The original cast album of the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Alan Ayckbourn flop musical Jeeves, based on the P.G. Wodehouse’s tales of Bertie Wooster and his butler, was recorded and released, but it is extremely hard to find. Lloyd Webber, reportedly acting on the advice of American theatre director Harold Prince, withdrew the recording in order to be able to reuse some of the musical material in subsequent shows.
One of Flip Wilson’s recurring characters on his TV variety show was Jives, the black butler. His best-known had to be either the brash Geraldine Jones, although her boyfriend Killer, the usual subject of her talk other than “What you see is what you get” and “The Devil made me do it!”, never appeared. Or else it was the Reverend Leroy of the Church of What’s Happening Now.
The fefderal Witnjess Protection program came under the US Marshalls in 1970. For a century before that, a similar program was in place, instituted by President Grant in 1871, to protect witnesses for Ku Klux Klan prosecutions where blacks were denied civil righs during Reconstruction, and was applicable only to those crimes. Four states have their own witness protection programs.
After his presidency, Ulysses Grant lost all his savings to a shady investment partner, leaving his family with nearly nothing. At the time, presidents were not given pensions and Grant had already forfeited his military pension when he became president. The noted writer Mark Twain offered Grant a generous deal to write his memoirs and terminally ill with cancer, Grant finished them just days before his death. The memoirs sold over 300,000 copies and earned his family over $450,000.
Note: I have a copy of his Memoirs in my library…not the original run, mind you, but still the same book he wrote.
The only existing film footage of Mark Twain was shot by Thomas Edison in 1909. Edison filmed Twain while visiting his home, and the footage was used in the 1909 short film, The Prince and the Pauper.
Mark Twain was not born in Hannibal, nor did he live there in his adulthood. He was born in Florida, Missouri, and his family moved to Hannibal in Samuel’s childhood. (My father’s ancestors were already living in Hannibal when the Clemens family moved there.)
Mark Twain lived in Hannibal MO from the ages of 4 to 18. When he was 18 he moved to live in big cities, first New York City, and then later Philadelphia, then St. Louis and Cincinnati.
Saint Louis, aka Louis IX, King of France, is the only French monarch to be canonized as a saint in the Roman Catholic Church.
How did you miss the fact that he also lived in SF Giants Nation, and for 17 years in Hartford, Connecticut?
In Play:
Saint Louis, aka Louis IX, King of France, is the only French monarch to be canonized as a saint in the Roman Catholic Church.
New Orleans’ St. Louis Cathedral is, of course,named for Louis IX, Saint Louis. But Louisiana is named for Louis XIV. There are three canonized saints named Louis:
Saint Louis IX (1214–1270), a King of France and Catholic saint
Saint Louis of Toulouse (1274–1297), bishop of Toulouse and Roman Catholic saint
Saint Louis de Montfort (1673–1716), French priest and Roman Catholic saint
Louis XV was the last French King of Canada.
The first wild card playoff team to win a Super Bowl was the Oakland Raiders who -defeated the Eagles by the score of 27–10, in Super Bowl XV
Over 150 people were killed in an 1863 attack on Lawrence, Kansas, by Quantrill’s Raiders, a ragtag group of veterans from the Civil War. The raid was in retaliation for the imprisoning of the wives of the gurerrillas in Kansas City, some of whom were killed when the overcrowded prison collapsed.
Between 70 and 90 people were killed in the Frank Slide, which occurred at 4 in the morning on April 29, 1903. Frank was a small mining town in the North-West Territories, at the foot of Turtle Mountain. 90 million tons of limestone slid down the mountain in less than 2 minutes, covering most of the town.
(I’ve seen the Frank Slide - it’s a little scary to think of the people buried underneath. I’ve also stood on the lava flow over a couple of villages buried by Arenal in Costa Rica, with the same feeling). Wiki time:
“Turtles all the way down” is a jocular expression of the infinite regress problem in cosmology posed by the “unmoved mover” paradox. The metaphor in the anecdote represents a popular notion of the theory that Earth is actually flat and is supported on the back of a World Turtle, which itself is propped up by a chain of larger and larger turtles. Questioning what the final turtle might be standing on, the anecdote humorously concludes that it is “turtles all the way down”
Although their relative brain-to-body size is small, turtles are remarkably intelligent animals.
It has been reported that wood turtles are better than white rats at learning to navigate mazes. In the laboratory, turtles can learn novel operant tasks and have demonstrated a long-term memory of at least 7.5 months. But it takes them a long time to run the mazes, which tries the patience of experimenters.
The world’s largest corn maze was constructed in Spring Grove, Illinois in 2015, covered 28 acres and featured the Blackhawks logo, two hockey players, the Chicago skyline and “Champions 2015.”
Lefty Grove won 300 games in the major league, despite not making it to the majors until he was 25. He wasn’t a late bloomer: he started in the minors at the age of 20 and won 111 games in five seasons, with a .740 W-L percentage. But most of that was with the minor league Baltimore Orioles, whose owner asked a very high price for him.* Finally, Connie Mack, who had already purchased players from the Orioles, came up with the money.
*Minor league teams were independent before the 1940s, and MLB teams had to cut deals – either for money or players – for their players.
For a couple of decades in the late 20th century, ornithologists considered the Baltimore Oriole to be the same species as the Bullock’s Oriole, of the western states. Together, they were called the Northern Oriole, much to the disappointment of Marylanders. But a reconsideration of taxonomic evidence resulted in the two species being split again, and now there is again a Baltimore Oriole.
The Baltimore Orioles have been to 7 World Series, winning 3 and losing 4:
1944: they lost to the St. Louis Cardinals; the Orioles were then known as the St. Louis Browns
1966: they beat the LA Dodgers
1969: they lost to the NY Mets
1970: they beat the Cincinnati Reds
1971: they lost to the Pittsburgh Pirates
1979: they lost to the Pittsburgh Pirates
1983: they beat the Philadelphia Phillies