Actress Veronica Lake, born in 1922, was only 50 when she died. She drank heavily, had cirrhosis, and she died of hepatitis and acute kidney injury.
Veronica Lake was known for her trademark peek-a-boo hairstyle, with a lock of her long hair falling over one eye. During World War II, Lake changed her hairstyle at the urging of the government to encourage women working in war industry factories to adopt more practical, safer hairstyles. The change supposedly lowered accidents involving women getting their hair caught in machinery by 22%.
Kim Basinger won an Oscar (undeservedly, I think, but that’s neither here nor there) for playing a prostitute who cultivated her resemblance to Veronica Lake in post-World War II Los Angeles in L.A. Confidential.
When Veronica Lake died in 1973, she was married to her fourth husband and working as a cocktail waitress in New York City. Her body was cremated at a Vermont funeral home, but, because of a financial squabble, her ashes remained there until 1976. At that time, two of her friends paid the bill and dumped her ashes off the coast of Miami.
However, years later, an urn purportedly containing some of Lake’s ashes showed up in a New York antique store.
Oscar Pistorius served prison terms for the shooting murder of his girlfriend, South African model Reeva Steenkamp (images, https://is.gd/yadUGo). She died in 2013. Pistorius is currently behind bars at Atteridgeville Correctional Centre.
South Africa did not allow television broadcasting until 1976. The Afrikaans-speaking people dominated South Africa at the time. and the majority feared that TV, through foreign and syndicated programs, would produce a preponderance of English language culture.
Table Mountain in South Africa (images, https://is.gd/FeZcr0) forms part of the Table Mountain National Park. Its high point is marked by Maclear’s Beacon, a stone cairn built in 1865, and is 3,563’ above sea level.
Table Mountain is a popular scenic destination.
Jude Law played a Confederate deserter and Nicole Kidman his lover in the big-screen adaptation of the Civil War novel Cold Mountain. Law is English and Kidman is Australian.
Renee Zellweger was born in Texas; her father is Swiss and her mother is Norwegian. She won the Oscar for best supporting actress in Cold Mountain (2003), and appears on several “worst Oscars” lists. One website describes her as going “full yokel for this cringe-worthy performance as a big-mouthed farm girl”, and “a-spittin’ and a-drawlin’, she mauls the scenery down to the dirt.”
The world’s longest road tunnel is in Norway. The Lærdal Tunnel, the Lærdalstunnelen, Evangervegen 4, 5700 Voss NOR, is over 15 miles long and runs between Lærdalsøyri and Aurlandsvangen.
gMap >> Google Maps
When the Simplon Tunnel in Switzerland was dug over a century ago, they started digging at once from both ends, 12 miles apart. They missed by less than one foot of making a perfect connection where they met…
Foot fetishism, foot partialism, foot worshipping or podophilia, is the most common form of sexual fetishism for otherwise non-sexual objects or body parts.
The Whittier Tunnel in Alaska, officially the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel on Portage Glacier Road, is a dual-use tunnel for highway and railroad passing under Maynard Mountain.
At 13,300 ft (2½ miles) long, it is the second-longest highway tunnel and the longest combined rail and highway tunnel in North America.
It runs between Portage AK and Whittier AK.
gMap >> Google Maps
We drove it last March 2019 while on a vacation there. My video and pics on imgur >> Driving into Alaska’s Whittier Tunnel - Album on Imgur
The video starts from at the foot of Maynard Mountain (ninja’d by panache45).
Richard M. Nixon attended Whittier College in California; his family was not well-off and his college expenses were paid by his maternal grandfather. He graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in History from Whittier in 1934. The President of the United States at the time was Franklin D. Roosevelt, born this day in 1882.
Nixon was in Dallas when JFK was shot. He was attending a conference for the Pepsi Cola Company, representing the company’s law firm, Mudge, Rose & Nixon.
Dan Rather was the first Dallas newscaster to break the news that JFK was dead, and he immediately phoned Walter Cronkite, who gave the news as “Dallas newscaster Dan Rather has reported that the President is dead.” Cronkite was obviously covering his own butt, and it’s interesting to contemplate what might have been if Rather had been wrong.
Of the nine NFL teams to win 3 or more Super Bowls, the first team to win their first Super Bowl was the Green Bay Packers. The next was the Dallas Cowboys…
1st — Green Bay Packers, in Super Bowl I
2nd — Dallas Cowboys, in Super Bowl VI
3rd — Pittsburgh Steelers, in Super Bowl IX
4th — Oakland (L.A. / L.V.) Raiders, in Super Bowl XV
5th — San Francisco 49ers, in Super Bowl XVI
6th — Washington Redskins, in Super Bowl XVII
7th — New York Giants, in Super Bowl XXI
8th — Denver Broncos, in Super Bowl XXXII
9th — New England Patriots, in Super Bowl XXXVI
Although the Cleveland Browns have never won a Super Bowl (or even played in one) they have won four NFL championships, in 1950, 1954, 1955 and 1964. Three of those were before the AFL ever existed. The AFL became the AFC when they merged with the NFL after the 1969-1970 season.
Paul Brown was was both the co-founder and first coach of the Cleveland Browns, a team named after him, and later played a role in founding the Cincinnati Bengals. His teams won seven league championships in a professional coaching career spanning 25 seasons.
The Cleveland Browns are the only NFL team where there is no design on both sides of the helmet. There’s only the color, orange-brown. The official color name is Pantone 2028 C (Browns tweak helmet color, logos - ABC News).
The Pittsburgh Steelers have their logo only on one side of their helmet. The other side is blank, and black.
All other teams have their logo on both sides of their helmets.