Larry Bird, former NCAA and NBA star performer, was affectionately known as “The Hick from French Lick.” Bird led his unheralded Indiana State basketball team to the NCAA final game, where they lost to Michigan State, led by Magic Johnson. Bird had a 13-year career with the Boston Celtics, during which time the franchise won 3 NBA titles. Bird, along with Magic, was a member of the 1992 US Men’s Olympic basketball team, called “the greatest collection of basketball talent on the planet”.
The first Olympics with basketball was in 1936. Many games were played outdoors, and the weather during the final was so bad, the US had only 19 points, who beat Canada with 8 points.
The White Star line built three Olympic class steamships for the passenger trade. Two fo them sunk (The Britannic and the Titanic). Two other ships – the Majestic and the Homeric – joined the White Star fleet, but they were not specially built, but were German lines given to White Star as war reparations.
During the Napoleonic Wars, the British Royal Navy attacked Denmark and seized most of the fleet of the Danish Navy. After their defeat and loss at Copenhagen in 1807, the Danes responded by planting 90,000 oak trees toward the Navy’s rebirth. In 2007, the Danish Nature Agency, successor to the Royal Forester, informed the Defense Ministry that their trees were ready.
On January 23, 1795, a rare occurrence took place. A cavalry regiment capture a naval fleet. The Dutch fleet was frozen in at Den Helder. The French horses were able to march across the ice and the French troops thus captured all 14 Dutch ships.
Vern Den Herder was a defensive lineman for the Miami Dolphins in the 1970s and 1980s. He decided to retire from football after the 1981 season, and returned home to Iowa, where he began working in agriculture. However, during the 1982 season, the Dolphins suffered a number of injuries, and their coach, Don Shula, talked Den Herder into coming out of retirement to help out his old team.
Den Herder then retired from football, for good, after that season, and became a farmer of corn and soybeans in Iowa.
In Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, hotshot space pilot Han Solo (Harrison Ford) takes exception to being called a “scruffy-looking nerf herder.”
Nerf-herder, huh? Gives one a whole new image and definition for the term ‘NERF balls’…
I can just imagine Johnny Carson, as Carnak the Great, using that in his routine —
Holds envelope up to turban, then gravely says, “Nerf balls.”
(tears open envelope, removes question)
“What gets cut off when you castrate a nerf?”
(moans and groans from audience - holds up hand for silence)
“May a scruffy-looking nerf herder violate your sister.”
In play:
It has been reported that NERF, as used in the soft foam balls, darts, and what-have-you, is an acronym for ‘non-expanding recreational foam’. This is incorrect, as the inventor has stated on his website that NERF was named after the slang term for the foam padding often found on motorcycle handlebars and the roll-cage tubing of off-road vehicles, which itself was derived from the 1950s term ‘nerfing’, or the bumping another car – either accidentally or intentionally – while racing.
-“BB”-
Reyn Guyer, a toy inventor from Minnesota, created the NERF ball, pitching the idea to Parker Brothers in 1969. Two years earlier, Guyer developed a game for Milton Bradley called Twister.
Agatha Christie created an “investigator of the heart” , Mr Parker Pyne, who believed there were five causes of human unhappiness, and with appropriate methods he could assist unhappy indivuals.
According to agathachristie.com, Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time. She has been outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare.
Christie wrote 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections. She also authored the world’s longest-running play – The Mousetrap.
The adage, “If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door,” is commonly attributed to writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson.
However, there is no written evidence of Emerson having penned those exact words That said, in 1855, Emerson did write a similar passage in his journal: “If If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.”
Waldo Junction CA is a small town 50 miles NE of Sacramento. From 1898 to 1915 it had a Post Office there. It was originally called Cabbage Patch in 1858 but its name was changed to Waldo Junction when the Post Office opened there. It is named after an early settler, William Waldo.
Astronomer William Herschel, who discovered the planet Uranus in 1781, was also an accomplished musician and composer. In addition to the oboe, he played the violin, harpsichord and the organ. He composed numerous musical works, including 24 symphonies and many concertos, as well as some church music.
Herschel Walker was not only an accomplished American football player, but also a sprinter, bobsledder, mixed martial artist and ballet dancer.
Bo Jackson played professional football and baseball. He is the only person to be an all-star in both sports.
Both Bo Jackson and Herschel Walker were about the same size. Both were about 6’ 1” and 225 lbs.
Both were born in 1962.
Both were from the south. Jackson was born in Bessemer, Alabama. Walker was born 300 miles to the east in Wrightsville, Georgia.
In the 1850s, English inventor Henry Bessemer developed a new process for making steel, in which air was blown into molten pig iron, to remove the impurities in the metal.
His “Bessemer process” revolutionized the steelmaking industry, and became a dominant method for the production of steel for decades, until more efficient processes made it obsolete.
Bessemer AL is named after Henry Bessemer.
Henry Fonda (1905-1982) had an acting career that spanned five decades. His last major role was starring in the 1981 movie On Golden Pond, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor, his only Oscar. Co-star Katherine Hepburn also won the Oscar for Best Actress for her work in the film. Fonda’s daughter Jane, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for the same film, accepted the award for her father, who was too ill to attend the ceremonies.
Frances Ford Seymour, wife of Henry Fonda, died by suicide in a mental institution at age 42. Their daughter Jane was told that she had died of a heart attack. A year later, Jane, age 12, learned the details of her mother’s death when reading a movie magazine.