Future NBA stars Chris Webber, Jalen Rose, and Juwan Howard, along with Jimmy King and Ray Jackson, formed the Fab Five, an all-freshmen team that won the 1992 NCAA basketball title for the University of Michigan. Because coach Bill Frieder accepted the job at Arizona State after the season, he was replaced by assistant Steve Fisher for the tournament, making Fisher the only coach to win the title without ever having coached a regular season game.
The Phantom of the Opera’s initial logo had the mask and a white gloved hand holding a rose. However, Andrew Lloyd Webber nixed the design, feeling it was too close to the one for his failed show Jeeves
The Fab Five came close but lost the championship game to Duke in 1992. Then in 1993 Michigan lost the championship game again, this time to UNC.
In 1989, Michigan and Steve Fisher did win the championship. That was the team with Glen Rice.
Tim Rice came up with the ideas for all three of the shows he wrote with Andrew Lloyd Webber: Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita.
Michigan basketball player Chris Webber never won an NCAA championship. When he lost the championship game in his sophomore year to UNC in his second and final college year, he was bringing the ball upcourt with 11 seconds left in the game and his team down, 73-71. He forgot that his team was out of time outs. He called time out to regroup and plan for the final shot to either win the game with a 3, or tie it with a 2.
The resulting technical foul effectively ended his chances. Webber went on to a strong NBA career, winning Rookie of the Year, and being a five-time NBA All Star and five-time All-NBA player.
Webber’s father eventually made light of the timeout gaffe and drives his car with Michigan license plates saying TIMEOUT.
The meeting of the Three Witches opens Macbeth with thunder and lightning in a deserted place. They exit chanting,
Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air.
The US Marine Corps’ LCAC (or, “ell kak”) is the hover craft for transporting personnel and material over water and flat land. LCAC stands for Landing Craft Air Cushion, and they are used for amphibious assaults. The LCACs have been deployed since 1986, but unfortunately for me and having served from 1980-1993, I’ve never ridden in one. But we were a 155-mm artillery unit and I don’t think the LCACs carried the M198 towed howitzers that we used. LCACs have a crew of 5 and can carry 180 Marines.
The whoopee cushion was invented in the 1920s by the JEM Rubber Co. of Toronto, Canada, by employees who were experimenting with scrap sheets of rubber. The owner of the company approached Samuel Sorenson Adams, the inventor of numerous practical jokes and owner of S.S. Adams Co., with the newly invented item. Adams said that the item was “too vulgar” and would never sell. JEM Rubber offered the idea to the Johnson Smith Company which sold it with great success. S.S. Adams Co. later released its own version, but called it the “Razzberry Cushion.”
U.S.Patent Number 4,344,142 claims a computer-controlled process for the vulcanization of rubber and became an important precedent in patent law when the application was approved by the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision (Diamond, Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks v. Diehr, et al., 1981).
The patent described a computer (not the applicant’s invention), a thermocouple (invented 150 years earlier), a formula for predicting when the rubber cooking was finished (discovered 100 years earlier), a timer, a door opener, and an unpatentable mathematrical algorithm. Although no piece of the invention was patentable, five Justices found that the combination was obviously “non-obvious” since no one had patented it before.
Diamond v. Diehr led to a flood of software patents in the 1980’s. An inventor who wrote
*1. I claim the mathematical algorithm which …*simply needed to insert six words to change his claim from algorithm to apparatus:
1. I claim a digital computing apparatus which implements the mathematical algorithm which …(Patent attorneys charged about $900 each for these words, but as a promotion would sell you all six for a flat $5000. 
)
The legal basis for the United States patent system is Article 1, Section 8, wherein the powers of Congress are defined.
It states, in part:
"The Congress shall have Power...To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries".Author Louisa Mae Alcott was born on her father’s 33rd birthday, and died two days after he did. Amos Bronson Alcott lead a very interesting life, and was either (or maybe both) very progressive and/or a total crazy.
In addition to the Little Women series, Louisa Mae wrote some very scary stories.
Tina Blacker was 33 years old when she starred on the Gilligan’s Island TV show, in the role of Ginger Grant, as Tina Louise.
Burke’s Law was a US TV series starring Gene Barry as Amos Burke, a LAPD homicide detective who was independently wealthy and who traveled to the crime scenes in his personal, chauffeured Rolls Royce. Two of the episodes of the show were written by Harlan Ellison; in one, he created the character of “Cordwainer Bird” (played by Sammy Davis, Jr.). Ellison would use the character’s name on any script of his that he felt was meddled with. Tina Louise had a guest appearance in the series.
Longtime and award-winning science fiction author Harlan Ellison’s screenplay for a movie version of Isaac Asimov’s short-story collection *I, Robot *was never produced, but is available as an illustrated book (and is very good IMHO).
N/M–ninja’d
Harlan Ellison has a reputation for being abrasive and argumentative. He has generally agreed with this assessment, and a dust jacket from one of Ellison’s books described him as “possibly the most contentious person on Earth”. Ellison has filed numerous grievances and attempted lawsuits; as part of a dispute about fulfillment of a contract, he once sent 213 bricks to a publisher postage due, followed by a dead gopher via fourth-class mail.
Harlan County, Kentucky, location for the Justifed TV series, was famous for the Harlan County War in 1931-32 between forces led by Sheriff J.H. Blair and coal miners attempting to organize. Pete Seeger sang a song about the Harlan County War.
Harlan Ellison wrote one of my favorite episodes of STAR TREK (the original series), titled The City on the Edge of Forever. It starred Joan Collins in the role of Edith Keeler in 1930s New York City when Dr. McCoy, and then later Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, traveled through a time portal to there and then.
The script needed many rewrites to fit the story into a 1 hour episode, and to make it “more STAR TREK” (Ellison’s script had Kirk wanting to sacrifice the Enterprise crew for his love for Edith Keeler), so much so that Ellison became unhappy with it and wanted to put a pen name, Cordwainer Bird, to it. But he relented.
Many critics consider this to be the best episode of *STAR TREK (TOS).
*
The name Edith comes the Old English name Eadgyð, derived from the elements ead “wealth, fortune” and gyð “war”. It was popular among Anglo-Saxon royalty, being borne for example by Saint Eadgyeth;, the daughter of King Edgar the Peaceful. The name remained common after the Norman conquest. It became rare after the 15th century, but was revived in the 19th century, when there was a renewal of interest in the Anglo -Saxons due to books such as Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe.
Not in play:
Louisa May Alcott (not Mae, as spelled above) took her middle name from her mother’s family, the Mays, early New England settlers. She based “Mr. Lawrence” in *Little Women * on her grandfather, Colonel Joseph May.