1954 was the first full calendar year of the Eisenhower Administration. Dwight D. Eisenhower was a career US Army officer and a national hero for his role in leading the Allies’ western invasion and conquest of Nazi Germany during World War II. A Republican, he defeated Adlai Stevenson, Governor of Illinois and the Democratic Party’s nominee, in the 1952 presidential election.
In 1956, President Eisenhower defeated Stevenson a second time with an even larger winning margin, and with more Electoral College votes and more popular votes than four years previously.
Eisenhower is one of four men to be elected President of the United States after reaching the highest level of military command (George Washington, Zachary Taylor, and Ulysses S. Grant are the others), surpassing political offices. Eisenhower is the only person of the 20th century to achieve this, and currently the most recent. (This does not include the men who served in our military, who are patriots and great men in their own right.)
Of the 45 men who have held the office of President of the United States, 14 never served in the military. The most recent such men are, in chronological order of their presidencies, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. Clinton was preceded by a 50-year stretch where all POTUSes had served. Further, prior to Harry S Truman (WWI veteran) having assumed office in 1945, there was a decades-long stretch from 1909 (beginning with Taft and through FDR) in which non-veterans were POTUS.
George Clinton is an American musician, songwriter, and bandleader, known for being one of the foremost innovators of funk music. He has led a “music collective” entitled Parliament-Funkadelic since the late 1960s, which recorded numerous funk albums, particularly in the 1970s.
Clinton and fifteen other members of Parliament-Funkadelic were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997, making them the largest music group (by number of members) to be so inducted.
Bill Clinton said in a biographical video prepared for the 1992 Democratic National Convention in New York City that, soon after his and wife Hillary Rodham’s daughter Chelsea was born, he was watching the infant roll back and forth on the bed. She rolled close to the edge several times but then away, and he excitedly told Hillary that their daughter understood gravity. Soon after, Chelsea rolled off the bed and fell with a thump, uninjured, and he had to admit that she might not have fully grasped the concept of gravity after all.
On July 2, 1982, Larry Walters attached 42 helium-filled weather balloons to a lawn chair with the intent to float across the Mojave Desert. He took along a pellet gun, with the idea of shooting the balloons to slowly descend, letting gravity take its course. When the line tethering him to his friend’s Jeep Cherokee unexpectedly broke, Walters’s lawn chair rose rapidly to a height of about 16,000 feet and was spotted from two commercial airliners.
Walter’s path drifted into the controlled airspace near the Long Beach Airport. After popping a couple balloons Larry accidentally dropped his pellet gun. He gradually descended, becoming entangled in the power lines in Long Beach; the lines broke, causing a blackout. Larry escaped unharmed, but was immediately arrested by authorities who’d been tracking him. After deliberations, he was charged with violating U.S. Federal Aviation Regulations by operating an aircraft within an airport traffic area “without establishing and maintaining two-way communications with the control tower,” and fined $1,500. Walters was nicknamed “Lawnchair Larry” and appeared on talk shows, discussing his adventure. His chair is on exhibit in the Smithsonian.
@knoodler : I may be dense, but what’s the connection between your post and the one above it?
In play:
In Marvel Comics, the superhero She-Hulk, who was introduced in 1979, has powers similar to the Hulk: superhuman strength, stamina, and durability (which can increase based on her emotional state), increased size, and a green skin color. Unlike the Hulk, She-Hulk usually is fully in possession of her normal intelligence and personality when she is in her enhanced, green form, and she typically chooses to remain in that form.
She-Hulk’s alter ego is Jennifer Walters, a lawyer and cousin to Bruce Banner (the Hulk); when she was critically wounded in a shooting while Banner was present, he saved her life by giving her a transfusion of his own gamma-irradiated blood, which also gave her superpowers. The Marvel Cinematic Universe version of She-Hulk/Jennifer Walters was played by Tatiana Maslany in the 2022 television series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.
In 1795, American physician Philip Syng Physick, performed the first human blood transfusion, although he did not publish this information. Then, in 1818, an English obstetrician named James Blundell performed the first successful transfusion of human blood to a patient for the treatment of postpartum hemorrhage. Using the patient’s husband as a donor, he used a syringe to extract four ounces of blood from the husband’s arm and successfully injected it into the patient and saved her life.
Although blood transfusions were performed successfully, it wouldn’t be until 1900 when Austrian physician Karl Landsteiner discovered that human blood had variations which would affect the outcome of blood transfusions.
Jimmy Drake, performing under the stage name Nervous Norvus, released a variety of novelty songs in the 1950s, the “heyday” (if there ever was such a thing) of the genre. Perhaps his most famous is “Transfusion,” about a reckless driver who keeps getting into pickles and needing blood transfusions as a result. The song, like so many others in those days, eventually wound up being the bread and butter of one Barry Hansen, who was told that he had to be “demented” to play that song on the air. That led to Hansen earning the nickname “Dr. Demento,” and he built a career on collecting and playing novelty songs on his Saturday night FM radio show, which was syndicated and itself broadcast to dozens of stations nationwide. One rather famous fan of the Dr. Demento show was a young architecture student at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) in San Luis Obispo. That student played the accordion and had a penchant for writing his own novelty songs, which were parodies of existing songs. He would record them on whatever cheap equipment he could afford, in “studios” that were more like bathrooms, and with the help of some friends, put together something of a band. The student would then send/give the tapes to Dr. Demento, and soon enough, that student started gaining fame as a parody artist. Do I need to tell you his name?
Comedy musician “Weird Al” Yankovic is known for playing the accordion, an instrument which he began playing at age seven. Al is not related to Frankie Yankovic, an accordion player and bandleader who was known as “America’s Polka King,” though the two Yankovics performed together several times, and Al performed on one of Frankie’s final recordings: a rendition of the classic polka song “Who Stole the Kishka?”
John Candy, best remembered as a comedian and member of the Second City comedy troupe of Toronto (and later, SCTV), was also an accomplished musician. Candy performed with a clarinet in an SCTV sketch “The Shmenges” that developed into a Canadian television mockumentary The Last Polka. Candy would go on to perform as a clarinet-playing member of the fictional band Kenosha Knickers in Home Alone.
Candy was linked to three film projects at the time of his death in 1994, at age 35. Those three unfinished movies (a biopic based on Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, an adaptation of “A Confederacy of Dunces”, and an adaptation of “The Incomparable Atuk”) are considered cursed because of the big name actors who were considered for them (Candy, John Belushi, Sam Kinison, and Chris Farley) all died before filming could begin.
Philip Seymour Hoffman was also touted for the starring role of Ignatius J. Reilly (and I think he would’ve been very good, too) in a movie based on John Kennedy Toole’s New Orleans novel A Confederacy of Dunces, but he was never actually cast in the role before his death in 2014, either.
In 1996, Ignatius Piazza founded Front Sight Firearms Training Academy and he eventually opened a premier training site about an hour’s drive west of Las Vegas near Pahrump NV. Piazza’s creative methods to grow the organization led to Front Sight eventually filing for Chapter 11. In 2022, Front Sight closed its doors for good.
Front Sight’s training facility was located at these DD coordinates:
△ Front Sight ▲ 36.0308, -115.8835
△ Front Sight Ranges ▲ 36.035, -115.89
Today, PrairieFire Nevada conducts firearms training at that location.
PrairieFire Nevada’s 2-day defensive handgun course costs $700 plus the cost of ammunition. Students are expected to bring 1,000 rounds of ammo for the course, where approximately 800 rounds will be expended.
I’ve taken firearms training courses at Front Sight, and I’ve DG’d every course I took (Distinguished Graduate). My wife once took a 2-day defensive handgun class with me there. She performed fairly well but the class revealed some of her limitations, and that led to how we store our guns and ammo at home. Hers are stored differently than mine which are quickly ready to go, if they will ever be needed. Which, I dearly hope, they never will be!
The state of Illinois has several nicknames, including “The Land of Lincoln” (also its official motto), “The Prairie State,” “The Inland Empire State,” “The Corn State,” and “The Garden of the West.”
Grey Gardens is the name of the home where “Big Edie” Bouvier Beale lived with her adult daughter, “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale, located near Georgica Pond in East Hampton, New York. They were first cousins of former First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. After a documentary exposed the squalid conditions the two women endured, Jackie and her sister Lee Radziwill provided funds to improve their living conditions. Following the death of Big Edie, Ms. Beale sold the house to Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and his partner, Sally Quinn. In 2017, Quinn sold the house to fashion designer Liz Lange, who completed the long-term renovations begun by Bradlee and Quinn in 2024.
Ben Bradlee served as managing editor and later as executive editor of The Washington Post from 1965 to 1991. He was played by Jason Robards in All the President’s Men (1976) and by Tom Hanks in The Post (2017), despite neither looking very much like him.
Jason Robards won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in two consecutive years: for playing Ben Bradlee in All the President’s Men (1976), then for playing Dashiell Hammett in Julia (1977).
Jason Robards is one of only 24 actors to have achieved the Triple Crown of Acting. He won two Academy Awards, a Tony Award and an Emmy Award. During his career he portrayed at least 4 different US Presidents:
⏵ Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln (1992), The Perfect Tribute (1991) and Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1964),
⏵ Ulysess S. Grant in The Civil War (1990) and The Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981),
⏵ Franklin D. Roosevelt in F.D.R.: The Last Year (1980), and
⏵ fictional President Richard Monckton (a Richard Nixon-type) in Washington: Behind Closed Doors (1977).