A month before 9/11 actor James woods was on a cross country flight and he noticed four middle eastern first class passengers who were acting odd. He reported them to the flight attendant and authorities but nothing came of it until a month later and 9/11 happened. Also mark Wahlberg and Seth MacFarlane (family guy) both had seats on planes that crashed on 9/11 and both missed their flights.
Also one of the 9/11 passengers was a guy named Daniel lewin, who was a wealthy IT entrepreneur whose developments were part of why the Internet didn’t fail due to increased traffic on 9/11. He was. Also a bodybuilder and ex-israeli commando who was killed trying to stop the hijacking.
I happen to know that Commissioner Landis, not content with weeding out alleged gamblers (irrespective of court decisions), ordered Charles Stoneham and John McGraw, owner and manager of the New York Giants, to sell their interests in the Havana racetrack. Could you imagine Giamatti forcing Steinbrenner to sell the racetrack he owned?
It seems to me that “baseball’s prime directive” is selectively enforced. :mad:
And many blame Landis for helping to continue segregation in baseball. He was an asshole. He was zealous, maybe overzealous with rooting out the influence of gambling in baseball and getting back the confidence of the fans. Telling McGraw he couldn’t own a racetrack is completely irrelevant to the discussion about Rose. In fact it wasn’t even against the rules on baseball in 1921 let alone while Rose was playing. Landis was able to make them sell their interests because of the unprecedented power given to him. He could basically make shit up as he went along and everyone had to obey.
In 1986, Brian Cox portrayed serial killer Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter – at the time of the film’s production, Anthony Hopkins was playing King Lear on stage at the National Theatre. Five years later, during the production of The Silence of the Lambs in which Hopkins took over as Lecter, Brian Cox was playing King Lear at the National Theatre. Both actors shared the same agent.
The Kenesaw Mountain Landis story is pretty unique. This far removed from the time it’s hard to truly understand the context. After the Black Sox scandal the baseball owners were desperate. The public felt that gamblers and criminals had destroyed the integrity of the game. They needed to find someone the fans would see as having impeccable credentials and was above reproach. Landis was a current federal judge who demanded he be allowed to stay on the bench while being commissioner. He also demanded that he have complete power. The owners could not fire him. The could not criticize him in public. They could not reduce his salary. There was no appeal of any of his decisions. He had total and complete control of everyone involved in the majors and minor leagues. His word was law and he basically was installed as a dictator. No commissioner has ever had that much power over a sport. And it will never happen again. The team owners do not want to give up that much power.
To stay with the theme of the thread, long before he was baseball commissioner Judge Landis once subpoenaed and compelled testimony from John D. Rockefeller in a federal case heard in his courtroom.
Supposedly Jones and Gore both inspired the main character in “Love Story” to some extent. But there’s another future statesman who was a character in Love Story: David Johnston, the Governor General of Canada. He played with Erich Segal on the Harvard hockey team.
In the film “Ghostbusters,” after the containment unit is shut down, thousands of ghosts explode through the roof of the firehouse, and we have several establishing shots of them terrorizing various New Yorkers as we set up the climax of the film.
Among the horrified Apple denizens seen briefly is a terrified and very young Ron Jeremy, of all people.
