The Sahara Desert covers roughly 3.6 million square miles, or about 31% of the African continent.
The Great Australian Desert covers roughly 1 million square miles, or about 35% of the Australian continent.
Yes, I misread the figures. The Sahara is more than three times larger than the next largest desert, not four.
Carry on.
Per Wiki, “Sahara is a 2005 American action-adventure film directed by Breck Eisner [and] based on the best-selling 1992 novel of the same name by Clive Cussler. It stars Matthew McConaughey, Steve Zahn and Penélope Cruz, and follows a treasure hunter who partners with a WHO doctor to find a lost American Civil War [i]ronclad warship in the Sahara Desert.” A key plot point in the book but not the movie: the remains of President Abraham Lincoln, who had been kidnapped by Confederate agents and not assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, are found in the ironclad. His body, nearly mummified by the heat and dryness of the desert, is returned to the U.S. and buried at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is a 1989 comedy film, about a pair of dumb high school students and aspiring musicians (played by Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter), whose music is destined to save the world in the future, and serve as the basis for a utopian culture by the 27th century.
In order to ensure that they pass a history class (and not be separated, which would imperil their future success), an agent from the future (played by George Carlin) loans them a time machine for doing research on their history project. Bill and Ted use the time machine to kidnap a number of historical figures, bringing them back to San Dimas, California in 1989, to participate in their final presentation; the figures include Abraham Lincoln, Billy the Kid, Socrates, Ludwig van Beethoven, Sigmund Freud, Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Joan of Arc (played by Jane Wiedlin, guitarist and vocalist for The Go-Go’s).
Raging Waters, a fixture of the Southern California culture, is located in San Dimas.
San Dimas (known in English as Saint Dysmas) is the penitent thief who was crucified at the same time as Jesus.
San Dimas, California, is a city of 35,000 in Los Angeles County near Ontario and Pomona. The two crucified with Jesus the Christ were Dismas (Dysmas) and Gestas. There is also a Demas in the Bible. Mentioned in the books of Philemon, Colossians, and Second Timothy, Demas was involved in the ministry of the Apostle Paul.
The Justice Center, the courts complex containing both the Court of Common Pleas of Cuyahoga County and Cleveland Municipal Court, as well as other related offices, is located at 1200 Ontario Street, Cleveland, Ohio, just north of Public Square. (It is across and slightly down the street from the Old Courthouse, in which scenes from both The Avengers and Air Force One were filmed). The Justice Center opened in 1976 and is now being evaluated for either overhaul or replacement.
Any Marine Corps aircraft carrying the President of the United States has the call sign Marine One. Any Marine Corps aircraft carrying the Vice President of the United States without the President has the call sign Marine Two. The first use of a helicopter to transport the President was in 1957, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower traveled on a Bell UH-13J Sioux (like one shown here).
(deleted, was ninjaed, because I dawdled in writing 
)
David “Gus” Bell was a baseball outfielder, primarily for the Cincinnati Reds, for whom he was named an All-Star four times in the 1950s. Gus’s son, Buddy, played third base for several MLB teams in the 1970s and 1980s, and was a five-time All-Star; Buddy’s sons David and Mike both also played in the major leagues.
The Bell family is one of only six third-generation MLB-player families:
● The Bells (Gus, Buddy, David, Mike)
● The Boones (Ray, Bob, Bret, Aaron)
● The Colemans (Joe, Joe Jr., Casey) - the Colemans are the only third-generation family of pitchers
● The Hairstons (Sammy, Jerry, Johnny, Jerry Jr., Scott)
● The Kessingers (Don, Keith, Grae)
● The Schofield/Werths (Ducky Schofield, Dick Schofield, and Jayson Werth). Werth is the grandson of Ducky Schofield and nephew of Dick Schofield, and also the stepson of Dennis Werth.
The Coleman Company, founded in Wichita, Kansas, is a leading manufacturer of outdoor equipment, especially camping gear. The company began by selling gasoline pressure lamps in 1901; the lamp was designed by William C. Coleman. In 1905, the company provided a demonstration for the Cooper vs. Fairmount football game, in which Coleman gas lamps were used to illuminate the first night football game played west of the Mississippi River.
John Coleman was a television weatherman, who worked at several TV stations, notably at WLS-TV in Chicago in the late 1960s and 1970s, where he and his staff developed the first “chroma key” (green screen) weather map to be used in U.S. television news.
Coleman left WLS to become the first weatherman on ABC’s Good Morning America in 1975, then became one of the co-founders of The Weather Channel in 1981. His college degree was in journalism, rather than meteorology (many TV weathermen in that era were not trained meteorologists), and in the early 2000s, he became known as a climate-change denier.
(Not in play: despite his later views on climate change, when I was a kid in the early '70s, I loved Coleman’s approach to TV weather, and he inspired me to consider a career in meteorology, which I still sometimes wish that I’d more seriously pursued.)
William Thaddeus Coleman Jr. served as a lawyer for the Warren Commission and once interviewed Fidel Castro aboard a fishing boat off the Cuban coast; Castro denied any role in President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Coleman later served as a delegate to the UN General Assembly, as Secretary of Transportation in the Ford Administration and as a judge of the the US Court of Military Commission Review.
Fidel Castro was fanatic about basketball. After taking over as President of Cuba, he would often organize matches with staff and state visitors. He quit playing at age 56, after breaking a toe during a game.
In 1970, US Intelligence observed an unusually large number of Soviet ships visiting Cuba. Satellite photos showed, among other things, soccer fields being built. Henry Kissinger was alarmed at that development, thinking that it indicated that the Russians were planning to stay in Cuba long-term. As Kissinger reportedly told H.R. Haldeman, “Cubans play baseball. Russians play soccer.”
Nixon White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman had a print of Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 painting Washington Crossing the Delaware hanging in his West Wing office. The original, which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, is more than 12x21 feet large.
When he was attending the University of Havana in the late 1940s or early 1950s, future Cuban leader Fidel Castro was a pitcher on an intramural baseball team, and apparently participated in a mass tryout event for a scout from the Washington Senators MLB team, though he was not considered to be a legitimate professional prospect.
However, in 1964, Don Hoak (a former major-league infielder) was interviewed by Myron Cope for Sport magazine, and told a story about playing ball in Cuba in the early '50s, and facing an exceptional pitcher, who turned out to be Castro. Though the story was fabricated, it led to a long-standing myth of Castro having been an excellent pitcher, and speculation on how history might have been different, if Castro had been signed by an MLB team, rather than becoming a political revolutionary.
As for Castro himself, he apparently never refuted the myth, as it likely served his own purposes.
(Edit: ninja’d, but it still works, thanks to “Washington.”)
Only persons returning from Cuba after a licensed visit there are permitted to bring Cuban cigars into the United States, provided the value of such cigars does not exceed 100 US dollars and the cigars are for that person’s personal use and not for resale. Contrary to what many people may believe, it is illegal for travelers to bring into the United States Cuban cigars acquired in third countries (such as Canada, England, or Mexico).