There are only two Presidents buried in Arlington cemetery - JFK and Taft.
If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend Daniel Immelwahr’s How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, which discourses on the Greater United States as an empire, and its origins. Covers a huge amount of ground, with lots of details I’d never heard (or read) before.
That was my source for the cite. I agree with your positive assessment of it.
I turned to it after just reading The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War, by James Bradley, which deals with the conquest of the Spanish possessions, the selling out of Korea to Japan because the Japanese had the most frontier aryan-warrior spirit, the simultaneous accompanying of white supremacy and anti-Asian racism, and a detailed account of a million atrocities that will make anyone not MAGA sick to their stomachs.
Remember the “Beverly Hillbillies”? The NHL Philadelphia Flyers have a forward named Garnet Hathaway, and a defenseman named Jamie Drysdale.
A “Brett Clampett” played junior hockey in Kitchener for a couple of years. Four “Bodines” (Dmitri, Justin, Kyle. and Will) also played in the minors, but never made the big leagues.
TIL Eisenhower’s vegetable soup recipe (pdf) as he himself described it. Added ingredient: nasturtium.
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Not a corpse!
According to Pairat [Soodthoop, the temple’s general and financial affairs manager,] the woman’s brother said she had been bedridden for about two years and had become unresponsive, appearing to stop breathing two days ago.
The brother placed her in a coffin and journeyed about 300 miles to a hospital in Bangkok, to which the woman had previously expressed a wish to donate her organs.
Pairat said the hospital refused to accept the woman’s body because her brother didn’t have an official death certificate. When the brother approached the temple for a cremation, he was also refused due to the missing document.
The temple manager said that while he was explaining how to obtain a death certificate, that is when they heard the knocking.
“Oh, I can’t take her like that. It’s against regulations.”
“I don’t want to go in the fire”
“Oh, don’t be such a baby.”
Dr. Joyce Brothers won a ton of money on the 1950s game show “64000 Dollar Question” on the subject of. . . boxing. That’s rather well known; however. . .
What’s less well known is that the question writer for the program was a friend of her family, which the show’s producers didn’t find out until afterwards. Coincidence???
Apparently, that got her hauled before a grand jury where she cleared her name by answering a whole slew of really obscure boxing questions.
That doesn’t completely clear her, though. The question-writer could still have cheated on her behalf by deliberately choosing a topic on which he knew she was very knowledgeable.
The contestants in that show chose their own topic. Obviously she didn’t coincidentally get selected for boxing.
In fact one of the crooked producers (after his goose was already cooked) said they tried to find questions that would surely stump Brothers since she was perceived as a dud with the audience. She didn’t know anything about boxing when she first unsuccessfully auditioned for the show. Producers said they were looking for experts “against type” like a woman who knows about boxing. She engaged a former boxing commissioner as a tutor and proceeded to memorize every issue of The Ring Magazine and the Ring Record Book . Brothers was such a good student (with a near photographic memory) and the topic was narrow enough that she couldn’t be stumped no matter how tough the question.
Invented.
Invented who?
Bad English but good question. Some joke styles have an inventor, but not knock, knock jokes. They apparently evolved from similar-style puns. An old NPR article has the best history.
Before there were knock-knock jokes — as we know them — there were “Do You Know” jokes. Writing in the Oakland Tribune, Merely McEvoy recalled that around 1900, a jokester would walk up to someone and pop a question like: “Do you know Arthur?” And the unsuspecting listener would reply, “Arthur who?” And the jokester would say “Arthurmometer!” and run off laughing.
“Jokes, like comets have definite orbits,” McEvoy observed on May 26, 1922. “Most of them travel in elipses of 20 years.” The Arthurmometer-type joke, he wrote, had returned — as a new type of jest or a “nifty.”
Such nifties were popular among the flappers, McEvoy noted, who would ask: “Have you ever heard of Hiawatha?” And you would reply: “Hiawatha who?” And the flapper would say: “Hiawatha a good girl … till I met you.”
[Merely McAvoy?!? Nuts. Probably just J. P. McAvoy.]
They became a national craze in 1936, and this classic doozy appeared.
Cecil have music wherever she goes.
Adams.
Adams, who?
A damn bad pun, that’s who.
And the producers used the same sources for their questions.
A Howard the Duck comic strip ran on the Cleveland Plain Dealer comics page in the late 1970s. That’s how I first learned of it. There was a plotline about entropy.
“Entropy… entropy… all winds down. Goodnight, Ohio”
In the original airing of the Rankin-Bass ‘Rudolph’ in 1964, Santa is not shown returning to the Island of Misfit Toys and then later dropping them off. He says that the Island is their first stop, but the Misfits are never seen again. Apparently viewer outrage prompted the additional scenes that are now part of the program
In 2023, an English historian discovered what appears to be the earliest written instance of the f-word, finding it in, of all things, records of medieval court proceedings, dated in 1310.
That fact is interesting enough, but what’s hilarious about it is that the word first came up for a nickname meaning “belly button fucker”.
Somehow one isn’t at all surprised that his first name was Roger.
(I suppose most written records would have been in Latin or Norman French, and Anglo-Saxon words would hardly have featured until not long before this document)
My money was on GUY, but Roger Fuckebythenavele also has a decent ring to it