George Foreman won a gold medal as a heavyweight boxer in the 1968 Olympics. He turned professional the next year and won the heavyweight crown in 1973 with a second-round knockout of Joe Frazier. The next year, however, he lost the title to Muhammad Ali in “The Rumble in the Jungle.” It wasn’t until 1994 when, at age 45, Foreman came out of retirement and regained a portion of the heavyweight championship by knocking out 27-year-old Michael Moorer.
In 1999 Foreman sold the naming rights of the George Foreman Grill for $138 million.
The Music group Wham!’s toured China in April 1985, the first visit to China by a Western popular music act.Before Wham!’s appearance in China, many kinds of music in the country were forbidden. One of the Wham! managers later admitted that he used cunning tactics to sabotage the efforts of rock band Queen to be the first to play in China: he made two brochures for the Chinese authorities – one featuring Wham! fans as pleasant middle-class youngsters, and one portraying Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury in typically flamboyant poses. The Chinese opted for Wham!
Celebration, a tribute to Andrew Lloyd Webber, was held in Beijing in 2002. The finale was Elaine Paige and a group of Chinese school children singing Lloyd Webber’s 1992 Barcelona Olympic Theme Friends for Life, partially in Chinese
The planned community (with all that implies) of Celebration, Florida was developed by Walt Disney Productions to realize what was Walt’s original vision for EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. Downtown Celebration’s post office was designed by Michael Graves, the adjacent Welcome Center by Philip Johnson, and the Celebration Health building by Robert A. M. Stern. Other nearby buildings are designed by well-known architects including: Charles Moore (Preview Center), Graham Gund (Bohemian Hotel), Cesar Pelli (movie theatre), Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (SunTrust Bank).
The invention of the graham cracker was inspired by the teachings of Sylvester Graham (1794-1851), a preacher who focused on the sinfulness of carnal desire. He believed that physical lust was harmful to the body and caused such dire maladies as spinal diseases, epilepsy, and insanity, as well as such lesser ailments as headaches and indigestion. Graham believed a strict vegetarian diet would aid in suppressing carnal urges. His famed “Graham bread” was fashioned from the coarsely ground wheat flour he espoused.
Graham Land is the portion of the Antarctic Peninsula that lies north of a line joining Cape Jeremy and Cape Agassiz. It is named after Sir James R. G. Graham, First Lord of the Admiralty at the time of John Biscoe’s exploration of the west side of of what became Graham Land in 1832. It is claimed by Argentina (as part of Argentine Antarctica), Britain (as part of the British Antarctic Territory) and Chile (as part of the Chilean Antarctic Territory).
Ushuaia, on Tierra del Fuego in Argentina, claims to be “the Southernmost city in the world”. It is a popular spot for travelers to Antarctica, with boats making the trip daily during the summer, November through March.
Although he disgruntledly denied it and there is no record of it, a Civil War story has it that Union Gen. John Pope datelined a message to President Lincoln from his “headquarters in the saddle” - and that Lincoln commented that Pope “has his headquarters where his hindquarters ought to be.” After losing to Lee at Second Manassas, Pope was transferred to Indian country.
Both Morris West’s The Shoes of the Fisherman and Robert Harris’s Conclave are novels about meetings of the Roman Catholic Church’s College of Cardinals and the election of a new Pope.
China produces more shoes per year (estimated 12.6 billion per year), more than the next nine producers combined (India, Brazil, Vietnam, Indonesia, Pakistan, Thailand, Mexico, Italy, and Turkey are the others).
The turkey bird is native to the Americas, probably originating in Mexico. There are two theories for the derivation of the name “turkey” for this bird, according to Columbia University professor of Romance languages Mario Pei. One theory is that when Europeans first encountered turkeys in America, they incorrectly identified the birds as a type of guineafowl, which were already being imported into Europe by Turkey merchants via Constantinople and were therefore nicknamed Turkey coqs. The name of the North American bird thus became “turkey fowl” or “Indian turkeys”, which was then shortened to just “turkeys”. The other theory arises from turkeys coming to England from the Americas via merchant ships from the Middle East where they were domesticated successfully. Again the importers lent the name to the bird: because these merchants were called “Turkey merchants” as much of the area was part of the Ottoman Empire. Hence the name “Turkey birds” or, soon thereafter, “turkeys”.
“The Merchant of Venice” was included in the Comedies of the First Folio.
Given its subject matter, nowadays it is considered more in the nature of the “problem plays” of Shakespeare’s later period, such as “Measure for Measure” and “All’s Well that Ends Well”.
Mariana, a minor character in Shakespeare’s play “Measure for Measure” was the inspiration for Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “Mariana in the Moated Grange”. This poem, as well as others by Tennyson, inspired the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who painted the subject of the forsaken Mariana waiting for her lover. The paintings by John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti are the best known of many.