“Doonesbury” cartoonist Garry Trudeau is married to newscaster Jane Pauley.
When comedian Pauly Shore was in high school he gave his first stand-up professional routine. He said, “Everyone else in school was filling out their SAT applications, but I just passed mine back. I knew I wasn’t going to go to college.”
Canada has the longest shore-line of all the countries in the world, at over 200,000 km (exact estimates vary).
The next longest is Indonesia, at under 100,000 km.
Tennessee-born Dinah Shore was one of the first national TV performers with a southern accent. After a decade on the radio, she made her first network TV performance in 1949. She had actually appeared as a performer in New York’s experimental W2XBS inn 1937, at age 21. The popular singer was crippled by polio in her childhood.
Dinah Shore had a long love affair with Burt Reynolds, 20 years her junior.
Good for her!
(What did she have that Loni Anderson didn’t have?)
In play:
Allie Reynolds was the first pitcher to pitch two non-consecutive no-hitters in one season. The following year, (1952) Virgil Trucks did it.
In Canada, the federal Parliament has exclusive jurisdiction over interprovincial transportation. However, Parliament appears to be only really interested in planes, trains, and boats, the big glamour transport, and essentially just adopts provincial laws for buses and trucks.
The longest freight train in history was a BHP Billiton ore train in Australia. It was composed of 682 cars and was 7,300 m long, carrying 82,000 metric tons of ore for a total weight of the train, largest in the world, of 99734 tonnes. It was driven by eight locomotives distributed along its length.
- Must have been fun waiting for it to pass the crossing.
*And it’s on You-Tube, if you like watching 682 car trains…- YouTube
Well, I can name two.
Holy Unending Choo-Choos, Batman!
In play:
The United States, with 140,000 miles of railway as of 2008, has the most railways of any other country in the world. China, as of 2015, has the second most with 76,000 miles. Russia, with 54,000 miles as of 2013, is third.
The longest train that runs with regularity may be the iron ore trains in Mauritania, which are frequently 2.5 kilometers long, and operate on a regular schedule. In the USA, a mile-long-train would be composed of 88 standard length boxcars, a length that is frequently exceeded, but rarely by much more than that.
The Doobie Brothers’ 1973 hit “Long Train Runnin’” is sometimes called “Without Love (Where Would You Be Now?)” for its most memorable lyrics.
Well the pistons keep on turning
And the wheels go round and round
The steel rails are cold and hard
For the miles that they go down.
US railways’ standard width is 4’ 8.5" wide, because British railways were that wide, because in turn the pre-railway tramways were that wide, and those in turn because wagon wheels were that wide, because if wagon wheels weren’t that wide then when they tracked in the ruts of the common wheels they would break. So wagon wheels were 4’ 8.5" wide. They were that wide because the first long roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome, and those ruts were that wide, and those ruts were made by chariots. Imperial Rome standardized the wheel spacing of their chariots. The Imperial Roman chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses.
So basically our railways are that wide because that’s how wide two horses’ asses are.
Pasadena’s Tournament Park, now run by Caltech, gets its name from the Tournament of Roses, and it served as a venue in the early 20th century for events associated with the Tournament, such as chariot races, ostrich races, and even a race between a camel and an elephant. It is best known for being the site of the first Rose Bowl Game in 1902, and the second to eighth Rose Bowl Games from 1916 to 1922 before the Rose Bowl opened in 1923.
Joe Kapp is the only quarterback to start a Rose Bowl, a CFL Gray Cup championship game, and an NFL Super Bowl championship game.
Joe Kapp and Angela Mosca got into an on-air fight at the 2011 Grey Cup, still quarrelling over a hit that Mosca laid on Kapp’s teammate, Willie Fleming, in the 1963 Grey Cup game, 48 years earlier. The hit took Fleming out of the game.
Kapp was 73 at the time of their on-air renewal of the quarrel; Mosca was 74. The two elderly football players toppled over on the tv set and disappeared from view, Mosca swinging his cane at Kapp.
In the past year, Mosca and Kapp have both announced that they have been diagnosed with Alzheimers.
Hey Bullitt, it’s Grey Cup, not Gray Cup!
In play:
Joe Kapp is suffering from Alzheimer’s now. The man lives in Los Gatos CA. When he was 36 he starred in The Longest Yard along with other pro football players Ray Nitschke, Henry Caesar, Ernie Wheelwright, Ray Ogden, and Sonny Sixkiller.
The quarterback with the all-time best passing yards in North America pro football never played in the NFL: Anthony Calvillo who played primarily with the Montreal Alouettes and accumulated 79,816 yards in his career.
Quarterback Vince Ferragamo started Super Bowl XIV for the Los Angeles Rams. In his ten year career he played for the Rams, the Buffalo Bills, the Green Bay Packers, and for the Montreal Alouettes.
I was being tactful and not pointing that out! 
In-play:
Ferragamo struggled in his one year in Montreal, eventually being demoted from starter to third string.
It was a cautionary tale for anyone hoping to come north to Canada and play well immediately in the Canadian game.
With its longer (110 yard) and wider (65 yard) field, deeper end zones (20 yard), extra man, and third down rule, the Canadian game is just similar enough to the US game to deceive American players into thinking the transition will be easy, when in fact the differences are enough to throw off the well-honed instincts of US-trained players.
Bastards notwithstanding, the word “carborundum” as a honing medium is not of Latin origin. It is a trade name created in 1894 by a company that combined carbon with corundum, the latter being a word of Tamil origin, from south India.