Should you ever come across an Academy Award on eBay, there’s a good chance it shouldn’t be there. That’s because Oscar winners aren’t allowed to sell their statuettes without first offering them back to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the nominal fee of $1, which is meant to maintain their prestige. As the Academy’s official regulations explain, honorees “have no rights whatsoever in the Academy copyright or goodwill in the Oscar statuette or in its trademark and service mark registrations” and “shall not sell or otherwise dispose of the Oscar statuette, nor permit it to be sold or disposed of by operation of law” before first giving the Academy the chance to buy it back. Presumably, the Academy always accepts that $1 offer in order to protect the brand, though it’s not clear how often, if ever, it’s actually happened. 

A sequel has never won Best Picture.

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Both “The Godfather Part II” (1974) and “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” (2003) won Best Picture. Just as impressive, all three films in both trilogies were nominated for Best Picture — and the original “Godfather” won it as well.

The rule is strictly enforced, with winners having to sign a contract before taking possession of their statuette. It also applies to their family members and descendants. Not everyone has abided by it, however. To take just one example: The trophy awarded to art director Joseph C. Wright, who won for his work on 1942’s My Gal Sal, was sold to an auction house for $79,200 in 2015. This led to the Academy winning a lawsuit enforcing the rule — and likely discouraging any future honorees from trying to break it.

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With an ever-expanding catalogue of more than 171 million items occupying 838 miles of bookshelves, the Library of Congress is the largest library on the planet as measured by collection size. Its prodigious holdings include more than 40 million books and other print materials, 74 million manuscripts, and the largest collection of rare books in North America. Old King Cole, which is about a millimeter tall (tinier than a grain of rice), is the library’s smallest book, while a 5-by-7-foot collection of photos of Bhutan is the largest.

The Library of Congress is the country’s oldest cultural institution.

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Founded in 1800, the library predates every other federal cultural institution in the U.S. — it's so old, in fact, that it was brought into existence by the same bill that relocated the capital to Washington, D.C., from Philadelphia.

The library doesn't just house printed materials, of course. It contains everything from the contents of Abraham Lincoln’s pockets on the night he was assassinated to hundreds of billions of tweets and Amelia Earhart’s palm print. The British Library and its massive catalogue is next on the list of the world’s largest libraries, with the top five rounded out by the New York Public Library, Library and Archives Canada, and the Russian State Library.

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Modern English wouldn’t be the same without William Shakespeare. Thanks to the Bard’s plays and sonnets, more than 1,700 words have been added to our language. But Shakespeare did more than just spice up the dictionary; he also may have invented one of the world’s greatest (or worst) comedy setups — the knock-knock joke. Strangely, the joke isn’t found in one of Shakespeare’s masterful comedies. Instead, it’s embedded within one of his darkest, most intense works. 

Shakespeare wrote the first “Yo Mama” joke.

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While the Bard did include a “maternal insult” joke in his play “Titus Andronicus,” a Babylonian student etched the first known “Yo Mama” joke on a tablet 3,500 years ago. The damaged tablet was deciphered in 2012, but sadly the punchline has been lost to history.

The beginning of Act 2, Scene 3 of Macbeth, after the tortured title character has just killed King Duncan, is known as the “porter scene.” It opens with a drunken porter (or gatekeeper) at Macbeth’s castle hearing a distant knock, pretending to be the porter of “hell-gate,” and saying, “Knock, knock, knock, who’s there?” Adding a bit of comic relief, the porter imagines the arrival of a farmer, an equivocator, and a tailor, using the same “knock-knock” construction each time. Although there’s none of the eye-rolling wordplay central to the modern knock-knock joke, this is the first known reference to a “knock, knock/who’s there” sentence structure in the context of comic relief. Yet it wasn’t until the 1930s that the modern knock-knock joke really caught on, as a reassuringly predictable form of comedy during the Great Depression. In other words, across its 400-year history, it seems the knock-knock joke has a knack for bringing levity to dark times. 

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Before founding the animation studio that bears his name, Walt Disney was a commercial artist in Kansas City, Missouri. It was there, around 1919, that he began making hand-drawn cel animations of his own, which were screened in a local theater and dubbed “Laugh-O-Grams.” The studio he acquired following his cartoons’ success had the same moniker, but it was a short-lived venture — Laugh-O-Gram’s seven-minute fairy tales and other works were popular with audiences, but financial troubles forced Disney to declare bankruptcy in 1923.

Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen.

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Intriguing though it may be to think otherwise, “Disney on Ice” is just a show. Not unlike Elvis still being alive and Paul McCartney being replaced by a look-alike, this odd urban legend has persisted for decades despite being based on nothing more than tabloid rumors.

Disney, his brother Roy, and cartoonist Ub Iwerks moved to Hollywood the same year and founded Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, which quickly changed its name to Walt Disney Studios at Roy’s behest. Had it not been for Laugh-O-Gram, however, it’s likely that Disney’s most famous creation would never have been born. The inspiration for Mickey Mouse came from a brown mouse who frequented his Kansas City studio trash basket — a “timid little guy” Disney was so fond of that before leaving for Hollywood, he “carefully carried him to a backyard, making sure it was a nice neighborhood,” at which point “the tame little fellow scampered to freedom.”

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Inspiration can come from the unlikeliest of places. While living in Jamaica in the early 1950s, author Ian Fleming was in search of a name for the secret agent main character in his new book, Casino Royale. “I wanted to find a name which wouldn’t have any romantic overtones,” Fleming later said. “I wanted a really flat, quiet name.” 

The film “Thunderball” is named after Ian Fleming’s estate in Jamaica.

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The 1995 film “GoldenEye” is named for Fleming’s estate in Jamaica, where he wrote his Bond novels. The name may be a reference to a WWII operation he oversaw as a British naval intelligence officer.

Fleming was an avid bird-watcher, and one of his favorite books was Birds of the West Indies, written by American ornithologist James Bond. “I thought, ‘Well, James Bond, that’s a pretty quiet name,’” Fleming continued, “so I simply stole it and used it.” For years, Bond (who actually went by Jim) had no idea that his name adorned a series of spy novels, but as the popularity of the books grew — and particularly after the premiere of the first 007 film, Dr. No, in 1962, turned Bond into a bonafide pop culture phenomenon — the ornithologist learned about his moniker’s double life. Fleming eventually apologized to Bond, offering his own name for “​​a particularly horrible species of bird” if Bond ever discovered one. The two met on February 5, 1964, when Jim Bond and his wife showed up at Fleming’s house while on a trip to Jamaica, and left as friends. Fleming even gave Bond a signed copy of the then-unreleased novel You Only Live Twice, inscribed “to the real James Bond.”  

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