I was ninja’d but my intended play still works. @knoodler-ninja!
President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat from Tennessee, took office on 15 April 1865 after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.
Johnson is the only US President who never attended school. He was born into poverty and never went to any school. His wife, Eliza McCardle, taught him to read and write.
Sorry B! Sometimes I don’t know my own power!
All’s fair in Trivia Dominoes!
Andrew Johnson was a tailor before he went into politics. He was also the subject of a Hollywood biopic. Per Wiki (lightly edited):
“Tennessee Johnson is a 1942 American film about Andrew Johnson, the 17th President of the United States, released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and directed by William Dieterle. The screenplay was written by John L. Balderston and Wells Root, from a story by Milton Gunzburg and Alvin Meyers. It stars Van Heflin as Johnson, Lionel Barrymore as his nemesis, Congressman Thaddeus Stevens (R-Penna.), and Ruth Hussey as First Lady Eliza McCardle Johnson…”
Actors Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting were ages 16 and 17, respectively, when they played the title characters in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. In 2022, Hussey and Whiting filed a lawsuit against Paramount Pictures, for sexual exploitation, sexual harassment, and fraud, alleging that the studio allowed Zeffirelli (who had died in 2019) to film the two then-minors in the nude, and despite the director’s assurances to the actors that their nudity would not be shown on screen, the final cut showed Hussey’s bare breasts and Whiting’s bare buttocks.
The lawsuit was dismissed by a California court in 2023.
Whiting Lane Elementary School, at 47 Whiting Lane, West Hartford CT, is named after the Whiting family, who were prominent landowners, dairy farmers, and greenhouse owners there in the mid-1800s. Emerson Alford Whiting (1818–1895) was a dairy farmer who helped organize West Hartford’s first government in 1854, and his brother, Alfred Whiting (1824–1905), operated the “Whiting Greenhouses,” which were on the property where the school now stands. The school was built in 1954.
My younger brothers and sister attended that school.
Pana, Illinois is a sad, poor, dried-up old town on the prairie in the middle of nowhere in Central Illinois. Seriously, the town is just so horribly depressing; beset by poverty, meth, and inequality. However, for a few, glorious decades, Pana was the center of the Midwest’s floral industry. Thanks to great soil, and greenhouses heated by the abundant local coal, the town produced so many flowers that it earned the nickname “The City of Roses.” Those days are long gone, of course, though the town still makes nods to its history every year via the Pana Rose Festival.
Pasadena, CA, and Portland, OR, are both nicknamed “The City of Roses.” Both have celebrations centered around roses: Pasadena features a Tournament of Roses Parade; Portland hosts a Grand Floral Rose Parade. Both parades include students from local high schools who have been crowned Rose Princesses, with a Rose Queen and a Rose Court, all who ride highly-decorated floats in their respective parades. Both parades have irreverent lesser-known minor parades that operate around the same time as the major parade: the Doo Dah Parade in Pasadena, and the Starlight Parade in Portland.
Billie Piper is an English actor and singer. Piper rose to fame in the UK as a pop singer while still a teenager, with six top-five singles, before she began to focus on acting. In 2005, she was cast as Rose Tyler, the Companion of the Doctor, when the science-fiction TV show Doctor Who returned to the air after a 16-year hiatus; the show was a worldwide hit, and made Piper an international star.
Piper remained on Doctor Who for two seasons (and later returned for several guest appearances); she then gained acclaim on television series including Secret Diary of a Call Girl, Penny Dreadful, I Hate Suzie, and Wednesday, as well as winning an Olivier Award for her stage performance in the play Yerma.
The Piper Cherokee is a family of light airplanes used frequently for training and personal use. It was introduced in 1961 and continues to be manufactured today. In the 1964 James Bond film Goldfinger, Pussy Galore is the leader of “Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus”, a group of women who fly Piper Cherokees as trained acrobats who double as cat burglars.
A PIO is a pilot-induced oscillation that is a series of uncontrollable oscillations where the pilot tries to control the airplane but s/he inadvertently induces increasingly larger vertical swings of the nose. The plane ends up porpoising dramatically.
Pilot and vlogger Jenny Blalock, aged 45 from Tennessee and known as “TNFlyGirl”, trained on a Piper Cherokee and then had bought a Beechcraft 35-C33 Debonair. Flying with her father in December 2023, she encountered a PIO and lost control of her Beechcraft and crashed. There were no survivors.
The American model and actress Jolene Blalock was born March 5, 1975 in San Diego, California. She is perhaps best known for playing Subcommander T’Pol, the Vulcan first officer of the United Earth starship Enterprise, NX-01, in the series Star Trek: Enterprise from 2001-2005.
British pop band T’Pau was at least the second British pop band to choose a name based on an obscure pop culture reference. The other was Duran Duran, who took their name from a character in the Jane Fonda film Barbarella (although the character was Durand Durand). T’Pau had a few hits in the UK, but in the US they were mostly one-hit-wonders, with the song “Heart and Soul.”
San Diego Stadium used to host Concerts on the Green where bands played to the crowds. San Diego Stadium was also the first stadium ever to host both the Super Bowl and the World Series in the same year. This was in 1998.
On 25 January 1998 in what was then called Qualcomm Stadium, in Super Bowl XXXII the Denver Broncos defeated the Green Bay Packers 31-24 in what was the first Super Bowl since Super Bowl IV on 11 January 1970 where a team favored to win by double digits was upset and lost.
In the 1998 World Series, the New York Yankees swept the San Diego Padres 4-0 to win their second World Series championship in three years and their 24th overall.
No other stadium has hosted both the Super Bowl and the World Series in the same year.
San Diego Stadium, along with the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles, was one of three stadiums to host the Super Bowl, the World Series, and the MLB All-Star Game.
San Diego Stadium was closed for good in March 2020. Its demolition began later that year.
San Diego Stadium formerly stood at DD coordinates ▲ 32.783, -117.119444. Today there is only an empty plot of land there. That is only ¾ mile west of ▲ 32.784, -117.107 which is the south end of the El Camino Real, at the Mission San Diego de Alcalá, in San Diego CA. The north end of the El Camino Real is at ▲ 38.2936, -122.456, at the Mission San Francisco Solano, Sonoma CA.
Five current Major League Baseball teams have never won the World Series: the Tampa Bay Rays, Colorado Rockies, Seattle Mariners, San Diego Padres, and Milwaukee Brewers.
All five of these teams were expansion teams, The Padres and Brewers have had the most chances at a World Series of the five, as they both began play in 1969; the Mariners began play in 1977, the Rockies in 1993, and the Rays in 1998. Of the five, the Mariners are the only team which has never even made it to the World Series.
Like the Milwaukee Brewers, the Colorado Rockies have only gone to the World Series once. They went in 2007 but were swept by the Boston Red Sox.
I went to Game 3 in Denver, the only time I’ve been to a game at Coors Field.
As noted, the Milwaukee Brewers came into existence in 1969, as part of the overall expansion of MLB that year. Four teams were added to the majors (two in each league), and each league split into two divisions.
The four teams that were added were the Seattle Pilots and Kansas City Royals in the American League, and the Montreal Expos and San Diego Padres in the National League. The Pilots re-located to Milwaukee after just one season, where they have remained ever since as the Brewers. The Expos played in Montreal until 2004, when they moved to Washington DC and became the Nationals.
The Nationals won the World Series in 2019, and the Royals won the World Series in 1985 and 2015.
(I attended Game 7 in 1985 in KC, and Game 1 in 2015. Both were Royals victories.)
The Milwaukee Braves were located in that city from from 1953 to 1965, after being located in Boston from 1871 to 1952. They’ve been in Atlanta since 1966.
As the Atlanta Braves they had an absolutely fantastic pitching staff with the ‘Big Three’, when they acquired Greg Maddux in 1993 from the Chicago Cubs to join with Tom Glavine (1987–2002 with the Braves) and John Smoltz (1988–1999, and 2001–2008 with the Braves).
Surprisingly, those Atlanta Braves teams with the Big Three only won one World Series Championship, in 1995 when they beat the Cleveland Indians. Tom Glavine was the World Series MVP.
Atlanta, like a lot of cities in the Southeastern US, has quite a bit of tree cover compared to their brethren in other regions. Approximately 47 percent of the town is covered by tree canopy; an impressive number compared to, say, Phoenix or L.A., but paltry in comparison to Columbus (70 percent) or Charleston, WV (74 percent). Further, Atlanta is like an Urban Continental Divide: rainwater falling on some of the city’s streets flows into the Atlantic Ocean, while rainwater flowing on other city streets flows into the Gulf of Mexico.
The Gulf of Mexico is the world’s largest gulf. It is home to the “Hot Tub of Despair” — in 2014 a salty brine pool near New Orleans was discovered. It is an underwater brine pool that is 4x saltier than the surrounding Gulf waters, and is so salty that most life cannot live in it. Its waters are warmer than the surrounding Gulf waters as well.
The “Seven Sisters” oil companies were a group of seven international petroleum companies, which dominated the global oil market from the 1940s until the 1970s. They were: