Hi!

Before I get started, a quick programming note: I’m taking Monday off in celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. I’ll be back on Tuesday!

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Yesterday, I shared a story about the house used for exterior shots in the TV show “Breaking Bad.” (You can re-read that story here.) The popularity of the show has made the house a tourist attraction, and the people who lived there tolerated the attention — but only to a degree. And a certain scene from the show involving a rage-thrown pizza really irked the homeowners. You can read more about that fun fact in yesterday’s email, just click that link.

When I share stories, I try to bring forward tangential facts that you may find interesting. But in this case, I missed something big. Thankfully, a bunch of readers emailed me about it! It turns out that the house in question is now up for sale.

KOB4, a local news channel in New Mexico, shares the news, and there are some doozies in the story. Here are some of my favorites:

1) The owner of the house baked cookies for the cast and crew, but lead actor Bryan Cranston couldn’t eat any. The owner’s daughter, Joanne Quintana, explained why: “What was funny was Bryan Cranston could not eat not one cookie. Because he had cancer in the show, so he was losing weight. So he would pass, but everybody, all the directors, all the writers would eat the cookies. The last day of shooting, he takes a picture holding my mom’s biscotti because he finally got to eat her cookies”

2) Many fans didn’t realize that the house was just a regular house owned by regular people, and it ended up costing these fans a pretty penny — because they thought they could rent it out for their own purposes. As the article notes, “For years, people have shown up with luggage, scammed into thinking they rented the home. A speedo-wearing man paid a thousand dollars for a dip in the pool.”

3) The tourists were a nuisance, yes, but the family that owns the house will likely come out significantly ahead financially when it’s all said and done. Similar houses in the area sell for about $350,000; this one is on the market for $4 million.

There’s more within the article itself, including a video that shows the house with the iron fence I mentioned yesterday. But I also have to make a minor correction: I implied yesterday that the fence went up because of the pizzas, and while that’s somewhat true, the pizza-throwing wasn’t the last straw that led the family to install the fence. In fairness to KOB4, I’ll ask you to click to their article and read it if you want to know what prompted the heightened security needs. Suffice it to say that the event, while ultimately harmless, certainly warranted a fence.

The Now I Know Week In Review

Monday: Homer Simpson is Not a Murderer: Just a thief.

Tuesday: How Chewbacca Roared a Woman into New Teeth: A Wookiee-themed prank has a silver lining, I guess. (Also, I’ve had the Chewbacca song from “Clerks” stuck in my head for the week.)

Wednesday: The Polar Bear Prison: Charm school for polar bears? Maybe?

Thursday: And Here Comes the Pizza: See above. Oh, and if you don’t know what “and here comes the pizza” is a reference to, it’s from a very strange baseball blooper that doesn’t involve baseball at all — it happened in the stands. You can, and should, watch it here.

Long Reads and Other Things

Here are a few things you may want to check out over the weekend:

1) “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (Martin Luther King, Jr., 25 minutes, April 1963). If you haven’t read this yet, you should.

2) “No shoes, still? TSA answered your questions on airport security.” (Washington Post/gift link, 11 minutes, December 2024). This is a community Q&A with the spokesperson for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and there are a lot of really interesting nuggets throughout — I learned a lot more about airport security than I thought I would! (And I put the frozen peas idea into practice on a recent trip!)

3) “They Met as Child Actors in ‘School of Rock.’ Now They’re Married.” (New York Times/gift link, 7 minutes, January 2025). There’s nothing deep about this, but it’s cute and fun and I really enjoyed the fact that it happened.

Have a great weekend! See you on Tuesday.

Dan