Kanye West was parodied in an episode of South Park where his character became something of a laughing stock for failing to get the inexplicably popular joke ‘Do you like fish sticks? What are you, a gay fish?’ which had been created by Jimmy. Also parodied in the episode is Carlos Mencia, who claimed to have written the joke, and was tortured by Kanye and his posse as a result.
Carlos Mencia’s given name is Ned and he is from Honduras.
Acclaimed 20th century poet William Carlos Williams was a successful pediatrician, and delivered hundreds of babies.
William Carlos Williams attend Penn, and while there, he became friends with Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle (best known as H.D.) and the painter Charles Demuth.
(BTW: “This Is Just To Say” changed my world and made a huge difference for me as a writer.)
William Penn and his wife Hannah are two of only seven honorary U.S. citizens, the first and perhaps best-known of which was Winston Churchill (so recognized in 1963).
(I think we did that one before)
For many years the most popular cigarette in the US was Winston, named for the headquarters city of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, Winston-Salem, NC (and, yes, they also made Salems).
Clarence “Big House” Gaines, who led the Winston-Salem State Rams from 1946 to 1993, was the first African-American inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame as a coach.
Elroy “Crazy Legs” Hirsch of the Los Angeles Rams played the co-pilot in the Fifties disaster movie Zero Hour! In the Zucker Brothers’ comic remake, ***Airplane!, ***a different Los Angeles sports star, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, played the co-pilot.
The Lakota chief Thasunkay Witko (or something like it), better known by his name’s approximate English translation of Crazy Horse, is the focus of a yet unfinished colossal statue in the Black Hills. In the 1990s a mental health advocacy group requested the name be changed to Thasunkay Witko Monument (or something like it) because they felt the term crazy, even applied to a horse, was offensive.
The Black Hills (Paha Sapa), were considered sacred by the Lakota Indians, and although the SCUTOS ruled in 1980 that they deserved to be paid for the loss of that land thru treaty violations, the tribe refused to take the money, preferring to press to get the land back (good luck with that, dudes). That money is in a trust, in the event they change their minds-- it’s > $700M at this point.
Per unreliable but persistent legend, when Wild Bill Hickock was killed while playing 5 card draw in the Black Hills boomtown of Deadwood his cards included a pair of aces and a pair of 8s, all spades and clubs. (Accounts are inconsistent on what the 5th card was.)
The brothels in Deadwood were shut down after a 1980 raid.
The sequel to Best Little Whorehouse in Texas was called The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public; it flopped. It was inspired by the true story of when the IRS hired the madam of the famous ‘Chicken Ranch’ from the original (which had reopened as a legal brothel in Nevada) to manage another licensed brothel that had been seized for the owner’s tax debts.
The tax on tea that led to the Boston Tea Party was actually pretty minimal, and Britain never expected it to bring in much money. It was partly enacted because the British wanted to establish their right to tax their colonies. The colonists claimed they were amenable to additional taxes (the money was being used to pay for the French and Indian War) if their own legislatures determined what they would be. At the same time, however, the money was being raised to help pay for better patrols to stop smugglers, and many patriot leaders did a good business smuggling goods.
“Smuggler’s Blues” was both an episode name on Miami Vice (Season 1) and a song by Glenn Frey on the soundtrack album Miami Vice I.
Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens is transferred from Miami back to his home state of Kentucky, much against his will, in the pilot episode of the new FX crime drama Justified.
The Mordecai Lincoln house in Springfield, Kentucky was the home of Abraham Lincoln’s wealthy slave-owning uncle and is a mansion compared to his brother’s farms in Indiana and Illinois; his brother’s wealth was not due to Thomas’s sloth (as Abraham seemed to think) but the fact that under the primogeniture customs of the 18th century his older brother inherited almost all of their father, who was also named Abraham Lincoln.
The sloth is an animal that hangs from a tree (a hanger-on is all he’ll ever be). He won’t be a rival for the lion’s crown; he’ll only be the leader of the upside-down. But if you pledge to indolence your troth, you might grow up to be a sloth.
While it does have some serious claws (the better to hang upside down from tree limbs), the sloth’s main defense mechanism is being really, really filthy. It has foul tasting moss growing inside its fur, and its meat tastes abominably bad. So, while its the easiest prey of them all, no one bothers.
Sloth, along with wrath, greed, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony, is one of the Seven Deadly Sins. That sloth was “promoted” to such deadly company is something of a mystery, though Dante may have played a role, claiming that slothful are punished underneath the Stygian lake, breathing sighs in bubbles and singing a dolorous song.