The Flying Karamazov Brothers are a comedy and juggling act originally from Santa Cruz, California. Among their repertoire is something known as the “Terror Trick” in which they gradually introduce nine very strange items—a cleaver, a torch, a salt shaker, a ukulele, a skillet, a fish, an egg, a block of dry ice, and a bottle of champagne (which they call a “time bomb”)—then juggle them all at once only to end up cooking the fish and the egg in the skillet and drinking the champagne.
I’ve seen The Flying Karamazov Brothers several times, dating back to the early Eighties, and love 'em!
In play:
One of the original Flying Karamazov Brothers (who appeared in Romancing the Stone 2) has retired to University Heights, Ohio.
The stone is a unit of measure for body weight. It is equal to 14 lb, or about 6.35 kg.
Character actor George E, Stone appeared in 184 pictures in a career from the 20s to the 60s. His credits included “Some Like it Hot” and “Man with the Golden Arm”.
The oldest known basilica, the Basilica Porcia, was built in Rome in 184 BC by Marcus Porcius Cato (‘Cato the Elder’).
The only basilica in China is in Shanghai: the Basilica of Our Lady Help of Christians (She Shan Basilica). Per Wikipedia it was created in 1942.
The oldest basilica in the United States is in Lackawanna, NY: Our Lady of Victory Basilica and National Shrine. It was created in 1926.
The word ‘basilica’ derives from the same Greek root as basilisk, a peculiar species of serpent hatched from the egg of a toad by an old cockerel when Sirius is ascendant. Although very useful – a mixture of the powdered blood of basilisk and human can be used to transmute copper into gold – the basilisk is very dangerous: its gaze alone is deadly. In the Middle Ages, travelers often carried cockerels or mirrors to protect themselves from basilisks.
There are six basilicas in the state of California.
► Alameda: St. Joseph’s Basilica
► Carmel-by-the-Sea: the Carmel Mission
► San Diego: Mission San Diego
► San Francisco: Mission Dolores
► San Jose: Cathedral Basilica of St Joseph
► San Juan Capistrano: Mission Basilica of San Juan Capistrano
Juan Antonio Samaranch was the President of the International Olympic Committee from 1980 until 2001. His last Olympics were the 2000 Summer games in Sydney.
While he was in Sydney his wife died in Spain. I sang at the Requiem mass arranged for her and met Señor Samaranch.
Organized Baseball’s smallest officially sanctioned minor league was the Cape Breton Colliery League, which operated from 1937-9, with all five teams located in coal mining towns within eight miles of Sydney, Nova Scotia.
The primary difference between the boys game of cricket and the girls game of rounders (known as “baseball” in the US) is that in the former, hitting the batter is completely legal.
The highest explosive yield-to-weight ratio of any weapon deployed was that of the 5-ton B-41 bomb with yield equivalent to 25 million tons of TNT. The primary stage had an implosion-activated uranium core with deuterium-tritium boosting; the secondary stage used lithium-6-enriched deuteride fuel. This was followed by a yet-larger tertiary fusion stage compressed by the secondary stage. Finally, there was a fission jacket (U-238 with an inner casing of U-235). 500 bombs were built in the early 1960’s and deployed by the United States Strategic Air Command; apparently none was ever actually exploded.
Marvin the Martian has repeatedly tried to destroy our planet with his Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator, because it blocks his view of Venus. Intrepid hero Bugs Bunny has always managed to prevent an Earth-shattering Kaboom, however.
I t was Marvin Miller who was responsible for getting rid of Major League Baseball’s dreaded ‘reserve clause’ and increasing baseball player salaries into the stratosphere.
In 1992, Red Barber said, “Marvin Miller, along with Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson, is one of the two or three most important men in baseball history.”
[sub]quoth from Wiki[/sub]
Jackie Robinson was not the first African-American player in major league sports. A year before Robinson played in the majors, Kenny Washington was a running back for the 1946 Los Angeles Rams of the National Football League, and scored eight touchdowns. However, Robinson played earlier in the 1946 baseball season, at the minor league level, in Montreal.
Washington was originally signed by teh Chicago Bears, but the NFL refused to let him play. But the Cleveland Rams moved to Los Angeles on condition that they would be allowed to field an ingegrated team.
The color line had not always been in place in the NFL. Fritz Pollard and Bobby Marshall were its first African-American players, in 1920. Pollard was also the NFL’s first black head coach, in 1921, with the Akron Pros. He also played for the Milwaukee Badgers, Hammond Pros, Gilberton Cadamounts, Union Club of Phoenixville and Providence Steam Roller, the last of which is the only NFL franchise to win a league championship but that no longer exists.
Besides the newer NFL teams of Baltimore, Carolina, Houston and Jacksonville, the teams with the fewest head coaches in their histories are Dallas, Minnesota and Seattle. They’ve each had seven head coaches.
The challenge of the the Seven Bridges of Königsberg was a famous unanswered questions in maths. In 1735 it was resolved by Leonhard Euler, thus laying the foundations of graph theory and topology.
Leonhard Euler was a devout Christian.
It has not been proven whether or not Euler’s constant (limit [1+1/2+1/3+…+1/n - ln(n)] ≈ .5772) is transcendental. Euler’s constant is not the same as Euler’s number (≈2.718) which was proven transcendental by Charles Hermite.