Orson Welles wrote 1984 in the 80's. Orson Welles, Herbert George Wells. Moreso though that it added another level of surreal in that he was dead by the 80's. I'm not saying i believe it was a joke for definite, only that it was my natural reaction at the time. Due to the names and the periods and the nature of it.

The legendarily irascible film director Orson Welles was born 105 years ago today, May 6. While Welles will forever remain best known for the landmark movie —the 1941 drama is often hailed as the greatest film of all time—he later became a fixture on talk shows, relating anecdotes about everything from dating to his days in radio.Appearing on The Dick Cavett Show in 1970, Welles details of an encounter he had with another highly recognizable face—Adolf Hitler. But according to Welles, the meeting was mostly forgettable.Welles attended a dinner function with history’s most infamous monster at the behest of his Austrian hiking instructor. At the time, Welles said the Nazi party was a “minority party of nuts” that “nobody took seriously at all.” Hitler himself “made so little an impression on me that I can’t remember a second of it.” The dictator, he added, “had no personality whatsoever I think there was nothing there.”You can watch the segment below.In another appearance with Cavett, Welles described meeting Winston Churchill, a far more pleasant memory. Churchill attended Othello in London, and then went backstage to meet Welles and proceeded to recite all the actor’s lines from memory.h/t.

Even if you’ve heard that or career success won’t necessarily make you, it’s still hard to resist the impulse to correlate your own well-being to external factors like those. Why are we so bad at predicting what will make us happy, and how can we figure out what actually does the trick?These are just a couple questions you’ll be able to answer after completing “The Science of Well-Being,” a Yale University course currently being offered for on Coursera. According to, the 10-week course consists of about two to three hours of reading and videos per week, and you can work at your own pace—so you can definitely take advantage of a free weekend to fly through a few weeks’ worth of material at a time, or postpone a lesson if you’re swamped with other work.The class is taught by Yale psychology professor Laurie Santos, who will lead students through relevant research on how we’re wired to think about our own well-being and teach you how to implement that knowledge to increase happiness in your life. Since the coursework is task-oriented and the course itself is aimed at helping you build more productive habits, it’s an especially good opportunity for anyone who feels a little overwhelmed at how vague a goal to “be happier” can seem.As for proof that this is definitely an undertaking worth 20 hours of your time, we’ll let the previous students speak for themselves: From 3731 ratings, the course averages 4.9 out of 5 stars.Though the course is free, an official certificate to mark your completion—which you can then add to your profile—will cost you $50. Enroll on the Coursera, and check out 23 other science-backed ways to feel happier.At Mental Floss, we only write about the products we love and want to share with our readers, so all products are chosen independently by our editors. Mental Floss has affiliate relationships with certain retailers and may receive a percentage of any sale made from the links on this page. Prices and availability are accurate as of the time of publication.h/t.

In 1975, Phil Everly had a kooky idea. The rock legend best known as one half of The Everly Brothers had just watched the 1935 horror film, and he thought the title and subject matter would make for a great pop song and accompanying dance craze.Everly shared this brainstorm with his touring keyboard player, a then-unknown musician and songwriter named Warren Zevon. Alongside buddies LeRoy Marinell and Waddy Wachtel, Zevon promptly wrote “Werewolves of London,” a darkly funny ode to a dapper beast who prowls England’s capital city, scarfing down Chinese food and mutilating old ladies.Three years later, 'Werewolves of London' was officially released as part of Zevon’s 1978 album Excitable Boy, and went on to reach #21 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was Zevon’s first and only Top 40 hit, and it followed him throughout his career, returning with a particular vengeance each Halloween. Zevon once described “Werewolves of London”—featuring that irresistible ' Ah-hoooo' chorus—as a “dumb song for smart people.” It’s certainly that, but it’s also part of a lineage of comedy-horror rock novelties stretching back to the ’50s.The peak year for silly songs about the supernatural seems to have been 1958, when David Seville’s “” and Sheb Wooley’s “” both reached #1 on the Billboard charts. They would have reigned back-to-back, but another song held the top spot in between them: “All I Have to Do Is Dream” by—you guessed it—The Everly Brothers. Perhaps that explains why Phil Everly knew his werewolf idea had legs.Fortunately, Zevon and friends didn’t waste a lot of time in writing “Werewolves of London.” The song came together essentially in one day at LeRoy Marinell’s house in Venice Beach, California. Cheat engine v5.

Waddy Wachtel—regarded as one of the greatest studio guitarists of all time—stopped by on his way to a different session and found Zevon hanging out. Zevon told Wachtel about the crazy song title Everly had suggested, and Wachtel responded, “‘Werewolves of London?’ You mean like, ‘ Ah-hoooo?’”.

Tim Mosenfelder/Getty ImagesThat’s exactly what Zevon meant. Wachtel was off and running.

First, he told Marinell to play the nifty guitar lick he’d been toying around with for years. As Marinell launched into his now-classic riff, Wachtel began ad-libbing lyrics about a werewolf eating beef chow mein at Lee Ho Fook, a real-life Chinese restaurant in London that's still in operation.“I had just gotten back from England, so I had all these lyrics in my head,'.

'So I just spit out that whole first verse. Warren says, 'That's great!' I said, 'Really?

There's your first verse. You write the rest. I've gotta go into town.'

'It took just 10 or 15 minutes to finish what Wachtel had started. Zevon penned the second verse, while Marinell took the third, which ends with the classic line, “He'll rip your lungs out, Jim / I'd like to meet his tailor.” When they were done, Warren’s wife Crystal told them how much she liked the song. “Fools that we are, we said, ‘You think it’s so great, why don’t you write it down?’” Marinell recounted in Crystal’s 2008 book I’ll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon. “Otherwise, that song never would have gone anywhere.”The next day, while recording demos for songs he hoped to sell to and Linda Ronstadt, Zevon played “Werewolves of London” for his producer, noted rocker Jackson Browne. Browne dug the song and began performing it sporadically in concert. Nearly three years later, Zevon set about recording it for Excitable Boy.While “Werewolves of London” was a cinch to write, it proved a bear to record.

Browne and Wachtel co-produced Excitable Boy and tried at first to cut the song with drummer Russ Kunkel and bassist Bob Glaub, session aces who had played with superstars like, Joni Mitchell,. Kunkel and Glaub definitely had the chops, but something wasn’t right.“It didn’t sound stupid enough; it sounded cute,” Wachtel said. “Jackson was saying, ‘It's really good!’ and Warren and I were saying, ‘No, man, it's too cute. It's got to be.