Did you need to know...?

• On some episodes of Thundercats, S-S-Slythe often pronounces Jackalman's name very quickly, not emphasizing the two syllables, so it sounds like a surname.

• Every time I hear bells on the radio, I hope that I'm about to hear For Whom the Bell Tolls, and nearly every time I get Hell's Bells instead.

• In 1976, a remake of King Kong introduced the world to a lovely young Jessica Lange and a man in a very bad rubber suit. To give you an idea of the quality of the film, at one point Jeff Bridges warns that “There is a girl out there who might be running for her life from some gigantic turned-on ape.” Lange's character is named Dwan, and she makes a point of spelling it out and explaining that she changed it to “D-W-A-N” from “Dawn” to make it more interesting. This version also features a flaming Kong leaping across the World Trade Center from one tower to the other. As bad as it was, it apparently spawned a sequel which did little for Linda Hamilton's career and featured a man dressed as a giant female ape, complete with swinging, sagging breasts. Peter Jackson's version was sorely needed, more than anyone realized.

• I'm taking a vacation day on Friday to wrap presents and do some ultra last-minute shopping. I'm sure I won't encounter any crowds in Target.

• When I was younger, my parents would occasionally buy me a comic book or two. In high school I started saving my own money, either from musical gigs or by not buying as much with my lunch allowance. For eight years I collected comics seriously, and tallied them along the way. At last count, my stacks numbered 4,137. This does not include any comics I received as gifts in the last ten years, so with stacks passed on to me from the likes of Rey, Jerry, and Curt among others, the collection is probably closer to 4,200. Despite my justifications to concerned parents and relatives when I was in high school and college, I probably will never sell them.

• An innocent joke by Darrell led to a horrible, horrible rap....

• When I was 14, I missed a train to school. I ran to catch it futilely, not realizing a small pebble had somehow, improbably, gotten inside my dress shoe and was slowly wearing away the skin on the back of my foot. After returning to the station and calling someone for a ride, excruciating pain would lead me to peel back my sock as skin fell to the ground, revealing a red spot of exposed inner skin layers the size of a quarter.

• The things on the end of your shoelaces are called Aglets.