I bet you didnt know that

Near Kolkata, India, there is a 250 year old banyan tree that has aerial roots covering 3.5 square acres of land, which equals roughly 156,000 square feet, or 14,400 square meters. To give you a rough guess of how large the space is, your local Aldi would take up 20,000 square feet or thereabouts.

All that talk of Greek got me thinking about Grease.


Henry Winkler turned down the role of Danny Zuko because he was too similar to Fonzie.

Marie Osmond turned down the part of Sandie because she did not want her kids thinking you had to turn all bad to attract a fella!

Producer Allan Carr wanted Andy Warhol to play the art teacher, however studio execs did not want him to be associated with the movie in any way, shape or form so it was scrapped. In a somewhat more surprising casting choice, Carr also wanted porn star Harry Reems to play Coach Calhoun and offered him the part after a screening of Casablanca at Hugh Hefner's gaff. Unsurprisingly, execs removed him from the cast list. Carr felt bad about it and wrote Reems a personal check for $5000.

A lot of the cast were waaaaaaaaaaay too old to be playing characters that were still in school. Stockard Channing (Rizzo) was 34 when the film was released. Newton-John was 29. Jeff Conaway (Kenickie) was 27. Travolta was 24. Jamie Donnelly (Jan) was 30 during filming, and had to dye her hair from her premature grey to black. Her hair grew back so quickly that her roots had to be colored in with a black crayon every day.

The Bee Gees were mentioned above, so here comes some Saturday Night Fever......

Saturday Night Fever was rated R when it was released, so theoretically this meant that its target audience would not be able to watch it (I'm sure they did regardless!). Anyways, they decided to release a PG version with all profanity, sex and violence downplayed or deleted altogether. This version took in another $8.9 million (about $30 million at 2016 ticket prices), bringing the film's U.S. total to $94.2 million. Both versions were released on VHS and laserdisc (ahhh, remember those?), though the R-rated cut didn't become widely available on home video until the DVD upgrade.

The story was based on a 1976 article about urban teenagers on the Brooklyn scene written by British journalist Nick Cohen. The central figure in the article was Vincent, "the very best dancer in Bay Ridge," whose name was changed to Tony Manero for the movie. Only problem was he confessed a few years later that the article was all balderdash. He was new in town at the time and did not have a clue about the scene, and so he based Vincent on a mod he knew in London.

The Bee Gees had zero input into the movie. In fact, the shoot of the movie was nearly over by the time they were asked to write a song for it. They also repurposed several songs they'd been working on, including "Stayin' Alive," a demo version of which was prepared in time to be used in filming the opening "strut" sequence. (You'll notice Travolta struts in sync with the music.) So if the movie's signature songs didn't come until later, what were the cast members listening to when they shot the dance scenes? According to Travolta, it was Boz Scaggs and Stevie Wonder.

Disco was dying a death when the movie came out and ended up extending its lifespan by giving more mainstream exposure.

Tony's now iconic white disco outfit was originally meant to be black, as men's suits tended to be at the time. Costume designer Patrizia Von Brandenstein convinced them it should be white, partly to symbolize the character's journey to enlightenment but also for practical reasons: a dark suit doesn't photograph very well in a dark discotheque.

The longest bout of hiccups ever recorded was 68 years from 1922 to 1990. George Osborne's hiccups started when he was weighing a hog for slaughter. From his recollection, he bent over to pick up the hog but instead fell down. The doctor told him he burst a blood vessel tin his brain, and in doing so damaged a part of his brain that inhibits the hiccup response.

At the start, he averaged about 40 hiccups per minute, but this gradually tapered off over the decades and he was reduced to 20 hiccups per minute when they eventually ceased in 1990. Somewhat annoyingly, as he aged and became slower at eating, his food had to be blended in order for him to eat properly. This was because he was unable to properly eat his food in-between hiccups.

At a rough estimate, he hiccuped over 430 million times in his life.

He died a year later in 1991 at the ripe old age of 97.

retalivity wrote: »

Jesus christ...how did he sleep??
Id have ended it all long before my 90s!!

By all accounts he lived a good life and he married twice and had eight children. I believe one of his coping mechanisms was to alter his breathing pattern (a technique taught to him by specialists at the Mayo Clinic) between hiccups which managed to suppress some of the noise. Even at that though, it must have been really annoying. There would have still been the constant physical motions of the hiccups to deal with. Not nice.