Usefully Useless

Fictional characters who boast stars on Hollywood’s ‘Walk of Fame’ include Big Bird, Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, Godzilla, Kermit the Frog, Mickey Mouse, Munchkins, Rugrats, Shrek, The Simpsons, Snow White, Tinkerbell, Winnie-the-Pooh and Woody Woodpecker.

Anti-American demonstrators protesting in Bangladesh after the September 11 terrorist attacks carried posters of Osama bin Laden sitting alongside Bert, a beloved Sesame Street Muppet character.

Mardi Gras translates as ‘Fat Tuesday’.

In 1888, Hollywood was founded by Harvey and Daeida Wilcox, who named the district after their summer home in Chicago.

Barney, the famous purple dinosaur, is from Dallas.

At its height, the TV show Doctor Who had an audience of 110 million people.

The longest Hollywood kiss was from the 1941 film You’re in the Army Now. It lasted for three minutes and three seconds.

The accent used by Mike Myers in Shrek is based on one his mother adopted when she was telling him bedtime stories.

In 1960 there were 16,067 slot machines in Nevada, home of Las Vegas. By 1999, this number had risen to 205,726 – one gaming machine for every ten people living there.

The word ‘Muppet’ was coined by creator Jim Henson, and is a combination ‘marionette’ and ‘puppet’, Kermit the Frog was named after Kermit Scott, a childhood friend of Henson, who became a professor of philosophy at Purdue University.

Close to three billion movie tickets are sold in India every year.

AN ANECDOTE FROM the founder of analytical psychiatry’s The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche: ‘A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window pane from outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to the golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata) which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since, and that the dream of the patient has remained unique in my experience.’

EDGAR ALLAN POE’S short story ‘The Black Cat’ was inspired by his tortoiseshell cat, Catarina. Catarina would curl up in bed with Poe’s wife to keep her warm while she was dying of tuberculosis.