“Assassing” was the second single from Marillion’s second album Fugazi, released in 1984. The song reached #22 on the UK singles chart (their fourth top 40 hit in that country) but did not chart elsewhere. The song’s lyrics are about character assassination.
The top five selling singles in the UK for 1984 were:
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"Do They Know It’s Christmas? Band Aid
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“I Just Called to Say I Love You” Stevie Wonder
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“Relax” Frankie Goes to Hollywood
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“Two Tribes” Frankie Goes to Hollywood
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“Careless Whisper” George Michael
The top-selling album was Can’t Slow Down by Lionel Richie
Terry Bollea, best known for his wrestling stage name Hulk Hogan, later wrestled as Hollywood Hulk Hogan. Early in his career, he was Sterling Golden, the name under which he played “Thunderlips” in Rocky III.
Hollywood has no municipal status, it is just an approximately-defined neighborhood in the City of Los Angeles, which absorbed the former town of Hollywood in 1910, before the movie industry began to gravitate to the area
The shortest abbreviation in the world for a place name, as measured by percentage reduction in letters, is generally thought to be “LA” for “El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula.”
The USS Pueblo was an environmental research (and intelligence) ship that was seized by North Korea in 1968. Its captain and crew were held for almost a year before being released.
Today is the 130th anniversary of the hanging of Louis Riel, the leader of the North-West Rebellion. Riel was tried for high treason in Regina, North-West Territories in July of 1885. He was convicted by the jury of high treason and sentenced to death by the presiding Stipendiary Magistrate. His appeal to the Manitoba Queen’s Bench was dismissed in September 1885 and his application for leave to appeal dismissed by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (the highest court in the British Empire) in October.
Author Louis L’Amour wrote 100 novels, over 250 short stories, and (as of 2010) sold more than 320 million copies of his work. By the 1970s his writings were translated into over 10 languages. Every one of his works is still in print.
Jean-Louis Trintignant, who played the race car driver in the film “A Man and a Woman” was the nephew of Louis Trintignant, an actual race car driver who was killed in a crash when Jean-Louis was three years old.
A Formula One (F1) racing car can accelerate from rest to 100 kilometer per hour in just 2 seconds. Within an additional second and half, the car will be doing a speed of 160 kilometers per hour. It can hit 300 km/h (186 mph) in less than 8.6 seconds. During acceleration, the car generates an acceleration force equaling 1.45 g. An F1 car consumes nearly 75 liters of fuel for traveling 100 kilometers, giving it a fuel economy of 3.1 mpg. The engine sucks in about 650 liters of air per second.
F1 engines are currently limited to 1.6L 90° naturally-aspirated V6s and limited to 15,000 RPMs. Up to 2014 they were 2.4L V8s. Engine regulations have been revised ever since the F1 circuit’s inception in 1947.
Michael Schumacher of Germany holds the record for most Formula 1 championships, with 7, including 5 consecutively, also a record. Juan Manuel Fangio of Argentina won 5, and Alain Prost of France and Sebastian Vettel of Germany have each won 4.
Still wondering.
Aren’t they all title roles in Assassins? 
In play:
Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee for President in 1988, served in the U.S. Army in Korea from 1955-1957 but never saw combat.
Michael Dukakis’ 1988 picture of him in an M1 Abrams tank did not help his campaign: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/85/Michael_Dukakis_in_tank.jpg.
When the Republicans ran a commercial about the whole Willie Horton fiasco during the 1988 Presidential campaign, the Democrats immediately responded RACISM. Odd that the commercial never showed a photo of Horton or mentioned his race. They just wondered a person convicted of life without parole for a vicious murder was being let out of prison on weekend furloughs, and was not pursued when he did not return one weekend.
(Nobody knows for sure if there are still any wooden pipes in the Detroit water system, but every once in a while digging crews run into wooden ones. It is unknown whether the last ones have been found yet.)*
The Massachusetts prisoner furlough program was an initiative of former Governor Frank Sargent, a liberal Republican environmentalist [sic], and had an excellent record of reducing recidivism. Sargent also delivered the keynote address at MIT for the first Earth Day in 1970, and was responsible for cancelling the Innerbelt project that would have sent elevated highways through much of Boston and Cambridge.
The Massachusetts prisoner furlough program was supposed to be for non-violent offenders who would be released from prison and returned to society at some point, and it was an excellent program for that group.
Willie Horton was serving life without parole for a violent, vicious murder. When Maryland had him in prison, Dukakis tried to get him returned to Massachusetts to finish his sentence. The Maryland governor’s response was along the lines of ARE YOU FUCKING CRAZY? He refused.
A good write up of the whole story is here
Only first-degree murderers were excepted, and then only until a state Supreme Court ruling that the law hadn’t excepted them.
Or here. There was certainly a lot of demagoguing on the issue even before GHWB’s team found it.
In play: GHW Bush’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, provided a rare literal example of deathbed repentance, with an apology to Michael Dukakis:
Atwater also explained the Republicans’ “Southern Strategy”:
There have been numerous famous quotes of last words from a person’s deathbed. Among the most famous are Oscar Wilde’s “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.” and John Adams "“Thomas Jefferson–still survives…” (ironically, Jefferson, who was a political opponent of Adams, died the same day) and the haunting “Let us pass over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.” by the Civil War general “Stonewall” Jackson.