Mindless Crap Arts & Literature Trivia

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Crap About Arts & Literature

The following are all of the Weekly Droppings that have appeared on Mindless Crap, dating back to the first one posted on October 1, 2000.

Norman Rockwell used diapers for paint rags. He claimed to have never found anything better and used to buy them in $50 lots.

X-rays of the Mona Lisa show that there are three completely different versions of the same subject, all painted by Da Vinci, under the final portrait.

The kazoo is not considered to be a musical instrument.

General Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur, published in 1880, was the first work of fiction to be blessed by a pope.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was the first novel ever to be written on a typewriter. Mark Twain typed it himself on a Remington in 1875.

When he was 26, Michelangelo discovered a huge block of marble while walking through a courtyard of the Cathedral in Florence. He learned that it had been lying in that spot for the past 46 years, so he made arrangements to take it. Seventeen months later, on January 25, 1504, he completed the Statue of David.

Sigmund Freud's major work, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), garnered him only $209. It took eight years for the entire first printing of 600 copies to sell.

Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, originated from a game he played with his stepson. Drawing a treasure map for his stepson on a rainy day, Stevenson was urged by the child to make up stories to go along with the drawings. Stevenson liked the stories so much that he wrote them down, and they became the basis for his novel.

The Indian epic poem the Mahabhrata is eight times longer than the Iliad and the Odyssey combined.

Washington Irving got his idea for Rip Van Winkle from the story of the Cretan poet Epimenides, who lived around 600 B.C. While hunting for sheep at his father's behest, Epimenides took a nap in a cave and awoke 57 years later. On awakening, he began looking for sheep again. When he came home, he found his younger brother had become an old man.

It wasn't until the Restoration, which began nearly a half century after Shakespeare's death, that anyone began to write about the bard. Biographically, it was too late: Shakespeare's colleagues and acquaintances were dead. Additionally, Shakespeare himself left no words about himself.

The real name of the painting, Mona Lisa, is La Giaconda.

Peter Paul Reubens got so many commissions that he opened up a painting factory, hired a school of pupils, and started an assembly line. Reubens would make the initial drawings, then the pupils would fill them in. Reubens would then make a few final strokes to complete the paintings.

The Power of Sympathy, the first American novel, was published in 1789.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was not the first person to use the pen name Mark Twain. The name was first used by Isaiah Sellers, who wrote newspaper articles and himself was Mississippi River pilot.

Only seven poems by Emily Dickinson were published during her lifetime.

Vincent van Gogh didn't start to draw until he was 27 years old.

The first comic strip was "The Yellow Kid," which ran in the New York World in 1896. The cartoonist's name was W.R. Hearst.

Michelangelo painted only one easel picture.

The genre of art known as Cubism derived its name from a belittling remark made by Matisse in reference to a Graque painting. Matisse said that the landscape looked as though it were wholly made up of little cubes.

The full name of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin is actually Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly.

Henri Matisse's Le Bateau hung in New York's Museum of Modern Art for 47 days in 1961 before someone noticed it was upside down.

Playboy debuted the triple-page centerfold in the March 1956 issue. Marian Stafford took the honors.

In all of Shakespeare's works - and excluding Roman numerals - only one word begins with the letter "X." Xanthippe, the wife of Socrates, appears in The Taming of the Shrew.

According to L. Frank Baum, the name Oz was thought up when he looked at his filing cabinet and noticed one drawer marked A-G, a second tagged H-N, and a third labeled O-Z.

The man who commissioned the Mona Lisa refused it.

During his lifetime Paganini published only five compisitions. He didn't expect anybody to be able to play them, and at that time nobody could.

It is believed that the Greek poet Aeschylus was killed when a bird flying overhead dropped a tortoise and struck him. Birds have been known to carry shellfish to great heights and drop them in order crack the shells.

Seven cities claim to be the birthplace of the Greek epic poet Homer. He is also thought to have been born in either 1159 B.C., 1102 B.C., 1044 B.C., 830 B.C., or 685 B.C.

Rembrandt died broke. A friend had to come up with the $5.20 it cost to bury the great master.

Michelangelo's Last Judgment, which hangs on the walls of the Sistine Chapel, drew some harsh criticism from one of the Vatican's officials because of the nudity. So Michelangelo made some changes to his work: he painted in the face of the complaining clergyman and added a donkey's ears and a snake's tail.

When Leonardo Da Vinci was young he drew a picture of a horrible monster and placed near a window in order to surprise his father. Upon seeing the picture his father believed it to be real and set out to protect his family until the boy showed him it was just a picture. Da Vinci's father then enrolled his son in an art class.

Beethoven used to pour cold water over his head to stimulate his brain before sitting down to compose.

Vincent van Gogh is known to have sold only one painting during his lifetime.

Rudyard Kipling was fired as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner. His dismissal letter was reported to have said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don't know how to use the English language. This isn't a kindergarten for amateur writers."

There really was a Cyrano de Bergerac. He lived from about 1620 to 1655, had a big nose and dueled. He was also a science fiction writer who was the first person in history to suggest that a rocket could carry someone into space.

Charles Darwin thought that the 1,250 first run copies of his book The Origin of Species was too much. It turned out he was wrong as they sold out the first day of publication.

The largest painting in the world is The Battle of Gettysburg, painted in 1883 by Paul Philippoteaux and sixteen of his assistants. The painting took two and a half years to create and is 410 feet long, 70 feet high, and weighs 11,792 pounds.

Books on religion outnumbered works of fiction by a 2 to 1 margin in 1870 England. Sixteen years later, novels surpassed religious works.

There are 48 Gutenberg Bibles still in existence. Two of them were in Germany during World War II and are missing, but many book collectors believe them to be in private collections.

The world's largest art gallery is the Winter Palace and the Hermitage in Leningrad. Visitors walk fifteen miles to visit each of the 322 galleries, which house nearly 3 million works of art and archaeological remains.

Pablo Picasso almost died at birth. The midwife present though he was stillborn and left him on the table. His father, a physician, revived Pablo by breathing air into his lungs.

Wonder Woman was the world's first comic book superheroine. She was introduced in All Star Comics in December 1941 and created by psychologist William Moulton Marston.

The Bible is the best selling book of all time with approximately six billion books sold. The second-best selling book is Quotations from the Works of Mao Tse-Tung with about 800 million sales.

The first book published in the United States was Massachusetts Bay Colony: The Oath of a Free Man, in 1638.

Pablo Picasso has sold more works of art individually costing over one million dollars than any other artist. His 211 is well ahead of the 168 for Pierre Auguste Renoir.

On April 25, 1889, The Kansas Times and Star was the first newspaper to use the phrase �bestseller.� On that day the newspaper listed six books as the �best sellers here last week.�

William Shakespeare used a vocabulary of 29,066 different words. By way of comparison, the average person uses about 8,000 different words.

The three central panels on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel tell the story of Adam and Eve.

The most expensive painting ever sold at auction was Portrait of Dr. Gachet by Vincent van Gogh. On May 15, 1990, Ryoei Saito paid $75 million for it. He followed up that spending spree by paying the second-highest price ever, $71 million for Au Moulin de la Galette by Pierre Auguste Renoir, just two days later.

The Four Freedoms by Norman Rockwell are the most widely reproduced and distributed paintings in history.

The word "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious," from the movie Mary Poppins, was added to the Oxford dictionary in 1964.

Engelbert Humperdinck's real name is Gerry Dorsey. He didn't make that name up, though. It originally belonged to the 1800s German musician who wrote the opera Hansel and Gretel.

The banjo is America's only true native musical instrument. It was first developed in the South in the 1790s.

The earliest known wholly glass objects - beads - were found in Egypt about 4,500 years ago. The first glass cups were also found in Egypt about 3,500 years ago.

The only painting by Leonardo da Vinci on permanent display in the United States hangs in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. It's a portrait of Ginevra di Benci, the wife of a politician in Florence.

Nobody knows what happened to the body Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. During his funeral in 1791, a thunderstorm suddenly appeared and his funeral party dropped the coffin and ran for cover. When they returned, the coffin was gone.

Charles Dickens grew up in extreme poverty. At the age of 10, his father was sent to debtor's prison, his mother forced into menial labor, this brothers and sisters worked in factories, and Dickens himself had to tie and label sacks of lamp black. He would later draw on these experiences in his novels.

In Hans Holbein's painting, "The Ambassadors," the artist added a small skull as a way of signing his name. Holbein is another word for "hollow bone" or "a skull."

Hamlet is the most demanding of Shakespeare�s roles with 1,422 lines or roughly 36% of the total number of spoken lines in the play. Hamlet�s role is made up of 11,610 words. The character Falstaff has the most lines of any character in all of Shakespeare�s plays combined with 1,614 spoken lines in three different plays: Henry IV, Part I; Henry IV, Part II; and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

D. H. Lawrence enjoyed taking off his clothes and climbing mulberry trees.

The statue of Freedom atop the U.S. Capital building is 19.5 feet tall and weighs 15,000 pounds. It was created in Rome, and the ship that brought it to America ran into a storm so severe that most of the cargo had to be tossed overboard. Before the ship reached the United States, it was condemned and sold in Bermuda, where the statue was put in storage. Two years later it reached Washington, but because of the Civil War the dome wasn't finished and the statue didn't get hoisted to its proper position for another two years.

The earliest works of art are paleolithic animal paintings discovered in prehistoric caves in southern France and northern Spain. The paintings date from 30,000 to 10,000 B.C.

Until the time of Michelangelo, many sculptors colored their statues. Most of the statues from ancient Greece and Rome at one time had been painted or polychromed. Rain through the ages washed off the paint and the statues were left in their natural marble.

There is a 6-foot tall stone monument dedicated to the cartoon character Popeye in Crystal City, TX.

When Charles Darwin published his theory on human evolution in The Descent of Man in 1871, not a single fossil that was known to be pre-human had been found to back up his ideas. Although his theory was later proved to be true, it was formulated entirely without physical evidence and based almost completely on speculation.

There are no living descendents of William Shakespeare.

Ancient Chinese artists freely painted scenes of nakedness and sex. However, they would absolutely never depict a bare female foot.

In literature, the average length of a sentence is around 35 words.

The statue by Auguste Rodin that has come to be known as The Thinker wasn't meant to be a portrait of a man in thought. It's a portrait of Dante Aligheri.

All of the proceeds from James Barrie's book Peter Pan were bequeathed to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London.

The largest stained-glass window in the world is at Kennedy International Airport in New York City. It can be found in the American Airlines terminal building and measures 300 feet long by 23 feet high.

George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and 1984, wrote under a pen name. His real name was Eric Blair.

At one time, Venus de Milo had arms.

The oldest works of art are pictures of animals found in caves in Spain and France. They have been dates as far back as 18,000 years ago.

Raphael died on his birthday in 1520 at the age of 37. His artwork was so popular that he essentially worked himself to death.

The largest sculpture ever made are the faces of Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson and Roosevelt on Mt. Rushmore.

Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, has been translated into more languages than any book outside of the Bible.

The oldest musical instrument is probably the flute. It's been discovered that primitive cave dwellers made an instrument from bamboo or some other small hollow wood.

The most expensive book or manuscript ever sold at an auction was The Codex Hammer, a notebook belonging to Leonardo da Vinci. It sold for $30.8 million.

Frederic Remington's sculpture The Bronco Buster has mistake in it: the cowboy is wearing his spurs upside down.

Andy Warhol based his 1964 series of silk portraits of Marilyn Monroe on a still photo from the 1952 movie Niagra.

The book The Doors of Perception, by Aldous Huxley, was the inspiration behind Jim Morrison naming his band The Doors. The book extolls the use of hallucinogenic drugs.

Paul Gauguin's Marquesas Island neighbor, Tioka, bit him on the head after he died. Tioka was following a Marquesan custom of verifying the dead.

There are no female characters in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island because he was following the instructions of his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, for whom he wrote the book. Llyod wanted a story "about a map, a treasure, a mutiny and a derelict ship...No women in the story."