Boston founder and guitarist Tom Scholz holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT. In the 1980s, he started a side project, Scholz Research & Development, where he developed and marketed a line of electronic equipment for guitarists. The company’s lead product was the Rockman headphone guitar amplifier, a small device which allowed a musician to quietly practice their electric guitar, while being able to listen to a fully amplified sound through a pair of headphones.
Boston original lead vocalist and frontman Brad Delp was 24 when their debut album was released in 1975. He performed in every Boston concert tour for over 25 years, until his suicide in March 2007. Delp, who had been suffering from depression since he was a teenager, took his own life by carbon monoxide poisoning in his home at 55 Academy Avenue, in Atkinson NH.
The following day, Boston’s website was replaced with a simple black background and white text message: “We’ve just lost the nicest guy in rock and roll.”
Boston, Massachusetts, was founded in 1630 by Puritan settlers from England, who named it after the town of Boston, which is located in Lincolnshire, England.
Boston in Lincolnshire is believed to have been named after St. Boltoph; the name evolved from ‘St. Boltoph’s town’ to ‘Boltoph’s town’ to Boston.
The Puritans weren’t (always) so puritanical. They had explicit, even by the standards of today, poems, letters, even how-to guides, on sexual pleasure in the marriage bed. They considered the denial of sex within the marriage as a form of theft that could be punished judicially.
Frommer’s is a publisher of travel guides. The brand originated in the late 1950s, when Arthur Frommer, then a corporal in the U.S. Army, wrote a pair of travel guides – one for U.S. servicemen, and one for civilians – on how to travel in Europe on a budget.
The Negro Motorist Green Book is a travel guide written by Victor Green, an African American postal worker from New York. Green wrote the book with tips on how African Americans can avoid social and moral infractions as well as breaking laws while traveling across the United States. The guide was published from 1936 to 1966, except during the war years (1940-46).
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Democrat of New York, won a second term in the election of 1936 over Republican nominee Alf Landon of Kansas. Landon won only the states of Maine and Vermont. FDR got 60.8% of the vote, winning the Presidency by the widest margin of any Democrat in US history.
ALF was a situation comedy which ran on NBC for four seasons in the late '80s. It featured an alien (portrayed by a puppet) who had crash-landed on Earth, in southern California, and was taken in by the Tanners, a middle-class family in southern California. The family named him ALF (for “Alien Life Form”), though his actual name was Gordon Shumway; storylines typically featured ALF learning about Earth culture, the Tanners hiding ALF from the U.S. government as well as their nosy neighbors, and ALF’s tendency towards bad jokes, and his obsession with eating housecats.
The series was cancelled after its fourth season, but the ALF character appeared in several spin-offs, including two animated Saturday-morning television series, a short-lived cable TV talk show, and a made-for-TV movie which also served to wrap up the storyline from the original TV series.
In the 1893 Conan Doyle short story “The Cardboard Box,” Sherlock Holmes notices his friend and associate Dr. John H. Watson contemplating a newly-framed picture of General Charles George “Chinese” Gordon," slain at Khartoum in 1885.
The Honolulu Star Advertiser reports that some of Conan O’Brien’s party guests are likely to testify at Nick Reiner’s trial. At Conan O’Brien’s holiday post on 13 December, Nick Reiner reportedly displayed unsettling, asocial and erratic behavior. Bill Hader had an uncomfortable encounter with Nick Reiner, and a “mortified” Rob Reiner ”reportedly got into a heated argument with his son about his behavior before he and his wife apologized and left the party.”
Conan O’Brien was inspired to write “Marge vs. the Monorail” (The Simpsons; S4:E12) after seeing a billboard on the highway that simply read, “Monorail.”
The Disneyland Monorail went into service on June 14, 1959; at that time, it was the first monorail system which operated on a daily basis in the United States.
Seattle, Wash. is the county seat of King County, pop. 2.3 million. The county was “renamed” in 2005 after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., after having originally been named after Vice President William R. King, who served with President Franklin Pierce. King, of Alabama, was a slaveholder.
When Franklin Pierce and William R. King won their election, because King was ill with tuberculosis and had traveled to Cuba for health reasons, he was not able to be in Washington DC to take his oath of office on March 4, 1853. He was sworn in by the US consul to Cuba, in Cuba. King is the first and, to date, the only vice president or president of the United States to take the oath of office on foreign soil.
On August 14, 2015, the US Embassy in Havana, Cuba, was officially reopened. Eight congressional lawmakers, as well as US Secretary of State John Kerry, attended the opening. The three Marines (Larry C. Morris, Mike East and Jim Tracy) who had lowered the U.S. flag at the embassy 54 years earlier presented a new flag, which was then raised by Marines assigned to the post.
There was a brief period during the Obama Administration when Americans could bring Cuban cigars back into the United States. That policy has since been reversed. However, Americans are not forbidden from actually buying and/or smoking Cuban cigars purchased elsewhere; however, the “Cuban” cigars offered for sale at most of the shops in major Caribbean cruise ports (Cozumel, Ocho Rios, etc.) are counterfeit.
As early as the mid-fifties Cuban tobacco planters had been experimenting with growing tobacco elsewhere in Central and South America from seed obtained from tobacco strains in Cuba. When Castro nationalized the tobacco industry, many of the fleeing tobacco growers took some of their precious seed with them, which they then used to establish tobacco plantations in Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua. Even today, some of these tobacco strains are still known as ‘Cuban seed’ tobacco in tribute to their origin.
So there are actually two types of ‘Cuban’ cigars — cigars made with tobacco grown in Cuba itself, which are subject to the embargo, and ‘Cuban seed’ cigars, which are cigars made with tobacco which originated from Cuban seed but is grown outside of Cuba and are legal to be bought and sold in the USA.
