We’ve got a group effort of odds and ends this week! A lot of little things to know.

We ran a round about blue jeans a few weeks ago, and Editor Ruby couldn’t manage to fit in this question about the 1890 play (and 1917 film adaptation) “Blue Jeans,” which is pretty much only notable for originating the trope of a hero tied to a board heading for a huge buzzsaw in a saw mill. So if you’re ever wondering who did that first, it was Joseph Arthur in the play “Blue Jeans.”

Editor Ira thought this was too gross to make into a question, but he still wants you to know that the airline industry has a specific word for the remains of a bird that has collided with a plane, and that word is “snarge.” (To answer that article’s titular question, the bird that gets hit by planes the most is the horned lark, a small bird that loves open airfields and feels safe when the predators are chased off by the airplanes.)

Editor Sophie, who does our fact-checking, did an incredible deep-dive on the exact circumstances that bring about the creation of a basilisk for our round on legendary creatures a few weeks ago. She updated the question to the (correct, we hope) information that a basilisk comes from an egg laid by a cockerel incubated under a toad, instead of the reverse. For some reason Wikipedia differentiates and says that cock’s egg under toad = cockatrice and toad’s egg under cockerel = basilisk, but by most accounts cockatrices and basilisks are the same creatures, so what’s going on. (Citation needed on Wikipedia here!) Sophie pointed out that in some cases basilisks come from “an aged cock laying an egg after copulating with another aged cock” so happy Pride to all the proud basilisk dads out there. She got curious about whether the words “basil” and “basilisk” are related, and the answer is yes! They’re both related to the Latin “basilicum,” from the Greek “basileus” meaning “king.” Basilisks have little crowns (it means “king’s serpent”), and basil was likely used in making royal perfumes. BUT in Latin, the words were confused because basil was supposed to be an antidote to the basilisk’s venom, so put that in your herblore books.

Editor Ruby found this SNL sketch about imaginary lyrics to “Roundball Rock” pretty funny while researching jock jams.

Editor Chuck found this video of Jonathan Wolff demonstrating how he composed the “Seinfeld” theme song--and how he re-recorded it for every episode (!) so the synth baseline would interplay with Jerry's voice (which he considered to be the main "instrument" in the song) in the opening stand-up monologue--pretty incredible.

Editor Ira recently watched the 1985 TV movie that introduced Max Headroom and wants to tell you two things: 1) The TV series won a BAFTA for best graphic effects even though it didn't use any. The makeup and editing applied to Matt Frewer was so effective that the Academy assumed he really was a computer-generated character, and the production team never dissuaded them of that assumption, and 2) A Max Headroom Christmas special that aired on British TV was written by a pre-fame George R.R. Martin.

And finally, Editor Ruby unearthed that the etymology of “halloumi,” the delicious Cypriot cheese, likely goes back to a Demotic word (a late Egyptian script preceding Coptic writing) for “cheese,” which dates from 2nd century Roman Egypt. Pretty cool!