On October 15, 1917, Dutch exotic dancer Mata Hari was executed by a firing squad for spying for Germany. Mata Hari was the stage name of Margaretha Geertruida “Margreet” MacLeod (née Zelle). According to an eyewitness account by British reporter Henry Wales, she was not bound and refused a blindfold. A non-commissioned officer after the squad had fired walked up to her body, pulled out his revolver, and shot her in the head purposefully to make sure she was dead.
“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” is a Beatles tune about a serial killer. His silver hammer comes down upon his victims to make sure that they are dead.
In the TV series Get Smart, telephones are concealed in over 50 objects, including a necktie, comb, watch, and a clock. A recurring gag is Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone; to use or answer it, he has to take off his shoe. There were a number of variations on the shoe phone, including being dfisguised as a golf shoe, complete with cleats.Smart’s shoes sometimes contain other devices housed in the heels: an explosive pellet, a smoke bomb, compressed air capsules that propelled the wearer off the ground, and a suicide pill (which Max believes is for the enemy).
Athletes have worn cleats since at least the 1500s. Although there are no images or surviving examples of cleats from that time period, the first written documentation of cleats comes from 1526, when “football boots” were listed in King Henry VIII’s Great Wardrobe. According to researchers, the English monarch ordered the royal cordwainer (shoemaker), Cornelius Johnson, to make him a pair of hand-stitched boots “to play football”. The shoes cost four shillings (about $200 today) and were probably made of especially strong leather.
Cordwainer Smith was the pen-name used by American author Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger for his science fiction works. In 1943, he was sent to China to coordinate military intelligence operations. He later became a close confidant of Chiang Kai-shek. By the end of the war, he had risen to the rank of major. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
During the Civil War, Quartermaster of the Army Montgomery Meigs played a key role in taking over the home of Robert E. Lee in Arlington and developing it into Arlington National Cemetery. Meigs hated Lee for betraying the Union, and ordered burials near the house, all the way up to the front door, to make it politically impossible for disinterment to occur and logistically impossible for Lee to be able to live there again.
Montgomery C. Meigs was born in Augusta, Georgia, and was thus a prominent Southerner to prove true to his military oath and remain loyal to the United States at the outbreak of the Civil War. Others included Winfield Scott and George H. Thomas of Virginia, David Farragut of Tennessee and John A. Winslow of North Carolina.
The New York Yankees’ Dave Winfield was the firt player to make so much money, he played the World Series fo a discount. Winfield’s 1981 regular seasoh salary was $1.3 million, or $8,000 per game. But the players share was only $38,000 for the winning team, and if the best-4-of-7 series went to a fifth game, he’d get less per-game return for those games, than as an everyday player. For most players, the World Series champion players share is more than half the minimum salary for an MLB player’s full season contract. The players share is a percentage of the gate receipts from the first four games of the series.
Since their first championship in 1923, the New York Yankees have won two or more World Series titles in every decade except the 1980s, when they won none. Additionally, they have won at least one American League pennant in every decade since the 1920s. (They have yet to win a pennant or Series in the 2010s.) The Yankees are the only team in either League to win more than three series in a row, winning in four consecutive seasons from 1936 to 1939, and a still MLB record five consecutive seasons from 1949 to 1953.
Only twice in the last century has a National League team won two World Series back-to-back: the Cincinnati Reds in 1976-77, and before that the New York Giants in 1920-21. It has been done four times since the Reds did it, all by American League teasms, the Yankees three times and the Toronto Blue Jays in 1992-3
The original Cincinnati Reds were expelled from the National League in 1880 for continuing to rent out the ballpark on Sundays and not ceasing to sell beer during games. A new team with the same name joined the National League in 1890 from the American Association.
The eight "Chicago Black Sox players of the Chicago White Sox were accused of intentionally losing the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for money from gamblers. The fallout from the scandal resulted in the appointment of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as the first Commissioner of Baseball, granting him absolute control over the sport in order to restore its integrity. Despite acquittals in a public trial in 1921, Judge Landis permanently banned all eight men from professional baseball. Despite requests for reinstatement in the decades that followed (particularly in the case of Shoeless Joe Jackson), the ban remains in force as of 2016.
Judge Landis was named after the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, fought on June 27, 1864, during the Atlanta Campaign of the American Civil War. It was the most significant frontal assault launched by U.S. Army Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s troops against the Confederate army led by Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, ending in a tactical defeat for Federal forces. Johnston soon evacuated his defensive lines, however, and Sherman continued his inexorable march to Atlanta. The fall of that vitally important city is considered decisive in securing President Lincoln’s reelection in November 1864.
Kennesaw, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, is the only US city to enact a municipal law requiring that eveyr head of household keep a fiream and ammunition in the home. There were numerous exceptions that would have made the ceremonial law un-enforceable, and no record of the 1982 law ever being enforced.
Gen. Joseph E. Johnston was appointed Quartermaster of the Army in 1860. When his native state, Virginia seceded from the Union in 1861, Johnston resigned his commission as a brigadier general in the regular army, the highest-ranking U.S. Army officer to do so. He was succeeded as Quartermaster by Montgomery Meigs.
[Elendil’s Heir, I didn’t know that Meigs was also a Southerner; that may partly explain his deep bitterness towards Robert E. Lee, in contrast to Northerners, like Joshua Chamberlain from Maine who was responsible for the salute to the surrendering Confederate soldiers at Appomattox]
(Yes, and Meigs also lost his son during the war, which further embittered him: Montgomery C. Meigs - Wikipedia)
Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, forced back again and again during William T. Sherman’s Atlanta campaign, was self-conscious about his baldness and usually wore hats, even while dining indoors.
The French term for a bat is chauve souris, literally a “bald mouse”. Apparently this comes from Latin, calva sorix which was based on the Greek, cawa sorix, meaning “owl mouse”.
Ionesco’a absurdist drama, La cantatrice chauve, does not actually feature a bald prima donna.
The only mention of her is when the Fire Chief is leaving at the end of the play, disappointed that there is no fire to put out in the Smith household. At the door, he turns and says, “Eh bien - et la cantatrice chauve?”, which creates an air of unease for the other characters, the Smiths and the Martins. The Fire Chief then leaves, with his question hanging in the air.
Warren Burger, Chief Justice of the United States, and Associate Justice Harry Blackmun were nicknamed “the Minnesota Twins” early on, as both were from that state. They were friends and often voted together on the cases which came before the U.S. Supreme Court. Blackmun became increasingly liberal as time passed, however, and voted accordingly; their friendship cooled.
During the 70s and 80s, the student run night-time cafeteria at Yale Law School was known as the Burger Court.