Charles Dickens was, in one story, inspired to write his most famous book by visiting a lonely churchyard in Scotland in which he found the grave of Ebenezer Scroggie, a dealer in corn whose stone read “Meal Man” which the dyslexic Dickens read as “Mean Man”. “Corn” in Britain means any kind of grain, not just maize.
Charles Dickens toured the U.S., doing public readings for pay, but didn’t always enjoy the experience. When his Lake Erie steamship docked in Cleveland, Ohio, he was not in the mood to be greeted by a committee of local worthies, so he stayed in his cabin until they left.
What is now the Golden Lamb Inn, still in business in Lebanon, OH, on what was once the main road between Cincinnati and Columbus, claims to have once hosted Charles Dickens on what must have been that same speaking tour in 1842. However, he left and found other accommodations when he was declined alcohol service.
Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati, the Great American Insurance Group, has been home to the Reds since 2003. Its address is 100 Joe Nuxhall Way, a street named after the left-handed pitcher who played from 1944 to 1966. Nuxhall held the team’s record for career games pitched (484) from 1965 to 1975, and still holds the team mark for left-handers.
Nuxhall also has the record for being the youngest player ever to appear in the majors, at 15. That was during the war, when the personnel-depleted majors also found room for a one-armed player (outfielder Pete Gray of the St. Louis Browns). Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis had asked President Franklin Roosevelt if he advised shutting down baseball for the duration, only to receive the “Green Light” letter telling him that soldiers and war plant workers still needed diversions.
AAGPBL, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was a women’s professional baseball league from 1943 to 1954. The 1992 motion picture A League of Their Own tells a fictionalized account of the Rockford Peaches. The real Rockford Peaches won four championships, the most ever in the league.
The Atlanta Falcons joined the NFL in 1965 as an expansion team. When choosing a nickname for the team, fans were invited to submit their choices and then vote on their favorite. The four finalists, based on the vote of the fans, were the Falcons, the Confederates, the Vibrants, and the Peaches.
In China, the peach blossom is usually associated with love and the Chinese believe that the flower will bring opportunities in love, as referred to in the phrase “peach blossom luck.”
The fiddle tune “Orange Blossom Special”, about the passenger train of the same name, was written by Ervin T. Rouse in 1938. It has been referred to as the fiddle player’s national anthem. While bluegrass performers tend to play it as strictly an instrumental, country legend Johnny Cash sang the lyrics, and replaced the fiddle parts with two harmonicas and a saxophone.
In 1992, President George H.W. Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Johnny Carson, for his television work. Carson was the second ever winner in the Television category. In 1989, Lucille Ball was the first, and hers was awarded posthumously.
USN Lt. j.g. George H.W. Bush was one of nine TBM Avenger pilots shot down in an attack on the island of Chichi Jima in September 1944. He crashed at sea and was rescued by a submarine, while the others crashed on land or near it. All of the others were captured by Japanese forces, tortured, and either beheaded with swords or repeatedly stabbed with bamboo stakes, and four were eaten.
A full-size replica of GHW Bush’s TBM Avenger hangs from the ceiling of his Presidential Library on the Texas A&M campus in College Station. Those Grumman Avengers are surprisingly big, too.
Grumman was a world of the Imperium in the Dune writings of American science fiction author Frank Herbert.
Grumman Aircraft was founded in NY NY by Leroy Grumman and several others from the Loening Aircraft Engineering Corporation on 05 Dec 1929 — only 2 months after the Great Depression started. Leroy Grumman was the largest investor. Grumman aircraft were prominent in the film *Top Gun * (1986).
Upon its release, Top Gun was an instant box-office hit. It went on to become the highest-domestic-grossing movie released in 1986, grossing over 176 million bucks in the United States. (Crocodile Dundee was second, with 174 million in gross domestic sales.)
Despite its commercial success, Top Gun won only one Academy Award, for Best Original Song, Take My Breath Away.
Top Gun, in which the Grumman F-14 Tomcat was featured, was far from the first film to glorify US naval aviation. Effectively the silent Top Gun was 1929’s The Flying Fleet, in which Ramon Novarro and Ralph Graves act as if they both want Anita Page (instead of each other 
) while moving on from Annapolis to heroism in their F-2B biplanes.
At the time of its retirement from U.S. service in 2006, the F-14 Tomcat was the only plane in the world that could fire the AIM-54 Phoenix, the fastest and (probably) longest-ranged air-to-air missile ever put into operational use. Both were still effective, but too expensive to continue using.
No Phoenix ever actually destroyed an enemy aircraft.
Since its retirement by the US Navy, the only military force in the world still operating the F-14 (although barely) is the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force. Their fleet was purchased by the Shah’s government before its overthrow.
Shah (which literally means King of Kings) was the title of the Persian emperors. It includes rulers of the first Persian Empire, as well as rulers of succeeding dynasties throughout history until the twentieth century and the Imperial House of Pahlavi. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran from 1941 to 1979, was the last ruler to hold the title of Shah.
The chess term checkmate derives from the Persian shah mat, literally “the king is helpless”.