The Cleveland East Ohio Gas Explosion occurred on the afternoon of Friday, October 20, 1944. The resulting gas leak, explosion and fires killed 130 people and destroyed a one square mile area on Cleveland, Ohio’s east side. It was the worst man made disaster in Cleveland’s history, and set the backdrop for Don Robertson’s book “The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread.”
Calvin Coolidge was the 30th President of the United States, from 1923 to 1929. He was a Republican lawyer from New England. Elected as Warren Harding’s Vice President in 1920, he succeeded to the presidency when Harding (former Ohio Senator) died in 1923 of a heart attack.
Calvin Coolidge was the only President of the United States to be born on Independence Day, July 4th (1872, in his case).
Three of the first five US presidents died on July 4. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (second and third presidents) both died on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. James Monroe, the fifth president, died five years later on July 4, 1831.
Eight Presidents have died in office, 4 of natural causes, and 4 were assassinated:
1841: William Henry Harrison. Died of pneumonia just 31 days into his term.
1850: Zachary Taylor. Cholera morbus or acute gastroenteritis, after a little more than a year into his term.
1865: Abraham Lincoln. Assassinated. Served 4 years.
1881: James A. Garfield. Assassinated. Served 6 months.
1901: William McKinley. Assassinated. Served 4 years.
1923: Warren Harding. Heart attack, 2 years into his term.
1945: Franklin Roosevelt. Stroke, only 12 years into his Presidency.
1963: John Kennedy. Assassinated. Served just short of 3 years.
There have been two fictional United States Navy Nimitz-class aircraft carriers named USS Thomas Jefferson - one in the Keith Douglass book series Carrier, and the other in Patrick Robinson’s novel Nimitz Class. The last actual USS Thomas Jefferson, an Ethan Allen-class nuclear-powered submarine, was decommissioned in 1985.
Ninja’d!: Thomas Jefferson was the third President of the United States. He died long after leaving office.
ETA: FDR being “only” 12 years into his Presidency - heh.
In Jeopardy! champ Ken Jennings’ book Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs, he mentions how well Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (“TJ”) of Alexandria, Virginia does against *college *teams in National Academic Quiz Tournaments events, often winning them.
Merv Griffin (1925-2007) created Jeopardy!. It debuted in 1964. In over 7,000 episodes, only Art Fleming (1924-1995; hosted until 1979) and Alex Trebek (born 1940) have been the regular hosts.
On at least one episode hosted by Art Fleming, all three contestants finished Double Jeopardy! with $0 or less, and as a result, no Final Jeopardy! round was played
Does anyone know if there have ever been other hosts?
No, just those two.
Kenan Thompson, besides being the longest-tenured performer in “Saturday Night Live” history, is also the writer of their “Black Jeopardy” game show sketches. Earlier, he co-starred on the Nickelodeon series “Kenan and Kel”, about two mischievous teens, with Kel Mitchell.
Pat Sajak once hosted Jeopardy! as part of an April Fools gag where he and Alex Trebek swapped shows for the day. Categories on the show included ‘Buy a Vowel’, ‘Before & After’, and ‘Say “Jack”’.
Pat Sajack served in the US Army during Vietnam as a disc jockey for American Forces Vietnam Network. Sajak hosted the same radio show that Adrian Cronauer had, and for 14 months followed Cronauer’s tradition of signing on with “Good Morning Vietnam!”
Louis Armstrong’s song “What a Wonderful World” gained, and has retained, popularity due to its inclusion in the soundtrack of the Robin Williams movie Good Morning, Vietnam!. Bob Thiele and George David Weiss wrote it for Tony Bennett, who turned it down, but has rectified his error with multiple studio recordings since the movie’s release. Only a handful of copies of Armstrong’s original recordings were sold in the US because ABC Records head Larry Newton did not like the song and therefore did not promote it.
Louis Armstrong was one of the first truly popular African-American entertainers to “cross over”, whose skin color was secondary to his music in an America that was extremely racially divided in the 1960s.
Sir Isaac Newton was the first in England to be knighted for scientific accomplishments, rather than political or military accomplishments.
In his later life, he was the Master of the Royal Mint.
Isaac Newton and Hans Christian Andersen are both believed to have been lifelong virgins.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the average age Americans lose their virginities (defined here as vaginal sexual intercourse) is 17.1 for both men and women. The CDC also reports that virgins make up 12.3 percent of females and 14.3 percent of males aged 20 to 24. That number drops below 5 percent for both male and female virgins aged 25 to 29 and goes as low as 0.3 percent for virgins aged 40 to 44.
(I was 19, BTW)
The game of Go is played on a grid of 19×19 lines.
;)
The computer program AlphaGo, which uses a Monte Carlo tree search algorithm, defeated the world’s top human Go player, Korea’s Lee Sedol, in the Google DeepMind Challenge Match in 2016. Lee’s response was “I am quite speechless.” Deep Blue defeated human champion Garry Kasparov in chess, a much simpler game for a neural network, back in 1997.
Garry Wills’s book Cincinnatus explores George Washington’s impact on Enlightenment-era art and political thought. Two of Wills’s other notable presidential-themed books are Nixon Agonistes, about the 37th President’s troubled leadership, and Lincoln at Gettysburg, which analyzes the great 1863 speech and compares it to Classical Greek funerary oratory.