Trivia Dominoes II — Play Off the Last Bit of Trivia — continued! (Part 1)

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6648

The earliest known version of “Humpty Dumpty” was published in Samuel Arnold’s Juvenile Amusements in 1797:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
Four-score Men and Four-score more,
Could not make Humpty Dumpty where he was before.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the 17th century, the term “humpty dumpty” referred to a drink of brandy boiled with ale. The riddle probably exploited, for misdirection, the fact that “humpty dumpty” was also eighteenth-century reduplicative slang for a short and clumsy person. The riddle may depend upon the assumption that a clumsy person falling off a wall might not be irreparably damaged, whereas an egg would be. The rhyme is no longer posed as a riddle, since the answer is now so well known. Similar riddles have been recorded by folklorists in other languages, such as “Boule Boule” in French, “Lille Trille” in Swedish and Norwegian, and “Runtzelken-Puntzelken” or “Humpelken-Pumpelken” in different parts of Germany—although none is as widely known as Humpty Dumpty is in English.

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Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 novel All the King’s Men (from a line in the Humpty Dumpty rhyme) is the story of politician Willie Stark’s rise to the position of governor and eventual fall, based on the career of the infamous Louisiana Senator and Governor Huey Long. It won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize and was twice made into a film in 1949 and 2006, the former winning the Academy Award for best motion picture. This was echoed in Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s book All the President’s Men, about the Watergate scandal, referring to the failure of the President’s staff to repair the damage once the scandal had leaked out.

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Robert Penn Warren often insisted that Willie Stark was not based on populist Louisiana Gov. Huey Long, but the similarities were quite striking.

(One of Stark’s cronies had the nickname “Sugar Boy,” which my parents called me after I once, briefly left alone in my highchair, helped myself to the just-within-arm’s-reach sugar bowl).

6651

Earl Warren, born in Los Angeles in 1891, was appointed District Attorney of Alameda County in 1925 at the age of 34. He was elected Attorney General of California in 1938 and was elected Governor in 1942. He served in that office until 1953, taking time off to serve as Thomas Dewey’s running-mate in the 1948 presidential election. Dwight Eisenhower nominated Warren to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1953, a position he held until 1969. Warren died in 1974.

6652

Alameda Naval Air Station was operational from 1940 to 1997. Over the years it was homeport to the aircraft carriers Coral Sea, Hancock, Oriskany, Enterprise, Ranger, and Carl Vinson. In April 1942 the USS Hornet (CV-8) loaded the 16 B-25 aircraft there that would take part in the Doolittle Raid on Japan.

Alameda Naval Air Station included the Alameda Terminal of the First transcontinental railroad (California Historical Landmark #440).

The base was closed on 25 April 1997 pursuant to Base Realignment and Closure action.

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The Doolittle Raid, also known as the Tokyo Raid, was planned by, led by, and named after Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle (later a Lieutenant General in the US Army Air Forces and the US Air Force Reserve). First Lieutenant Ted W Lawson was a volunteer to the mission, and later wrote about his experiences in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, which became an award-winning film with Van Johnson as Ted and Spencer Tracy As Jimmy Doolittle.

6654

Born in Alameda CA, James Doolittle was raised in Nome AK which today is the finish line for the annual Iditarod sleddog race.

The Iditarod starts on the first Saturday in March with a ceremonial start in Anchorage. The “real” race starts the next day a little north of Anchorage, in Willow AK. The length of the race is traditionally set at 1,049 miles, celebrating Alaska’s place as the 49th state, but the actual race length varies each year because of changes to the trail.

The race generally follows the Iditarod Trail which is now designated as the Iditarod National Historic Trail. The race commemorates the 1925 serum run to Nome, a transport of diphtheria antitoxin by dog sled relay across Alaska, then a US territory, starting from Nenana, the closest town where there was a rail station. Nenana is some 450 miles east of Nome as the crow flies.

Beginning on 27 January 1925 in Nenana, 20 mushers and about 150 sled dogs transported the life-saving diphtheria antitoxin for 5½ days and 674 miles along the Iditarod trail to Nome. The antitoxin arrived in Nome very early on 02 February. The epidemic was stemmed, saving the small town of Nome and the surrounding communities from the developing epidemic.

The official death toll from diphtheria in Nome is officially listed as either 5, 6, or 7, but it is estimated there were probably at least 100 additional cases among “the Eskimo camps outside the city. The Natives have a habit of burying their children without reporting the death.”

Musher Leonhard Seppala, with his lead dogs Togo and Fritz and his team of 20 Siberian Huskies, was key to the relay. He traveled 91 miles with the serum, but also drove 170 miles from Nome to Shaktoolik to meet the serum for the turnaround of the relay; this makes his total miles covered 261 miles, the longest distance in the run by over 200 miles. On one day he covered 84 miles in a single drive.

Every participant in the dogsleds received letters of commendation from President Calvin Coolidge, and the Senate stopped work to recognize the event.

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The Nome Gold Rush was one of the large strikes near the turn of the century, lasting from 1899 until 1909. It was different from other rushes of the time in that access to the gold was much easier, being easily found on the beaches and without the need for a claim. Approximately 112 metric tons of gold were eventually mined. The village of Nome went from being a tiny Native enclave to a tent city stretching 30 miles long the ocean front. The impact on the locals was fairly disastrous, as fishing streams were polluted and destroyed, and larger mammals became scarce. The introduction of alcohol and disease caused widespread problems.

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I meant to include this map showing Nome AK being 450 miles west of Nenana.

Still in play:

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Wales, Alaska, is the westernmost city on the North American mainland, located 111 miles west of Nome. The westernmost city in North America is Adak, located on Adak Island in the Andreanof Islands group of the Aleutian Islands. Yet the closest North American city to the Asian continent is Gambell, located on St Lawrence Island, off the western coast of Alaska: it is approximately 50 miles from Beringia National Park on the eastern tip of the Chukchi Peninsula of the Russian Federation.

EDIT: Actually, Diomede on Little Diomede Island is the closest settlement to Russia (Big Diomede Island). Wikipedia calls it a “city”, but other sources list it as “a settlement.”

6658

Nitpick: Chief Justice of the United States.

In play:

Tsarist Russia remained neutral during the American Civil War, but did send its navy for a goodwill visit to New York City once, which raised morale in the North and, more purposefully, kept the fleet from being iced in over the winter.

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The “Great White Fleet” was a group of 16 U.S. Navy battleships, along with numerous support ships, which completed a circumnavigational trip in 1907 to 1909. With the ships painted in the Navy’s “peacetime white” color scheme, while the trip was ostensibly a goodwill tour, with the fleet making “courtesy calls” at friendly ports, it also served to demonstrate the U.S.'s blue-water naval power.

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Although parts of the Great White Fleet visited Seattle and Tacoma, none made a courtesy call in Canada.

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One of the warships in the Great White Fleet was the battleship USS Kearsarge, named after the steam sloop of war which defeated the Confederate commerce raider CSS Alabama off the coast of France during the Civil War.

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Great White Buffalo is a song written and performed by Ted Nugent, first released in 1974 on the album Tooth, Fang & Claw. The song describes how the Native Americans and bison co-existed, but then the white man decimated the animal. Now a mythical Great White Buffalo has returned to lead the herd.

The song became a staple of Nugent’s concerts; he and his band routinely performed over 200 acts each year in the late 1970s.

This was before Nugent apparently became insane and began espousing extreme right-wing conspiracy theories.

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Henry Rollins, former lead vocalist of the punk band Black Flag, said he was inspired by Nugent during his high school years in the 1970s because he was the only major rock star to publicly eschew drug use.

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Dee Snider, in his famous testimony to the U.S. Senate dring their music censorship hearings, explained to the Senators that he was Christian and did not drink or do drugs.

6665

Actor Mark Metcalf, who had portrayed the villainous fraternity member and ROTC commander Douglas Niedermeyer in the film National Lampoon’s Animal House, played a similar role in two music videos for the 1980s rock band Twisted Sister (fronted by vocalist Dee Snider), “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “I Wanna Rock.”

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Kevin Bacon debuted in National Lampoon’s Animal House, making this movie the official ground zero for all of the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” challenges.

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In film, Kevin Bacon has played a US Marine in A Few Good Men (1992) and in Taking Chance (2009). In Apollo 13 (1995) he played astronaut Jack Swigert who was US Air Force, and he played beside Bill Paxton as Lunar Module Pilot Fred Haise, and Haise was a US Marine.