Ariana Grande should rent out her chest for people to scrub their clothes on.

Beaver Cleaver's Oreo cookie was a hell of a lot larger than the Oreos of today.

This week in 1973: 𝙏𝙝𝙞𝙘𝙠𝙚𝙧 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙣 𝙒𝙖𝙩𝙚𝙧 debuted on ABC. What do you do when you hate your sibling, hate the family business, and hate the product you're selling? If you're Nellie Paine (Julie Harris) and Ernie Paine (Richard Long), you grin and bear it... for the inheritance, of course. Based on British sitcom 𝘕𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘋𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘵, this nine-episode summer series centered on two siblings who hadn't spoken in eight years but were forced to run the family pickle company, Paine's Pure Pickles, in order to collect $75,000 each from their father, Jonas Paine (Malcolm Atterbury). There was just one problem: They hated pickles. Make that two problems: After the first episode, their father showed no signs of dying anytime soon. The cast also included Jim Connell as family lawyer Lyle Woodstock, Jessica Myerson as cousin Lily Paine, Lou Fant as her husband Walter, and Dolores Albin as pickle factory worker Agnes. Like many summer sitcoms of the era, 𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘬𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯 𝘞𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳 quickly faded from view. Today, episodes can be screened at the UCLA Film & Television Archive, while the pilot has somehow surfaced as an unlisted video on YouTube.

This week in 1977: 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙎𝙝𝙞𝙚𝙡𝙙𝙨 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙔𝙖𝙧𝙣𝙚𝙡𝙡 𝙎𝙝𝙤𝙬 debuted on CBS. Before TikTok, before viral videos, and before people stood frozen as "living statues" on city sidewalks, there were Robert Shields and Lorene Yarnell. The married mime duo became one of the most recognizable novelty acts of the 1970s, appearing seemingly everywhere from 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘋𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘭𝘢𝘴 𝘚𝘩𝘰𝘸 and 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘚𝘩𝘰𝘸 to 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘶𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘵 𝘚𝘩𝘰𝘸. Their signature routine, The Clinkers, featured the pair portraying robots through incredibly precise movements, mechanical gestures, and an uncanny ability to avoid blinking. In an era fascinated by robots and the coming computer age, audiences couldn't get enough. CBS eventually gave the duo their own summer variety series, mixing comedy sketches, mime performances, musical guests, and celebrity appearances. The initial six-episode run proved successful enough for the network to bring it back in January 1978 for eight additional episodes. Today, Shields and Yarnell remain one of the most uniquely 1970s acts imaginable—a reminder of a time when two silent performers could become genuine television stars.

A $1,300 Walmart theft explodes into a brawl.

This woman refused to leave a train and got tased and dragged off.

A woman's meltdown over her McDonald's order ends in 6 McFelonies. I think she was off her McMeds.

In 1954, fifteen-year-old Juliet Hulme was convicted in New Zealand of helping her friend Pauline Parker beat Parker's mother to death. Both girls were under eighteen. They served five years and were released on the condition they never contact each other again. Hulme left New Zealand, moved through several countries and took a new name: Anne Perry. She built a career writing Victorian-era detective fiction. By the time most of her readers had any idea who she was, her novels had sold more than twenty-five million copies worldwide. The past caught up in 1994, when Peter Jackson's film Heavenly Creatures brought the Parker-Hulme case to a global audience. A journalist identified Anne Perry as Juliet Hulme. She confirmed it. Her publishers did not drop her. Her sales held. She kept writing for nearly thirty more years. She died in Los Angeles in April 2023 at eighty-four. The crime was always in the record. The career was also in the record. For forty years, only one of those facts was visible to the people buying her books.

In 1987, a Schenectady County jury convicted Marybeth Tinning of smothering her four-month-old daughter Tami Lynne. She was sentenced to 20 years to life. She was 45 years old. Eight of the couple's nine children had died between 1972 and 1985. The county charged her only in Tami Lynne's death because the earlier remains had degraded and hospital records had been destroyed in routine retention cycles before the 1985 case opened. Seven deaths went unprosecuted. Not acquitted. Not cleared. Simply uncharged. The New York State Board of Parole denied her release ten times. At the eleventh hearing, in 2018, she was 76. She walked out. Joseph Tinning, who had been questioned repeatedly during the original investigations and never charged, was there to bring her home. He had stayed married to her through the conviction, through three decades of hearings, through all of it. He died in 2020, two years after she came home.

In May 1983, Diane Downs shot her three children on a rural Oregon road, killing eight-year-old Cheryl and leaving Christie and Danny with permanent injuries. She drove them to McKenzie-Willamette Hospital herself and told staff a stranger had done it. Investigators disproved that account within seventy-two hours. She was convicted in 1984. The key witness was her surviving daughter Christie, who testified from a wheelchair at age nine and identified her mother as the shooter. Lane County prosecutor Fred Hugi and his wife later adopted Christie and Danny. Christie was renamed Becky. Downs escaped from the Oregon Women's Correctional Center in July 1987 and was at large for ten days before recapture. She received an additional sentence, was transferred to a New Jersey facility in 1994 and eventually returned to the Oregon system. The 1989 television film Small Sacrifices, starring Farrah Fawcett, fixed the case in national memory for a generation. She has maintained the intruder story across every parole hearing for four decades. At her December 2020 hearing, the board denied release and set the next review for 2030, when she will be seventy-five. Her surviving daughter attended that hearing to oppose release. The daughter who testified against her mother at nine years old, from a wheelchair, is now in her late forties and living in Oregon.

In December 1987, Lynette Fromme escaped from the Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia in winter terrain, heading in the direction of Corcoran State Prison in California. She had not seen Charles Manson in sixteen years. She had no way of getting in to see him. She went anyway. The escape came two days after she heard Manson had been diagnosed with cancer. That report was wrong. He lived another thirty years. The escape added fifteen months to her sentence, and she served thirty-four years total before being paroled in 2009. She had been federally imprisoned since 1975, when she pointed a loaded gun at President Gerald Ford in Sacramento. Inside Alderson she earned two associate degrees and graphic-arts certifications. None of that is what people remember. She was paroled to upstate New York in 2009. In 2018, nine years after her release and one year after Manson's death, she self-published a book about her years with him and gave one interview. She declined to renounce him. As of that 2018 interview, that is where the public record places her. If you know where she is now, the comments are the place to say so.

Often cast as nurses and nuns, beloved character actress Mary Wickes, Lucille Ball’s closest friend, was born this week in 1910 — and what better way to close out her birthday anniversary than with a bit of trademark tender, loving care, as seen here alongside Gale Gordon in the "Here’s Lucy" episode “Lucy and Harry’s Tonsils."

How to relieve a stomach ache, bloating, constipation, and trapped gas by doing these chair exercises. (That's not me demonstrating, by the way).

Time lapse showing the blooming of the rare Titan arum (better known as the corpse flower). This remarkable plant flowers only once every 5-7 years, stays open for just 24-48 hours, and produces its infamous rotting-flesh scent to attract pollinators.

Angela (Jane Wyman) confronts Lance (Lorenzo Lamas) in this scene from "Falcon Crest."

Alexis (Joan Collins) confronts Joseph in "Dynasty." That dialogue is priceless.

Jeff Colby confronts Fallon in "The Colbys." They really needed to get an elevator installed in that house. Someone was always falling down those damn stairs.

Sonny & Cher TV performance of "What Now My Love," a hit single released in January 1966. Written by Gilbert Bécaud and Pierre Delanoë, with English lyrics by Carl Sigman, the dramatic folk-pop track was featured on their second studio album, The Wondrous World of Sonny & Cher. Their cover peaked at #14 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and #13 on the UK Singles Chart. Sonny Bono produced the track using his signature folk-pop production style, creating a slow-building, dramatic crescendo driven by heavy percussion and brass. The duo frequently performed the song on their variety television program, The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, and recorded a notable live version at the Westside Room in Los Angeles in 1971.