Single Quinta Vintage Port, port made from the grapes of a specific estates and years, has been marketed in recent years as a posh wine.
Mikhail Gorbachev is perhaps the most prominent person to have a “port-wine stain,” a benign pigmentation disorder.
Gorbachev was the seventh and last General Secretary of the Soviet Union, and the only one to be born after the 1917 revolution that created the Soviet Union. (That being said, I suspect Putin is doing his best to restore the Soviet Union without the name, and seems to control roughly the same power as did Gorbachev.)
According to a former CIA source, that organization once created a spy cat that would be able to listen in on conversations by certain Soviet visitors in Washington. The internally wired cat ideally would not be noticed as it approached, and therefore could broadcast the desired conversations to CIA operatives with receivers nearby. However, the first day the cat was deployed, the million dollar feline was run over by a taxi as it approached the Russian targets. Thus ended operation “Acoustic Kitty”
[del]The only one of the 15 Soviet republics not to secede from the USSR was Russia, which absorbed the remains of the USSR government after the collapse of a military counter-perestroika coup attempt against Gorbachev which led him to seek physical protection from Russian president Boris Yeltsin.
(According to one joke about Raisa, Gorbachev was also the first Soviet leader to weigh less than his wife. 
)[/del]
I like Biotop’s story better.
The phrase “not enough room to swing a cat” does not refer to a feline; it’s original meaning mean “not enough room to swing a cat of nine tails” (i.e., a whip).
Huck Finn told Tom Sawyer that one can cure warts with a dead cat:
“Why, you take your cat and go and get in the graveyard 'long about midnight when somebody that was wicked has been buried; and when it’s midnight a devil will come, or maybe two or three, but you can’t see 'em, you can only hear something like the wind, or maybe hear 'em talk; and when they’re taking that feller away, you heave your cat after 'em and say, ‘Devil follow corpse, cat follow devil, warts follow cat, I’m done with ye!’ That’ll fetch any wart.”
Thomas Charles “Tom” Sawyer was a U.S. Representative from the Buckeye State from 1987 to 2003, and currently serves in the Ohio Senate.
Nitpick: General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
The Ohio Statehouse, praised by Frank Lloyd Wright for its design, was built in part by prisoners. President-elect Lincoln visited it on his way from Springfield, Ill. to take power in Washington, D.C., and four years later briefly lay in state there after his assassination.
Edwin Stanton went to considerable efforts to find and destroy all photographs of Lincoln lying in state during his post-mortem tour of the states. In part it was because he did not want them sold as postcards or other curiosities, and also in part it was because his body was beginning to show obvious decomposition even with constant embalming. Only one authentic photograph (there are many fakes) is known to exist: it was taken at City Hall in Manhattan; the plate itself was destroyed but Stanton did not know a few copies had been made first.
Edwin McMasters Stanton was born in Steubenville, Ohio, and his statue still stands on the Jefferson County Courthouse lawn there. Like Lincoln, he was a noted trial lawyer before the Civil War. Although he was rude to Lincoln when the two appeared as co-counsel in a major civil case, Lincoln admired his intellect and tenacity, and appointed him as his second Secretary of War. It was Stanton’s later firing by President Andrew Johnson that directly led to Johnson’s impeachment and trial by Congress.
During Stanton’s life (but probably with little connection to him) the city of Steubenville, OH had a reputation for being the ‘whorehouse capital of the U.S.’ due to the oddly disproportionate number of brothels that surrounded it; the nice thing was that some of its higher priced establishments were also said to be the nicest brothels in the U.S… At least one man was hanged for beating a prostitute there, and others were imprisoned for not paying their bills.
According to Kinsey, 70% of adult males have patronized prostitutes. This 1948 result has been disputed as too high, with more recent studies suggesting a much lower figure.
[del]Steubenville was named after Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, a self-styled Prussian baron who is credited with helping Washington institute military organization and training of the Continental troops at Valley Forge. He served as Washington’s Chief of Staff in the Revolution’s final years. He had found himself forced to leave Europe due to his fondness for young boys.[/del]
Sue Grafton’s alphabetically titled mystery novels (A is for Alibi, B is for Burglar etc.) feature detective Kinsey Milhone.
There are multiple communities in the U.S. named Grafton, including in Calif., Ill., Iowa, Mass., Nebr., N.H., N.Y., N.D., Ohio, Utah (a ghost town), Vt., Va., W.Va. and Wisc.
Tom Reamy, best known for his Nebula Award winning story “San Diego Lightfoot Sue,” died of a heart attack while editing his novel, Blind Voices.
The American Basketball Association’s San Diego Conquistadors lasted only three seasons, but they employed former Celtics great K.C. Jones as their first head coach and legendary Philadelphia Warrior-Los Angeles Laker-cocksman Wilt Chamberlain as their second.
In 1967 Art/Prog rock band Procol Harum released their eponymous first album, which included their most famous song A Whiter Shade of Pale and a studio version of Conquistador. In 1972, Conquistador was recorded live, backed by the Edmonton Symphonic Orchestra, and went on to become the band’s second-best song.
Hernan Cortes, the leading Spanish conquistador in the conquest of Mexico, was initially mistaken by the Aztecs for their departed god Quetzalcoatl.
The movie Q was about a cult accidentally reviving the Aztec God Quetzalcoatl, which then terrorized New York City