Uncle John’s Impossible Questions & Astounding Answers Read Online Free PDF Page A

Archives placed Satchmo’s trumpet into the Millennium Time Capsule, which won’t be opened until 2100—giving our descendants a chance to see a few 20th-century artifacts, including (besides the trumpet) a transistor, a piece of the Berlin Wall, and a film showing Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk.
Persona Non Grata
    Rodney Dangerfield. Born in 1921 as Jacob Cohen, he spent years trying to break into the comedy business using the name Jack Roy, but met with failure after failure (because he “lacked a persona,” as he put it). Cohen eventually gave up show business and sold aluminum siding to support his family. But he just couldn’t give up on his dream.
    At the age of 45, he returned to the stage, performing his self-deprecating stand-up act in small clubs…and in 1967 landed a spot on The Ed Sullivan Show . His act was a hit, but he wanted to distance himself from his previous (failed) career, so he changed his name to Rodney Dangerfield. Where’d he get that name? A nightclub owner gave it to him. Where did the club owner get it from? He heard Ricky Nelson use it on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet . Where did Nelson get it from? He heard it on the radio: The name of a comical cowboy character on Jack Benny’s radio show in 1941 was…Rodney Dangerfield.
     
Special Delivery
    American actor Andy Garcia ( Ocean’s Eleven, The Godfather Part III ) was born with what unusual birth defect?

Macabre Matinee
    What movie was playing in the theater that Lee Harvey Oswald ran into after (allegedly) shooting JFK?

     
Special Delivery
    Garcia was not born alone. Immediately after his birth, doctors noticed a softball-sized growth on his left shoulder. It turned out to be an underdeveloped, parasitic twin that had stopped growing early in gestation…and lived off of baby Andy in the womb. The doctors immediately removed the conjoined twin, whereupon it died. (Garcia still has a scar on his shoulder.) After he became a famous actor, his sibling became a running joke on The Howard Stern Show— Stern mused that the twin was “the one who got all the personality.”
Macabre Matinee
    War Is Hell , a Korean War drama (in black-and-white) directed by Burt Topper and starring Tony Russel. It was the first half of a double feature (the other film was called Cry of Battle ) playing at the Texas Theater in Dallas on November 22, 1963. A few blocks away, President Kennedy’s motorcade was traveling down Elm Street; the President was shot while riding in the back of his convertible (a Lincoln).
    Shortly after the movie started, Oswald ran into the theater without paying the 90-cent admission fee. The manager called the police. While a blaze of gunfire was exploding on the screen, Oswald was captured and taken into custody. Interestingly, the film had been delayed from release for three years because of its alleged anti-American sentiments.
     
Coming Attractions
    What future Oscar-winning actress was fifth-billed under Justine Bateman, Britta Phillips, and two others as a sex-crazed bass player in the 1988 girl-rocker movie Satisfaction ? Who got second billing in that film?

     
Coming Attractions
    Julia Roberts. Her big-screen debut came as Daryle, the sex-crazed bass player in this well-publicized but poorly reviewed movie about a girl band trying to make it big. Directed by Joan Freeman (her second and final feature film—her first was 1985’s Street-walkin ’), Satisfaction was intended to launch the film career of TV star Bateman (Mallory on Family Ties ). But the movie and Bateman’s feature-film career flopped. (Don’t cry for her—she’s had a successful run as a TV actor and fashion designer.)
    Julia Roberts, who was only 20 when Satisfaction was filmed, went on to superstardom two years later after she took a role that several better-known, A-list actresses—including Meg Ryan, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Daryl Hannah—turned down: the hooker with a heart in 1990’s Pretty Woman . Roberts later won a Best Actress Oscar