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28 Trivia Tidbits About Pop Culture That’s Aged Poorly
Welcome to the Cracked newsletter!
This issue is about poorly-aged pop culture, funny firings, trivia tidbits, how Tim Curry saved ‘SNL,’ and much more.
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Whether you’re a fan of The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Clue or the celebration of child endangerment that is Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, it’s pretty much impossible not to love Tim Curry, the legendary actor who turned 78 on Friday. He even showed up in a couple of episodes of Roseanne, playing one of Dan’s sketchy friends who is sadly never revealed to be Pennywise the Clown in disguise.
Far less-celebrated is Curry’s one and only Saturday Night Live appearance, even though he bailed the show out of a historic disaster.
Ah, the internet, our modern source for good news and bad news, pleasure and pain, buying things and researching loans because we bought too many things. But with how quickly and widely it’s expanded, multiplied by the years it’s had to do so, the idea of the “entire internet” is laughable now. Of course, this wasn’t always the case. Even the mightiest tree, bearing the fruits of mostly pornography, starts from a single seed.
The internet as we know it — and when I say internet here, I mean the world wide web that still exists at the beginning of most URLs, even if we don’t write it out anymore; if you want to go on at length about TCP/IP and peer-to-peer connections, can it, nerd — was invented in 1989 by a scientist named Tim Berners-Lee who was working at CERN. (No, it wasn't Al Gore.) CERN stands for the Conseil Europeen por la Recherche Nucleaire, or in plain American, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Which is to say, finding out a computer scientist at CERN invented the world wide web is like finding out a chef in Japan invented sushi.