The Ford F-150 pickup truck has been the best selling vehicle in the United States for over 30 years. Ford has been making their F-series trucks since 1948 and to date over 33 million have been sold across twelve generations. It is Ford’s longest running nameplate.
Chevrolet introduced the Chevelle-based El Camino, with a car-type cab and a stylized pickup bed, in response to the success of the Ford Ranchero. The Ranchero was originally based on the standard sedan platform, then moved to the Falcon chassis, the Fairlane, the Torino, and eventually the Thunderbird luxury-sedan chassis.
The thunderbird is a legendary creature in certain North American indigenous peoples’ history and culture. It is considered a supernatural bird of power and strength. It is especially important, and frequently depicted, in the art, songs and oral histories of many Pacific Northwest Coast cultures, and is found in various forms among the peoples of the American Southwest, Great Lakes, and Great Plains. The thunderbird’s name comes from the common belief that the beating of its enormous wings causes thunder and stirs the wind.
The term “Butterfly Effect”, a term from chaos theory meaning a single beat of a butterfly’s wings can affect the future dramatically, is generally, although perhaps falsely, thought to have originated in the Robert Heinlein short story “A Sound of Thunder”. A hunter returning from time travel to a Tyrannosaurus hunt in the late Cretaceous notices a number of minor differences - then notices a crushed ancient butterfly on the sole of his boot.
Ray Bradbury wrote “A Sound of Thunder.”
“The Sound of Silence,” written by Paul Simon and sung by him and Art Garfunkel, was the duo’s first hit #1 song. But when it was first released on the LP album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., it did not fare well and the entire album initially did poorly. When the album was released in October 1964 it was a commercial failure, and Simon and Garfunkel went their separate ways.
About six months after the album’s release, the song gained a small following. Simon and Garfunkel were not performing together, and so Tom Wilson, the song’s producer, remixed the track without the singers’ knowledge. When the remix was released in September 1965 it immediately began climbing the charts. By December 1965 the song hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Wilson did not consult Simon and Garfunkel when he remixed the song because, he said, the duo at the time was no longer a “working entity.”
Powered by the song’s success, Simon and Garfunkel scrambled back together and recorded their second album. Columbia Records titled that album The Sounds of Silence to capitalize on the song’s success.
Dion DiMucci was one of the first rock artists signed to Columbia Records.
Dion released Runaround Sue in 1961 and it became a #1 hit for him. Dion, as in Dion DiMucci.
DeSoto stopped manufacturing cars after the 1961 model year.
The first documented European to have crossed the Mississippi River was Hernando de Soto in the early 1500s.
The Mississippi River is the main river of the largest river system in North America.
The siege of Vicksburg lasted from May 18 – July 4, 1863, and resulted in the capture of the city by Union forces under the command of Major General Ulysses S. Grant. The surrender of the city led to the entire Mississippi River returning to Union control and spliting the Confederacy in two, and prompted President Lincoln to say “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.”
The best-known example of the rare English perfect pangram (a sentence including every letter of the alphabet exactly once) yet created is “Cwm fjord bank glyphs vext quiz” - markings on the side of a (Welsh) hill next to a fjord annoyed a strange man.
I call bulshit on this one. What about “Mr Jock, TV quiz Ph.D., bags few lynx?”
26 letters, all different, and it doesn’t need an explanation. As creator Clement Woods said “Serves Jock right.Any academia who sells out to mass media deserves to have his marksmanship suffer.”
You have to count Mr., TV, and Ph.D. as words, though.
The US Navy’s Marksmanship Medal is the equivalent of the Expert Marksmanship Badge in the United States Army and Marine Corps, each of which is the highest award one may receive for weapons qualification.
The highest weapons qualification rating, rifle or pistol, for the US Marine Corps is Expert. The nest two lower ratings are, in turn, Sharpshooter and Marksman. There are no other qualification ratings.
Chuck Connors beat 40 other actors for the lead on The Rifleman, portraying Lucas McCain, a widowed rancher known for his skill with a customized Winchester rifle. This ABC Western series, which aired from 1958 to 1963, was also the first show to feature a widowed father raising a young child.
Chuck Conners is one of only 12 athletes in the history of American professional sports to have played both Major League Baseball and in the National Basketball Association.
Conners played basketball for the Rochester Royals (now the Sacramento Kings) and led them to the league championship in 1946. He also played basketball for the Boston Celtics.
Conners played major league baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers and for the Chicago Cubs, in 1949, and 1951, respectively.
Conners was also drafted by the NFL’s Chicago Bears, but he never played a game for them.
I loved that all of the United Daughters of the Confederacy signs on the Vicksburg battlefield referred to this or that unit being here “from [date] until the conclusion of the siege.” Quite a euphemism - not “the Confederate defeat,” “the rebels’ surrender” or “the fall of the city.”
In play:
Chuck Connors was born Kevin Joseph Connors in Brooklyn, New York. He was raised Roman Catholic and served as an altar boy. He liked baseball but didn’t like his first name. He tried out “Lefty” and “Stretch” before settling on “Chuck,” because while playing first base, he would always yell, “Chuck it to me, baby, chuck it to me!” to the pitcher. The rest of his teammates and fans soon caught on, and the name stuck.
Kevin Connors is a sports television journalist for ESPN. He is a host of ESPN SportsCenter, and is seen frequently on the program’s 6pm and 11pm EDT broadcasts. Connors also provides play-by-play for college basketball broadcasts on the ESPN family of networks, as well as for international basketball broadcasts on ESPN and ESPN2. He was previously a sports reporter and sports anchor for WCBS-TV (CBS 2) in New York City, the flagship station of CBS Television Network.