The San Francisco Giants are one of the longest-established professional baseball teams. The Giants have won the most games of any team in the history of American baseball. They were the first major league team based in New York City, most memorably playing at the legendary Polo Grounds. Their colors are orange and black, which were first used in 1933. Before that they used a blue logo. Orange and black lasted for three season, 1933-1935, before going back to blue in 1936. Since 1947 their colors have been orange and black, consistently.
The New York Giants’ home stadium, the Polo Grounds, was the third of its name. Only the first ever actually was the site of a polo match. The famous baseball park also hosted the New York football Giants, as well as a number of soccer, boxing, and Gaelic football matches, and even midget motor racing.
P.T. Barnum’s resident giants at his museum, Martin Van Buren Bates and Anna Swan, married and became the tallest married couple in the world; each was around 7’6. They were much more publicity shy than Tom Thumb and his wife, though they did receive wedding gifts from Queen Victoria (plate sized pocket watches) and other luminaries. The couple semi-retired to a specially designed house where Anna bore two children, one of whom weighed 18 pound and the other 23 pounds at birth; sadly both children died in early infancy. Anna died in her forties, after which Martin married a woman of average height (who refused to live in his “giant” house) and, very unusual for a man of his height at that time, lived to be an old man.
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Victoria is the only city name that occurs in Canada, USA and Mexico. The ones in the US and Mexico are named after Guadalupe Victoria, the first president of Mexico.
The sister city of X is (are) ***Y (Y2, Y3, etc) ***:
Sunnyvale CA: Iizuka Japan
Santa Clara CA: Izumo Japan, Coimbra Portugal
Mountain View CA: Iwata Japan, Hasselt Belgium
San Jose CA: Okayama Japan, Dublin Ireland, Pune India, Tainan City Taiwan, San Jose Costa Rica, Veracruz Mexico, Yekaterinburg Russia, Kanpur India
San Francisco CA: Osaka Japan, Manila Philippines, Abidjan Côte d’Ivoire, Amman Jordan, Assisi Italy, Bangalore India, Barcelona Spain, Cork Ireland, Haifa Israel, Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam, Krakow Poland, Naples Italy, Paris France, Seoul South Korea, Shanghai China, Sydney Australia, Taipei Taiwan, Thessaloniki Greece, Ulaanbaatar Mongolia, Zürich Switzerland
A common name in Mandarin Chinese for San Francisco is Jiujinshan, Old Gold Mountain, reflecting its past as a port of entry for many Chinese immigrants. Similarly, Honolulu is Tanxiangshan, Mountain with Sandalwood Fragrance, and Ithaca, NY is Qisejia, Beautiful Scenery with Wonderful Colors.
The Chinese fortune cookie was invented by a San Francisco resident. A Japanese resident, at that.
George Takei played dual roles in the Broadway musical Allegiance: a modern day elderly survivor of a young man who was held in the Japanese internment camps and, in flashbacks to the camp, the same character’s grandfather. His co-stars included Filipino actress Lea Salonga, best known on Broadway and in London for her roles in Miss Saigon and Les Miserables.
Editing the above to correct typo:
George Takei played dual roles in the Broadway musical Allegiance: a modern day elderly man who was held in the Japanese internment camps as a young man and, in flashbacks to the camp, the same character’s grandfather. His co-stars included Filipino actress Lea Salonga, best known on Broadway and in London for her roles in Miss Saigon and Les Miserables.
Victor Marie Hugo He is considered one of the greatest and best-known French writers. In France, Hugo’s literary fame comes first from his poetry and then from his novels and his dramatic achievements. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles stand particularly high in critical esteem. Outside France, his best-known works are the novels Les Misérables, 1862, and Notre-Dame de Paris, 1831 (known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame). He also produced more than 4,000 drawings, which have since been admired for their beauty, and earned widespread respect as a campaigner for social causes such as the abolition of capital punishment
Victor Hugo lived in exile from France for approximately 20 years, most of it (1855-1870) on the island of Guernsey, a British possession off the coast of Normandy. His house there is a museum. Guernsey may be most famous for the bestselling 2008 novel The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society about several eccentric island residents and their mainland English guest on the island in the years after the German occupation and World War 2.
Australian film actor Hugo Weaving (“The Matrix”) was born in Nigeria.
Helen Adu was born in Nigeria in 1959 and has had success as a singer/songwriter under the name of Sade.
In 1999, Australian actor Hugh Jackman was cast as Wolverine in Bryan Singer’s X-Men , replacing Dougray Scott. According to a CBS interview in November 2006, Jackman’s wife Deborra-Lee Furness told him not to take the role, a comment she later told him she was glad he ignored.
Wolverines are in the same family as weasels, badgers, ferrets, otters, minks and martens. It is the largest of land mustelids. Of all the mustelids, only the sea otter and the giant otter are larger.
Dammit, took to long again.
Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot is a Japanese TV series (Giant Robo) that was adapted to American audiences, featuring a Giant Robot that fought a variety of monsters under the control of The Gargoyle Gang, led by the evil Emperor Guillotine.
The San Francisco Giants have won eight World Championships, in 1905, 1921, 1922, 1933, 1954, 2010, 2012 and 2014.
The Women’s World Curling Championship is on this week in Swift Current, Saskatchewan.
Canada is currently in a two way tie for third place with Japan, behind Switzerland and Scotland.
Earlier this week, Canada defeated the US, 10 to 2. The US conceded after 6 ends.
In 1912, the Mayflower Curling Club in Halifax served as a temporary morgue for recovered bodies in the aftermath of the Titanic disaster.