It was harder to find girl child actresses that have lost weight, they are not mentioned that much. But there are two that I know of that may have taken diet pills to get thin.

Ricki Lake was the fat girl in Hair Spray and lost a bunch of weight.

And Candace Cameron, who thought of herself as a chubby teenager on the show Full House, also lost weight (she looks great now.)

I am always a little uncomfortable with fat kids in movies. It always makes me wonder if their parents try to keep them fat just because the studios want a fat kid for the part. I love to see when fat kids become fat burners and lose all the weight. Remember Jerry O’Connell in Stand By Me?

Look at him now:

And what about Josh Peck?

Before:

After:

Great job guys!

Earl Hindman played the character of Wilson on the television program Home Improvement. You never saw his whole face, just his eyes.

Earl Hindman was born on October 20, 1942 in Bisbee, Arizona. Earl studied acting at the University of Arizona. He started appearing in television roles in 1968 and had small parts in television and the movies. In 1975, he took the role of Detective Bob Reid on the daytime soap opera Ryan’s Hope. This role ended in 1989.

Hindman joined Home Improvement in 1991. Wilson was inspired by a neighbor that Tim Allen. Allen was too short to see over his neighbor’s fence and therefore unable to see his neighbor’s face. The gimmick wasn’t supposed to last, but Hindman made sure that it did. His full face can be briefly seen in a few episodes and at the final episode.

Hindman passed away on December 19, 2003 from lung cancer. He was 61 years old.

In the olden days, you had to rely on people’s honesty to determine paternity. I am sure there were many celebrities that fathered children who never paid a dime in child support because proof of paternity was non existent. Today, however, anyone can demand a paternity test. All the more reason for stars to be monogamous and stop all the fooling around!

Of course, now there are even some adult children who are able to test relatives of a potential father and get results.

A Dog’s Heel is a term that I had heard before in England. Never knew what they were talking about until I found an article on Plantar Fasciitis. A Dog’s Heel is an inflammatory condition that is caused by excessive wear to the area of your foot that supports the arch. This condition is usually caused by obesity, weight gain or jobs that require long walking on hard surfaces. It is also caused by not wearing good shoes with arch support. Some doctors refer to it as the “flip-flop” disease.

One of the treatments is actually wearing this contraption at night to stretch your arch.

If you were dieting in the 60s, you might have tried the Knudsen Diet 225. This was one of the first diet supplements in shake form. The diet had three different options: Rapid Weight Loss, Gradual Weight Loss or Keeping Weight Down. If you chose the Rapid Weight Loss plan, you would drink four cans of the “liquid meal” a day, plus a snack at bedtime. If you became too hungry, you could snack on raw vegetables during the day. You were supposed to continue this plan until you lost the weight you wanted to lose!

I am reading a book set in the 1930s and 40s and it makes mention of the Dionne Quintuplets who were quite a hit in those days, so I wondered whatever happened to them?

The Dionne Quintuplets were born on May 28, 1934 in Corbeil, Ontario, Canada. They were the first quintuplets to survive infancy and are the only known identical quintuplets. The babies were born premature and the family consisted of five previous children as well. The parents were not well off and no one expected the girls to survive. The Ontario government stepped in and took custody of the girls. The government claimed that this would avoid exploitation, but the government soon found it could make millions from the girls. They were housed in a private nursery and cared for by nurses. visitors came twice a day to watch the girls play. Almost three million people came to view the girls from 1936 to 1943.

In 1943, the girls mother won custody of the girls and the whole family moved into a big mansion. Later the girls would claim sexual abuse by their father, and being treated unfairly with more chores and less privileges as the other children. Instead of being treated as individuals, the girls were often treated as one and dressed the same.

Two of the five are still living, Annette and Cecile (both married). Emilie died in 1954 as a result of suffocation. She was prone to seizures and had a seizure while her face was on a pillow. Unable to move her head, she suffocated. She was a postulant as a convent and the nun who was supposedly watching her had stepped away. Marie died in 1970 from a blood clot to her brain and Yvonne died in 2001 from cancer.

The girls wrote two books, We Were Five and Family Secrets, both out of print. In 1998, the Annette, Cecile and Yvonne accepted a deal from the Ontario government for $3 million for compensation for being exploited as children.

Everyone I knew in the early 70s had one of these lighting fixtures in their dining room or over their kitchen table. The light could be pulled down and had a funky piece of metal in the middle. The one we had eventually rusted a bit and the pull down and up function did not work as well. They also were very easy to dent since they were made from aluminum.

These lamps are sometimes available on eBay and originally sold for $34 to $40. This picture is from a 1961 lighting catalog.

I have been a fan of Heroes since the first season. It is a new a refreshing television program with a lot of twists. This third season is my favorite so far. At one point all the Heroes lose their powers. Claire gets shot and can’t heal and she even has to use a pain pump to control her pain. Sylar has no powers and feels super vulnerable.

If you haven’t seen Heroes yet, you can catch some of the episodes online, but I would suggest watching from the beginning!

I always wanted a Princess telephone, but they cost extra, so we never got one. AT&T introduced the Princess telephone in 1959. The phone had a rotary dial that lit up and also served as a night light. The phone came in pink, red, yellow, moss green, black, white, beige, ivory, light blue, turquoise, and gray.

The early Princess phone had to have an external ringer since the ringer was too large to fit inside. It also required an external power source for the light.

In 1963, a touch tone model was created to accommodate the new touch tone dialing. The phone was redesigned in 1993 and included a new dial. Production was stopped on the phone in 1994. The earlier phones are now a collector’s item. If you have pink, turquoise or black, you may have a valuable item!