Grant Williams was a Hollywood actor best known for playing The Incredible Shrinking Man.
Actor Anson Williams is 75 years old. He is best known for playing Warren “Potsie” Weber on the TV series Happy Days (1974–1984). His birth name was Anson William Heimlich and his father’s cousin was Dr. Henry Heimlich, he of the Heimlich maneuver.
Williams first played Potsie Weber in 1972, two years before Happy Days, on the TV series The Love Boat on an episode titled Love and the Happy Days. This episode also introduced actor Ron Howard playing the role of Richie Cunningham, and also Richie’s mother Marion (played by Marion Ross who is 96 years old).
Happy Days (BTW a teenage favorite of mine and of many of us in junior high and high school during the late 1970s) ran for 255 episodes through 11 seasons. Ron Howard is 71 years old.
OOP: It was Love American Style
IP: On Happy Days, Ritchie’s older brother Chuck went out to play basketball and never appeared in the series again. And in the finale, the father Howard talks about raising two wonderful children, obviously in reference to Ritchie and his sister Joanie.
There is an unofficial name for that: The Chuck Cunningham Syndrome. Other characters who have suffered include Mandy Hampton (S1 on The West Wing) and Roy Simpson (S8 on The Simpsons).
Items from the estate of O.J. Simpson, who died last April, are now on sale via an online auction. The sale, which began last Wednesday, features such items as ‘personally owned’ dress clothes, several photograph collections, and a framed autographed photo of Simpson and Bill Clinton. Simpson’s student ID card from USC currently has a bid of $1300.
Harry “Suitcase” Simspon was a professional baseball outfielder. Simpson started his career in the Negro Leagues, playing for the Philadelphia Stars in 1946-48, before being signed by the Cleveland Indians of the American League. In addition to the Indians, Simpson also played with the New York Yankees (with which he went to the World Series in 1957), the Kansas City A’s, the Chicago White Sox, and the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Simpson’s nickname was apparently bestowed on him due to his size 13 feet, and the commensurate very large shoes which he wore.
“Suitcase” was the nickname of Luther Simpson, a character in the series of Jesse Stone novels by Robert Parker. In the books Simpson was given the nickname by his high-school coach – however, in the films based on the books he was given the nickname by Jesse Stone (played by Tom Selleck, who is himself a huge baseball fan), along with a brief history lesson on the real “Suitcase” Simpson.
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Man in a Suitcase is a British television private eye thriller series that originally aired in the United Kingdom on ITV from 27 September 1967 to 17 April 1968. ABC broadcast episodes of Man in a Suitcase in the United States from 3 May to 20 September 1968. It was effectively a replacement for Danger Man, whose production had been curtailed when its star Patrick McGoohan had decided to create his own series, The Prisoner.
Rover is a plot device from the 1967 British television program The Prisoner, and was a crucial tool used to keep “prisoners” from escaping the Village. It was depicted as a floating white balloon that could coerce, and, if necessary, incapacitate or kill recalcitrant inhabitants of the Village. Open questions surrounding Rover suggest that its use in the series was a variation of the deus ex machina type of plot device, used as a means to give a reason as to why the Village is so successful in coercing the inhabitants and preventing escape, without having to waste screen time explaining this method.
The Irish Rovers are a Canadian-Irish band, formed in 1963 and still touring, with one of the founding members, George Millar. They took their name from the traditional song, “The Irish Rover”, about a magnificent sailing ship which comes to an unfortunate end.
The Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) is an Irish amateur sporting and cultural organization, dedicated to promoting and preserving traditional Irish sports and pastimes.
GAA sponsors play of the traditional Irish sports of hurling, carnogie (a women’s variant of hurling), Gaelic football, Gaelic handball, and GAA rounders, as well as promoting Irish music and dance, and the Irish language.
Saint Mary’s College of California is a private Catholic college in Moraga, CA. Moraga is about 25 miles east of San Francisco. Saint Mary’s athletic teams are nicknamed The Gaels. From the Gaels website: "The Gaels are an ethno-linguistic group which spread from Ireland to Scotland and the Isle of Man. Their language is of the Gaelic (Goidelic) family, a division of Insular Celtic languages.” The nickname was given to the school’s football team (now discontinued) in 1926 by Pat Frayne, a writer for the now defunct San Francisco Call-Bulletin. The school’s previous nickname was the Saints, although the baseball team was known as the Phoenix until the 1940s.
The sports teams at Queen’s University at Kingston, Ontario, are called the Golden Gaels. Queen’s was founded by Scottish Presbyterians.
Cha gheil!
Queens, New York was named after Queen Catherine of Braganza, wife of King Charles II.
During the 1974 and 1975 baseball seasons, the New York Yankees were unable to play at their home park, Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, due to an extensive renovation project for the stadium. During those two seasons, the Yankees shared Shea Stadium, in Queens, with the New York Mets.
The caps of the New York Mets is an exact replication of the New York (baseball) Giants cap except with a background color that is the same blue as the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Despite lasting less than four years and producing just two albums, the original New York Dolls are counted as major influences to almost every punk, glam, and heavy metal band today.
The term ‘heavy metal’ has been used in chemistry to describe elements such as uranium. The first usage of the term in popular culture is believed to be by the author William S. Burroughs, whose 1961 book The Soft Machine included a character who was described as “Uranian Willy, the Heavy Metal Kid”. The first use of the term in a music lyric appeared in the Steppenwolf song Born to be Wild:
I like smoke and lightning
Heavy metal thunder
Racin’ with the wind
And the feelin’ that I’m under
Heavy Metal is/was the title of an American science fantasy comics magazine, first published in 1977. The magazine is known primarily for its blend of dark fantasy, science fiction, and steampunk comics – and, since it eschewed the restrictive Comics Code Authority (a holdover from the 1950s comics crackdown), the magazine was also noted for its inclusion of erotica, explicit nudity, sexual situations, and graphic violence.
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Heavy Metal was a 1981 animated science-fiction film, based on the comic magazine of the same name (Leonard Mogel, the magazine’s publisher, was one of the film’s producer). Like the magazine, the film had an anthology format; the individual segments were tied together by an over-arching plotline.
The film received mixed reviews, in part due to its sexual content and violence (consistent with the magazine’s stories). The soundtrack album, which featured songs by a number of prominent musicians, including Don Felder, Sammy Hagar, Blue Oyster Cult, Black Sabbath, Cheap trick, and Devo, sold well, reaching #12 on the U.S. charts.