The title characters in the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim animated sf comedy Rick and Morty are very loosely based on Dr. Emmett Brown and Marty McFly from the Back to the Future movies, although rather than friends, they are grandfather and grandson. Christopher Lloyd, who played “Doc” Brown, recently appeared as Rick in a short live-action promo for Rick and Morty.
Olympics swimming events have been in every summer Olympics. Women’s swim events have been held since 1912. Swimming events include freestyle, breast stroke, backstroke, and the butterfly.
On the show Diff’rent Strokes there were a total of three housekeepers. The third one was played by Mary Jo Catlett who is better known as the voice of Mrs. Puff on Spongebob Squarepants.
Quite contrary to the tone of the 1963 Peter, Paul & Mary song “Puff the Magic Dragon,” a U.S. Air Force AC-47 gunship during the Vietnam War bore the name.
“Spooky the Tuff Little Ghost” was a comic book character from the 1950s and 1960s. Part of the Harvey Comics lineup (which also included Richie Rich, Little Dot, and Wendy the Good Little Witch), he first appeared in a “Casper the Friendly Ghost” comic in 1953.
He is Casper’s cousin and is similar in appearance to Casper, except that Spooky has freckles, a large black nose, is rarely seen without his derby hat. and his dialog was written with a pronounced Brooklyn/New Jersey accent (his hat is therefore referred to as a ‘doiby’, and his ghostly girlfriend, Pearl, is referred to as ‘Poil’).
-“BB”-
Harvey was a 1950 film starring Jimmy Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd, a lovable but eccentric man whose best friend is a ‘pooka’, which is an invisible 6’3" white rabbit named Harvey.
Jesse White was also In the cast of Harvey, his first time he played a character who had a name. White later became an advertising icon as the original Maytag Repairman, who was lonely because no one ever called him.
Fritz Maytag’s revival of Anchor Steam beer of San Francisco inspired many other brewers to follow, and he is often considered the father of modern microbreweries.
San Francisco is briefly seen in Star Trek: The Motion Picture as the site of Starfleet Command; Admiral James T. Kirk’s shuttlecraft flies past the Golden Gate Bridge.
A strait is a naturally formed, narrowing, typically navigable waterway that connects two larger bodies of water. The Strait of Gibraltar, between Spain and Morocco, is 8 miles wide at its narrowest point and connects the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. The Golden Gate strait, between San Francisco and Marin County, is 1 mile wide and connects San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean.
Country music performer George Strait has had 60 singles reach #1 on the Billboard country chart, making him not only the performer with the most #1 country hits, but also the performer with more #1 hits on the various U.S. charts than any other musical act. He is also the only musician to have had a top-10 hit (on the U.S. charts) every year for 30 straight years.
George Strait is known as the “King of Country.” By 2009, he broke Conway Twitty’s previous record for the most number-one hits on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart when his 44 number one singles surpassed Twitty’s 40. Counting all music charts, Strait has amassed a total of 60 number-one hits, hitting the landmark with “Give It All We Got Tonight” in 2013, breaking a record also previously set by Twitty, giving him more number one songs than any other artist in any genre of music.
The British rock band Dire Straits had a big hit with their 1985 album Brothers in Arms, which is one the top 10 best-selling UK albums in chart history.
One of the most popular tracks on the album is “Walk of Life”; the Youtube video has over 208 million views. The original music video for the song made for the UK features a busker (street musician) wearing the same shirt as lead guitarist Mark Knopfler, intercut with the band performing on a stage. Near the end of the video, the busker gets taken away by policemen. However, the American version of the video, featuring sports scenes, bloopers and celebrations in place of the busker scenes, was more popular, and the busker version was largely dropped.
A fun and feel-good video to enjoy:
Dire Straits’ song Money for Nothing was written by Mark Knopflerafter he heard delivery men making comments while watching Mtv in a department store. Strangely they did not get cowriting credit but Sting did.
Sting also sang backup vocals for the Dire Straits song “Money for Nothing,” including the line “I want my MTV.” Per Wiki, “The groundbreaking video was the first to be aired on MTV Europe when the network launched on 1 August 1987.”
The Pentland Firth separates the Orkney Islands from Caithness in the north of Scotland. It is not a firth. It is a strait.
Residents of the Orkney Islands, a Scottish archipelago of about 70 islands (of which 20 are inhabited), are called Orcadians. The islands have been inhabited for at least 8,500 years and contain some of the oldest and best-preserved Neolithic sites in Europe.
The shortest plane scheduled plane flight is in the Orkneys between Westray and Papa Westray. The flight is 1.7 miles and with a tailwind can take less than a minute.
The Tailhook scandal was a military scandal, involving aviation officers from the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, who were alleged to have committed sexual assaults and other indecent behavior at a conference of the Tailhook Association, a semi-official club of Navy and Marine aviators, in Las Vegas in 1991.
“Tailhook”, the Tailhook Scandal, happened at the 35th Annual Tailhook Association Symposium at the Las Vegas Hilton. The investigation led to approximately 40 Navy and Marine Corps officers receiving NJP, non-judicial punishment, mainly for conduct unbecoming an officer. Three officers were taken to courts-martial, but their cases were dismissed. No officers were disciplined for the alleged sexual assaults.