Mighty Mouse was a cartoon character created by Paul Terry of Terrytoons as a parody of Superman. The actual cartoons were also parodies of the “damsel in distress” melodramas of early film and many were staged as operas.
The Mk 4 Folding-Fin Aerial Rocket (FFAR), also known as Mighty Mouse, was an unguided rocket used by United States military aircraft. 2.75 inches (70 mm) in diameter. It was designed in the late 1940’s as an air-to-air weapon for interceptor aircraft to shoot down enemy bombers, but primarily saw service as an air-to-surface weapon.
I still remember from my youth, Mighty Mouse flying to the rescue and singing in his operatic voice,
“HERE I come to save THE DAAAY!”
Fun memories, even though that cartoon was a little hokey.
Cartoonist Paul Terry was born in 1887, close to San Francisco, in San Mateo CA (nearby!). He was raised in San Francisco. One of his first cartoons was around the years 1805-1910 and drawn with his brother, John Terry, of a dog named Alonzo for a publication called the San Francisco Call. He moved to NYC in his 20s, shortly before WWI.
IF Terry was a fan of the New York Giants, then he would be at least the second great cartoonist who’s also a Giants fan. Charles Schulz loved the San Francisco Giants. GO GIANTS!! Baseball is here!
ETA - ninja’d but still works. Reason: war.
Triple-ninj’ed. Will go again.
Terry and the Pirates was an action-adventure comic strip created by cartoonist Milton Caniff. The daily strip began October 22, 1934, and the Sunday color pages began December 9, 1934. Initially, the storylines of the daily strips and Sunday pages were different, but on August 26, 1936, they merged into a single storyline. In 1946, Caniff won the first Cartoonist of the Year Award from the National Cartoonists Society for his work on Terry and the Pirates.
PNC Park, the home ballpark of the Pittsburgh Pirates, is IMHO the 2d-nicest ballfield in the MLB today behind, of course, the Giants’ Pac Bell Park. Okay, AT&T. And I’ve been ti 27 of the 30 MLB teams’ home parks so far.
PNC Park opened on April 9, 2001, one year after Pac Bell Park opened. PNC Park is the fifth home of the Pittsburgh Pirates since their inception in 1887.
1st: Recreation Park, located at the corners of Grant and Pennsylvania Avenues along the Fort Wayne railroad tracks on the North Side
2nd: Exposition Park, opened in 1891, and situated along the Allegheny River between the PNC Park site and where Three Rivers Stadium formerly stood (first World Series, 1903)
3rd & 4th: Forbes Field in Oakland, June 30, 1909. The club spent 61 seasons at Forbes, its longest tenure at any facility, before returning to the North Shore with a move to Three Rivers Stadium on July 16, 1970.
The section of the left-field wall at Forbes Field that was cleared by Bill Mazeroski’s home run to win the 1960 World Series against the hated Yankees still stands, on the campus of Carnegie-Mellon University. Every year on the anniversary of that day, a group of fans, often including Mazeroski, gather there to listen to a recording of the radio broadcast of the game, and celebrate the memory at the climactic moment.
(In 1990, I had been to all 30, but I/ve been to very few new ones since. Just Detroit, Chicago, Houston.)
In play:
The Pittsburth Pirates are the only team in MLB with a feminine nickname, since the Latin root for Pirate (pirata) is a feminine noun. There are also, of course, the Toledo Mud-Hens of minor league basesball.
Nice. I hope to make 30/30 soon, possibly even this year.
The Pittsburgh Steelers were the first team to win 3 Super Bowls, and the first also to win 4. They are also the first team to score a safety in a Super Bowl.
Here you go: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/12/28/article-1342305-0056B2CC00000258-186_634x497.jpg
In play:
The USS Pittsburgh was one of seven City-class ironclads serving the U.S. Army, and after October 1862 the Navy, in western waters during the Civil War. Three other American warships have borne the name since.
The US Army had warships. In WWII the Army operated over 127,000 pieces of floating equipmemt. Large troop and cargo transfer ships were Army vessels, and there were over 1,000 of them.
Today, excluding the ships for the Army Corps of Engineers, the Army operates 50 vessels of three kinds, large landing craft, logistics support vessels, and large tugs.
The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops was known as The Ghost Army. Their mission was to deceive and confuse the enemy in the weeks leading up to the D-Day Invasion of Normandy. They utilized 1,100 soldiers, inflatable tanks, cannons, jeeps, trucks, and airplanes, sound trucks, fake radio transmissions and pretense all to keep the Germans chasing a large force that did not really exist. Their mission was successful and they kept on till the end of the war, staging more than 20 battlefield deceptions
Their existence was classified for more than 40 years after the war, and elements of it remain classified. The unit was the subject of a PBS documentary The Ghost Army in 2013.
Soldiers of the Ghost Army were encouraged to use their brains and talent to mislead, deceive and befuddle the German Army. Many were recruited from art schools, advertising agencies and other venues that encourage creative thinking. In civilian life, ghost soldiers had been artists, architects, actors, set designers and engineers.
The Ghost Dance (Caddo: Nanissáanah, also called the Ghost Dance of 1890) was a new religious movement incorporated into numerous Native American belief systems. According to the teachings of the Northern Paiute spiritual leader Wovoka (renamed Jack Wilson), proper practice of the dance would reunite the living with spirits of the dead, bring the spirits of the dead to fight on their behalf, make the white colonists leave, and bring peace, prosperity, and unity to native peoples throughout the region. The Lakota variation on the Ghost Dance tended towards millenarianism, an innovation that distinguished the Lakota interpretation from Jack Wilson’s original teachings. The Caddo Nation still practices the Ghost Dance today.
Wilson’ said he stood before God in heaven and had seen many of his ancestors engaged in their favorite pastimes, and that God showed Wilson a beautiful land filled with wild game and instructed him to return home to tell his people that they must love each other and not fight. He also stated that Jesus was being reincarnated on earth in 1892, that the people must work, not steal or lie, and that they must not engage in the old practices of war or the traditional self-mutilation practices connected with mourning the dead. He said that if his people abided by these rules, they would be united with their friends and family in the other world, and in God’s presence, there would be no sickness, disease, or old age.
The Lakota (Lakȟóta) nation of the northern great plains was centered in western South Dakota, and also in western North Dakota and northern Nebraska, and eastern Montana and Wyoming. Initial United States contact with the Lakota was during the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804–1806, and was marked by a standoff. Fort Laramie WY was built by the US Army in 1834 to protect the interests of lucrative fur trade routes, and then later to protect the Mormon and Oregon Trails.
Today, Lakota tribal governments have significant governing leeway, as semi-autonomous political entities, in deviating from state law (e.g. Indian gaming.) They are ultimately subject to supervisory oversight by the United States Congress and executive regulation through the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
The nature and legitimacy of those relationships continue to be a matter of dispute.
Lewis and Clark County, Montana, is one of only two counties (that I can think of) named after two people. The other is King and Queen County, Viginia.
The six most common US county names not named after US Presidents are in order, Franklin (24 counties), Clay (18), Montgomery (18), Union (18), Marion (17), and Wayne (16). The most common county name named for a group of people is Cherokee County (8).
Madison County, Alabama, was established on December 13, 1808 by the governor of the Mississippi Territory. It is one of 19 states with a country named after the 4th President, James Madison (Lousiana has a Madison parish).
For much of the county’s history, the economy revolved mainly around agriculture. Madison County was one of the largest cotton-producing counties in the state, and textile mills operated around the county. This changed when a group of German rocket scientists, led by Wernher von Braun, came to Redstone Arsenal in 1950. They developed, among others, the Redstone rocket, which was modified to launch the first two Americans into space.
For the record, it is also the county I have resided in since 1997.
Cuyahoga County, Ohio, the greater Cleveland area, has about twice as many people as all of Vermont (1,280,122 in the 2010 Census vs. 626,042 current estimate).
Until 1996, Vermont was the only state without a Wal-Mart. And, Montpelier, Vermont is the only U.S. state capital without a McDonalds.