“Winter is coming” is the motto of House Stark in George R.R. Martin’s *A Song of Ice and Fire *series of books, brought to the small screen by HBO as Game of Thrones.
In the Marvel Comics universe, Tony Stark is a billionaire business magnate, playboy, and scientist, who suffers a serious chest injury during a kidnapping in which his captors attempt to force him to build a weapon of mass destruction. Instead, Stark creates a powered suit of armor to save his life and escape. Later, Stark improves his suit with weapons and other technological devices he designs, and uses it and later versions to protect the world as Iron Man, concealing his true identity.
In 1953, on 01 October, HMH Publishing Company was incorporated. Its first magazine was published in December 1953. It had Marilyn Monroe on the cover and sold more than 50,000 copies.
The company owner was Hugh Hefner, and the magazine’s name was Playboy.
Magazine cover pic: Playboy - Wikipedia
James Monroe was the last of the Virginia dynasty of Presidents, and the last Founding Father to serve as President.
The last dynasty to rule China was the Qing, or Manchu, dynasty, which was overthrown in 1912 by Sun Yat-Sen’s rebellion and replaced by the Republic of China. The last emperor was Pu Yi, who was reinstalled by Japan as its puppet ruler of Manchuria during that region’s occupation.
Fu Manchu was a pulp villain from the works of Sax Rohmer. He has appeared in books, comics, and movies, though less as time goes on, as the characterization is considered offensive. He’s most associated today with the long style of mustache that bears his name.
Richard Rohmer is a Canadian general and lawyer who is also a novelist. His novel ''Ultimatum", set in the aftermath of the Oil Crisis of the early 1970s, was a Canadian best-seller. Its premise was that the United States President gave an ultimatum to Canada to be annexed because of Canada’s oil wealth.
Ernest Alexander “E. A.” Cruikshank was a Canadian Brigadier General who served with canadian troops in France during World War I. However, he is better known as first Chairman of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada.
The first graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point who has played in Major League Baseball is Chris Rowley, a pitcher for the Toronto Blue Jays, who play in Toronto, Canada.
Babe Ruth’s first professional home run (not counting spring training) came at Hanlan’s Point Stadium in the Toronto islands, for the Providence Grays against the Toronto Maple Leafs, on September 5, 1914. Hanlan’s Point is now the site of a clothing-optional beach adjacent to Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport.
On July 27, 1921, University of Toronto researchers led by Frederick Banting proved that the hormone insulin regulates blood sugar. Banting and John James Rickard Macleod shared the 1923 Nobel Prize (Medicine) for the discovery.
Warren G. Harding, a Republican, took office as President of the United States on March 4, 1921, having defeated James M. Cox - like Harding a newspaper publisher from Ohio, but a Democrat - for the job. Cox’s running mate was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in 1932 rose to some small political prominence in his own right.
Japanese soldier Takeichi Nishi died in defense of Iwo Jima in 1945. His was a main character in Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima (2006). In the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, that same Takeichi Nishi won the gold medal in equestrian for individual show jumping. To this day, it remains Japan’s only gold medal in that equestrian event.
Tokyo has been chosen to host the Summer Olympics three times, for the 1940, 1964 and 2020 games. In 1936, when Tokyo was chosen, it became the first non-Western city to win an Olympic bid. However, when the Second Sino-Japanese war broke out in 1937, members of the Japanese Diet moved to forfeit the games; the forfeiture was officially announced in July 1938.
Alex Trebek has been hosting Jeopardy! since 1984. Jeopardy! first aired in 1964.
Kenneth Wayne “Ken” Jennings III holds the record for the longest winning streak on the U.S. syndicated game show *Jeopardy! * and as being the second highest-earning contestant in game show history. In 2004, Jennings won 74 Jeopardy! games (in a row) before he was defeated by challenger Nancy Zerg on his 75th appearance. His total earnings on Jeopardy! were $3,196,300.
People are still debating whether Ken Jennings’s question to the Jeopardy question “This term for a long-handled gardening tool can also mean an immoral pleasure seeker” — “What is a hoe?” — was really, as it was judged to be, incorrect. (Yes, “rake” might be the more accepted answer, but did Jennings get it wrong?)
In one Corner Gas episode, Mayor Fitzy’s gramma proposes that the town of Dog River needs a large roadside attraction to put it on the tourist map. Given the agricultural history of the region, she suggests building the world’s biggest hoe.
Local lore in Saskatchewan is that this episode has its roots in an actual proposal in Brent Butt’s home town.
The Oregon Trail, really a network of trails instead of one single trail, followed major rivers from its start in Independence MO to the Willamette Valley OR. Those major rivers include the Platte, North Platte, Snake, and Columbia Rivers.
On April 6, 1808, John Jacob Astor established the American Fur Company. His Columbia River trading post at Fort Astoria was the first US community on the Pacific coast, for which he was granted permission by President Thomas Jefferson. He later (1810-1812) financed the overland Astor Expedition to reach the outpost. Members of the expedition were to discover South Pass, through which hundreds of thousands of settlers on the Oregon, Mormon, and California trails passed through the Rocky Mountains. Astor was a German-born American fur trader and investor who created the first trust in the US and is said to have become the richest person in the world, having invested in large tracts of New York City.