Vassar College in Poughkeepsie is one of the historic Seven Sisters, the first elite female colleges in the U.S. It is the only one of the seven that became coeducational (in 1969). Of the other six “sisters”, Radcliffe merged with Harvard and then became the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (meaning that it no longer accepts undergraduate students but has graduate fellows). Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Wellesley are still women’s colleges.
“Did you ever pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?” As Elvis tells us, that line came from Gene Hackman’s character, Popeye Doyle in The French Connection (1971).
That movie had an epic car chase scene through the streets of NYC. According to Road & Track magazine (and IMDB), the chase scene was filmed without obtaining the proper city permits. There were some minor controls in place by the movie crew, but at times the chase continued beyond areas where traffic control measures were in place. At one point a crash with a white Ford at an intersection was actually a civilian’s car – the driver inadvertently entered the chase scene and got hit. They included the scene because of its realism. (no shit)
Road & Track site: https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/entertainment/videos/a24683/the-french-connection-chase-was-shot-on-uncleared-public-streets/
For the movie Blues Brothers, producers purchased dozens of vehicles including 12 Bluesmobiles, over 60 police cars, and 6 Ford Pintos (for the Nazis). One Bluesmobile was specially built by a mechanic just to fall apart at the end of the movie’s final car chase—a visual gag many months and many thousands of dollars in the making.
In one of the more memorable scenes of the iconic 1980 film, the title characters drive through shopping mall with police not far behind as shocked shoppers run for safety and the whole place ends up trashed. The memorable moment took place in Harvey, Illinois’s Dixie Square Mall. It had long been abandoned but was set up for the movie. And after the brothers left it in shambles, the crew left town without even cleaning it up.
The movie First Man (2018), due to be released this coming October, is about the life of Neil Armstrong and stars Ryan Gosling in the lead role.
Gratuitous trivia: Neil Armstrong flew over 200 different types of aircraft.
Trailer: First Man - Trailer (HD) - YouTube
Comment: looks interesting and I want to see it, but… Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong? Seriously?
In the Tom Hanks-produced HBO series “From the Earth to the Moon”, which used the title of the Jules Verne novel, Neil Armstrong was played by Tony Goldwyn, grandson of MGM mogul Sam Goldwyn. Bryan Cranston played Buzz Aldrin. Goldwyn went on to play President Fitzgerald Grant on “Scandal”.
Mooning is the act of displaying one’s bare buttocks by lowering the backside of one’s trousers and underpants, usually while bending over. While better known as an act of protest by students in the 1960’s-70’s, it has a long history.
In 80 AD, Flavius Josephus recorded the first known incident of mooning. Josephus recorded that in 66 AD, at around the beginning of the First Roman–Jewish War, a soldier in the Roman army mooned Jewish pilgrims at the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem who had gathered for Passover, and “spake such words as you might expect upon such a posture” causing a riot in which youths threw stones at the soldiers, who then called in reinforcements—the pilgrims panicked, and the ensuing stampede resulted in the death of ten thousand Jews.
Pro football quarterback and NFL Hall of Famer Warren Moon played 23 seasons before retiring at the age of 44. (And Tom Brady will be 41 this season.) Moon first played 6 seasons in the Canadian Football League where he won 5 Grey Cup Championships and was twice the Grey Cup MVP. In his 17 NFL seasons his playoff performances were not as successful. In 7 playoffs, Moon’s teams only advanced to the second game 3 times and lost all of them. In the other 4 seasons his teams were 1-and-done.
Warren Burger and Harry Blackmun were both Minnesota Republicans and were both appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Richard Nixon. They were already friends before joining the court, and voted with each other so often in Blackmun’s early years there that some jokingly called them the “Minnesota Twins,” after the baseball team. Blackmun’s views began diverging more and more from Burger’s, however, and the two men were considerably less friendly by the time Burger left the court.
The Minnesota Twins are one of two major league baseball clubs that were formerly known as the Washington Senators, having moved there from DC’s Griffith Park in 1960. They were immediately replaced by an expansion team, with the same name and stadium, which moved to Arlington, Texas in 1972 as the Texas Rangers. The original Senators were the team long-suffering fan Joe Boyd helped to finally win the American League pennant by selling his soul to “Mr. Applegate”.
Joe Boyd, after his transformation to Joe Hardy, helped the Senators win the pennant in the book ‘The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant.’ The book was the basis for the 1955 Broadway musical ‘Damn Yankees.’ A movie of the same name was released in 1958, starring Tab Hunter as Joe Hardy.
I have uttered the phrase Damn Yankees countless times and will continue to do so whenever the Yankees are successful.
The retirement of shortstop Derek Jeter’s #2 filled a gap, and means no Yankee will ever again be assigned a single-digit uniform number. Plaques with the retired numbers are placed in Monument Park in the new Yankee Stadium, replacing an area in the old park that was partly hidden by a relocated center field wall.
Yankee magazine was founded in 1935 and is based in Dublin, New Hampshire. It focuses on the lifestyles and attractions of the New England states.
Two of the fastest growing cities in California are Santa Clarita and Dublin.
Dublin, Ireland, began life as a Viking trading post.
Only two teams have ever gone to four Super Bowls without any victories: the Minnesota Vikings, and the Buffalo Bills. Only one team has ever played in four straight Super Bowls: the Buffalo Bills.
The most famous song about the Vikings, oddly titled “Immigrant Song”, was written during Led Zeppelin’s tour of Iceland, Bath and Germany in the summer of 1970. The opening date of this tour took place in Reykjavík, Iceland, which inspired Plant to write the lyrics. It is played over the loudspeakers at the Minnesota Vikings’s stadium (some corporate name, can’t be arsed) before every home game, with the fans trying to imitate Robert Plant’s opening howls.
The Icelandic National Football (soccer) team qualified for the 2018 World Cup, the first time that they had made it to the event. With a total population of about 350,000, they are the smallest country (by population) to ever qualify for the Cup.
German Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin (1838-1917) served as an observer for the Union’s Army of the Potomac in the American Civil War in Virginia in 1863. Later that year, in Minneapolis - St. Paul Minnesota, he made his first aerial balloon ascent from a site near the International Hotel.
The town of Zepelin, in the northern country of Germany’s Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, was the family’s hometown and has a memorial to honor him. The town was called Cepelin, and in 1334 its name was changed to Zepelin.
Led Zepelin’s classic rock song “Stairway to Heaven” was voted number three in 2000 by VH1 on its list of the 100 Greatest Rock Songs, and was placed at number 31 on “Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time”. It was the most requested song on FM radio stations in the United States in the 1970s, despite never having been commercially released as a single there.
A substantial part of Tom Clancy’s 1986 novel Red Storm Rising, about a non-nuclear World War III between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, is set in West Germany, as Soviet armed forces try to reach the Rhine despite stiff German, United States, British, Belgian and French opposition.