Many of John Glenn’s missions in Korea were flown in F-86 Sabres, when he served in a USAF squadron as part of a career-broadening officer exchange program. There, he got the nickname “The Mig-Mad Marine”.
The emblem of the United States Marines is a globe, eagle and anchor. The emblem appears as collar and cap insignia, and also on the Marine Corps flag, which is mainly red. The motto of the Marines is Semper Fidelis, “Always faithful.”
San Francisco’s Anchor Steam Beer, from the Anchor Brewing Company near Potrero Hill, was the first of the modern generation of microbrewery beers.
The headquarters for the TV program Mythbusters is located at the southern edge of the Potrero Hill neighborhood.
For a time in the 70s, Clark Kent was changed from a newspaper reporter to a TV reporter for WGBS. His boss at the station was millionaire Morgan Edge.
Kent, just to the southeast of London, is one of the Home Counties and has been called “the garden of England.” It is a major residential area for stereotypically conservative, well-to-do London commuters. Its flag shows a white horse on a red field.
The first known heart medicine was discovered in an English garden. In 1799, physician John Ferriar noted the effect of dried leaves of the common foxglove plant, Digitalis purpurea, on heart action. Still used in heart medications, digitalis slows the pulse and increases the force of heart contractions and the amount of blood pumped per heartbeat.
The 1981 comedy Heartbeeps starred Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters as two robots who fall in love and run away together to start a new life.
Actor Brock Peters played both a treasonous Starfleet admiral and the Cajun-chef dad of DS9 boss Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) in various incarnations of Star Trek.
Brock Peters portrayed Darth Vader in the NPR radio dramatizations of all three of the original Star Wars stories (Star Wars in 1981, The Empire Strikes Back in 1983, and Return of the Jedi in 1996).
Enron’s most notorious investment funds were called JEDI and Chewco, after Star Wars characters. Their California energy fraud strategy was called Death Star.
The mcguffin in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious was uranium; Hitchcock claimed the FBI had him under surveillance because of that. It’s also known for what was considered the longest screen kiss; Hitchcock got around Hayes Office restrictions by having Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman kiss for a few moments, break it for a moment, then kiss again.
The Motion Picture Association of America abandoned the Hays Code in 1968, after 58 years, when it introduced the current rating system. Initially, the rating letters were G, M, R, and X, for General, Mature, Restricted, and Explicit subject matter, but the ratings have gone through several alterations and subdivisions since.
Originally the MPAA did not trademark the ratings descriptors. As a result the “X” rating, which was supposed to include legitimate films with adult content, was co-opted by the porn industry. The MPAA later adopted the NC-17 category for films that were formally rated.
Actually, the MPAA did trademark all ratings except for X. This was deliberate, in order to allow porn films to use the rating without the MPAA being involved. Midnight Cowboy is the only film originally rated X to win a Best Picture Oscar (its rating was later changed to an R).
Providing some of the soundtrack music for the film Midnight Cowboy was the group Elephant’s Memory, whose “Old Man Willow” is a dreamy seven minutes of psychedelia. The group would later go on to back John Lennon and Yoko Ono for selected live appearances.
In 1976, Alaskans voted to move the state capital from Juneau to Willow, just outside Anchorage in the Matanuska-Susitna valley but near the state’s population center (and the city of Wasilla), but in 1982 voted against appropriating any funds to do it.
PS: The Hays Code was in effect for 38 years, not 58. Mea culpa.
Wasilla’s second-most famous current resident in recent weeks has been writer Joe McGinniss, Sr., whose most successful book was Fatal Vision about the murders of the pregnant wife and daughters of Green Beret Dr. Jeffrey McDonald at Fort Bragg, NC. McDonald is still in prison for the murders and still maintains his innocence, but unless he can prove his innocence he is not eligible for parole until 2071.
Braxton Bragg, the Confederate general who gave his name to the fort, is considered by most historians to have been one of the most incompetent and disputatious commanders of the South. At one point, his subordinate generals unanimously petitioned Confederate President Jefferson Davis to remove him from command; Davis heard them out but decided not to.
Fort Bragg is named after Braxton Bragg, a West Point graduate who eventually served in the army of the Confederate States of America. His brother Thomas was Attorney General in Jefferson Davis’s administration.
ETA: Nosed out by Elendil’s Heir, but my entry includes some different info, so I’ll keep it as is.