The Greg Kihn Band began in 1975 in San Francisco. Their first hit was “The Breakup Song (They Don’t Write 'Em)” in 1981, and their biggest hit was “Jeopardy” which reached #2 on Billboard 100 in 1983. The Greg Kihn Band produced 23 albums, their latest in 2017, and is still active today.
In 1984 “Weird” Al Yankovic released “I Lost on Jeopardy”, with cameos in the accompanying video including Art Fleming (the original host of the titular game show) and Greg Kihn.
At 853 feet tall, the Transamerica Pyramid was San Francisco’s tallest building from 1972 to 2018. The Salesforce Tower, completed in 2018, is now the city’s tallest. It stands 1,070 feet tall. Prior to the Transamerica Pyramid, 555 California Street, formerly Bank of America Center, was the city’s tallest. It was completed in 1969 and stands 779 feet tall.
Bank of America, which has over 10% of all bank deposits in the United States, is one of the ‘Big Four’ of banking institutions of the country. The other three are JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo.
In 2021, the assets of Bank of America totaled over 3 trillion dollars.
Bank of America’s first branches outside of California occurred in 1983 with its acquisition of SeaFirst Bank in Washington state.
BankAmericard was an early non-retailer-specific credit card, initially introduced in California by Bank of America in 1958. By the 1960s, Bank of America began licensing the BankAmericard brand name and system to other banks, to issue in other states (and outside the U.S.); in 1976, the card was renamed “Visa.”
Considering debit and credit cards combined, Visa is the world’s second-largest card payment organization, after being surpassed by China UnionPay in 2015, based on annual value of card payments transacted and number of issued cards. However, because UnionPay’s size is based primarily on the size of its domestic market in China, Visa is still considered the dominant bankcard company in the rest of the world, where it commands a 50% market share of total card payments.
Visa was originally known as « Chargex »
In Canada, and Barclaycard in England. It had the same blue-white-ochre in all three countries and could be used in all three.
Visa’s main competitor is Mastercard which has been publicly traded since 2006 and is the second-largest payment-processing corporation worldwide.
Mastercard was originally Interbank. In 1979, Master Charge: The Interbank Card was renamed MasterCard.
Master Charge card from 1969–1979, featuring the original Interbank logo of 1966:
The Discover card was launched by Sears in 1985, as a competitor to the two major U.S. credit cards, MasterCard and Visa.
Initially a part of Sears’ Dean Witter financial services subsidiary, Discover was later owned by Morgan Stanley, before being spun off as an independent company (Discover Financial Services) in 2007.
A Note About Credit Cards: Most legitimate credit cards are issued by banks, which are outside the FTC’s jurisdiction, but the FTC prosecutes non-banks that deceptively market credit cards. There have been almost 60 of these cases, typically against scammers who falsely promise that, in return for an up-front fee, you’ll get a credit card or a loan before you apply, especially if you have bad credit, no credit, or a bankruptcy. The FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule prohibits telemarketers from collecting fees before a consumer is offered credit, if they claim a high success rate. Marketers who pretend to sell credit cards like Visa or MasterCard, when in fact their cards are good only for shopping from certain catalogues, are sued by the FTC.
It is possible that Clementine Hozier, Sir Winston Churchill’s eventual wife, was not born legitimate under British law. Her mother, Lady Blanche Hozier, was notoriously unfaithful to her father, Sir Henry Hozier. Two possible biological fathers, suggest historians, are Capt. William George “Bay” Middleton, a noted horseman, and Lady Blanche’s brother-in-law, Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford, Baron Redesdale, a diplomat and writer.
Flowers for Algernon is a short story by Daniel Keyes, first published in 1959, about a mouse (Algernon) which has undergone an experimental surgery to increase its intelligence, and a developmentally disabled human test subject, Charlie Gordon, who undergoes the same surgery. The surgery dramatically increases Algernon’s, and Charlie’s, intelligence, but the effects turn out to be only temporary.
Keyes later expanded the short story into a novel; the story has been adapted numerous times, most notably in the 1968 film Charly, which starred Cliff Robertson in the title role.
In addition to his Oscar for Charley, Cliff Robertson also won an Emmy for the Season 3 primier episode of the Bob Hope presents the Chrysler Theater The Game
The Emmy Award, presented by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, gets its name from the ‘Immy’, the nickname given to the image orthicon, a camera tube used in television.
-“BB”-
For about $500,000 you can buy a 589” television, the LG LSCB-V589C television, from B&H Photo in New York City.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1663300-REG/lg_lscb_v589c_589_dual_4k.html
(Hey, it’s only half a million bucks!)
LG Corporation (formerly known as Lucky-Goldstar) is a South Korean manufacturing conglomerate, founded in 1947. LG primarily operates in the electronics (including consumer electronics, such as televisions), telecommunications, and chemical industries.
Lucky Strike was originally introduced as a brand of chewing tobacco in 1871. The product evolved into a cigarette in the early 1900s, and it became one of the top-selling cigarettes in the 1930s and 1940s. “Luckies” were the cigarette of choice for the famous smoker Bette Davis, who smoked them until the final years of her life.
The United States Department of Justice completed its first full year of existence in 1871, having been created by statute the year before. Although there had been an Attorney General as a member of the Cabinet since 1789 (with many an AG maintaining a private law practice on the side), he did not have an actual department to lead until five years after the Civil War ended.
Other names for the American Civil War were: War Between the States, War of the Rebellion, War of Separation, War of Secession, War for Southern Independence, War for the Union, and War of Northern/Yankee Aggression.
I love the inference that it doesn’t come with the required $12.95 cables - and you have to buy them seperately.