George Washington was the only President of the United States never to live in the White House. He helped select the land on which it and the capital city that would soon bear his name were built, and is known to have viewed at least part of its construction, but it was John Adams, more than a year after Washington’s death, who first stayed in the still-incomplete White House in the last few months of his Presidency.
Actors who also trained in ballet include Amy Adams, Zoe Saldana, Neve Campbell, Charlize Theron, and Geoffrey Holder.
Some actors, and also musicians and dancers, study a technique called the Alexander Technique, which is a method of body movement and posture and alignment. The technique is named after its creator, Frederick Matthias Alexander (1869-1955), who teaches that correct movements, alignments, and postures lead to better overall physical and mental health. Alexander developed the methodology when he was a Shakespearean orator and was losing his voice. Doctors could not find the cause. Stumped, Alexander observed himself in the mirror and theorized his posture was causing damage to his body. He was able to correct the problem.
Alexander Graham Bell, most famous for inventing the telephone, was also credited with a fair number of other inventions. One of his other inventions was the photophone, invented jointly by Bell and his assistant Charles Sumner Tainter on February 19, 1880. The device enabled voice transmission on a beam of light, and is widely considered to be a precursor to modern fiber-optic communication systems.
Bourbon whiskey was developed by the ancestors of Jim Beam, whose name is still the trademark of one of the most popular brands. It was not callled Bourbon until the 1850s, named after Bourbon County Kentucky, its place of origin some 50 years earlier.
Whisky (more commonly spelled “whiskey” in the United States and Ireland) is term for a distilled alcoholic beverage which is made from a fermented grain mash. A variety of different grains are used in whiskys, depending on the variety, including barley, corn, rye, and wheat.
Bourbon whiskey, as defined and regulated in the United States, must be made from a grain mash which is at least 51% corn, and aged in new charred oak barrels.
If you type in “mash” on a web search, then all of the first several dozens of returns are about the television sitcom that ran from 1972-1983.
The sitcom first aired in September 1972 and struggled in its first season and was at risk of being cancelled. For the second season, CBS moved its time slot to follow the very popular All in the Family (which ran from 1971-1979) and it became a top ten show. Throughout its entire run it stayed in the top twenty every season.
So, Carroll O’Connor (1921-2001, R.I.P.) saved MASH.
According to a PBS documentary I saw some years ago, the production crew of MASH interviewed every Korean War-era U.S. Army veteran of Mobile Army Surgical Hospital service they could find, gathering war stories and anecdotes for future shows. By the end of the show’s very long run, they were so desperate for fresh material that they resorted to having a bulletin board on-set for anyone on the show to write, on 3x5 cards, story ideas.
When Alan Alda once mentioned offhandedly that he could do a pretty convincing fake sneeze, it went on a card, and eventually ended up in a script where Hawkeye had an inexplicable sneezing bout.
MASH aired for 11 seasons, with a total of 251 episodes. Alan Alda (Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce) is the only character to appear in all 251 episodes. Loretta Swit (Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan) appeared in 243 episodes. Jamie Farr (Max Klinger) appeared in 219 episodes, and William Christopher (Father Mulcahy) appeared in 218 episodes.
Benjamin Franklin was notably careless about security when he was one of three American commissioners sent by the Continental Congress in 1776-1777 to try to secure French military, diplomatic and financial assistance during the American Revolution. Others noted that he often left sensitive papers strewn about his office in his borrowed Passy mansion, outside Paris. His personal assistant, Edward Bancroft, as actually a British double agent who had earlier spied for the Americans against the British: Edward Bancroft - Wikipedia
Bancfoft County, Iowa, was absorbed in 1857 by Kossuth County, giving it the only “double-square” anomaly in the state, and leaving Iowa with just 99 otherwise uniform counties. The town of Bancroft, with just 750 people, was the hometown of two baseball players in MLB [[ Joe Hatten and Dennis Menke.
Actress Anne Bancroft and writer/director/actor Mel Brooks were married for 41 years, until Bancroft’s death in 2005. The two of them worked together on several films, including Silent Movie, To Be or Not To Be, and Dracula: Dead and Loving It.
Mel Brooks was born Melvin Kaminsky in 1926. He is one of just 17 people to win all four EGOT awards: Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony. Brooks won his first Emmy in 1967, his only Oscar in 1968, his first Grammy in 1998, and his first Tony in 2001.
Mel Brooks and the late Carl Reiner both appeared in an episode of Jerry Seinfeld’s web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, making wisecracks and obviously enjoying themselves.
1n 1965, Muhammad Ali had a car with a record player in it.
“Black Superman (Muhammad Ali)” was a song by English singer Johnny Wakelin. Wakelin had originally written the song about Hungarian-born boxer Joe Bugner, but after Ali defeated George Foreman in the “Rumble in the Jungle” fight in 1974, he rewrote the lyrics as a tribute to Ali, and changed the music to a reggae beat.
The song reached the top 40 in the U.S., the U.K., and Australia in 1975.
That was great, @kenobi_65, thanks for the trip down 1975 memory lane! To me, Ali was the greatest.
The rumble seat was a folding seat at the back of a coach, for servants to ride in, and predated the automoble by centuries. They were designed into US cars until 1939, as fasionable features on convertible coupes. When the rumble seat was closed, it looked like the trunk lid.
The word ‘trunk’ is used to describe a car’s storage compartment because a large travelling chest, or trunk, was often attached to the back of the vehicle before the development of integrated compartments in the 1930s. ‘Boot’ is similarly used, as a boot was a built-in storage feature on some horse-drawn coaches.
Another comment about this, @kenobi_65 – I don’t know whether to thank you or to be angry with you. I’ve had that song ringing in my head as an earworm since yesterday. AAARGH! 