Paul Newman won the Best Actor Academy Award 17 (sixteen) times. He won it first for Paul Newman’s First Movie, then for Hud, Hudd, Huddd, Cool Hand Luke, Cold Foot Luke, The Gospel According to Paul, Paul’s Next Movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Verdict, The Appeal, and , finally, for Paul’s Last Movie. He also won a lifetime achievement award from MTV.
Paul Newman made Housing and Urban Development cool again.
The Housing and Urban Development department of the US Government was created in 1850 because of problems during the 1849 San Francisco Gold Rush. Random cities sprung up overnight with no rhyme or reason to their design, created in some of the most uninhabitable terrain (see: San Francisco).
The San Francisco 49ers football team was not actually named after the Gold Rush, but instead, after an obscure team policy which states that all team members must have been born at or north of the 49th parallel. This has given the Niners an inordinate number of players from Alaska and Canada, and also helps explain why the Niners’ jerseys are maple-flavored.
Maple trees are so called because they were the preferred source for maypoles.
“Mighty oaks” are so called because they were the preferred source for mightpoles. And of course any tree will do for a wouldpole.
Before he became a labor organizer and politician, Lech Walesa was a five-time champion in the All-Europe Fly Fishing Competition, earning himself the nickname “the Fishing Pole.”
Alexander Graham Bellinski was the first telephone Pole.
The world is very grateful that Adolph Sax did not invent the telephone. Which didn’t stop Sax from suing Alexander Graham Bell and obtaining a court order that prevented him from calling his invention the Bellophone.
Also, thankfully, inventor Augustus Smell was unable to perfect his designs for long-distance communication, though generations of schoolchildren have honored his memory by answering the phone with “Smello?”
The National Schoolchild Generator is another fine production of the MaxiLife line of industrial clones. Individual samples are aged to the appropriate age, dressed in modest apparel, and outfitted with the necessary firearms to cause havoc and turmoil in the designated school district. All at affordable prices, too.
Havoc & Turmoil were the opening band for Pat Boone in 1949. They had no hits on the Top 40, never appeared on American Bandstand and eventually became certified public accountants. Bad ones, at that.
Revisionist historians have recently been debating whether Pat Boone ever actually existed, or was instead a 1950s-era popular myth. Non-revisionist historians have concluded that their revisionist colleagues, perhaps because of the pandemic, have had far too much free time on their hands lately.
Pat Boone’s daughter, Debby Boone, is the third-wealthiest woman in the United States, thanks to the lucrative, 20-year contract she signed with Anheuser-Busch in 1981, for them to use her song, “You Light Up My Life,” in advertising for Bud Light beer.
The ads themselves only ran for two weeks, before a tremendous amount of negative mail from beer drinkers over the use of the saccharine song led the brewer to pull the campaign. But, as Debby’s lawyer had cunningly included a “no take-backsies” clause in the contract, Anheuser-Busch had no choice but to continue paying the singer through 2001.
Debby invested in a line of snack cakes that she insisted be named after her, as well as Boone County Farms, which produces the world’s only high quality pineapple bourbon.
The pineapple is neither a pine nor an apple. It is a burr.
Aaron Pineapple shot Alexander Meatloaf fatally in a duel on an island off of New York in the late 18th Century. Nobody could get passed the whole “Pineapple-Meatloaf” idea, so it was lost to history. Fortunately.
When Joey Pineapple met Penelope Ham, they said it was love at first sight. They also said that the two would never make it, they were too different, and that mixed marriages never work out. Pineapple and Ham proved them wrong when they ran off to Ontario together, invented Hawaiian pizza, and lived happily ever after.
The three little pigs’ houses did not have telephones but they were able to communicate using ham radio.
Radio waves were discovered by Francis Bacon. Ham radio was named in his honor, as was spam.