During Thursday Night Football on September 12, 2024, Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa suffered a concussion against the Bills after leading with his helmet into contact with safety Damar Hamlin following a scramble. Tagovailoa went into a defensive, fencing posture and was removed from the game. Following league-mandated protocols he was allowed to back on the field on October 21.
Incidentally, the defensive player who made contact (Hamlin) had been the subject of a scary hit a year earlier on January 22, 2023, against the Cincinnati Bengals that resulted in him going into cardiac arrest. Hamlin did not return to the field the remainder of the season.
Hannibal Hamlin was Abraham Lincoln’s first vice-president, and the first Republican vice-president.
Hannibal Hamlin was both put on the Republican ticket in 1860 without his foreknowledge, and taken off it four years later, again without his foreknowledge. He is the only person to serve in the military while also serving as Vice President; he was a corporal of a Maine militia unit providing coastal defense near Kittery in 1864.
The movie Thinner (1996), based on the 1984 Stephen King novel, was filmed in Kittery, ME.
Kittery is the southernmost town in Maine. It lays claim to being the oldest incorporated town in Maine. US naval officer Jeremiah O’Brien hails from Kittery. The World War II US liberty ship SS Jeremiah O’Brien was named in his honor. Now a museum ship in San Francisco, its engine room was used in the 1997 film Titanic to depict the ill-fated ship’s own triple-expansion engines. Its engine is very similar to the engines on board the RMS Titanic.
In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Hard Time,” Chief Miles O’Brien is made to suffer the memory of 20 years of imprisonment in his mind. Towards the end of that time, he murders his cellmate and friend, Ee’char, when he thinks he’s hoarding food from him. The knowledge of what he’d done, along with the fact that he almost struck his daughter Molly, nearly drives him to suicide.
Horrifically, there’s talk that a similar holographic memory system may soon exist in real life.
Irish actor Colm Meaney started out on Star Trek: The Next Generation as a background actor, playing an unnamed character. His character eventually got a name (Miles O’Brien) during Season 2; he became the transporter chief on the Enterprise, and a series regular.
When the spinoff series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine began in 1993, O’Brien was the one character from TNG who was initially moved over to the new series; Meaney stayed on that show for all seven of its seasons.
In all, Colm Meaney appeared in 225 Star Trek television episodes (52 TNG, 173 DS9), making him second only to Michael Dorn (Worf, 272, across TNG, DS9, and Picard) for total number of appearances on Star Trek series.
Colm Meaney has also appeared in the TV series Brooklyn Bridge, MacGyver (the original), The Unit, Law and Order: Criminal Intent, and Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman, among others.
MacGruber was a 2010 American action comedy film, based on an SNL skit, which was itself based on the 1980s TV series MacGyver. It starred Will Forte as the eponymous single-named character.
Richard Dean Anderson of MacGyver is a long-time supporter of Waterkeeper Alliance, a worldwide network of environmental organizations founded in 1999 that work to protect bodies of water around the US and the world.
➜ Richard Dean Anderson Website - Charity ■
In The Simpsons, Marge’s sisters Patty & Selma have a celebrity crush on Richard Dean Anderson.
Matt Groening has said he named the main family characters in The Simpsons after his parents and younger sisters.
American cartoonist Matt Groening named the little boy of The Simpsons family Bart, an anagram of “brat,” but loosely based the character on himself at that age. Bart has appeared in every single episode of the series except “Four Great Women and a Manicure” (2009).
A bratwurst, or “brat” (pronounced “braht”), is a style of German sausage, typically made from pork meat, sometimes blended with other meats, including beef or veal.
In the United States, brats were initially popular in areas of the upper Midwest with large populations of German immigrants – particularly in Wisconsin; in recent decades, their popularity has become more widespread, and bratwurst brands such as Johnsonville are available throughout the U.S.
My friend loves these so much that we nicknamed him “Bratagnan”, after D’Artagnan.
(In play)
The most brats consumed in one sitting is 76, in ten minutes. The record was set Sept 18, 2022, at the Oktoberfest Zinzinnati in Cincinnati, OH. An unofficial record set in 2017 in Tulsa, OK, claims 101 brats were consumed in ten minutes.
Roy Rogers, Doris Day, and Steven Spielberg were all born in Cincinnati.
Halle Berry, Dorothy Dandridge (whom Berry played in a 1999 movie), Tracy Chapman, Drew Carey, Carol Kane, Arsenio Hall, Wes Craven, Don King, Kid Cudi and Alan Ruck were all born in Cleveland, Ohio. Paul Newman was born in neighboring Shaker Heights.
The state that boasts the most native-born presidents is Virginia, with eight. Seven of the first 10 presidents were born in Virginia; the only one after that group was the 28th president, Woodrow Wilson. Oho is next, with seven. The first Ohioan to become president was Ulysses Grant, the 18th president. The most recent was Warren Harding, who was the 29th president.
Currently there are only four men who served as POTUS and were born west of the Mississippi River: Dwight D Eisenhower (born in Texas); Lyndon B Johnson (also Texas); Richard M Nixon (California); and Barack H Obama (Hawaii).
Lyndon Baines Johnson was enamoured with his initials, LBJ, which became a widely-used shorthand for his name. His wife, Claudia, was known from childhood as “Lady Bird,” and when she married him, she effectively became LBJ, as well. They had two daughters, both of whose initials were LBJ: Linda Bird Johnson and Luci Baines Johnson. He owned a pet beagle named Little Beagle Johnson, he owned the LBJ Ranch in the Hill Country of Texas, and his cufflinks, shirts, and even ashtrays were emblazoned with his initials.
