Two different forms of dance have been associated with afflictions causing involuntary movements. Sydenham’s chorea, also known as St. Vitus Dance, was first described in the late 1800s. And the Tarantella, known since before the Christian Era, was thought to have been caused by a spider bite in the region of Taranto, Italy. That assocition with the Italian wolf spider led to the word Tarantula, for large but otherwise similar arachnids of the New World.
Rush’s “New World Man” is their sole Top 40 hit in America, reaching #21 for three weeks in 1982. The song reached #1 in Canada.
Minor nitpick: she spells her name with one R - Daryl Hannah.
Rush Limbaugh escaped the Vietnam War draft due to a pilonidal cyst on his rear.
One of Rush’s most popular songs is the 1981 instrumental song titled YYZ. YYZ is the IATA airport code for Toronto, Ontario, which is near to where the band hails from.
Many of Canada’s airport codes begin with Y. Only six USA airport codes begin with Y:
YAK: Yakutak AK
YIP: Detroit MI
YKM: Yakima WA
YKN: Yankton SD
YNG: Youngstown OH
YUM: Yuma AZ
ETA: ninja’d by Elvis, but my play still works. And at least I won’t have to make a play off of the cyst on Limbaugh’s ass.
Probably the best-known alumnus of Yankton College, in the southeast corner of South Dakota, was Lyle Alzado, a defensive lineman with the Denver Broncos, later with the Cleveland Browns and LA Raiders, who died of complications of severe overuse of the steroids that gave him his career.
The Cleveland Browns are unique among the 32 member franchises of the National Football League in that they do not have a helmet logo. Since resuming operations in 1999, the Browns - and their long-suffering fans - have had only two winning seasons: a 9–7 record in 2002 and a 10–6 record in 2007.
The Cleveland Browns used to have a helmet logo: the word BROWNS, in all caps.
ETA: disregard this, I misremembered. It was the Bengals who had their name in all caps on the helmet. Not the Browns.
Missed the edit window for this.
ETA2: here’s a picture of Virgil Carter in an old Bengals helmet, http://cdn.bleacherreport.net/images_root/slides/photos/001/415/304/bengals-virgil-carter_display_image.jpg
A female yak is a nak.
The St. Louis Browns nearly were the first MLB franchise to play in Los Angeles. A deal was in place and was set to be approved on December 8, 1941. Pearl Harbor the day before put an end to it (wartime travel restrictions would have made it impossible). The Brown won their only AL championship in 1944, losing in the World Series to the Cardinals (who shared the stadium).
Alexander Sergeyevich Yakovlev was a Soviet airplane designer. His Soviet military airplanes were designated YAKs.
ETA: It looks as though Chuck missed jtur88’s play, on yaks and naks.
Andrei Tupolev, the pre-eminent chief designer of Soviet bombers and transport aircraft, did the bulk of the work for which he was most famous during the Stalin regime as a political prisoner, leading a sharashka (a sort of labor camp for technology workers). The Moscow facility was named the Tupolev Design Bureau after his rehabilitation, two years after Stalin’s death, and he was allowed to leave freely. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about a different *sharashka *in The First Circle.
If a major league professional sports team were killed in a plane crash, there is a contingency plan already in place. Each team maintains a current list of protected players, and the ill-fated franchise could immediately draft unprotected players, and resume play as early as the next day.
(n his book “Ball Four” Jim Bouton quipped that if the Yankee plane crashed, the headlines would say “Mantle, Ford, 23 others killed in plane crash.”)
When the Robert DeNiro film Bang the Drum Slowly, based on a novel of Mark Harris’ The Southpaw tetralogy (worth a read) was released, Jim Bouton was asked to review it. His comment: “If a real ballplayer had leukemia, his teammates would call him Luke.”
Bang the Drum Slowly is reportedly the favorite film of Al Pacino.
The Big Bang Theory tells us that the entire universe was once condensed in the form of a primeval atom or a dense mass. Then, between 10 billion to 20 billion years ago (the exact timing is not currently locked down), a gigantic explosion caused the universe to expand. The dense mass or primeval atom expanded very rapidly, spewing out all matter and energy in the vast void. As the universe expanded, it cooled down, and as it cooled down, the elements started to form, stars were born from the simplest elements, and the stars formed galaxies. Therefore, the explosion of a tiny seed of matter and energy formed into the universe that we know today.
Cosmic inflation was an exponential expansion of space just after the Big Bang. Andrei Linde of Stanford University was one of the three original architects and major contributors to the theory who, in 2002, shared the prestigious Dirac Prize for this work.
JFK was once jokingly asked by a reporter on Air Force One, “What would happen if this plane crashed?”
The President replied, “Your name would be in all the papers the next day, but in very small print.”
In play:
American University in Washington, D.C. has excellent political science, history and international relations programs, but no football team.
Reminds me of the famous Onion headline: “TERRORISTS ATTACK PENTAGON – SEE PAGE 14”
In play: Washington University (not to be confused with Washington State University or the University of Washington) is located in St. Louis, Missouri.