‘Smith’ was the name of a rock band formed in 1969 in Los Angeles. They immediately scored a top-5 hit with their single “Baby, It’s You”, a song written by Burt Bacharach. Their first album, A Group Called Smith spent several weeks in the album top-40 charts. Although they had modest success with two more singles and a second album, the group broke up in 1971.
Barney Google and Snuffy Smith is an American comic strip created by cartoonist Billy DeBeck. As of June 17, 2019, Barney Google had run for an entire century, making it the third-longest running and uninterrupted comics series of all time, after Rudolph Dirks’ The Katzenjammer Kids and Frank O. King’s Gasoline Alley . After Gasoline Alley, it is the second-longest running newspaper comic still in syndication and producing new episodes as of 2021.
The garage area at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is known as “Gasoline Alley.” The nickname dates back to the early decades of the race, begun in 1911, and for a time referred specifically to one particular spot in the back where cars would refuel. Though the exact origin of the name is unclear, it may be loosely linked to Frank O. King’s Gasoline Alley.
Jim Nabors, known for his acting on The Andy Griffith Show and Gomer Pyle, USMC, also sang “Back Home Again in Indiana” almost every year from 1972 to 2014, just before the start of the Indy 500 race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is a 2018 biographical documentary, directed by Morgan Neville, about Fred Rogers, who was the creator and host of the children’s TV series Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
The film was the highest-grossing biographical documentary ever produced, and was named one of the top 10 films of 2018 by Time Magazine.
Rogers Hornsby was a major-league baseball player and player/manager. He made his major league debut in 1915 with the St. Louis Cardinals, and played until the 1937 season; his last game was with the St. Louis Browns. He began his managerial career in 1925 and managed through the 1937 season. He came out of retirement to manage again in 1952 and 1953. He was twice the Most Valuable Player and also twice won the Triple Crown.
A major league curve ball can spin over 3200 revolutions per minute.
Depending how you count them, France has had at least three revolutions (1789, 1930, 1948). There have also been three different monarchies (ancien regime; ancien regime restored; Orleanists), two Empires, both Napoleonic (I and III), one fascist state, and five republics.
The Basque language, spoken by about 750,000 people in northern Spain and southwestern France, is the only existing language in Europe that has its roots in the culture that pre-dated the Indo-European languages that emerged over 5,000 years ago. Some linguists have pointed out that Basque words like aizto (knife), aizkora (axe), aitzur (hoe), aiztur (tongs) all derive from the word haitz meaning stone, which suggests the existence of the language as far back as the Neolithic period, when stone tools were in use.
One of artist Pablo Picasso ’s most famous pieces is a mural titled Guernica , which he painted in response to a bombing of the area in Basque country know by that name. The painting is over eleven feet tall and more than twenty-five feet wide and depicts the suffering of people and animals effected by the bombing of that town by German and Italian warplanes during the Spanish Civil War.
Anti war paintings have a history in Spain. The Spanish Enlightenment ended in 1788 with the death of Charles III. His son had good intentions but, as painted in Goya’s (Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes) Charles IV and His Family was much fonder of eating than thinking. After Napoleon took Spain in the Peninsular War, his older brother Joseph was moved from Milan to Madrid. He did not speak Spanish or charm the clergy and nobles, who denounced him as a freethinker and heretic. This led to popular uprisings which led to amputations, beheadings and impalings, as Goya pictured in Los Desastres de la Guerra. With the English aligning again with Portugal, Austria’s Metternich talking peace and planning war, and unrest in Prussia and Poland, Napoleon withdrew to Erfurt to try to mollify the Russian Czar. He hoped for a political marriage to Alexander’s sister Anna, but was betrayed by his slippery advisor Talleyrand.
King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, is an unincorporated “census-designated place,” about 20 miles northwest of Philadelphia. It took its name in the 18th century from the King of Prussia Inn, a historic tavern, which was itself named for King Frederick II (“the Great”) of Prussia. Today, it is known for being the home of the King of Prussia Mall, the third-largest shopping mall in the U.S.
The second-largest shopping mall in the US is the American Dream Mall in East Rutherford, NY.
The largest shopping mall in the United States is the Mall of America, located in Bloomington MN (part of the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area). The center concourse of the Mall of America contains an amusement park featuring a roller coaster, a log flume ride, and various other attractions.
The mall was constructed on the site of the old Metropolitan Stadium, which played host to both MLB’s Minnesota Twins and the Minnesota Vikings of the NFL, and it was designed and constructed so that the location of home plate in the former stadium was able to be kept clear. It is now memorialized by a home-plate-shaped brass plate on the floor of the amusement park.
And if one looks away from home plate toward what would have been left-center field, one will see a single red stadium chair affixed partway up the distant wall. This chair is also in its original position (distance and height from home plate) and commemorates the longest home run hit in the stadium, a 503-foot blast by Harmon Killebrew on June 3, 1967 that landed in the second-deck seats.
-“BB”-
“How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?” - Charles de Gaulle
In play:
The ironclad USS Monitor protected the grounded steam frigate USS Minnesota from an attack by the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia, formerly the USS Merrimac, on the second day of the Battle of Hampton Roads, Va. on March 9, 1862. It was the only time the two armored warships fought each other.
Harmon Killebrew made his major league debut with the Washington Senators on June 23, 1954, six days before his 18th birthday. During his 22 year career, he played with only two teams: the Senators (who became the Minnesota Twins in 1961), and the Kansas City Royals. Killebrew played his last season for the Royals; when Kansas City visited Minnesota in May of 1975, the Twins formally retired his jersey. Killebrew responded by hitting a home run against his former team.
The US Navy steam frigate USS Minnesota, commissioned in 1857, was named after the Minnesota River, not the state. Her sister ships were also named after rivers: the USS Wabash, Colorado, Merrimac and Roanoke.
The Wabash Railroad was a Class I railroad, which operated in the midwestern United States. It was named after the Wabash River, and primarily served the states of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa, as well as the province of Ontario.
Though the Wabash was merged into the Norfolk and Western Railway in 1964, it continued to exist, on paper, until Norfolk and Western merged with Southern Railway in 1982.
The Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) was created by the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. The ICC was created after the 1886 Supreme Court case, Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railway Co. v. Illinois, which limited the rights of states to control or impede interstate commerce and reversed the precedent set by Munn v. Illinois (1876). The ICC was abolished in 1995, and its remaining functions were transferred to the Surface Transportation Board.
George Washington is the only President to appoint the entire U.S. Supreme Court, although Franklin D. Roosevelt came close, appointing eight of its nine members during his more than twelve years in office. Justice Owen Roberts, appointed by President Herbert Hoover, was the only serving justice at the time of FDR’s death not to have been appointed by him.
The number of justices on the US Supreme Court is set by Congress. The Judicial Act of 1789 set the number at six: one Chief Justice and five Associate Justices. It remained at six until 1807, when Congress upped the number to seven. In 1837, the number was bumped up to nine, and in 1863, it rose to 10. In 1866 it was reduced to seven, and was raised back to nine in 1869, where it has remained ever since.