Uncle John loves toilets, of course…even make-believe ones. Here are some of the best, not-quite-real commodes to ever grace movies and TV. Mr. Toilet Man The talking baby movie Look Who’s Talking proved so popular in 1989 that a sequel, Look Who’s Talking Too, hit theaters a year later. This one finds babies (voiced by […]

We can’t look into the future…but these people with psychic abilities say that they can. Here are some major events we can all apparently look forward to this year. The celebrity update Nicolas Aujula is technically 33, but at the age of 17 he claims he discovered that he’d been re-incarnated several times. In one […]

Here’s your first Tooth Fairy fact: She (or he, at the BRI, we’re woke) isn’t real. We hate to be the ones to tell you but it was your parent who put money under your pillow when you lost a tooth. Here’s some more trivia about this beloved, dental-obsessed mythological magical creature. Origin story The […]

Stan Lee passed away this week at the age of 95. As the chief creative mind at Marvel Comics for decades, he helped make comics a viable literary form and a distinctly American contribution to art with near-mythological-level by introducing everyone from Spider-Man to the Avengers to the X-Men to the Fantastic Four to the […]

Do you play the video game Minecraft? If you don’t, your kids or somebody close to you probably does. Not since Pac-Man has a single video game been this popular. Here’s a look into the origins and impact of this cultural behemoth. (This article was first published in our 31st annual edition, Uncle John’s Actual and […]

Well, according to those celebrities, that is. Sammy Hagar In his 2001 memoir Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock, Van Halen singer and solo star Sammy Hagar (“I Can’t Drive 55”) recounted an encounter with what he believes to be extraterrestrials. While lying in bed as a kid, he looked out the window outside his […]

For every PlayStation or Nintendo Wii that sells in the tens of millions and generates billions of dollars, plenty of other video game systems enter the market…and then it’s game over. OUYA The OUYA system got to market outside of the system—the creators raised $8.5 million in development cash via crowdfunding website Kickstarter. Units were […]

“Rideshare” services like Uber and Lyft have only been around for a few years, but they’ve already become a big part of American culture. Basically privatizing the taxicab industry, individuals sign up to be paid drivers, and people pay a reasonable fee for a ride by using a smartphone app. They also leave stuff behind […]

Not every video game can thrill gamers and sell millions. Here are some titles that hit the “Game Over” screen entirely too quickly. Pac-Man How can the most famous and popular video games of all time land on a list of flops? Because of the limitations of technology in 1982. In the very early 1980s, […]

It’s the end of an era for Ronco, an era they created. Ron Popeil’s company virtually invented the as-seen-on-TV product, sold via informercials. And in the process, they made millions…but that’s all in the past now.  As the company files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, here’s a look back on some of the crazy gadgets Popeil […]

Some celebrities are as famous for their shocking deaths as they were for the work they did during their lives. As it turns out, the collective knowledge of their deaths…turned out to not be true. JAMES DEAN Dean was a brooding, charismatic, and magnetic screen presence. His mystique likely grew because he starred in only […]

Here’s are some facts about the one thing keeping your feet from the inside of your shoes—socks. (Today is actually “No Socks Day,” but still.) Old Socks The word sock comes from an Old English word socc, part of the language since about the year 1400. It means “light slipper,” and comes from the Latin […]

According to superstition and modern folklore, “Friday the 13th” is a day where weird stuff is destined to happen. There’s no truth to that, of course…or is there? Lighting Strikes On Friday, August 13, 2010, a boy was at  the Lowestoft Seafront Air Festival in England. That’s when lightning struck him. He was hospitalized with […]

Today is National Barbie Day. Why? It was on this day in 1959 that the doll was unveiled to the public for the first time, at the American International Toy Fair in New York. TV-based Marketing Strategy Barbie was the first toy to have a TV-based marketing strategy. That was revolutionary—lots of kids were watching […]

Spinoffs have long been a part of TV and the movies. The Simpsons and Frasier launched off from The Tracey Ullman Show and Cheers, respectively, while Minions is a spinoff of the Despicable Me movies, to name some examples. The phenomenon happens in video games, too, although those spinoffs seem to be a bit on […]