City Island, Bronx NY, is a small island about 0.75 sq mi in size located at the extreme western end of Long Island Sound. Harry Carey II, the actor who lived from 1878 to 1947, not to be confused with baseball announcer Harry Caray, lived on City Island, and so did actor and comedian Red Buttons (1919-2006).
Harry Carey II’s son Harry Carey Jr. also became an actor, and appeared in nine movies with John Wayne, and four movies directed by his close friend John Ford, including She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949). Both his mother and his wife were also actresses.
Monument Valley, in southern Utah and northern Arizona, was used as a setting in many of John Ford’s western films, including Stagecoach (1939) and The Searchers (1956). One site that featured often is now known as John Ford’s Point - a promontory at the edge of a plateau overlooking a large area of uneven, undulating desert land.
gMap, John Ford’s Point, Monument Valley: Google Maps.
When tourists visit Monument Valley, one of the last stops is Monument Point. A local Native American saddles up a horse and rides out to the end of the promontory so the tourists can have a photo op of the Lone Indian Gazing Into The Distance.
The Totem Pole in Monument Valley is a 640-foot high rock spire with an 18-foot diameter. Located within the lands of the Navajo Nation, the Totem Pole had religious significance to the Navajos who prohibited climbs on the formation.
For The Eiger Sanction (1975), Clint Eastwood hired mountaineer, rock climber and cinematographer Mike Hoover to serve as climbing adviser for the film. Hoover negotiated permission from the tribal authorities for his team to climb the Totem Pole to remove pitons and other climbing hardware embedded in the structure by previous climbers, restoring the monolith to pristine condition.
The ascent was made by two climbers from Moab, Eric Bjornstad and Ken Wyrick, who were tasked with preparing the summit for the helicopter film crew and removing existing hardware. Upon attaining the summit, they were helicoptered off and Eastwood and Kennedy were lowered onto the eighteen-foot wide summit for one of Eastwood’s happiest film-making memories, watching the sun setting over Monument Valley where many classic Westerns were filmed.
gMap, John Ford Point to the Totem Pole, Monument Valley: Google Maps
The term totem is derived from the North American Ojibwe word for clan (doodem), and the family clan remains an important part of Native American society to this day.
As of January 29, 2018, there were 573 Native American tribes that are legally recognized by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) of the United States.
The State of Vermont opposed Federal tribal recognition of the Abenaki tribe of Native Americans due to longstanding and widespread intermarriage, and the great difficulty in confirming who was or was not an Abenaki in modern times. However, Vermont granted state recognition of two bands of the Abenaki tribe, the Elnu or El Nu, and the Nulhegan, in 2011. The next year, the Koasek band was also granted state recognition. The tribe has still not received Federal recognition.
One reason the Abenaki tribe has not received Federal recognition and had difficulties in getting state recognition is the concern that they will, as many Indian tribes have done, use their status to open a casino. There are currently 474 American Indian gaming operations in the United States. These are owned by 243 of the nation’s 566 federally-recognized tribes. These gaming tribes operate in 29 of the 50 states. The annual revenue from all Indian gaming exceeds $32 billion and represents 43% of all casino gaming revenue in the U.S.
Cassino, also spelled Casino, is an Italian card game, first recorded in 1797. Apparently the card game did not take its name from the gambling establishment.
The first of two film adaptations of Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, Casino Royale (1967), was not produced by Eon Productions (the production company responsible for all but two Bond films), due to the film rights for the story having been sold before Eon was founded.
Unlike the other Bond films, Casino Royale is a comedy, and features a large number of characters named (or going by the pseudonym of) James Bond, including David Niven, Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, and Woody Allen.
In most markets that do not use imperial measurements, the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder is known as the Hamburger Royale, Royal, McRoyal, or variants thereof.
The only state capital without a McDonald’s is Montpelier, Vermont.
Montpelier VT is the smallest state capital in the USA.
Montpelier, Vermont was after Montpellier, a city in the south of France. The Vermont city has a population of about 8,000, while the French town has a population of 275,000, or nearly 35 times more people.
(I stole this from a question on a recent episode of Jeopardy)
In play: Vermont is the only state where the first four letters of the name of the capital city are also the last four letters of the name of the state.
Vermont was badly flooded in 1927. President Calvin Coolidge, although Vermont-born, did not advocate for Federal disaster aid. He had not done so for the much-worse Mississippi River flooding earlier that year, and did not wish to be seen as hypocritically favoring his home state. Coolidge’s approach to disaster relief stemmed both from his view that disaster relief was not an appropriate function of the United States Government, and his commitment to reducing the Federal deficit after World War I.
When she is commissioned in March 2019, the USS Vermont (SSN-792), a Virginia-class submarine, will be the third US Navy ship named after the Green Mountain state. She was christened just over five weeks ago.
(ETA: well, I guess she already is the third ship named Vermont.)
Vermont has a small enough population that it is represented by a single at-large Member of Congress, currently Peter Welch, a Democrat, who attended the recent christening of the nuclear fast-attack submarine USS Vermont. The island of Manhattan in New York City, by contrast, includes four U.S. House districts, in whole or in part.
Vermont is one of seven states that have just one Representative in the House. The other six are Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming.
The smallest state by area, Rhode Island, has two Representatives.