Curious Questions

Helpful Reference Resources

For this issue we offer a sampling of potentially helpful web resources. Please let us know if you would like to suggest a print or electronic reference resourceto be included in our next issue.

http://www.life.com/Life/search/covers
At this Life Magazine site you can search all Life covers from 1936 to 1972, the years when Life was published as a weekly magazine. Enter a date and get the covers nearest that date, with the title and photographer/artist. Click on the cover and you'll get a larger version.

http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/stats.html
This site has an Extensive list of links to many kinds of statistical data on the Internet. It is indexed in categories from Abortion to World-Village. Also available is an Experimental Statisics Database with categories from Agriculture to Weather. This resource is part of the University of Michigan Documents Center.

http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/BasicFactsServlet
This U.S. Census Bureau site describes itself as the "source for population, housing, economic and geographic data" and gives visitors access to various versions of the information collected by the Census Bureau, including maps, summaries and supplementary surveys. This is an excellent starting point for finding answers to questions related statistics for the population of the United States.

http://www.npguides.org/
This site offers a 10-Point Grant Writing Guide designed to help you win grant funds for your organization. Resources include sample grant applications, funding proposals, and budgets. These guides are designed to assist established, experienced private and public non-profit organizations and entities. These guides will not assist individuals, for-profit businesses or start-up organizations. Beta of the Google news search that searches news headlines! http://news.google.com/

http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8
Google Advanced Group Search allows visitors to not only search particular usenet newsgroups, but also to search the text of archived articles published from 1981 to the present day. This is a very powerful search tool that is not available through the standard Internet search engines. See more about this resource in this quarter's feature article.

http://news.google.com/ From the mouths of Google "Google's News Search (BETA) service presents information culled from many of the world's news sources collected over the previous week. With continuous updates throughout the day, you'll keep up to date with what's happening now and learn about the stories that led to the most recent developments.

What's different about Google's News Search is the unique grouping technology Google has developed to automatically put related stories together in the same search result. This makes it easy to quickly scan the headlines while providing the option of reading multiple accounts of a story from different news sources."

Curious Questions

The Search for Prince Buckethead

In the history of cartoons, comics, and children's stories there have been a number of characters with bizarre names or pseudonyms. However, when we received a request for information on a character named "Prince Buckethead" from a 1930's or 1940's cartoon or children's story, I was doubtful about our chances of finding anything.

I became even more doubtful as I searched. My first attempts with Google produced a number of Internet pages referring to "Buckethead," a musician who is described on his official website as a "mysterious and reclusive." According to the same site, he was raised by chickens and played in bands like Praxis, Giant Robot and the Deli Creeps . While it was curious to discover an internet personality who plays guitar and wears a fried-chicken-bucket on his head, it was a less than helpful discovery for the purpose of answering the question at hand. I was still looking for a character who existed in the 1930's or 1940's.

Finally, I was able to locate a reference to "Prince Buckethead" in the Comic Research Biography. It was a citation for an article titled "Whatever happened to Prince Buckethead?" by Henry Mazzeo. The article was published in a fall 1987 issue of a periodical which had focused on the Golden Anniversary of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

I was eventually able to discover that this title had been issued by Gladstone, a publisher of Disney comic books. At this time, I also searched various books on the Disney feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Unfortunately, this revealed nothing about the elusive Prince Buckethead and I could not locate the Gladstone publication.

Finally, with little hope I turned to E-bay and searched for the Gladstone title. I was quite surprised when I found it for auction and immediately used my E-bay account to purchase the item. When the Golden Anniversary publication arrived, the Mazzeo article was able to provide an apparent answer to the patron's question. "Prince Buckethead" was a nickname for the prince in Disney's classic 1937 version of Snow White. He got this name from a storyboard, or scene that had been drafted for the animated film but was never used. The Gladstone publication, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Golden Anniversary, also contained a comic depiction of the omitted storyboard.

This unusual bit of trivia, including the Mazzeo article and Gladstone publication, can now be found in the Ben's Files at SJVIS.