Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was so enamored of the white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries that he had a copy of it with him when he parked his Ryder truck filled with explosives. The book’s writer was William Pierce, a former disciple of George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party who was interviewed for Playboy by Alex Haley.
When next I visit West Virginia I will try to go to Morgantown, 75mi south of Pittsburgh, for a Pitt @ WVU game, to experience the stadium roaring with –
♫ Sweet Caroline (Eat shit Pitt!)
♫ Good times never seemed so good (Eat shit! Eat shit! Eat shit!)
♫ I’d be inclined (Eat shit Pitt!)
♫ to believe they never would
Would be fun!
Still in play:
When he graduated from the US Military Academy, the first assignment of Joshua Sill, for whom Fort Sill in Oklahoma is named, was to the Watervliet Arsenal in Troy NY. The Watervliet Arsenal is the oldest continuously active arsenal in the United States, and today produces much of the artillery for the Army and Marine Corps, as well as gun tubes for cannons, mortars, and tanks.
The Watervliet Arsenal has been a National Historic Landmark since 1966.
Vliet Street, named for the Dutch word meaning “creek”, is one of the most important streets in old inner-city Milwaukee. As a result of its significance, a number of other towns in Wisconsin also have a Vliet Street. The word is elsewhere unusual as a geographical name, but occurs a few times in upstate New York, dating back tot he Dutch colonial era. The unincorporated community of Vliets, Kansas, is named for its founders, the Van Vliet family.
Vliets, Kansas is a tiny town about 50mi north of Manhattan KS and about 75mi NW of Topeka. It is named after the Dutch family, Van Vliet, who originally owned the site.
A popular history suggests that the Manhattan Cocktail (whiskey, sweet vermouth, and bitters )originated at the Manhattan Club in New York City in the early 1870s, where it was invented by Dr. Iain Marshall for a banquet hosted by Jennie Jerome (Lady Randolph Churchill, mother of Winston) in honor of presidential candidate Samuel J. Tilden.
“Manhattan” has been translated as “island of many hills” from the Algonquin peoples’ Unami language.
In the graphic novel Watchmen, the blue, superpowered and near-omniscient Dr. Manhattan fails to prevent JFK’s assassination but almost single-handedly wins the Vietnam War for President Richard M. Nixon.
Watchmen is the only comic book ever to have appeared on Time’s List of the 100 Best Novels of all time.
Daylight Savings Time began as a joke by Benjamin Franklin. He proposed waking people earlier on bright summer mornings so they might work more during the day and thus save candles. It was introduced in the U.K. in 1917 and then spread around the world.
Benjamin Franklin, the 15th of 17 children of candle maker Josiah Franklin, appears as a precocious Boston child who interacts with Enoch Root in Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver.
Laurence Fishburne has been credited as Larry Fishburne in some of his early movies. One of them was when he played the character Voodoo in the 1986 Kevin Bacon movie, Quicksilver.
Laurence Fishburne was the first black actor to play Shakespeare’s Othello in a major film production. The role had previously been played in blackface by actors including Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier and Anthony Hopkins.
Laurence Fishburne was cast in Apocalypse Now when he was 14, having lied about his age to play a 17 year old. He was 16 & 17 years old when his scenes were actually shot.
Ann Miller lied about her age to play Essie in the movie You Can’t Take It With You. She was 15, and said she was eighteen.
The traditional carnival held annually in the city of Ivrea, Italy commemorates a spirited “Mugnaia” (Miller’s daughter) who supposedly refused to let a local duke exercise his “right of the first night”, and proceeded to chop the duke’s head off and spark a revolution. (The story may or may not haver historical validity, but it’s apparently a good enough reason for a party…)
In 2014 Italy was the fifth-most visited country by international tourists, with 49 million. France was 1st with 84 million, then the US with 75 million, Spain with 65 million, and China was fourth with 56 million.
The travel and tourism industry is one of the world’s largest industries with a global economic contribution of almost 7.6 trillion U.S. dollars in 2014.
In the United States alone, tourism generated nearly $1.5 trillion in economic output in 2013.
According to Forbes magazine the most profitable industry in 2015 was Health Technology. Second was Finance.
Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, the former home of the Pittsburgh Pirates, was located in Schenley Park. The outfield wall was concrete, with no padding, and no warning track to alert outfielders that they were about to collide with it. Bill Mazeroski famously hit a ball over it, and Ralph Kiner hit a lot of them.,