Editor Ruby here this week to round up some stray facts we’ve discovered while writing trivia questions. Here we go!

In 1996 Joni Mitchell dropped a "Big Yellow Taxi" techno remix EP as a tie-in with "Friends." You’d think it would be linked to “Got Til It’s Gone,” but it precedes that song by a year!

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Brief addendum to Tony’s exploration of Josh Gibson: I want to share about another other Negro Leagues Player: Cool Papa Bell, who people tried not to walk, because he was so fast he would steal second and third at once. He’s already in the Baseball Hall of Fame, so he probably doesn’t need my attention, but I’m excited about anyone who challenges Oil Can Boyd for the best baseball nickname of all time.

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This probably goes to a very dark place quite quickly, but I was struck by this list of experimental cat breeds while researching cats for our “Cat or Fish?” round for National Catfish Day. I would like to pet a Mandalay cat. They look so soft. Cat breeds aren’t real in the same way dog breeds are (more information here) so it’s all kind of silly. This article taught me the word “landrace,” which is a domesticated variety of a species developed over time, like a domestic cat or Sierra Mixe corn, a nitrogen-fixing variety of Zea maize grown in Mexico.

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From Co-Owner Chuck: I don't recall why, but our Dept. Heads meeting recently turned into a discussion about everyone's favorite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles memories. Afterward, on a whim, I decided to check and see if anyone had ever made a TMNT stage musical. Sure enough! It was called "Coming Out of Our Shells," and, sadly, it isn't about gay ninja turtles. Also it was terrible. I know this because there's video of the entire show on YouTube. It was sponsored by Pizza Hut, as was the improbable sequel, a 30-minute stage show that played at Six Flags Amusement Parks across the country, called "Gettin' Down in Your Town." According to the TMNT fan wiki, it continues the story of the Turtles "traveling with their message of music being better than fighting." It's somehow even worse than the first one. Anyway, someone should write a good TMNT musical. Krang should get a big ballad.

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Any time we put a pronunciation guide on Ralph Fiennes’ name, we get at least one host clarifying that it’s really pronounced like “Rayf.” It is! My response has always been “it’s Welsh!,” which is an answer that covers a multitude of “those letters aren’t doing what I expect” scenarios. However, Ralph Fiennes is one of the most English people on Earth.

You may be familiar with the “never ask an actor why their parents’ names are in blue on Wikipedia” meme, but under Early Life, Fiennes’ doesn’t just link to blue parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents, it also links to the Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes family, which is something I would make up to make fun of English people. (Wykeham is pronounced like “Wickham,” of course.) Nepo baby discourse aside (Fiennes has proven himself, I think, at this point), his family has been ennobled in England since the 1400s. Why does his name have a Welsh pronunciation?

Well, first of all, while Ralph Fiennes was born in Ipswich, which is on the other side of London from Wales, his family’s castle (and, I assume, therefore their barony) is actually pretty close to Wales. But the more important information, as unearthed by Ralph Wedgwood, the division is actually a north-south one across the U.K. Scottish people pronounce “Ralph” the way most Americans do, like “ralf.” In the southern part of the U.K., including both Wales and south and central England, the “rayf” pronunciation came into fashion as part of the – say it with me!! – Great Vowel Shift. It’s basically the same reason “halfpenny” is pronounced like “heypenny.” One fun thing about Wedgwood’s article is the reminder that spelling variations are one of the key ways we discover old pronunciations — where people also signed their names “Rafe,” we can assume it was pronounced differently from people who alternated with “Ralf.”

Ralph Fiennes’s nephew is named Hero Beauregard Faulkner Fiennes Tiffin. End of section.

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Speaking of the other side of the pond, I learned for the first time about English suffragist Rosa May Billinghurst while researching people whose disabilities informed their work for a Disability Pride Month round. Huge caveat here: I wasn’t able to find anything about her racial politics and a lot of white suffragists were super racist, so apologies if I am endorsing someone who wasn’t in solidarity with all women. However: what I do know about her, I love. Partially paralyzed from a childhood bout of polio, Billinghurst used her wheeled tricycle to block police from arresting other protestors. She also used her lap blanket to hide rocks used as part of a 1912 window smashing campaign, as well as “sticky black substances” she and her comrades poured into mailboxes. From a 2020 BBC piece:

In one episode Billinghurst speaks to the audience while vomiting and bleeding in hospital after a hunger strike in prison, which actually happened to her in 1913. In another, she describes the police officers attempting to surround the protesting suffragettes: "In these situations I am invaluable. Being in a wheelchair is highly useful… the hard metal of this clumsy thing is no match against policemens' shins."

Hell yeah. You tell ‘em, Rosa May. Despite being dumped out of her chair by the cops on several occasions and suffering through force feeding in prison, she lived to be 78.

Happy last weekend of Disability Pride Month! Have a good one out there. – Editor Ruby