Title. I just think ot would be fun if a journalist interviewed, for example, a famous musician, but instead of questions regarding their latest album, the interview was all about that year where they worked as a plumber.

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    Bob Newhart started as an accountant until he tried his hand at standup. Not that hard to believe actually.

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    Tom Lehrer - sort of a Weird Al of the early 1960s, who wrote all kinds of satirical songs - was a university math professor.

    • Stovetop@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Reads opening summary

      “Okay, mhmmm, interesting life and career as an actress…”

      Reads just below that

      At the beginning of World War II, along with George Antheil, Lamarr co-invented a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of radio jamming by the Axis powers.

      “WHAT that’s cool”

      • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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        10 hours ago

        It was a cool idea - unfortunately the US Navy decided not to use it because they felt the required gears, motors and circuitry (in the age of vacuum tubes) would add too much weight and complexity to a torpedo, and they were concerned about reliability. So the idea remained on paper, with no prototypes ever being built. In the late 1950s, when transistor technology was replacing vacuum tubes, radio engineers at Phillips Corp (if I remember right) made the concept practical. Some people’s version of all this is to credit Lamarr for inventing WiFi or even the Internet, and that the navy wouldn’t listen to her because she was a woman until a corporations stole her idea - placing her in the mythical realm of Nikola Tesla.

      • can
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        11 hours ago

        There’s even a headcrab named after her.

      • xmunk
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        2 days ago

        Hedy Lamarr is absolutely awesome, enjoy the Wikipedia rabbit hole.

  • JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee
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    1 day ago

    This is probably well known to many, but Steve Martin was a professional musician, magician and TV series writer before more commonly being known as a standup comic, actor, comedian, and later, film writer. Not to mention:

    Inspired by his philosophy classes, Martin considered becoming a professor instead of an actor-comedian. Being at college changed his life.

    It changed what I believe and what I think about everything. I majored in philosophy. Something about non sequiturs appealed to me. In philosophy, I started studying logic, and they were talking about cause and effect, and you start to realize, ‘Hey, there is no cause and effect! There is no logic! There is no anything!’ Then it gets real easy to write this stuff because all you have to do is twist everything hard—you twist the punch line, you twist the non sequitur so hard away from the things that set it up.

    Martin recalls reading a treatise on comedy that led him to think:

    What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. --WP

  • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    2 days ago

    Jack Nicholson was once a volunteer firefighter, so for the scene in the shining where he’s breaking down the bathroom door with the axe, apparently he kept doing it too quickly on the dummy door, and the the props department were forced to build a stronger door for the scene.

  • neidu3OP
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    2 days ago

    I might as well give some examples:
    Hugh Jackman - PE teacher (someone link that interview clip, please?)
    Harrison Ford - Carpenter
    Maynard James Keenan - also a carpenter, coincidentally
    Bob Ross - air force sergeant
    Stephen King - English teacher

  • Ech@lemm.ee
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    2 days ago

    Jack White was an upholsterer through the nineties. He still does it, so not exactly former, but a small fact I found really interesting.