In the Disney animated film Zootopia, Nick Wilde is a small-time con artist fox who ends up working with ZPD Officer Judy Hopps, the department’s first bunny cop, on a missing mammals case.
Wilde Avenue in San Francisco is a street in The City’s southeast corner, in the Visitacion Valley neighborhood. Locals pronounce it, WILE-DEE.
Visitacion Valley, or Viz Valley, was given its name in the late 18th century by Spanish friars and soldiers. They baptized the valley and named it Rancho Cañada de Guadalupe la Visitación y Rodeo Viejo.
The term “Visitacion” is Spanish and a reference to the Visitation in Luke 1:39 of the Bible. It is a visit by Mary, bearing the child Jesus, to her cousin Elizabeth, who despite her advanced years is pregnant with John the Baptist. The gestating John the Baptist leapt in Elizabeth’s womb as Mary entered, knowing that he is in the presence of the gestating Savior, Jesus the Christ, in the womb of Mary.
According to accounts in the New Testament, John the Baptist was beheaded for denouncing the marriage of King Herod to the divorced wife of Herod’s brother.
There are no less than four locations that claim to house the head of the murdered saint: Damascus, Rome, Munich, and Amiens, France.
Various churches observe the Beheading of St John the Baptist as a feast day (which sounds a bit cannibalistic), or a commemoration. In some Orthodox traditions, on the feast day the pious will not eat from a flat plate, use a knife, or eat round foods, since the traditional imagery shows Salome presenting John’s head to Herod on a round platter.
The Feast day is today, August 29, and is on the front page of Wikipedia in the “On This Day” section.
The opera Salome was composed by Richard Strauss. The libretto is based on the German translation (by Hedwig Lachmann) of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome, which he wrote in French.
Salome is never mentioned by name in the New Testament. We know her name from Flavius Josephus. Though not named in the Bible she is referenced in Matthew 14:8 and Mark 6:24.
The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are referred to by biblical scholars as the “synoptic gospels.” These three three books contain many of the same stories, often in the same sequence and with similar (and sometimes identical) wording (the “triple tradition”). Scholars debate whether these similarities were due to one gospel being written using another of the gospels as a source, or whether one or more of them used a separate, now-unknown source document (a “proto-gospel”).
By contrast, the fourth canonical Gospel, that of John, contains material which is largely distinct from the others.
Kohei Hanami, retired captain of the Japanese destroyer Amagiri, which ran over and sank US Navy Lt. JG John F. Kennedy’s PT-109 during World War II, was invited by the President-elect to attend his Jan. 20, 1961 inauguration ceremony, and did.
The Amagiri encountered Kennedy’s PT-109 in the Blackett Strait south of Kolombangara of the New Georgia Islands in the western Solomon Islands between New Guinea and Vanuatu. Kennedy’s actions in saving his surviving crew after his PT-109 was rammed and sunk by the destroyer earned him several commendations and made him a war hero.
On September 12, 1962, President John F. Kennedy challenged the American people to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, saying, “We choose to go to the moon; not because it is easy, but because it is hard.”
He died a little over a year later, but his goal was achieved posthumously by Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969.
The American flag shown in 1942 flying over US forces on Midway Island in the 1976 war movie Midway, and the American flags held by Los Alamos staffers at a 1945 rally attended by the title character in the 2023 movie Oppenheimer, are each, incorrectly and noticeably, 50-star flags. That flag was not adopted until 1960.
Sensurround is the brand name for a process created by MCA and developed by Cerwin-Vega in conjunction with Universal Studios to enhance the audio experience during film screenings, specifically for the 1974 film Earthquake. The process was intended for subsequent use and was adopted for four more films: Midway (1976), Rollercoaster (1977), the theatrical version of Saga of a Star World (1978), the Battlestar Galactica pilot, as well as the compilation film Mission Galactica: The Cylon Attack (1979).
The “disaster movie” genre had its golden age in the 1970s, starting with the success of Airport in 1970. Subsequent major disaster films in that decade included The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, and Airport 1975 (all released in 1974), The Hindenburg (1975), and Black Sunday and Rollercoaster (1977).
By the end of the 1970s, disaster movies were performing poorly at the box office, and Hollywood studios moved on to other genres.
The Greek gods Zeus, Poseidon and Hades were brothers, sons of Cronos.
After they overthrew their father, they cast lots to determine their areas. Zeus became god of the skies, Poseidon god of the seas, and Hades the god of the underworld. The earth was common to all three.
Zeus’s symbol in art was the lightning bolt, Poseidon’s was the trident, and Hades’s was the bident and cap of invisibility.
Trident gum was introduced in 1960 and was one of the first sugarless gums. The brand uses xylitol for sweetness. Trident is well-known for their 1980s advertising slogan, which was “4 out 5 dentists surveyed would recommend sugarless gum to their patients who chew gum.”
In late September 2015, San Antonio Spurs center, Tim Duncan, reported to training camp wearing a t-shirt with the slogan, “4 out of 5 dads will get this joke.”
Cigarette ads until the 1950s made many bold claims. These often involved “doctor recommended” brands, with “the majority of doctors (from all specialties) preferring Camels, which “caused not a cough in a carload” and indeed cured catarrh and other conditions.
The medical establishment hardly complained. The back of airplane seats and medical school lecture chairs often contained little ashtrays. In first grade we were encouraged to make glazed pottery ashtrays for our parents.
Quebec recently won a $4.1 billion settlement based on misleading advertising and other actions allegedly causing many to suffer from pulmonary disease. Lawyers were awarded over $900 million of that sum, an unheard of windfall in Canada until now, somewhat justified by the 200,000 hours of work put into the case at some degree of risk and an agreement to get 20-22% of any winnings.
DeForest Kelley, who played Dr. McCoy in Star Trek, was a smoker and pitched the idea of the crew puffing away on “health-rettes”, cigarettes which were good for you.
Since 1971 advertisements for cigarettes have been banned from American TV and radio broadcasts.
The oldest existant cigarette brand Muratti is over 200 years old.