playing. It was destroyed when his house flooded in 1979. I’m telling you, the universe REALLY didn’t want these costumes to exist!

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Editor Ruby here this week to round up some stray facts we’ve discovered while writing trivia questions.

• The world’s first selfie: taken by a guy who had to set up a tin plate daguerreotype and then stand perfectly still for 15 minutes. Robert Cornelius did a pretty good job for 1839! Check out the giant lens he used.

• I was trying to write a question about the phrase “when pigs fly” and wondering if there’s a term for that kind of phrase and there are two: adynaton and idiom of impossibility.  The Greek “adynaton” literally means “impossible” and was translated to Latin as “impossibilia.” I recommend clicking those links for good examples, but a few I’d like to call out are the Portuguese “not even if it rains penknives,” Turkish “when fish climb poplar trees,” and German “on St. Never's Day” (“Am Sankt-Nimmerleins-Tag”). A lot of them are about things blooming that are not capable of blooming, such as salt, an owl’s tail, clogs, a flagpole, or bamboo, but also apricots, which are on a blossoming plant! Going off this one Instagram post I found, it looks like maybe that one is more about the brevity of the apricot season than about the impossibility of their flower. Egyptian Arabic speakers, get at me about this one. Also, Arabic for apricot is formally “al-barqouq,” but people tend to actually say “mish-mish,” which rules.

• Speaking of what stuff is named in other languages, Swedish people call thumbprint cookies “hallongrotta,” or “raspberry caves.”

• Coca-Cola is not available in Cuba or North Korea, but you can buy it in every other country in the world. Here’s a good podcast episode about “coca-colonization,” but more specifically, we wanted to draw your attention to this sentence from the BBC link: “[Dwight Eisenhower] also introduced the drink to top Soviet general, Georgy Zhukov, who asked if a special, colourless version - one that looked like vodka - could be made, and Coca-Cola duly obliged for a while.” Do we think clear Coca-Cola tasted different? Is this a Crystal Pepsi situation?

• We all know the ocean is full of giant terrors. But few pause to wonder: why? What about the deep sea makes big animals like squid and jellyfish even bigger? This phenomenon has a name and it’s “abyssal gigantism” — which is coincidentally not a bad name for your next doom metal band. (Paradoxically, tiny animals get even tinier down there.) What’s going on? Scientists have a few theories — reduced predation, efficiency of larger animals’ metabolisms in a food-scarce environment, increasing size with lower temperature — but it’s so hard to do research on the deep ocean we just don’t know. The ocean: leave it alone, probably.

• While trying to write a question where the answer was Tommy, I discovered several facts. First of all, the question I ended up with was: “Half of a stoner comedy duo, half of a team of paranormal federal agents, and all British infantrymen in World War I share what name?” The first part refers to Tommy Chong and the second part refers to Tommy Lee Jones in “Men in Black.” A friend raised to me that “Jay” also seems like it would fit those parameters — Jay of “and Silent Bob” fame, and Agent J from the MiB. I regret not wording it as “the actor behind half a team of paranormal federal agents”! That’s my bad!

• But turning to the last part, as U.S. WWI infantrymen were called “doughboys,” British soldiers were called “Tommy Atkins,” which seems baffling until you think about stuff like “John Q. Public” or “Joe Six-Pack.” The nickname is actually even older, first documented in Jamaica in 1743. Weird!! Even weirder: there is a kind of mango called a Tommy Atkins for totally unrelated reasons (named after a specific guy). Tommy Atkins are kind of the Red Delicious of the mango world: they’re fine, they have a long shelf life, but they’re not the mango you’d choose if you had options. Editor Ira wants to make sure you know that both the soldier and the mango are completely unrelated to horror leading man Tommy Atkins of “The Rockford Files.”

• Anyway, while doing all that research, I also found out that Tommy Tune is not a stage name. His given name is Thomas Tune.

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In this week’s Friday Know-It-All, Private Events Manager Greg takes us on a dive into a bit of American mascot lore that runs deeper than you might expect.

Hey all! Private Events Manager Greg here with a brief dive into some strange American ephemera: the Billiken!

I’ve never been much of a fan of basketball, probably owing to the fact that I was uniquely cursed with the pairing of a 6-foot-3 height and a fundamental lack of hand-eye coordination. No, I do not play. Yes, I’ve tried.

I am fascinated, however, by the unique culture around the sport that fills our feeds every March during tourney season. While bigger teams are mainstays of the competition, small teams emerge every decade or two (or more!) with strange traditions. This year Omaha’s own Mavericks brought a bizarre win streak-spurring tradition of beating up trash cans to the big dance, though it didn’t stop them from getting bounced in the first round.

One thing that caught my eye (and imagination) in particular, thanks to a Sickos Committee post on Bluesky, was St. Louis University’s mascot. What is that? What is a Billiken? Was I missing out on a regional American cryptid? Why did I dream about it the night after seeing that post?

The Billiken was created by an American art teacher and illustrator in Kansas City, Missouri, named Florence Pretz, after reportedly coming to her in a dream. It was said to give you good luck if you bought it (ah, capitalism) and better luck if you received it as a gift (ah, souvenirs). The name came from a poem by Bliss Carman full of whimsical creatures and characters. (Tag urself, I’m Tallenough.)

But something about the Billiken was deeply memetic. A sort of prototype of the Troll Doll explosion half a century later, the Billiken expanded its reach. Notably, it topped a landmark tower called Tsutenkaku Tower in Japan, where visitors would rub its feet for luck. It spread through souvenir culture seemingly worldwide, from Tokyo to Alaska.
Whether you’re an originalist who sticks to the “It Follows” vibe of the top-tufted earlier mascot or the angular redesign that won a slam dunk contest on Jimmy Fallon in 2019, I hope you enjoyed this look into the humble Billiken. And if you see it in your dreams, please tell it to stay out of mine.

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Editor Ira is here this week to guide us through the vast and varied talents of Rosalyn Drexler.

History is peppered with fascinating polymaths — people who just seem to be good at everything to which they put their minds. Most of us count ourselves fortunate to be okay at one or two things. It’s hard to imagine what it’s like inside the brain of, say, a Leonardo da Vinci, or Benjamin Franklin, or Ada Lovelace, or Donald Glover, or the woman who wrote the novelization of “Rocky.”

As regular Friday Knowers-of-It-All might have guessed, it’s that last one who’ll be our topic of discussion today. And what a topic Rosalyn Drexler is!

Born into an artistically inclined family in the Bronx in 1926, Rosalyn Bronznick seems to have been on an artsy path right from the start. Her parents regularly took her to gallery shows and vaudeville performances, and eventually enrolled her in New York’s prestigious (and public) High School of Music & Art.

She was an early adopter of the “tune in, turn on, drop out” philosophy, quitting college after a single semester and moving into an apartment with her new husband, artist Sherman Drexler. The pair did the whole starving artist thing, raising two young children and working a variety of jobs while immersing themselves in a burgeoning New York City art scene that would spawn any number of historic movements over the next several decades.

But first, wrestling!

Around 1950, a friend who frequented a local gym in her Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood suggested that Rosalyn might be a good fit for a women’s professional wrestling troupe that trained there. Thus was Rosalyn Drexler, young Jewish mother from the Bronx, reinvented as “Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire.” (Obviously not a character that would come anywhere close to flying today, but very much par for 1950.)

Despite a lack of wrestling experience, Drexler embraced the performance aspect of the job. She quickly learned the tricks of landing fake blows and getting the crowd wired up. (“The hardest thing to do was to reinforce the straps of my bathing suit so it wouldn’t tear in battle,” she later told an interviewer.)

She carved out a two-year career wrestling with the traveling show, but hung up her leotard after a tour of the South gave her a first-hand look at the ugliness of segregation. “I had never been to the South,” Drexler said. “Water fountains and bathrooms would say ‘whites only.’ At one of the venues where I wrestled, there was a sign that said ‘special section for colored fans.’ I thought I was in a foreign land.” Unable to justify performing in venues that supported racial separation, she went back to New York and her artwork.

Over the back half of the 1950s, Drexler established a reputation as an original and witty sculptor amongst NYC critics and art patrons. Her profile grew further when she began shifting her focus to the then-swelling Pop Art movement. Drexler’s eye for social commentary perfectly complemented her sense of humor as she recontextualized imagery from magazines and movie posters. Her paintings and collages garnered praise for their stark, often darkly comic depictions of violence and inequality. As one of the few women visual artists allowed to enter the inner circle of Pop Art, she also stood out as an overtly social and political artist in a genre better known for being too cool to care. She impressed Andy Warhol enough that he produced silkscreens of her in her Rosa Carlo persona.

OK, so you’ve been a traveling wrestler and a pioneer of a generation-defining art movement. What’s your next move? If you said “become one of your era’s most acclaimed playwrights,” I’m guessing this isn’t the first Rosalyn Drexler bio you’ve read.

Drexler had her first play produced in 1964, an experimental piece titled “Home Movies” that a New York Times critic deemed “too far out to grasp” but earned her the first of three career Obie Awards. She penned dozens of other plays and experimental theater pieces over the next several decades, at least one of them involving puppets. As with her artwork, her plays are renowned for their high energy, wicked humor, and on-point observations. She’s won multiple high-profile playwriting grants and fellowships and had works produced across the U.S.

That seems like more than enough for a single resume, right? Well, too bad, ‘cause Rosalyn Drexler is a celebrated fiction writer too. Her first novel, 1965’s “I Am the Beautiful Stranger,” is a coming-of-age satire that was faintly praised as “bright, inventive, but undisciplined writing” by a Kirkus reviewer who’d I’d wager missed at least some of the point. Her 1966 short story “Dear” earned her the Paris Review’s Humor Prize. She’s published nine novels to date, boasting provocative titles such as “The Cosmopolitan Girl,” “Vulgar Lives,” and “Unwed Widow.”

Drexler’s most notable original novel is probably 1972’s “To Smithereens,” a fictionalized account of her time on the women’s wrestling circuit two decades prior. The New York Times was effusive about this one, saying, “‘To Smithereens’ is an extraordinarily good book, but then so is everything Rosalyn Drexler ever wrote.” It was adapted into a film called “Below the Belt” that was shot in 1974 but sat on the shelf until 1980, when it was finally released to an indifferent reception. (Drexler says that she pointed out that “below the belt” is a boxing term, not a wrestling one, and was told by the producers that it was sexier this way. That seems to sum up the overall vibe of the film.)

And hey, speaking of movie adaptations and boxing, we’ve got one more chapter of Rosalyn Drexler to explore before I let you get back to your Friday. Notice how I called “To Smithereens” her most notable original novel? That’s because Drexler also dabbled in crafting novelizations of movies, a very 1970s literary pursuit. You’ve never heard of most of the movies she adapted, with one major exception.

In 1976, Rosalyn Drexler somehow landed the gig of turning Sylvester Stallone’s much-vaunted screenplay for “Rocky” into a paperback novel one might pick up at the drugstore. Writing under her frequently used pseudonym of Julia Sorel, Drexler cranked out 118 pages that TotalRocky.com says provide “some cool insights into scenes that ultimately did not make the final cut.” Stallone reportedly disliked the adaptation, largely because of a new scene added by Drexler in which his titular boxer suffers erectile dysfunction.“His character would never have a problem in bed!” Stallone supposedly whined, and honestly Rosalyn Drexler would be a legend just for facilitating that reaction.

At the time of this writing, Rosalyn Drexler is still living in New York City at the age of 99, Sherman having passed on in 2014. After decades as something of a cult favorite, she’s enjoyed a swell in interest in her multifaceted body of work in recent years. She deserves all of the acclaim and then some as an artist who tried on every hat she came across and found they all fit just fine.

And that’s all there is to…

Oh yeah, and she won an Emmy as one of the writers on Lily Tomlin’s first TV comedy special.

And THAT’S all there is to know this week.

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Happy Women’s History month! Editor Sophie is here this week to give some context to a frequently remixed, misquoted, and misattributed feminist slogan.

You’ve heard it before, maybe printed on a mug or a T-shirt or pasted across someone’s bumper. You’ve probably seen it attributed to any number of famous historical women, from Eleanor Roosevelt to Mae West to Marilyn Monroe — if, in fact, it’s attributed to anyone at all. Maybe you’ve encountered it remixed to feature a rebel princess or a Disney villainess.

“Well-behaved women rarely make history.”

Wait, back up, because that’s the first thing people tend to get wrong. Properly quoted, it’s actually “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” And, well, it doesn’t mean what you might think it means. You see, the “well-behaved women” line was first written by a historian named Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and understanding her and her work is key to understanding the sentiment behind the quote.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is, today, a retired Harvard University professor. Much of her scholarship has focused on women in colonial to pre-industrial America. Her most famous work is probably the 1990 book “A Midwife’s Tale,” which won a Pulitzer Prize and was adapted for PBS’ “American Experience” series in 1998. “A Midwife’s Tale” is a historical account based on the diary of Martha Ballard, which she wrote in every day for 27 years, from 1785 to 1812, recording her life as a woman, mother, and midwife in rural Maine.

Despite literally thousands of entries creating a first-hand account of Martha Ballard’s unique place in American history, her diary had often been dismissed by earlier historians. In a later journal article reflecting on the recurring theme of housework and domestic labor in Ballard’s diary, Ulrich cites historians who “found much of the diary ‘trivial and unimportant... being but a repetition of what has been recited many times,’” and “filled with trivia about domestic chores and pastimes.” But Ulrich uses those same “trivial” mentions of household chores to deepen our understanding of the roles of 18th-century frontier women within their homes, families, and communities. Taking on the eight-year task of reading every diary entry, compiling statistical data about Ballard’s life, and writing her own book was, in Ulrich’s own words, her “enterprise in recapturing the historical significance of 'trivia.'” (She’s really speaking our language here, wouldn’t you say?)

So let’s get back to the “well-behaved women” of it all. Ulrich coined that line in the opening paragraph of an article titled “Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735,” which she wrote as a graduate student at the University of New Hampshire in 1976. Here it is more fully situated within the paper:

“They prayed secretly, read the Bible through at least once a year, and went to hear the minister preach even when it snowed. Hoping for an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth. And they haven’t been. Well-behaved women seldom make history; against Antinomians and witches, these pious matrons have had little chance at all. Most historians, considering the domestic by definition irrelevant, have simply assumed the pervasiveness of similar attitudes in the seventeenth century.”

“They” refers to Puritan women of 17th- and 18th-century New England. In her article, Ulrich was attempting to form a portrait of attitudes towards these Puritan women through a deep reading of three types of ministerial literature: wedding and childbirth sermons and eulogies. You can see how just a few extra sentences completely transforms the meaning of the “well-behaved women” line; Ulrich wasn’t making a call to arms, encouraging women to rebel and stop being “well-behaved.” She was simply making a comment about the ways in which the lives of average, everyday women had been left largely absent from historical narratives — something that would clearly guide her own approach to historic scholarship throughout her life.

For her part, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich seems mostly bemused by the strange journey into popular culture that her words have taken. She even wrote a book in 2007 (titled, you guessed it, “Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History”) exploring what it means to make history — both in the sense of larger-than-life figures leaving their mark on history, but also the way that the very concept of history is constructed by academics and historians. Reflecting on the quote, Ulrich went on to say, “When I wrote that ‘well-behaved women seldom make history,’ I was making a commitment to help recover the lives of otherwise obscure women. I had no idea that 30 years later, my own words would come back to me transformed.”

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Executive VP Brenna is here this week to discuss one of her favorite authors. Happy Women’s History Month!

I first met Anne Shirley when I was about 9. She was a kindred spirit — another kid who would swing from flights of fancy to “the depths of despair” to righteous indignation (emotional regulation: it’s always been hard!). Anne was a kid who got into trouble both by accident (using liniment instead of vanilla) and on purpose (you do not have to walk the roof ridge pole just because Josie Pye dared you to!) and used long, fancy words. And, best of all for a voracious reader, she was in a series of eight books (but if you’re pressed, the first three and the very last are the best).

“Anne of Green Gables,” published in 1908 and never out of print since, is the story of an orphan adopted at age 11. Author L.M. Montgomery lost her own mother when she was not yet 2, and was raised by her maternal grandparents. They were Scottish and Irish Canadian, strict folk who shared tales of fairies and travelers. Her emotional connection to her home infused her characters (like Pat of Silver Bush); her ambition to be a writer was lifelong (like Emily of New Moon); her expansive imagination (like Anne’s) helped her navigate an isolated childhood.

Lucy Maud Montgomery — Maud to her friends, Dame after receiving the OBE in 1935 — authored 20 novels and had hundreds of short stories, poems, essays, and articles published in her lifetime. She died in 1942 (content warning for suicide), and was born in Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, in 1874, which inspired the fictional Avonlea, where her most famous character lived. Montgomery, like Anne, got her teacher’s license in Charlottetown, and taught off and on. Like Anne, she refused three proposals of marriage and went to college (Dalhousie for Montgomery, Redmond for Anne). When she did marry, at age 36, it was not a lifelong friend and future doctor like the fictional Gilbert Blythe, but a Reverend Ewen Macdonald; she later told a reporter, “Those women whom God wanted to destroy He would make into the wives of ministers.”

Montgomery was first paid for her writing at age 19. At 23, in 1898, she returned to her childhood home to support her widowed grandmother, staying until her wedding, not long after that grandmother’s death, in 1911. In those 13 years, she was making a livable income from writing, according to her extensive journals. The story of the little red-haired orphan was rejected by five publishers in 1905, so she put it in a hatbox for a time.

When “Anne of Green Gables” did come out in June 1908, it was an immediate success, with six printings before the end of the year. In 1917 began a seven-year dispute with her publisher over royalties: she’d been paid seven cents on the dollar rather than the 19 cents she was owed. The contentious case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court (the publisher was based in Boston), she won, and was awarded $15,000 (about $372,000 currently). Montgomery is estimated to be the most successful Canadian author in sales, both during her lifetime and since, with “Anne of Green Gables” now found in 36 languages.

Montgomery wrote about her career in 1917 for a magazine series, later collected in the book “The Alpine Path,” and begins, “Was not — should not — a ‘career’ be something splendid, wonderful, spectacular at the very least, something varied and exciting? … It had never occurred to me to call [my writing] so; and so, on first thought, it did not seem to me that there was much to be said about that same long, monotonous struggle.” Turns out that work is still work even when you’re a successful writer!

For all that, Anne’s story is over 100 years old, it still feels relevant, and not just in the universal emotions of a kid wanting the latest fashion (“It would give me such a thrill, Marilla, just to wear a dress with puffed sleeves.”). Montgomery extended empathy to all the characters, each with their own distinct angles. Marilla, the aged spinster who unexpectedly loves an unasked-for little girl, is sketched sympathetically as she questions her assumptions about how to raise a good person. Before Anne goes to the teachers’ college, Anne is effusive about how much she’ll miss home, and how much she loves Marilla and Matthew. “Marilla would have given much just then to have possessed Anne’s power of putting her feelings into words; but nature and habit had willed it otherwise, and she could only put her arms close about her girl and hold her tenderly to her heart, wishing that she need never let her go.”

Montgomery wrote in 1901, “I don’t care for dramatized novels. They always jar on my preconceptions of the characters.” Her Anne was first adapted to film in 1919, and has since been reimagined for radio, television, anime, comics, and more than 50 times — next coming later this year in an updated Japanese version. A movie about the author herself is also in production: Megan Follows, who played Anne in what many (including me and my cousins, pictured with me at Green Gables) consider the definitive, 1985 CBC adaptation, will portray her in “Lucy. Maud.” It may not be a flawless dramatization, but as Anne would say, “isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?”

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In this week’s Friday Know-It-All, Social Media Coordinator Mia wraps up the 2024 film awards season with a look back at some of this year’s biggest successes, snubs, and snafus.

Even though you just heard about some Academy Awards history from Ira last week, I’m here to recap this year’s award season! As Trivia Mafia’s resident film expert (i.e., the narrow winner of the past three Oscars pools and writer of many a too-difficult movie theme round), I’ve got plenty of opinions on the awards shows of the past few months. Even though the slate of 2024 movies wasn’t as strong as past years in my opinion, there was still plenty to talk about this year — from egregious snubs and obnoxious acceptance speeches to surprisingly good hosts.

Hostesses with the Mostesses

Women are making awards shows funny again! This year, we saw some absolutely fantastic female performers taking the stage to host some of this year’s shows, from old favorites to historic firsts.

SNL alum Aidy Bryant was back again to host this year’s Film Independent Spirit Awards, which I was super excited to see — last year’s Spirits was her first hosting gig ever, and she absolutely killed it. Her 2024 opening monologue poking fun at the typical roast comedy at awards shows is one of my favorite host bits I’ve ever seen, and she once again brought some fantastic comedy to the 2025 ceremony. For the uninitiated, the Spirits are basically the indie Oscars (or, as Bryant lovingly referred to them last year, “the bisexual Oscars”), which award films and television series made by independent filmmakers and studios on smaller budgets. This year, “Anora” took home the most awards, including Best Feature, with Sean Wang’s feature directorial debut “Dìdi” and Jesse Eisenberg’s “A Real Pain” following closely behind. My personal favorite film of 2025, “My Old Ass,” even managed to take home a win, with star Maisy Stella (making her feature debut) very deservedly taking Best Breakthrough Performance.

Also this year, comedian Nikki Glaser became the first woman to solo host the Golden Globes in its 82-year history. Which, first, yikes — Tina Fey and Amy Poehler have co-hosted a couple of times, and Sandra Oh co-hosted with Andy Samberg a few years ago, but taking this long to have a female solo host? Really? At any rate, Glaser not only made history in that sense, but also perhaps as one of the funniest hosts in the show’s history, which was especially needed for the Globes to bounce back after Jo Koy’s disastrously unfunny and misogynistic monologues last year. She did an excellent job of toeing the line of making some edgy jokes while also just delivering some very tight comedy, even fitting in a self-aware but topical musical bit about “Wicked” and “Conclave” that I still quote, weeks later.

Actor Kristen Bell stepped up to host this year’s Screen Actors Guild Awards, which I would argue are even more significant and meaningful than the Oscars, since the Actors are peer-voted. It wasn’t her first rodeo, having hosted the ceremony back in 2018, but she somehow managed to top her own performance this year. The “Frozen” star opened the night with what may be my favorite awards show monologue ever, a parody of her character Anna’s song “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” (here instead “Do You Want to Be an Actor?”) that featured a highlight montage of some of the nominees’ first-ever roles. It’s a great example of how different styles of hosting can all be equally as meaningful — even though it can work out great, you don’t have to be doing roast comedy to make a good impression as a host! You can actually be earnest and do something heartfelt that makes people feel good and be just as effective! Imagine that.

Even though the women hosting this year’s shows killed it, I do also have to offer an honorable mention to David Tennant’s second BAFTAs. Even though I’ve not watched him in much since “Doctor Who,” he’s one of my parents’ favorite actors, and for good reason — his comedic timing and self-awareness is impeccable, and of course he had to lean into his Scottish heritage with a rousing rendition of The Proclaimers’ “500 Miles,” famously his favorite song.

I Don’t Want No Snubs…

As is inevitable during any awards season, there are plenty of fantastic films and performances that don’t end up getting the recognition they deserve. Last year, for example, even though A24 really beefed it with the distribution, I will die on the hill that Zac Efron should’ve gotten a Best Actor nomination for “The Iron Claw.” And where were Celine Song and Greta Lee’s respective Best Director and Best Actress nominations for “Past Lives”? Anyway.

Perhaps one of the most notable films to be completely shut out from this year’s Academy Awards was Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers.” Even though I’ve never been a huge Luca fan, I was, like most of America, completely enamored with the film: the performances from Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist were all fantastic, the cinematography was genuinely inspired, and the screenplay was honestly pretty solid, too. However, its real stand-out was its earworm-y techno score composed by Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. The pair had previously worked with Guadagnino on the score for this 2022 cannibal romance “Bones and All,” and he approached them to score “Challengers” by simply asking, “Do you want to be on my next film? It's going to be super sexy.” Despite winning several dozen industry awards and honors, including the literal Golden Globe for Best Score, the soundtrack didn’t even get so much as a nomination at this year’s Oscars, with the eventual winner being “The Brutalist.”

Also really shocking, maybe just to me personally, was Greg Kwedar’s “Sing Sing” getting locked out of a Best Picture nomination. Based on the real-life Rehabilitation Through the Arts program at Sing Sing Maximum Security Prison, the film also starred actual formerly incarcerated actors from the program playing fictionalized versions of themselves. It also made headlines for its pay structure, with every single person on the cast and crew agreeing to the same day rate in exchange for a certain amount of equity in the film. It was one of the best films of the year, but again, A24 really botched the distribution, with the film never even hitting wide release in some markets. Thankfully, it still received a few nominations at this year’s Oscars, including Best Actor for star Colman Domingo (which he was robbed of, but we’ll get to that a little later), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Song.

Speech! Speech! Speech! Speech!

Let’s get it out of the way: with dozens of speeches every awards season, there are always some duds. This year was no exception, from Adrian Brody throwing his gum at his date, refusing to be played off, and somehow producing the longest acceptance speech in the history of the Academy Awards, speaking for five minutes and 37 seconds; to “Emilia Pérez” soundtrack co-writer Camille awkwardly breaking into song mid-speech (and, you know, failing to acknowledge anybody in the transgender community). But we’ve also seen some incredibly sincere and heartfelt acceptance speeches at the various awards shows in the past few years. From the likes of Ke Huy Quan, Bong Joon Ho, Lupita Nyong’o, and plenty of others, most awardees do know how to graciously and non-obnoxiously accept an award.

Even this year, we had a couple of really great ones, with my personal favorites coming from some of our SAG and Golden Globes acting winners. Timothée Chalamet, winning the Actor for his portrayal of Bob Dylan in the biopic “A Complete Unknown” (notably marking his first major win after almost a decade of nominations), gave an impassioned speech about his pursuit of greatness as a performer. It was honestly a breath of fresh air in the sea of winners being overly humble and insisting they didn’t deserve the recognition. Chalamet also had a fantastic showing during his Oscar campaign this year in general, between his interviews with the likes of Brittany Broski and Nardwaur and becoming the first non-musician this century to do double-duty on SNL.

Fellow first-time winner Demi Moore, who led the Coralie Fargeat body horror flick “The Substance,” took home the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical/Comedy and told a heartfelt story about her journey in the industry and the impact of winning her first acting award in her 45 years of working. Many fans pointed out the significance of Moore’s win at 62 in relation to the film itself, which features her character being pushed out of her job as a performer for being too old, in favor of a shinier, younger counterpart. Personally, I just saw “Ghost” for the first time recently and I think Moore deserves all of the career awards for that performance alone, so I was pleased to finally see her take home some wins this year.

In conclusion — overall, a somewhat interesting season, although nothing’s ever going to beat the rush of watching “Everything Everywhere All At Once” take home so many awards in 2023. There have already been some pretty fascinating flicks out this year — I’m headed out to see Bong Joon Ho’s “Mickey 17” this weekend, and, against all odds, I actually loved Osgood Perkins’ newest film, “The Monkey.” And hey, there’s plenty of opportunity for next year’s shows to be just as, if not more, interesting than this year’s.

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In this week’s Friday Know-It-All, Editor Ira gets us ready for Oscars weekend with a dive into some less well-known Academy Award winners and nominees.

A big part of writing for Trivia Mafia is staying aware of upcoming cultural events, annual observances, and other corners of the calendar. Late February usually means we’re working up a lot of rounds about both Black History Month and the Oscars, two topics that have overlapped more in recent years than they used to.

We’ve run plenty of rounds celebrating well-known Oscar winners such as Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, Jordan Peele, and Jennifer Hudson, but there are also plenty of lower-key honorees whose contributions have stayed largely behind the scenes. For today’s Black History Month Friday Know-It-All, let’s dig into the stories of a few undersung winners and nominees in less-celebrated Oscars categories.

Willie D. Burton, Best Sound Mixing

Sound mixing is one of those film jobs that often goes unnoticed when it’s done well, but is unmistakable when it’s done poorly. Sound mixers have the tricky task of recording and mixing dialogue and location sounds in real time. While a lot of sound-related jobs are performed in post-production, the sound mixer is responsible for making sure the volume and quality of the on-set recordings are usable and easy to work with.

Since the 1970s, Willie D. Burton has been recognized as having some of the best ears in the business. A sound aficionado from an early age, Burton studied electronics at Compton City College in L.A. and operated sonar in the U.S. Navy before becoming the first Black member of the International Sound Technicians Union in 1969. He started out in lower-level sound jobs in television and worked his way up to film, getting his big break mixing sound on Sidney Poitier’s hit comedy “Let’s Do It Again” in 1975.

Burton earned his first Oscar nomination in 1978 for “The Buddy Holly Story,” where he had the unenviable task of making audible sense of Gary Busey. His first Oscar win came for mixing another music biopic, Clint Eastwood’s 1988 movie “Bird,” starring Forest Whitaker as jazz icon Charlie Parker. He won a second Academy Award for “Dreamgirls” in 2006, and a nomination for 2023’s “Oppenheimer” tied him with Quincy Jones as the most-nominated Black artist in Oscars history, with seven. You’ve also heard his work in the likes of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” “The Shawshank Redemption,” “Se7en,” and “WarGames.”

Hannah Beachler, Best Production Design

A production designer is regarded as the person most responsible for the overall look and feel of a movie. It’s a role that requires skills in creative design, project management, financial management, planning, and communication. That’s a lot of hats to wear, which makes someone who can balance them all one of a film’s most valuable assets. When a movie’s production design is on point, it shows in a distinctive vibe that makes for some iconic imagery.

There aren’t many more iconic designs in recent Hollywood history than the Afrofuturist nation of Wakanda, as envisioned by production designer Hannah Beachler. The child of an interior designer and an architect (go figure), Beachler started making no-budget indie movies in college. She was still on the indie circuit when she collaborated with first-time director Ryan Coogler on 2013’s harrowing “Fruitvale Station,” a film that went on to be one of the year’s most acclaimed and launched both of their careers. Beachler has since worked with Coogler on “Creed” and both “Black Panther” films, Beyoncé on “Lemonade” and “Renaissance,” Barry Jenkins on “Moonlight,” and Steven Soderbergh on “No Sudden Move.”

To realize her vision of the fictional African utopia from 2018’s “Black Panther,” Beachler assembled a 515-page “set bible” laying out everything from the country’s geological landscape to the history of its buildings to its favorite foods. Her in-depth planning paid off in arguably the most celebrated and visually striking movie in the Marvel canon, and one that made her the first Black production designer to win the Oscar.

Also, her house in New Orleans kicks all kinds of ass.

Ruth E. Carter, Best Costume Design

“Costume designer” might seem like a fairly straightforward job title, but in Hollywood it generally means a lot more than just designing costumes. A costume designer is also responsible for sourcing materials, supervising clothing creation, and collaborating with the wardrobe department. Their designs are a key element of cinematic storytelling, a way for audiences to tell at a glance what a character is all about.

Ruth E. Carter has outfitted many of the most memorable characters in the past half-century of cinema. She learned to sew at a local Boys & Girls Club when she was 9, a skill she later combined with her love of theater. Carter met up-and-coming director Spike Lee while working with a Los Angeles theater company in the late '80s. She became the costume designer for much of Lee’s catalog, including “Do the Right Thing,” “Crooklyn,” and “Malcolm X,” the latter of which earned her the first of her four Oscar nominations.

She’s worked with a who’s who of Black directors from the '90s to today, including John Singleton, Ava DuVernay, Robert Townsend, Lee Daniels, Keenan Ivory Wayans, Ernest R. Dickerson, Reginald Hudlin, and, of course, Ryan Coogler. Carter brought home the Oscar for her indelible work on “Black Panther,” then nabbed a second for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” becoming the first Black woman to win two Oscars in any category.

Hugh A. Robertson, Best Film Editing

Any time a three-hour movie gets nominated for Best Film Editing, you’ll hear the same joke from the dullest wit in the room: “Wow, I didn’t even think that movie HAD an editor!” Setting aside the ghastly assumption that editing is synonymous with abbreviating, the idea that an editor’s main role is just to decide what doesn’t belong in a movie is way off. A film editor assembles a movie’s footage to ensure that it’s coherent, creative, and engaging for the eye and the mind.

Nowadays that’s done mainly with computers, but back when Hugh A. Robertson was coming up, it was a manual process that required cutting and splicing physical strips of film. It was painstaking, eye-straining work, but a skilled editor could dictate the pace and tone of a film more than nearly any other creative. The Brooklyn-born son of Jamaican immigrants, Robertson landed a summer job with a small film studio as a teen and never looked back. After serving in the Signal Corps in World War II, he studied film at the Sorbonne. He later joined the Negro Actor’s Guild in New York and became the first Black member of the Motion Picture Editors Union in 1960.

Robertson’s career as an editor was brief but remarkable. In 1959, he worked as an assistant editor on “Come Back Africa,” a groundbreaking guerrilla film shot in secret in South Africa as a protest against the apartheid government. He worked as a sound editor through the early '60s and got his widest exposure in 1969 as the film editor on John Schlesinger’s controversial hit “Midnight Cowboy.” That film became the only X-rated movie ever to win Best Picture, and Robertson became the first Black editor to be nominated for an Oscar. His next editing gig was Gordon Parks’ possibly even more impactful 1971 “Shaft,” a huge hit that helped define an era of Black filmmaking.

Robertson moved on to directing television shows and low-budget feature films before relocating to Trinidad in 1973. He established a film school and dedicated the rest of his career to building a Trinidadian film industry, directing a number of movies and TV shows in his adopted homeland. He was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1982, a pioneer on multiple fronts.

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In today's Friday Know-It-All, AV Expert Davis introduces a new segment called “Make a Name for Yourself (And Your Trivia Team),” exploring the names and branding of Minor League Baseball teams and beyond.

So, you’ve come to a trivia night at one of our fine locations. The first thing you’ve got to do, after ordering your food and drinks, of course, is create a team name — honestly, one of the hardest parts of any trivia night, and one that can cause more anxiety than ever intended. While I can’t tell you what to name your team, I can give you inspiration in the best way I know how: through baseball team branding and the stories behind the names. While we will spend a majority of our future editions in the wacky world of Minor League Baseball branding, we start this journey with the Negro Leagues.

The Negro Leagues had many iterations, all of which were borne out of the necessity for non-white players to enjoy, and often times dominate, the American pastime. Let’s explore these teams and their names in order to better understand the history of America, baseball as it is today, and to give inspiration to your next team name. We start with the Kansas City Monarchs.

Kansas City Monarchs

The Kansas City Monarchs are one of the more prolific teams in the Negro Leagues. They had players with some of the most recognizable names, like Satchel Paige and Jackie Robinson. It seems obvious that they named themselves after royalty, much like the current Kansas City team. That’s not the case. They are named after a line from a 1782 poem by poet William Cowper (pronounced “Cooper”). The poem itself is about a castaway's life on a deserted island. The castaway is forced to have sovereignty of that place and is out of humanity’s reach.  The line goes: “I am the monarch of all I purvey.”

The owner at the time, J.L. Wilkinson, who was the first white owner of a Negro Leagues team, something that was not uncommon after him, understood the importance of Black baseball and what it could become. He created a relationship with The Call, an African-American Kansas City newspaper that is still in service to this day, and gave them a stream of articles about the team.  The writer C.A. Franklin recognized the role that Wilkinson and the Monarchs were playing in improving racial harmony in Kansas City. He noted, “From a sociological point of view, the Monarchs have done more than any other single agent to break the damnable outrage of prejudice that exists in this city.” 

Poetry isn’t often used in the naming of a team, but let the Monarchs be inspirational to you whilst you read your next poem. A stanza could give you your next team name.

Birmingham Black Barons 

Looking at a list of team names in the Negro Leagues, one naming convention really sticks out: the use of the word “Black” before an already existing team name. A list of a few, but not all, are:

• Birmingham Black Barons

• Washington Black Senators

• Atlanta Black Crackers

• New York Black Yankees

• Chattanooga Black Lookouts

• And many more!

These team names, a lot of times, were brought about simply because it was the only jersey they had. The Atlanta Black Crackers were originally called the Atlanta Cubs. They played on the same field as the white team, the Atlanta Crackers, so the name was changed after one year, simply because that was what everyone called them.

Often these teams changed ownership multiple times and the leagues were always going in and out, so if they could save money by not changing uniforms, they would.  They would get uniforms from a defunct team or the ones they weren’t using from the year prior. The San Francisco Sea Lions famously had a bear on their jersey, because a San Francisco Cubs team had folded and the owner bought the jerseys on the cheap.

Documented by a lot of the newspapers of the time, the Black versions of teams would outperform their non-Major League counterparts, both on the field and in the stands. There were two teams for the longest time in Birmingham, Alabama, the Birmingham Barons and the Birmingham Black Barons. They both played on the same field, but the crowds for the Black Barons would often equal or outnumber the Barons, despite the white team having a longer history. They even got equal press coverage.

These naming conventions have gone by the wayside, but to remember these teams and what they did to survive is paramount in understanding the Negro Leagues.

New York Cubans

While the first Latino player preceded Jackie Robinson by more than 45 years — Lou Castro appeared for the Philadelphia Phillies in 1902 — only a few were allowed into the Majors, most of them required to be white or “light-skinned.” The players that weren’t accepted into the league created these “Cubans” teams, despite not all being from Cuba. The most iconic of the teams was the New York Cubans.

There were two Cuban Stars teams that preceded the New York Cubans. One was in New York, and one was in the Midwest. They would often barnstorm, which was a tactic many Negro League teams employed by going to different cities, putting on a show, and challenging the local team to a game that they would often handily win.

This team name shows how deep the roots of segregation ran in baseball. It also shows the resiliency in the naming of their teams as a nationality that wasn’t largely accepted in the Bigs. The name was more of a message that these players were staying true to who they were and where they came from, even if the Major League didn’t want them around.

Homestead Grays

Long considered to be the most dominant team in all of the Negro Leagues, the Homestead Grays were formed in 1912 and disbanded in 1950, changing leagues and locations all throughout. The 1931 Homestead Grays are considered to be the best team in all of baseball, just four years after the all-white 1927 Yankees, known as “Murderers' Row,” took that designation for the Majors. The 1927 Yankees had six future Hall of Famers. The Grays had seven. 

The interesting part of their name isn’t so much the Grays; they were just named for their jersey color (which is better than your sock color, Boston and Chicago). The interesting part is the location. Homestead, Pennsylvania, a borough of Pittsburgh, is where the team started, but was only partially the team’s home. They played a majority of their games in Pittsburgh proper and Washington, D.C.

The Negro Leagues were borne out of the unfair practice of segregation in more than just baseball, but in America, as a whole. Because of this, these teams couldn’t play everywhere. Parks were often closed to them. So, these teams did what they knew best — and that was to play baseball. They played wherever they could.

While we will never know how the ’31 Grays would have fared against the ’27 Yankees, we do know that the Yankees had much better commodities than the Grays. They played in the nicest of ballparks and had the best of care. The Grays entered the “best team ever” conversation while not fully having a home field. So, if you can’t find inspiration from the earlier team brands, naming your team after one of the best in all of baseball is never a bad choice and pays homage to, likely, the best franchise in the Negro Leagues.

So, have you made a name for yourself yet?

The color barrier in baseball was broken by Jackie Robinson in 1947, and the last formal Negro League disbanded in 1948. That doesn’t mean their history doesn’t last; in fact, MLB recently added the Negro Leagues stats to the official stats for all of baseball. You can find inspiration for your team name anywhere, and the Negro Leagues is not a bad place to look.

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