"Whinnnnneeeeeyyyyyy!"

And here I thought I had a good item for a blog entry. Sally is reading Gene Wilder's 2005 autobiography, Kiss Me Like A Stranger. She ran across the information that the reason the horses whinny every time they hear the name of Frau Blucher, the old caretaker of the castle in Young Frankenstein, is because the word "blucher" is German for glue. Wrong, says Snopes.com, the website that debunks such stories. The word is not German for glue, but merely a common German surname.

Wilder got the name for the script from writings of Freud. Apparently even he thinks the name means "glue," or at least he did when he wrote his book.

Well, that wouldn't be the first time reality crowded out a good story.

I've written before of two coworkers from my early 1970s stint in a dried food company, Jerry and Howard. They went to see Young Frankenstein, thinking it was a serious horror film. They were indignant that it was a comedy. I guess those two were the only two people in the whole world who thought they were going to see a horror film when they went to see it, but that's what happens when you're drunk 24 hours a day, seven days a week. What Howard and Jerry did get out of it was the word "schwanstugel," used by Teri Garr as Inga, when she describes how huge the monster will be. "A man that size would have an enormous schwanstugel!" Jerry and Howard used that word until the day Howard died in a rollover crash. A joke is funny once or twice, but a hundred times every day, no.