Land’s End to John o’ Groats is the route along the whole length of the island of Great Britain between Land’s End, Cornwall, the southwesternmost point, and John o’ Groats in northeastern Scotland. The traditional distance by road was measured at 874 miles, but newer route calculations have measured it at 814 miles. The record for a run along the route is 9 days.
In the Nine Taylors by Sayers, she gives the inscription on each of the bells in the belfry of Fenchurch St Paul. One of them is inscribed:
“From Land’s End
To John o’ Groats
There is no bell
That can better my note.”
Dick Groat was an outstanding multi-sport athlete in the 1950s. As a college basketball player at Duke, Groat was named the Helms Foundation Player of the Year in 1951 and the UPI National Player of the Year in 1952 after setting an NCAA record with 839 points. For his pro career, he turned to baseball, and was named the National League MVP in 1960, the year he led the Pittsburgh Pirates to a World Series win.
Pittsburgh won the 1960 World Series despite being outscored by the New York Yankees by a margin of 55-27. Incredibly, that is the largest margin by which a team has ever outscored another in a World Series… and the team with fewer runs won.
Not in play: Pittsburgh won Game 7 of the 1960 World Series on a walk-off homer by Bill Mazeroski in the bottom of the ninth, after the Yanks had tied the game with 2 runs in the top half of the inning.
Dick Groat also won a world championship with the Cardinals in 1964.
In play: The fewest runs scored by the winning team in the World Series is 9, by the 1918 Boston Red Sox. They defeated the Chicago Cubs 4 games to 2. The Cubs outscored the Sox in the series 10-9.
The fewest runs scored by a losing team in the World Series is 2, by the 1966 Los Angeles Dodgers, who were swept by the Baltimore Orioles in 4 games. The Orioles scored 3 runs in the top of the first of Game 1, which was more runs than the Dodgers would score in the 4-game series.
The Boston Red Sox did not win a World Series between their wins in 1918 and 2004. This drought was called the Curse of tne Bambino, for their selling Babe Ruth to the NY Yankees in 1919. Prior to that the Red Sox had won 3 of the previous 6 World Series.
Bill Mazeroski’s cousin was the Clerk of Court of the Court of Common Pleas of Coshocton County, Ohio in 1994. And I met her!
ETA - ninja’d! She did not play for Red Sox, either.
Baseball’s first openly all-professional team was founded in 1866 and became fully professional in 1869: the Red Stockings of Cincinnati Ohio.
According to this Sporcle quiz, in the ‘Big 4’ professional sports leagues (MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL), there are 12 teams that contain a color in their name: Boston Red Sox, Chicago White Sox, Cincinnati Reds, Toronto Blue Jays, Golden State Warriors, Cleveland Browns, Green Bay Packers, Washington Redskins, Chicago Blackhawks, Columbus Blue Jackets, Detroit Red Wings, and St Louis Blues.
For his 52nd birthday, Franklin Roosevelt hosted a toga party in the White House. He dressed as Caesar and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt dressed as the Oracle of Delphi, with guests also donning white robes and Grecian headbands.
“What creature walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening?” — was the riddle that the Oracle of Delphi asked Oedipus Rex. Oedipus Rex answered, “Man.”
Note: Bullitt, that was the riddle of the Sphinx that Opedius solved.
In play:
The Pythia was the name of the High Priestess of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi who also served as the oracle, commonly known as the Oracle of Delphi. The Oracle emerged pre-eminent by the end of 7th century BC and would continue to be consulted until the 4th century AD
In his short story “Telemachus, Friend”, O. Henry had his narrator describe his old friend “… We was friends an amount you could hardly guess at. We was friends in business, and we let our amicable qualities lap over and season our hours of recreation and folly. We certainly had days of Damon and nights of Pythias.”
Telemachus was the son of Odysseus and Penelope, In Greek myth, he helped his father, returned incognito from the Trojan Wars, trap and slay his mother’s many pushy suitors.
New Orleans is the only city in the US that has a Telemachus Street. Seemingly, you can say that about practically any street in New Orleans, such as Duels, Magazine, Tchoupitoulas and Terpsichore.
Magazine Street in New Orleans was probably named from a munition magazine located in this vicinity during“ the 18th-century colonial period. It may also have been named after the Spanish word magazin or almazon which means warehouse for exporting items.
New Orleans was, by a very wide margin, the most populous city in the Confederacy, and the Union captured it in spring 1862.
The loss of New Orleans to a naval squadron commanded by Flag Officer David G. Farragut (there were no admirals in the U.S. Navy at the time) marked the only time that Confederate President Jefferson Davis was seen to weep in response to news from the front during the entire Civil War.
“The Battle of New Orleans” is a song written by Jimmy Driftwood. The song describes the War of 1812 Battle of New Orleans from the perspective of an American soldier. Driftwood was a school principal in Arkansas with a passion for history, and he set an account of the battle to the music of a well-known American fiddle tune in an attempt to get students interested in learning history. Driftwood eventually was given a recording contract by RCA, for whom he recorded 12 songs in 1958, including “The Battle of New Orleans.”
While playing at the Chicago bar “The Quiet Knight” in 1971, songwriter and musician Steve Goodman saw Arlo Guthrie and asked to sit in and play a song for him. Guthrie grudgingly agreed on the condition that Goodman buy him a beer first; Guthrie would then listen to Goodman for as long as it took Guthrie to drink the beer. Goodman played “City of New Orleans”, which Guthrie liked enough that he asked to record it. His version was a hit, as was Willie Nelson’s 1985 version, which won a posthumous Grammy for Goodman, who died of leukemia in 1984.