The Miracle on Ice hockey game occurred on February 22, 1980, during the Winter Olympics being held at Lake Placid, New York. The team from the Soviet Union was the four-time defending gold medalist and was expected to win another gold. The USA team was a surprising qualifier for the medal round, tying the favored Swedish team and handily defeating another favorite, Czechoslovakia.
Both Sweden and the USA qualified for the medal round, along with the Soviet Union and Finland. The format called for each team to play the two qualifiers from the other pool, and then the medal standings would be determined by each team’s record against the other three teams in the medal round, which included the earlier games played in the qualifying round.
The USA team, of course, defeated the Soviet Union 4-3, while Sweden and Finland tied 3-3 in the other game on the 22nd. Two days later, USA defeated Finland 4-2 to clinch the gold medal, while the Soviets earned silver by thrashing Sweden 9-2.
USA won the gold with a 2-0-1 record, and the Soviets were second with a 2-1-0 record. Sweden won the bronze with a record of 0-1-2, and Finland finished fourth in the medal round with a record of 0-2-1.
(Another long and somewhat rambling post, but I confess I did not know how the medals were awarded. If I understand this correctly, had the USA team lost to Finland in the last game, the Soviets would have won gold. I believe a tie in the last game would also have given the gold to the USA by virtue of their win over the Soviet Union.)
The Swedes don’t find The Swedish Chef particularly funny. Nor do they find him particularly Swedish. To them, he sounds Norwegian, because the “sing-songy” tone of his delivery is more consistent with the tonal nature of spoken Norwegian. And by the way, if stand-up comedy is any indication, speakers of other Nordic languages like to take the piss out of Norwegians by imitating their speech, finishing the final syllable of the final word in a sentence about two or three octaves higher.
Not in play: My junior high school English teacher was married to a cameraman at these Olympics. Unfortunately, he didn’t get to cover any of the hockey games.
In Sweden, meatballs are called köttbullar (literally “meat buns”) and are considered a national dish. It is traditionally served with gravy, boiled or mashed potatoes, broccoli, and ligonberry jam.
Lingonberry (not ligonberry) jam and syrup are popular food items sold by IKEA.
Per Wiki: “IKEA was founded in 1943 by Ingvar Kamprad, and has been the world’s largest furniture retailer since 2008. The brand name is an acronym of the initials of the names of Ingvar Kamprad, the founder, Elmtaryd, the family farm where Kamprad was born, and Agunnaryd, Kamprad’s hometown in Småland, [in] southern Sweden.”
On June 1, 1943, German Luftwaffe aircraft shot down BOAC Flight 777, a scheduled passenger aircraft over the Bay of Biscay; all 17 persons on board perished, including actor Leslie Howard.
Nuremberg (2025) is a historical drama film directed by James Vanderbilt, starring Rami Malek as US Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley and Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring of the German Luftwaffe, focusing on the psychological battle between them during the Nuremberg trials of 1945-1946. Based on the book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, by by Jack El-Hai.
Inherit the Wind is a 1955 play based on the historic 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial and subtly condemns the McCarthy Trials that were currently happening at the time. Many characters in the play were based on real participants of the Scopes’ trial, including famed orator William Jennings Bryan (as Matthew Harrison Brady), defense attorney Clarence Darrow (as Henry Drummond), John Scopes (as the defendant Bert Cates, a high school teacher), and reporter H. L. Menken (as E. K. Hornbeck of the fictional Baltimore Herald newspaper). The courtroom scenes were the heart of the play, with Brady and Drummond squaring off in presenting their arguments.
At age 27, Benjamin Ferencz was the youngest chief prosecutor involved with the Nuremberg Trials. He was born to a Jewish family in Hungary in 1920 and migrated with them to the US as a young child. After graduating from Harvard law school in 1943, he served in the US army and then was assigned to a team investigating war crimes. He died in 2023, aged 103.
Future Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States Ruth Bader Ginsburg attended Harvard Law School for two years, but she was refused permission to complete her Harvard degree through remote study at the Columbia Law School (her husband had taken a job in New York). Ginsburg thus instead left Harvard, and transferred to Columbia Law School, where she finished tied for first in her class.
Harvard University is home to the famed “Statue of Three Lies.” That’s because it is purported to depict John Harvard, and states that he founded the school in 1638. Except it doesn’t depict John Harvard, Mr. Harvard didn’t found the school (he just gave it a shit-ton of money), and the august institution was founded not in 1638, but 1636.
The bronze statue of John Harvard at the university, there in Cambridge, depicts him sitting on a chair, and the (seated) height of his body is 6 feet. The statue was completed in 1884.
Tourists often rub the toe of his left shoe for luck in the belief that doing so is a Harvard student tradition. But it is not. There is no such tradition.
The face of John Harvard on his statue… is not his face (as intimated by @HeyHomie). The sculptor did not know what John Harvard looked like. Instead, he used a Harvard student to serve as the ‘inspiration’ for the face of John Harvard.
Prior to John Harvard’s endowment, Harvard was called “New College” after the town, Newe Towne, established Sept. 8, 1636, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The town was renamed Cambridge the same year Harvard made his donation.
Cambridge is home to several colleges and universities, among them are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge University, and the former Radcliffe College (one of the Seven Sisters) before it merged with Harvard University in 1999.
Following the renaming of Newe Towne in 1639, a group of townsfolk relocated to a nearby area and named in Cambridge Village, then Newtown, and finally Newton in 1766. Years later, Philadelphia baker Charles Roser used the name for his fig roll cookie: Fig Newton.
“Seven Sisters” can refer to many types of groupings, including
the star cluster Pleiades
a mountain chain in Donegal, Ireland. and a group of small mountains on the Atherton Tableland in Australia, and a multi-summit massif British Columbia, Canada
a district in North London, named for a clump of seven elms planted in a circle
a group of skyscrapers in Russia
seven US liberal arts colleges that are historically women’s colleges (in order of foundation date, Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Radcliffe, Bryn Mawr, Barnard)
The flag of Australia seen on the uniform of a character in the 1997 Paul W.S. Anderson-directed sf horror film Event Horizon, set in 2047, has the Aboriginal flag in its canton and not the Union Jack, as the current flag does.
In astrophysics, the term “event horizon” describes a boundary in spacetime beyond which a signal (such as light) can never reach a given observer. A particular example of an event horizon is in reference to black holes, which are so dense that the escape velocity from the back hole’s gravitational field exceeds the speed of light.
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a telescope array consisting of a global network of radio telescopes. The first image of a black hole, at the center of galaxy Messier 87, was published by the EHT Collaboration on 10 April 2019 in a series of six scientific publications.
A black hole plays a key role in the 2014 Christopher Nolan film Interstellar, for which Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist and author Kip Thorne was a scientific consultant.
That black hole in Interstellar was named Gargantua. Gargantua is widely considered the most scientifically accurate film depiction of a black hole (as it was developed with Nobel laureate Kip Thorne, as @Elendil_s_Heir shared). The rendering of Gargantua took 100 hours per frame, totaled 24,000 hours to visualize, and produced groundbreaking, published research on gravitational lensing.
