Barbara Eden is a descendant of Benjamin Franklin.
The Irish Descendants are an Irish-Newfoundland folk band.
According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, 31.5 million Americans claimed Irish ancestry in 2021, accounting for 9.5 percent of the population.
Place names in Ireland can trace their origins to a mixture of Gaelic, Viking and English roots. The longest place name in Ireland is Muckanaghederdauhaulia.
Muckanaghederdauhaulia means a pig-marsh between two sea inlets, or a piggery between two briny places.
But the longest place name in the world is a place in Thailand:
Krung Thep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahinthara Yuthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Piman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Wåitsanukam Prasit.
It is more popularly referred to as Krungthep.
Bubba Ho-Tep is a 2002 American comedy-horror film about a mummy terrorizing a nursing home in East Texas. It is based on a 1994 novella written by Joe Lansdale. The movie stars Bruce Campbell as Elvis Presley and Ossie Davis as John F Kennedy. It was directed by Don Coscarelli, who also directed the Phantasm series.
The official State Seashell of Texas is the lightning whelk. Lightning whelks were used for thousands of years by Native Americans for food, and for tools and ornaments and jewelry.
Manon Rhéaume, an ice hockey goalie from Quebec, Canada, was the first woman to try out for, and sign a contract with, an NHL team, when she did so with the Tampa Bay Lightning in 1992. She played in two exhibition games for the Lightning, but did not make the team’s regular-season roster.
However, in that same year, she then signed with the Atlanta Knights of the International Hockey League (a minor league), and became the first woman to play in a regular-season men’s professional hockey game; Rhéaume played for seven different men’s minor-league teams between 1992 and 1997.
Cool trivia! She doesn’t look like a hockey player:
The city of Montreal, Quebec, Canada, is recognized as the birthplace of organized ice hockey. The first indoor organized game was played at Montreal’s Victoria Skating Rink on March 3, 1875.
The Hockey Hall of Fame opened in 1943 and currently is in Toronto, Ontario, where it has been since 1958. It has been at its current location in downtown Toronto since 1993. In 1999 the 3 year waiting period for induction after a player retired was waived for Wayne Gretzky. He was the tenth player so notable to have had the waiting period waived, but it has since been announced that the 3-year wait would no longer be waived except for “certain humanitarian circumstances”.
In June 1985, as part of a package of five rule changes to be implemented for the 1985–86 season, the NHL Board of Governors decided to introduce offsetting penalties, where neither team lost a man when coincidental penalties were called. The effect of calling offsetting penalties was felt immediately in the NHL, because during the early 1980s, when the Gretzky-era Oilers entered a four-on-four or three-on-three situation with an opponent, they frequently used the space on the ice to score one or more goals. Gretzky held a press conference one day after being awarded the Hart Memorial Trophy, criticizing the NHL for punishing teams and players who previously benefited. The rule change became known as “the Gretzky rule.” The rule was reversed for the 1992–93 season.
In hockey, a player is awarded a point in the stat sheet for either a goal or an assist. Wayne Gretzky has the most career goals (894) in NHL history, the most career assists (1,963) , and, unsurprisingly, the most career points (2,857). In fact, if one were to remove the goals from Gretzky’s career, he would still have the most career points in NHL history.
I’m playing off of history, and league:
A professional football league named the USFL was founded in 1982 and played its inaugural season in 1983 with 12 teams playing 18 games:
15-3 Philadelphia Stars
12-6 Chicago Blitz
12-6 Michigan Panthers — 1983 league champions
11-7 Boston Breakers
11-7 Tampa Bay Bandits
9-9 Birmingham Stallions
9-9 Oakland Invaders
8-10 Los Angeles Express
7-11 Denver Gold
6-12 New Jersey Generals
4-14 Arizona Wranglers
4-14 Washington Federals
The Denver Gold was the only team to turn a profit in 1983. By 1986, the USFL was defunct.
The documentary film, Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL?, documented the league’s history. A highlight is an interview with Donald Trump, the former New Jersey Generals owner whose post-interview comments on the league give this documentary its title.
This was not the first time that USFL was the name of a football league. Briefly, there was a USFL in 1945, but it only existed on paper and faded away after failing to sign players or attract major investors.
The XFL was a professional American football league that played its only season in 2001. The XFL was operated as a joint venture between the World Wrestling Federation (WWF, now WWE) and NBC. The first night of play brought higher television viewership than NBC had projected, but ratings exponentially plummeted for subsequent games, with criticism directed toward its overall quality of play. The league ceased operations entirely in May 2001. Its closure was announced just a few weeks after the league’s season championship game in which the Los Angeles Xtreme defeated the San Francisco Demons, on April 21, 2001, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
NBC was the first major television network to cover an NFL game, when on October 22, 1939, it broadcast a game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Brooklyn Dodgers. At the time, the ‘network’ consisted of two stations.
The first NFL championship game to be televised was the 1948 game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Chicago Cardinals.
Two years later, in 1950, the Los Angeles Rams and the Washington Redskins became the first NFL teams to have all of their games televised. This included both home and away games.
The Arizona Cardinals NFL team were originally the Chicago Cardinals, and were one of the founding members of the American Professional Football Association (which became the NFL) in 1920. However, the Cardinals can trace their history back to their founding in 1898 on Chicago’s South Side, as the Morgan Athletic Club, making the Cardinals the oldest continuously-run professional football team in the U.S.
The Chicago Cardinals relocated to St. Louis in 1960, then to Phoenix in 1988.
My father’s uncle, Patrocinio Pablo, OS1c (his Navy rank, Officer’s Steward 1st Class) is listed among the Pearl Harbor survivors of the USS Arizona (BB-39) from when it was sunk in December 7, 1941.
The Arizona was a Pennsylvania-class battleship. The Pennsylvania (BB-38) and the Arizona were the only shops in that class.
https://www.nps.gov/perl/learn/historyculture/ussarizonasurvivors.htm
Architect Alfred Preis, who designed the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, was born and raised in Vienna, Austria, and emigrated to the U.S. in 1939, when Nazi Germany annexed Austria.
Preis, who had settled in Honolulu, was detained for three months at the Sand Island Detention Facility in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, as the U.S. government adopted a policy of detaining citizens and visitors who had Japanese, German, and Italian backgrounds.
The Sand Island Detention Facility opened shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. At its peak, the ‘camp’ held 450 local Hawaii residents, many of whom were American citizens. The facility was closed in March of 1943, but re-opened in 1945 as a POW camp for prisoners from both the European and Pacific theaters.
Sand Island (Hawaii) was known as Quarantine Island during the 19th century, when it was used to quarantine ships believed to carry contagious passengers.