Noël Coward was never one for simple congratulations. He sent this telegram to actress Gertrude Lawrence on her debut:

A WARM HAND ON YOUR OPENING

He sent another when she married Richard Aldrich:

DEAR MRS. A HOORAY HOORAY
AT LAST YOU ARE DEFLOWERED
ON THIS AS EVERY OTHER DAY
I LOVE YOU – NOEL COWARD

In 1982, writer Chuck Ross transcribed the screenplay of Casablanca. He changed the title to Everybody Comes to Rick’s, and he changed the piano player’s name to Dooley Wilson. Then he submitted it to 217 Hollywood agencies.

Only 85 read it. Of those, 38 rejected it outright, 33 recognized it (but only eight specifically as Casablanca), and only three declared it commercially viable.

One suggested turning it into a novel.

See also The Steps Experiment.

If you hear the words “castle thunder,” you probably think of a particular sound effect. That’s not surprising — recorded originally for the 1931 version of Frankenstein, that sound been reused in numerous Disney and Hanna-Barbera cartoons, Scooby-Doo, Gilligan’s Island, and countless movies, including Citizen Kane, Cleopatra, The Hindenburg, Ghostbusters, Airplane!, Murder by Death, Twilight Zone: The Movie, Clue, Back to the Future, Big Trouble in Little China, Trading Places, Short Circuit, Star Wars, The Monster Squad, Death Becomes Her, and Young Frankenstein. You can even hear it in Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion.

See Wilhelm Scream for another famous effect.

American baseball teams famously blame their losing streaks on curses — for instance, the Red Sox’ long drought after selling Babe Ruth.

But the most colorful such curse is not even American. During a victory celebration in 1985, fans of Japan’s Hanshin Tigers threw a statue of Colonel Sanders into a canal in Osaka. That act started an 18-year losing streak.

The Colonel apparently relented in 2003, when the Tigers finally won a tournament. To prevent a relapse, the local KFC bolted down its statue.

The 10 richest fictional characters, as judged by Forbes magazine in 2006:

1. Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks
2. Charles Montgomery Burns
3. Scrooge McDuck
4. Richie Rich
5. Jed Clampett
6. Rich Uncle Pennybags (the Monopoly mascot)
7. Bruce Wayne
8. Anthony Stark (Marvel Comics’ Iron Man)
9. Prince Abakaliki
10. Thurston Howell III

Abakaliki, new to the Forbes list, is the fictional Nigerian “entrepreneur” mentioned in millions of fraudulent spam messages.

You can’t always rely on baseball’s record books — they’re haunted by “phantom” players. According to one box score, a player named Lou Proctor walked as a pinch hitter for the St. Louis Browns against the Boston Red Sox on May 13, 1912. It turns out that Lou Proctor was really a Cleveland telegraph operator who had inserted his own name in place of Pete Compton’s. More than two dozen such errors have been uncovered; this one wasn’t found until the mid-1980s.