Dr. Thomas Morell (1703-1784), the librettist of many of Handel's works, was roused at five o'clock one morning by the composer, who had come in his carriage some distance from London. Handel, then engaged in composing an oratorio, asked him: "Vat de devil means de vord 'billow'?" The doctor, laughing at the trivial reason for his interrupted sleep, explained that a billow was a wave upon the sea. "Oh, de vave!" Handel exclaimed, and promptly bade his coachman return to London, without so much as another word to the doctor.

As Nellie Oleson, the bad seed on "Little House on the Prairie," Alison Arngrim earned the enmity of many fanatic viewers. "I was in a Christmas parade," she once recalled, "and all of a sudden - thwack! - I was hit on the head with a McDonald's orange soda. The cup was half full. Still had the lid and the straw. And I thought, 'Oh, man, somebody hates me enough to give up their orange soda!'"

Cool Compliment

Isaac Asimov, noted for his prolific output, once attended a cocktail party well-stocked with other writers. "When," he asked one, "will you be publishing your next book, Miss Coolidge?"
"When," Miss Coolidge wryly replied, "will you not be publishing your next book, Mr. Asimov?"

Dale Earnhardt: HANS Device

Though many racing experts touted the HANS (head and neck safety) helmet-restraint system at the turn of the millennium, NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt was not among them.
"Earnhardt was pretty much the ringleader against it," racing journalist Ed Hinton recalled. "He once refered to the HANS device as, quote, 'that damned noose.' His commonsense told him if you wore straps around your helmet and you got in a crash it was going to hang you. So he refered to it as the noose because he thought it was going to kill him rather than save him...

"He sat right here in Indianapolis [in August 2000] and he looked me in the eye and, with a lot of people present, he said, 'I'm comfortable the way I've got my stuff rigged, and I have not pulled my brain stem loose and I've hit the wall many times.' I have not pulled my brain stem loose - his exact words... And I looked him back in the eye and my thought was, 'Yet.'"

Tragically, Dale Earnhardt died after hitting the wall during the Daytona 500 in February 2001. The cause of Earnhardt's death? "Basilar skull fracture from restrained torso, unrestrained head."

Watts Riot?

When (in 1896) the poet and critic Theodore Watts added his mother's surname(Dunton) to his own, Whistler, unimpressed, sent a letter skewering his friend's arrogance: "Theodore," it read, "Watts Dunton?"