The names “Looney Tunes” and “Merrie Melodies” were inspired by Walt Disney’s earlier and shorter-lived “Silly Symphonies”, which ran from 1929 to 1939. Silly Symphonies did not feature continuing characters like Mickey Mouse but did see the introduction of Donald Duck in 1934. They won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film seven times; Looney Tunes won two Academy Awards, and Merrie Melodies won three.
Former Los Angeles Laker star Kobe Bryant won an Oscar in 2018 for Best Animated Short, for a film based on his poem “Dear Basketball”, which he wrote on the occasion of his retirement from the NBA. Bryant is the son of former Philadelphia 76er Joe “Jelly Bean” Bryant, and was named for his father’s favorite Japanese restaurant.
“The Big O” is Oscar Robertson, retired NBA guard for the Milwaukee Bucks who played from 1960 to 1974. Robertson was a 6’5" point guard who, in the 1970-1971 season, helped bring the only NBA title in Bucks history.
Oscar Robertson grew up in Indianapolis and attended Crispus Attucks High School, an all-black high school. As a sophomore in 1954, he starred on an Attucks team that lost in the state quarterfinals to eventual state champions Milan, whose story would later be the basis of the classic 1986 movie Hoosiers. In the following two years, Crispus Attucks went 62–1 and won state titles both years.
Cool trivia, Railer13).
Jimmy Chitwood, the star shooting guard character in the movie Hoosiers (1986), was based on Bobby Plump of that 1954 Milan (“MY-len”) High team. Similar to real life, Jimmy Chitwood hit the last shot to win the state championship, and Bobby Plump made the last shot to win it in 1954 for Milan.
Today in Indianapolis’s Broad Ripple district is Bobby Plump’s bar, called Plump’s Last Shot, and its walls are adorned with his basketball memorabilia.
Ripple ice cream flavors became very populsr in the mid 20th century. They consisted of marbled streaks of fruit or chocolate syrup running through vanilla ice cream. The form declined in popularity when modern mass production of ice cream made it more difficult to inject the ripple into the product. Most ice cream manufacturers no longer off ripples in their flavor line.
Ripple was a type of flavored fortified wines produced by E & J Gallo Winery. It is no longer being produced. Flavored fortified wines are inexpensive wines that typically have an alcohol content between 13% and 20% alcohol by volume. They are usually made of grape and citrus wine, sugar, and an artificial flavor. Other well-known brands are Night Train, Thunderbird, and MD 20/20, often called “Mad Dog”.
Not in play: Brings back some rather unpleasant memories.
In play:
Dick “Night Train” Lane, a native of Austin, Texas, played professional football in the National Football League for 14 years as a defensive back for the Los Angeles Rams, Chicago Cardinals, and Detroit Lions.
As a rookie in 1952, Lane had 14 interceptions, a mark that remains an NFL record more than 65 years later.
Al Brenner holds the CFL record for most interceptions in a season: 15, while playing with the Hamilton Ti-Cats.
In one game, he intercepted Joe Theismann four times.
“Slingin” Sammy Baugh holds an NFL record likely never to be broken: in 1943, at the age of 29, Baugh led the league in these three categories
— passing: 133 completions, 239 attempts, and 55.6% completion percentage
— punting average, 45.9 yards per punt
— interceptions (passes picked off) as a DB, 11 interceptions made
Sammy Baugh’s 1943 season is considered to be the best-ever NFL season by a single player.
(And I called Rotan TX and spoke to the great player, back in the early 1990s.)
(And in2016 I visited Rotan TX and paid my respects at his gravestone.)
British actor Martin Freeman has played a porn stand-in (Love Actually), an American murderer (Fargo), a British doctor (Sherlock), a reluctant adventurer (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Hobbit), and a CIA agent (Black Panther), among many other roles.
ETA - new page!: He has never played anyone named Sammy.
Freeman John Dyson FRS (born 15 December 1923) is an English-born American theoretical physicist and mathematician. He is known for his work in quantum electrodynamics, solid-state physics, astronomy and nuclear engineering. He theorized several concepts that bear his name, such as Dyson’s transform, Dyson tree, Dyson series, and Dyson sphere. Dyson’s eldest daughter, Esther, is a digital technology consultant and investor; she has been called “the most influential woman in all the computer world.”
According to the Hebrew Bible, Esther was a Jewish queen of the Persian king Ahasuerus. The Jews established an annual feast, the feast of Purim, in memory of their deliverance from their planned destruction due to the intervention of Esther and her cousin/adopted father Mordecai.
Fred Sanford (played by Redd Foxx) once told his sister-in-law, Lamont’s Aunt Esther (played by LaWanda Page) “I’m gonna stick your face in a pile of dough and make gorilla cookies!”
Fred Vinson, Chief Justice of the United States, and his friend President Harry S. Truman frequently played poker together.
US Representative from Georgia Carl Vinson (1883-1981) was known as the Father of the Two-Ocean Navy. The Two-Ocean Navy Act of 1940, also known as the Vinson-Walsh Act (for Carl Vinson and David Walsh, who chaired the Naval Affairs Committee), grew the US Navy by 70% and is the largest naval procurement bill in U.S. history. The act authorized procuring 18 aircraft carriers, 2 Iowa-class battleships, 5 Montana-class battleships, 15,000 aircraft, and much more. The act allowed the Navy to establish sizable forces in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth’s oceans. It covers about 46% of Earth’s water surface and about one-third of its total surface area, making it larger than all of Earth’s land area combined. The Pacific was first sighted by Europeans when Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 and discovered the great “southern sea” which he named ‘Mar del Sur’. The ocean’s current name was coined by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan during the Spanish circumnavigation of the world in 1521, as he encountered favorable winds on reaching the ocean. He called it ‘Mar Pacífico’, which in both Portuguese and Spanish means “peaceful sea”.
Although Balboa actually was the first European to see the Pacific from the Panama Isthmus, Keats chose to give the credit to “stout Cortez” in his magnificent poem, “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer.”
P.G. Wodehouse, who frequently used poetical allusions in his works, was once criticised for referring to Cortez, by a well-informed reader who wrote “You big stiff! It wan’t Cortez, it was Balboa!”
Plum’s defence was that “if Cortez was good enough for Keats, he is good enough for me. Besides, even if it was Balboa, the Pacific was open to being stared at about that time, and I see no reason why Cortez should not have had a look as well.”
In the poem On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, in which he mentions Cortez and the Pacific, Keats also mentions a new planet. That planet was Uranus, which had been discovered in 1781 by Herschel, who proposed the name Georgium Sidus (George’s Star), or the “Georgian Planet” in honour of his new patron, King George III. Much to the delight of middle-schoolers for generations after, the name did not achieve widespread use.