Hiya Skeleton Crew,

Welcome to Tuesday!

Trivia 1

Cher’s officially mononymous these days, but she started out her life as Cheryl Sarkisian. Apparently her mom named her after one Cheryl Crane, who’d been born a couple years earlier. It was kinda maybe a li’l bit of an inauspicious choice, ’cause Cheryl Crane’d go on to become kinda infamous for stabbin a fella named Johnny Stompanato to death when she was fourteen years old.

Now lemme be clear: Ms. Crane never got charged & there were extenuatin circumstances. In other words, it was deemed a justifiable homicide. See, Mr. Stompanato was … not such a great guy. Matter of fact, he was a downright crook! Like, literally, he worked for the mob. He also happened to be an abusive boyfriend, & the reason Ms. Crane stabbed him was in defense of him threatenin & assaultin her mom.

The whole incident became kinda famous, ’specially ’mongst Hollywood watchers, on account of the fact that Cheryl Crane’s mom was a super-duper famous actor who’d recently been nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Peyton Place. Who was Cheryl Crane’s mom?

Trivia 2

Didja know that doctors can still prescribe tincture of opium, a.k.a. laudanum? I honestly thought it’d been relegated to ye olde times, ’long with leeches & miasmas & all those other medical anachronisms. But apparently nah: nowadays it can be prescribed as a last-ditch remedy for diarrhea!

“Last ditch” bein the operative word there, ’course. There are WAY more conventional medicines to help with the runs, your Imodiums & your Kaopectates & whatnot.

Didja know that although Kaopectate USED to be made with kaolin & pectin (surprise!), they reformulated it back in the ’80s to replace the kaolin (a type of clay) with attapulgite (another type of clay). But then the FDA reclassified attapulgite, so now the Kaopectate ya get in the U.S. of A. is actually made with the same stuff as Pepto-Bismol – namely, the subsalicylate of what element?

Fun fact: I was under the misapprehension that this was the heaviest stable element on the ol’ periodic table, but apparently it’s got an isotope with a half-life of around 10¹⁹ years, so technically it’s its neighbor, lead, that wins the Heaviest Stable Element award.