5 posts tagged “wikipedia”

No...wait. Seriously.

(SUBTITLE: I <3 Wikipedia. Or; How a martini taught me about the Corsican Flag.)

When I was in the 8th grade my history teacher tried to recruit me into the GATE class (I turned her down). She said my mind was like a sponge. That I just absorbed information.

Without sounding like a pompous ass; that might be the most astute observation about my personality ever made. I do love information and I try to get my hands on as much as possible.

Despite what people think of it, Wikipedia is the perfect tool for gathering information, random bits of it, things that you would never learn about other wise.
This is one of those stories.

I bought a new bottle of vermouth today.
It's a special bottle "for a fruitier martini".
I looked on the Martini & Rossi website for recipes but didn't find any so I turned t the web. Among my results was a Wikipedia entry about vermouth. So I clicked it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermouth

When I was done with the article I saw at the bottom there was a link to an article about the "History of Alchol"
I clicked it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_alcohol

When I was about half way done with it I noticed a chart depcitcing "alcohol per capita comsuption"

I clicked it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countries_by_alcohol_consumption

I said "Uganda? Really?"
Uganda has the highest rate of alchol comsuption in the wold. almost 19.5 liters per person per year.
The United States is way down at #43.

Then I spent a little while reading about Uganda. Oh yeah, Idi Amin. You should check out the documentary about him "General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait" I saw it a few years back. That dude was crazy. I still haven't seen the movie with Forrest Wittiaker about him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uganda
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idi_Amin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Idi_Amin_Dada:_A_Self_Portrait

Then I went back to the list and I emailed it to my friends.

I was reviewing it again and noticed that there is a country in the top ten called Réunion.
I was like, WTF? Réunion? I've never heard of such a place and they have the same flag as the French.

So I clicked it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Réunion

So I was reading all about Réunion and I notitced that Réunion is in NUTS Region FR9.
What? NUTS?
That's right. I clicked it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_level_NUTS_of_the_European_Union

I got down to France and noticed there was a subdivison called "Corse" and I thought "Corsica! Napolean!!"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corse

I was intrgued by the flag of Corsica. So naturally I clicked on the Corsican flag to learn more about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Corsica

And that, friends, is how I learned all about the Corsican flag because I wanted a Martini.

And I ended up drinking a mai tai anyway.

Did you know:

That there is an actively erupting volcano in Antarctica? Me either.
Mount Erebus

Or that in 1979 an airplane crashed into it killing everyone on board.
Air New Zealand Flight 901

(Clearly, I'm bored.)

I spend lots of time reading Wikipedia, like way more time that I should. Often I learn really interesting scholarly things. Today isn't one of those days. Today I learned something about Forrest Gump that I thought was funny.

When I read Forrest Gump the book I did so in one day and I really enjoyed it. It is significantly different from the movie, which is a really good thing. When I read the sequel "Gump & Co." it felt more like an attempt to cash in than a proper sequel; but I have always wondered why they didn't make it into a movie, seeing as Hollywood is prone to cashing in on things like that.

Today I learned why:

Forrest Gump is a 1985 novel by Winston Groom, a 1994 film adaptation, and the name of the title character of both. The film was a huge commercial success, earning $677 million worldwide during its theatrical run (the top grossing film in North America released that year), although Paramount claimed it was a commercial failure and did not pay Groom his share of the profits. As such, Groom has refused to allow the novel's sequel, Gump and Co., to be filmed, stating that he could not in good conscience sell the rights to film the sequel to a failure.  The film garnered a total of 13 Academy Award nominations, of which it won six, including Best Picture, Best Visual Effects, Best Director (Robert Zemeckis), and Best Actor (Tom Hanks).

This one takes a little longer to get to the point, but I found it all by my lonesome.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Boo_Berry&oldid=64826392

...Robert Barry was born in 1948 to James and Evelyn Barry, middleclass educators from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. James Barry, a former real estate agent turned high school guidance counselor, was heir to a mentholated tobacco fortune cultivated in the early twentieth century by his father Lucius Barry and partner Nathaniel Kool. Evelyn Barry, a banker's daughter from Newport News, Virginia, taught geography to the underprivileged.

An only child, Barry attended Rutherford B. Hayes primary school; in 1961 his older cousin Francis Christopher Barry moved in with the family, taking a fraternal, almost mentor-like role in Robert's life. Francis was attractive, popular and a letter athlete. Robert, nicknamed "Bug"--and later "Booh"-- for his eccentric behavior in many social situations (a junior high yearbook photograph shows him urinating into what looks like a very old oven) gained confidence under Francis's watch.

At the age of seventeen he graduated five months early from Zachary Taylor high school and immediately enlisted in the Air Force Reserve. Francis, meanwhile, was accepted to the University of Arizona's acting program in Tucson. Robert took to flying with a grinding tenacity and almost sexual fierceness that impressed even his most senior commanders. He quickly shed the "Bug" / "Booh" moniker and picked up the somewhat awkward title of "Soar-O", a cumbersome--yet oddly endearing--pun on the contemporary television hit. He would often be out in the skies for hours, attempting cork screw after hot-dogging cork screw, wasting time, patience and fuel in his seemingly endless quest to, as cadet Ed DaGreigh would later comment, "[be the] ultimate flyer. Rob wanted nothing but supreme, Roman God-like greatness. Specifically Roman."

At the same time, Francis was rapidly winning the hearts and kudos of students, faculty and the collegiate-theatre-attending populous of the southwest's ninth largest city. After a thankfully brief "exploratory period" into the unforgiving waters of stand-up comedy (a heavily sought-after 1966 bootleg from an East Flagstaff open-mic documents a naive, "red-faced" Barry doing a bit called "Chief Dropping Pants" that would make Lenny Bruce wince) his discipline turned to Shakespeare and Marlowe. Perhaps prematurely, he moved to Los Angeles County after only three semesters of study, enticed by a meeting with Susannah Mills, the second daughter of General Peter Mills. Susannah would prove to be a wildly erratic and influential figure in Francis's California-period: an infatuation, an inspiration, a brief but vehement enemy, a part-time manager and powerful career associate.

Back in Colorado Springs, at the USAF academy, Robert was taking fairly monumental personal strides of his own. Frustrated with the lack of bureaucratic support for his quickly developing style of recreational, stunt-craft maneuvers--an unknown superior slighted the form as "dumb fa**ot flying"-- Robert, in February of 1967, founded "Soar-O's Green Angels", a three-man troupe of self-described "provocative, acrobatic pilots" who first performed publicly on March 11 in Frankfort, Kentucky as part of a state-sponsored novelty aviation and slammed dunk exposition. After a brief setback in April, May, June and July--the "Angels" were prosecuted for manslaughter when they maimed two hot air balloonists in Paducah (the entire Angel operation was based out of the Midwest at this point, with hangars in Cincinnati and West Lafayette, Indiana)--the team picked up a steady steam of fairly strong bookings throughout the Great Lakes region. The line-up was expanded to four planes and a clown-helmed "ground wagon," and the name streamlined to "The Green Angels".

As Robert shined, however, his older cousin seriously faltered. Frustrated by lack of work and reams of surprisingly pointed and personalized rejection slips, Francis Christopher started to comb the Hollywood hills for anything that remotely gleamed of stardom. A near-miss with appearing on a Sunkist soda album, "Orange You Glad it's Summer with Sunkist?" brought him back to the offices of Susannah Mills, who was scouting southern California on behalf of her father's cereal empire. Won over by Francis's down-to-earth good looks and nearly untouchable charisma, Mills obtained a private audience for him with an ailing General Peter. Bolstered by the stratospheric success of "Count Chocula's Chocolate Food"--which was liberated to simply "Count Chocula" after the 1937 death of Ernst Choukula and the 1944 clearing of all legal suits with an out-of-court settlement involving Grinsh Choukula--Mills was intrigued at the idea of another "mascotted" product, one that could connect with an ever-finicky buying public and make inroads into the expanding market of tele-vision advertisement. Over a grueling six hour audition in General's Visalia ranch, Francis reportedly sang, read from the texts of Sherwood Anderson, and may have even performed several semi-nude dances. Diary entries from the time show Mills to have been fantastically disappointed in Barry's showing--he was, fascinatingly enough, taken with Barry's rendering of several "dirty limericks"--yet was convinced that his Johnny-Next-Door persona would be a sure sell with the youth of North America.

Without much of a tangible push, in October of 1968, "Strawberry Berries with Francis Barry" was launched regionally

to universally limp response. Although Francis was disappointed, Mills was undeterred, and in January of 1969, "Strawberry Berries with Frank Barry" was re-shipped. Both General Peter and his daughter Susannah thought the use of Francis's formal, somewhat pious-sounding name was predominately to blame for the initially lackluster sales, and their strategy of integrating a more common character into their presentation was rewarded by a quick upturn in the marketplace. But before Francis Christopher could enjoy the spoils of his exponentially growing success, tragedy struck.

On February 2, 1969, Robert Barry’s four-plane group, now known as “The Green-Blue Angels”, took to the skies in a routine “horizon sweep;” this was a standard mid-morning exercise where the planes would spin low to the ground in hexagonal patterns. At approximately 10:16 a.m., Robert’s altimeter malfunctioned, his plane dropped suddenly and severely, and he crashed unceremoniously into the hard earth of central Illinois. When word reached the west coast, Francis Christopher was nearly incapacitated with grief. The ever-increasing success of “Frank Barry’s Cereal” was absolutely no salvation from the melancholy he felt. Susannah Mills struggled to lift her fiancée’s spirits. After a difficult month, the engaged two, along with General Peter Mills, traveled to North Carolina for Robert’s funeral. In a surprising and touching move, Peter spoke at length after the ceremony, passionately and animatedly describing his plans to immortalize his soon-to-be son-in-law’s brother the only way he new how: on a cereal box. With tremendous emotion and very little public fanfare, "Robert 'Booh' Barry's Airplane Cereal" first saw mainstream distribution in December of 1969.

I remarked today to my boss that someone in the office reminded me of Doyle from Gilmore Girls.
"We'll call him ScottDoyle from now on" she said. "Except, Doyle isn't is first name is it? Who would name their kid Doyle?"
"I don't know. It's a TV show, I don't think he even has a last name."
"Let's Google it."

Well, I did one better and went straight to the Gilmore Girls Entry in Wikipeida. I found his last name (McMaster in case you were interested) but then spent some time browsing around, reading character bios and what not.

While reading the article on Paris Gellar I came across a Wiki Category that made me literally lol (would that be llol?).
Fictional Jews.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fictional_Jews

I love that someone, or some group of people spent the time to create this group and populate it with all sorts of fictional people. It's awesome.

I was even more pleased to find that the list didn't discriminate. Cartoon characters are on the list as well, including my man Dr. Zoidberg!

Oh Wikipedia, how I love you.