Cool. As a kid in school back in the 1970s, I remember on a big field trip that we tapped Maple trees and then boiled the sap to reduce it. We might’ve done some other processing but then in the end we poured out the hot ooze onto handfuls of snow, and once it cooled we tasted it. That was fun!
In 2001, PepsiCo purchased the Quaker Oats Company, as the culmination of a long bidding war between PepsiCo and Coca-Cola for the company. Both soft drink companies had been interested in Quaker, in order to obtain the sports drink Gatorade, which was, at that time, growing rapidly.
In addition to Gatorade, PepsiCo’s purchase of Quaker Oats also gave them ownership of a number of other well-known food brands, including Quaker Oatmeal, Cap’n Crunch, Life Cereal, Aunt Jemima (now named Pearl Milling Company), and Rice-a-Roni.
Cap’n Crunch, Life, and the various Chex cereals were originally products of the Ralston-Purina Company, a large conglomerate headquartered in St. Louis and probably best known for its various animal feeds such as Purina Dog Chow. Foods tailored to the nutritional needs of other animals were also marketed as “Chow”, so it was also possible to buy Cat Chow, Rabbit Chow, Pig Chow, and even Monkey Chow.
Cheerios and Honey Nut Cheerios rank #1 and #2 on the list of best-selling cereals in the United States. Frosted Flakes is third, followed by Honey Bunches of Oats, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and Lucky Charms.
Though nowadays you get rainbows, hearts, balloons, moons, shooting stars, horseshoes, hourglasses, AND clover hats in your cereal bowl, the first boxes of Lucky Charms had just four 'mallows: yellow moons, orange stars, pink hearts, and green clovers. The first newbie to arrive on the scene was the blue diamond, added in 1975… but the first newbie to actually stick was the horseshoe, forged in 1983. The marshmallows in the cereal were originally repurposed Circus Peanuts.
The Ben Stiller Show did a parody of U2’s One where they were managed by Ruben Kinkade from The Partridge Family and did a commercial for Lucky Clovers (an obvious fill in for Lucky Charms).
Broadway is my Beat was an old time radio series about detective Danny Clover, who covered crime on NYC’s Broadway. The role was originated by Anthony Ross, who left after three months to be replaced by Larry Thor. Some of the music was written by future Star Trek composer, Alexander Courage.
Composer Alexander Courage was hired by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry to be the show’s musical composer, upon the recommendation of fellow television score composer Jerry Goldsmith (who had turned down the job).
Courage wrote the main theme for Star Trek, as well as incidental music for some of the series’ first episodes. However, he became angered with Roddenberry, as Roddenberry had written a set of lyrics for the Star Trek theme, in order to take credit as a co-writer of the theme, and receive 50% of the royalties for it. Due to this, Courage left the show, though he later returned to score several of the episodes of its third (and final) season.
Dan Rather was anchorman of the CBS Evening News from 1981 through 2005. Early on, he briefly ended each broadcast with the word “Courage,” but was widely mocked for it.
Early in his career, Dan Rather worked as the play-by-play announcer for the University of Houston football team for four seasons, and he also was the play-by-play radio announcer for the Texas League Houston Buffs for one season.
Dan Rather’s coverage of the Nov. 22, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas and its aftermath was his first big break into national journalism. He was not in Dealey Plaza at the time, but nearby, and was one of the first reporters to observe the Zapruder film. The next year, he was named CBS News’s White House correspondent.
Calling the country “the Ukraine” is a holdover from the Soviet Union days of Russia (RSFSR) and in context referred to the Ukrainian SSR as a region and not a country. Although the change to “Ukraine” was made in 1993 to represent its sovereignty, Putin still uses the “the Ukraine” construction.
OOP: If you are curious how the Russian language, which doesn’t have a word for “the” can call it “the Ukraine”, the answer is here.
Notable Americans of Ukrainian descent include actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Dustin Hoffman, actress Mila Kunis, jurist Ruth Bader Ginsburg, jeweler Harry Winston, Iwo Jima flag-raiser Michael Strank, composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer and Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler (all per Wiki).
Actress Mila Kunis was born in the city of Chernivtsi, in what was then the Ukrainian SSR of the Soviet Union (now the nation of Ukraine). She and her family emigrated to the U.S. when she was 7 years old.
At age 14, Kunis auditioned for the television sitcom That '70s Show. The producers had restricted auditions to actors who were at least 18 years old, and Kunis told them that she “would be turning 18” – she omitted the fact that she would be doing so four years in the future. Despite this, the producers decided that she was the best fit for the role, and hired her anyway.
The Ukrainian SSR, with a 1989 population of over 51 million, was the second-largest of the 15 Soviet Socialist Republics. The Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, with a population of 1.5 million, was the smallest.
It’s a 5 minute escalator ride down to the metro station in Kyiv UKR at the Arsenalna station, which is over 100 yards beneath the Dnieper River. The Dnieper River surrounds Kyiv and is the fourth-longest river in Europe, after the Volga, Danube, and Ural rivers.
A 5 minute escalator!
But that pales in comparison to one in Hong Kong. The Central–Mid-Levels escalator and walkway system there is the longest outdoor covered escalator system in the world.
Lisbeth Salander, the title character of the novel and the later 2011 movie The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, has a fight with a thief who tries to steal her bookbag and laptop on an escalator in a Stockholm subway station. She recovers her bookbag and gets away from him, but her laptop is irreparably damaged.
Holy crap. I’ve ridden the MARTA escalator in Atlanta that has a ride of about 2 minutes 20 seconds. That was plenty long for me. I can’t imagine five minutes, let alone 20!
In play:
In 1985, Toshiba released the Toshiba T1100, which the company later described as “the world’s first mass-market laptop computer”. The computer ran MS-DOS 2.11, featured two 3.5" floppy drives (one internal, one external), an Intel 80C88 CPU, and 256KB of RAM. It weighed 9 pounds and cost a mere $1799.00.