1. “LOL” started back in the 1980s, when a Canadian teenager named Wayne Pearson used it on a Bulletin Board System, one of the earliest forms of internet chat rooms, when a friend said something funny.
He says, “Instead of trying to type out really quickly ‘That made me laugh out loud,’ I just sort of typed LOL.” The friend asked what it meant . . . he told him . . . and it caught on, spreading throughout the forum.
2. Elton John’s real name is Reginald Kenneth Dwight. And when he changed it to Elton John, he also gave himself a new middle name: Hercules.
3. There’s only one word that starts with the letter “X” in all of Shakespeare. In “The Taming of the Shrew”, a character mentions Socrates’s wife, Xanthippe.
4. There’s a town in western Pennsylvania called Donora, with only 4,800 people . . . but it’s where two of the greatest baseball players who ever lived are from. And they were born almost 50 years apart: Stan Musial in 1920 and Ken Griffey Jr. in 1969.
5. On “Gilligan’s Island”, it’s not clear if Gilligan was his first name or his last name. He was always just referred to as “Gilligan.”
