Sideswipe: October 7: What are long eggs?

The 70s endured some weird culinary fashions. Aside from the gelatinous salads and the carefully curated food presentation, there were eggs ... Weird Universe writes: "Long eggs are either: a) eggs laid by specially bred long chickens; or b) a highly engineered food product created in the 1970s to satisfy the food service industry's desire to have egg slices with a consistent ratio of white and yolk."

Secrets surface after death

1. My grandfather was very wealthy and I found out after he passed that he anonymously paid for hundreds of funerals for children in minority, low-income parts of our town.
2. After he died, I found out my dad served in Vietnam as a combat medic. Kinda explains a) why he never said anything about it; b) was so resistant to me enlisting at 17; and c) had really good first aid skills. He was also married twice before meeting my mom and published a heap of fiction and non-fiction books.
3. My great-grandfather had not, in fact, been eaten by a bear on Mt Rainier (he was a park ranger). Instead, he'd been cheating on my great-grandmother and was summarily run out of town by her brothers. He moved to Alaska and nobody knew what had become of him until we located his grave, many decades later.

Sick burn

Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood says that the face of one of the nasty orcs seen in the film was based on the equally grotesque Harvey Weinstein. Apparently during the period that Lord of the Rings was in development at Miramax, Weinstein was a bully to director Peter Jackson, attempting to control how the films would be made and threatening to fire him. Eventually, Jackson struck a deal with New Line Cinema to make the films he wanted to make. And that included having one of the orcs' faces modelled on Weinstein. (Via Hollywood Reporter)

Table 35's fun fact

Matt writes: "According to my calculations this means the average person eats about 1 ton of food per day. This made me feel malnourished."

Old school teachers

Peter Hitchcock was in standard 3 in 1964 in a small rural school. "Our teacher was a big man and had a strap but never once used it on anyone. If one of us was playing up he would, without saying a word, get his strap, place a piece of chalk on your desk and strap the chalk. The speed, the noise and watching that chalk obliterated into a cloud of dust was a performance that only had to be repeated about twice a term."
2. A worthy student comeback. "At Victoria University, circa 1970, a lecturer noted a student asleep. He pointed to the student next to the sleeping one and asked that he wake him up. The response was: 'You wake him up. You put him to sleep.'"