The “Nathan’s Famous” chain of hot dog stands was founded on Coney Island, and sponsors the annual hot dog eating championship every July 4. It has been won the last two years by Joey Chestnut, restoring America’s proper supremacy in its national sport, although barely, over Japan’s diminutive Takeru Kobayashi, aka “The Tsunami”.
An amusement park in Cincinnati is called Coney Island.
Gene Wolfe was nominated for a Nebula Award for his short story “The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories.” At the awards dinner, Isaac Asimov called his name as the winner, but, as Wolfe approached, someone whispered to Asimov and he turned white. Asimov corrected himself and said that the winner was “no award” (i.e., there was no winner that year).
At the dinner afterward someone joked that if Wolfe wanted to win the award, he should write a story called “The Death of Doctor Island.” He wrote it and won. Later, Wolfe wrote “The Doctor of Death Island” and “Death of the Island Doctor.” The four stories were collected in The Wolfe Archipelago.
[del]‘Coney’ (also spelt cony) is an old word for a rabbit. Also a fish (always spelt with the e, AFAIK.)[/del] Dangit!
Isaac Asimov wrote over 500 books, but is perhaps best known for his Foundation and Robot series. Late in life, he wrote a series of books that interlinked the two previously-unconnected science fiction series.
Asimov’s character R. (for “Robot”) Daneel Olivaw appears in both his Robots and Foundation series.
Rosie the Robot, the maid from The Jetsons, was based on Hazel, the maid played by Shirley Booth on a then hit series. Hazel was based on a cartoon that ran in The Saturday Evening Post.
Norman Rockwell published a total of 322 original covers for The Saturday Evening Post over the span of 47 years, beginning in 1916.
Rockwell, who had a #2 hit in 1984 with the song “Somebody’s Watching Me,” was actually Kennedy Gordy, the son of Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr.
Motown singer/writer/producer Smokey Robinson wrote the hit “Tears of a Clown” after hearing the calliope bridge and wondering how to use it in a song.
Calliope was the muse of epic poetry, the daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne, and Homer’s invoked inspiration for the Iliad and the Odyessey.
In the movie Xanadu, Olivia Newton-John plays Kira, a young woman who inspires an artist named Sonny Malone to follow his dream and build a dance club. Kira is actually the Greek muse Terpsichore (the muse of dance).
Newton-John met gaffer/cameraman Patrick McDermott a year after her 1995 divorce from Matt Lattanzi. The couple dated on and off for nine years until he went missing following a 2005 fishing trip off the California coast. Various theories have since circulated as to what happened to him, but police say she was never a suspect.
The rock group Spirit was formed around the father-and-stepson combination of Randy California and Ed Cassidy. California died in 1997, drowning after he rescued his own son from a dangerous ripcurrent.
Randy (Ethan Suplee) was the borderline-retarded brother of Earl Hickey (Jason Lee) in the critically-acclaimed but short-lived NBC comedy My Name Is Earl. Both Suplee and Lee are Scientologists.
Famously, James Earl Jones did not want to be credited as the voice of Darth Vader in Star Wars. At the time, he said it was because he didn’t feel he had done enough work for the billing, but later admitted he didn’t want to be tied to the role at an early stage in his career. He is credited, however, in the 1997 “Special Edition”.
(There are no Roman numerals. Han shot first. You kids get off my lawn.)
Jones’s career was well-established when Star Wars came out in 1977; Jones’s first film role was in Doctor Strangelove in 1964. He also was nominated for an Oscar for The Great White Hope in 1971 (and had won a Tony for the role).
Jones also appeared as the first black President of the United States in the 1972 movie The Man, based on the 1964 novel by Irving Wallace.
Other black presidents in movies have included Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact, Danny Glover in 2012, and a 7 year old Sammy Davis Jr. in a dream sequence in the (woefully racist by modern standards) 1933 musical short comedy Rufus Jones for President.
At seven, Sammy Davis Jr. would be too young to serve as President except in his dreams, since the Constitution defines the minimum age as 35. Theodore Roosevelt was the youngest man to become President, upon the assassination of President William McKinley; John F. Kennedy was the youngest man to be elected President.