Because of the Teapot Dome scandal and other scandals in Warren G Harding’s administration, polls of historians and scholars consistently rank Harding as one of the worst Presidents.
Harding’s most lasting achievements was in popularizing the phrase “return to normalcy.” He was castigated for supposedly coining the term “normacy,” but the OED indicates the word had been used at least 70 years before in the same meaning.
Harding also said, "“We must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it… and more concerned about what it can do for the nation” which parallels John F. Kennedy’s "Ask not what your country can do for you . . . "
John F Kennedy, due to his assassination happening just before a Superman comic book in which he appeared hit the stands, has been counted among the casualties of the so-called Superman Curse.
(Unfortunately for DC, the books had shipped before the assassination, they just hadn’t come out, yet.)
Depending on who’s using the term and in what context, “The Irish Curse” can have two different meanings.
If the speaker is somber and serious, he’s referring to the all-too-real phenomenon of Irish alcoholism.
If he’s laughing and joking, he’s referring to the widespread belief that all Irish men have tiny schlongs.
“Schlong” is thought to be derived from the German word schlange, meaning “serpent.”
In the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, the rings of the Aes Sedai are designed as a great serpent biting its own tail.
No one has been named Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year” more often than Joseph Stalin.
Morris Day and the Time experienced a resurgence in popularity as a band after appearing in Kevin Smith’s Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back in 1995.
The personal computer was Time magazine’s first “Machine of the Year.”
H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine popularized the concept of traveling through time by a mechanical device and is cited as being the first use of the term in that context. It was designed as a criticism of British society, which Wells saw as dividing into the rich and lazy (eloi) vs. poor and doing manual labor (morlocks).
The rock band Tin Machine consisted of David Bowie and two sons of comedian Soupy Sales.
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Tin Man” was about a race between the Federation and the Romulan Star Empire to make first contact with a very sophisticated alien artificial intelligence probe, which had been given a Wizard of Oz-inspired codename.
Tinpot is a condescending British adjective for something inferior or dismissable. Tim Rice used it in the lyrics for Evita (“Who the hell does the king of England think he is?/Tea at some tinpot castle of his…”) and Chess (“you’d rather perhaps/see her world collapse/for a tinpot competition!?”).
“Travis Tea” was the pen name of a group of science fiction writers who wanted to write the worst possible novel in order to prove that vanity press publisher PublishAmerica would take anything sent to them. Their result, Atlanta Nights was indeed accepted, despite being deliberately wretched.
There is always a color in the title of every mystery novel featuring Travis McGee. It was long speculated that, when author John D. MacDonald finally got around to killing off McGee, “Black” would be the color in the title.
At the age of 26, William B. Travis was a lieutenant colonel in army of the breakaway Republic of Texas and commander of the regular troops at the Battle of the Alamo.
Travis “Machine Gun” Grant scored 4045 points for Kentucky State and became the all-time leading scorer in United States college basketball history. His mark, set in 1972, has yet to be topped.
Kentucky State University was chartered in 1886 and opened in 1887 as the State Normal School for Colored Persons. In 1890, the U.S. Government made the school a land grant institution.
The NAACP started as a protest group led by W.E.B. Du Bois on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls called “the Niagara Movement.”
The Niagara Conference was an attempt to resolve the Civil War peacefully in 1864 sponsored on the Canadian side of the Falls by Horace Greeley in the North and Clement Clay from the Confederacy. Two of the many reasons it was damned from the start were that Jefferson Davis refused to entertain any notion that would end slavery (including gradual emancipation or even purchase) and Abraham Lincoln refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Confederate government by considering diplomatic negotiations with their representatives.