The “Six flags” of Texas are: Spain, France, Mexico, Republic of Texas, Confederate States, and the United States.
Six Flags, Inc., which originally owned just the Dallas-area amusement park in the state which gave it its name, now operates 21 theme parks throughout the US and Canada. Six Flags has sold off its former European properties. It is currently in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Notwithstanding recent changes, U.S. bankruptcy laws are much more lenient than those of most other Western democracies, and have been credited by some economists with playing an important role in general American economic dynamism over the years.
English bankruptcy law originally permitted debtors to be jailed, forcing their friends and families to pay their debts so their loved one could be released. Many released debtors relocated to the American colonies, especially Georgia and Texas, to rebuild their lives.
Of course the debtor system is self perpetuating and England soon ran out of space in its jails so turned old ships into floating prisons.
Prison hulks were also convenient places to stash convicts scheduled to be transported to Australia. Previously, during the American Revolution, more rebel POW’s died aboard British hulks than in all battles combined. In New York’s East River alone, approximately 11,500 prisoners died on board, and are commemmorated by the Prison Ship Martyr’s Monument in Fort Greene Park.
The Vernon C. Bain Center is an 800-bed jail barge used to hold inmates for New York City as part of the vast Rikers Island jail complex.
Jonathan Frakes, playing William T. Riker, grew a beard between the first and second seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, giving rise to the term “growing the beard,” meaning a TV show has become good after a rocky start.
Jonathan Frakes is married to Genie Francis who was soap opera royalty in the 1980s as the female half of Luke & Laura (Tony Geary playing Luke) on General Hospital; they were an odd romantic duo as their first sex occurred when Luke raped her in a bowling alley.
Conrad Bain (who co-starred in the 1970’s sitcom Maude) and Jonathan Frakes (who played Commander Will Riker in Star Trek: The Next Generation) both acted with Burgess Meredith in different movies.
ETA: For that matter, Conrad Bain and Genie Francis both acted with Jerry Stiller.
Todd Bridges, one of Conrad Bain’s TV children on Diff’rent Strokes (and who remains close to Bain) is the author of a new bestselling memoir entitled Killing Willis. (On talk shows where he’s promoting it he comes across as very level headed and hysterically funny when talking about the media’s refusal to let him live down his troubled-child-star past.)
“Diff’rent Strokes” is notable for the number of its stars who have had criminal troubles. Dana Plato, a drug addict, moved into the porn industry.
Plato’s Retreat was the name of a famous “swingers’ club” for heterosexual couples in New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
According to (disputed but ancient) tradition, a Greek wrestling coach twenty-four centuries ago gave his student Ariston a nickname which translates loosely into English as “broad shoulders”; to this day Ariston is better known by that nickname, Plato.
According to Carl Sandburg, Chicago is the
“Hog butcher for the world,
Tool maker, stacker of wheat,
Player with railroads and the nation’s freight handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the big shoulders.”
Argh too slow.
Pyrithione zinc is the active ingredient in Head and Shoulders brand anti-dandruff shampoo.
To be galvanized is to be coated with zinc.
Aside from Starscream and several Sweeps, there are virtually no Decepticon deaths in 1986’s Transformers: the Movie, and even those who die are not killed by Autobots. Several of the injured Decepticons are reanimated and reformatted by Unicron, including Megatron becoming Galvatron.
*Transformers: the Movie *was among the last credits of Orson Welles, Scatman Crothers, and Roger C. Carmel (who was best known as Harry F. Mudd in Star Trek), all of whom died within a year one side or the other of its release.