Dick Cheney served as Wyoming’s at-large Congressman before being named Secretary of Defense by President George H.W. Bush. Even as Vice President (2001-2009), he displayed the Wyoming state flag in his West Wing office.
Wyoming Knott is one of the leaders of the revolt on the Moon in Heinlein’s classic, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.
In 1872, Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park was designated as the first official National Park.
In 1906, Wyoming’s Devils Tower was designated as the first National Monument.
The earliest known version of the folk song classic “The Yellow Rose of Texas” is found in Christy’s Plantation Melodies. No. 2, a songbook published under the authority of Edwin Pearce Christy in Philadelphia in 1853. Christy was the founder of the blackface minstrel show known as the Christy’s Minstrels. Like most minstrel songs, the lyrics are written in a cross between the dialect historically spoken by African-Americans and standard American English. The song is written in the first person from the perspective of an African-American singer who refers to himself as a “darkey,” longing to return to “a yellow girl”, a term used to describe a light-skinned, or bi-racial (“mulatto”) woman.
(And if that trivia doesn’t make your jaw drop, I don’t know what will)
The New Christy Minstrels was a folk ensemble group founded in 1961 and named for the group mentioned above. It was extremely popular and had several hits, their first album staying on the charts for two years. Membership in the group launched the careers of Kenny Rogers and Barry McGuire, among others.
Feeling that the New Christy Minstrels were not offering the success they wanted, Kenny Rogers and fellow members Mike Settle, Terry Williams, and Thelma Camacho left the group. They formed The First Edition in 1967 (later renamed “Kenny Rogers and The First Edition”). They were later joined by Kin Vassy. They chalked up a string of hits on both the pop and country charts, including “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)”, “But You Know I Love You”, “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town”, “Tell It All, Brother”, “Reuben James”, and “Something’s Burning”. When the First Edition disbanded in 1976, Rogers started his solo career.
Singer Kenny Rogers used to be a pro tennis player. He has an ATP rating.
The ATP ranking system began on August 23, 1973, and has continued since then as the official ranking system in men’s professional tennis.
This week’s ATP rankings, released on Monday the 26th, lists Novak Djokovic as #1, Rafael Nadal as #2, and Roger Federer as #3. The highest ranking American is John Isner at #10.
An aircraft type rating (or ATP) is a regulating agency’s certification of an airplane pilot to fly a certain aircraft type that requires additional training beyond the scope of the initial license and aircraft class training. In many countries pilots of single-engined aircraft under a certain maximum weight (12,500 lb, typically) do not require a type rating for each model, with all or most such aircraft being covered by one class rating instead.
Kim Novak had a major fight with the president of Columbia Pictures, who wanted her to use the stage name “Kit Marlowe”. Apparently he thought her own name would turn people off: “Nobody’s gonna go see a girl with a Polak name!”
Novak won the fight.
ETA: as far as I know, Ms. Novak has never held a pilot’s licence.
Harry Cohn was the president of Columbia Pictures for many years. Once, during a dinner conversation he got into a discussion about what made a good movie. He described his method by saying “I have a foolproof device for judging whether a picture is good or bad. If my fanny squirms, it’s bad. If my fanny doesn’t squirm, it’s good. It’s as simple as that.”
Screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, was the first to reply. “Imagine. The whole world wired to Harry Cohn’s ass!”
Mankiewicz was fired from Columbia soon after.
STS-107, the space shuttle Columbia, disintegrated on reentry on 01 Feb 2003. At that time it was the oldest shuttle in the fleet. It completed 27 missions. STS-107 was its 28th mission. The investigation into the cause of the crash cost over $400 million, involved more than 2,500 workers, and over 85,000 pieces of debris, equaling over 38% of the shuttle.
The shuttle was given the name Columbia after the Columbia River, and that rive was named by boat captain Robert Gray in 1792.
With due respect, Columbia was named after Robert Gray’s ship. He also named the river after it. All the shuttles were named after ships.
Anyway, the first space shuttle was Enterprise (named after a ship, but no, not that one) but it never flew in space. Built without engines, it was used for atmospheric tests. Originally they planned to refit it with enginers for use in space, but the design of the shuttle ended up changing enough that Enterprise could not be refit to the new design. Enterprise is still on display in New York City, where you will find it, of all places, aboard the USS Intrepid, a World War II aircraft carrier converted into a museum.
The Soviet space program developed its own reusable space shuttle vehicle, the Buran, during the 1970s and 1980s. The Buran’s spaceplane (orbiter) strongly resembled NASA’s Space Shuttle Orbiter, at least in part because Soviet designers made heavy use of the American progam’s research (much of which was unclassified) as they designed Buran.
The Buran orbiter made only one spaceflight – a brief, unmanned orbital flight in 1988. The program was mothballed with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the only Buran orbiter to have been completed (designated K1) was destroyed when the hangar in which it was being housed, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, suffered a roof collapse in 2002.
(Not in play, but a fun fact: the Space Shuttle Enterprise was originally designated the Constitution. After a mass letter writing campaign by Star Trek fans, then-President Gerald Ford directed NASA to rename the shuttle after the fictional spacecraft. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, and a number of actors from the original TV series, attended the rollout of the Enterprise in 1976.)
Kazakhstan, a former Soviet Socialist Republic, is the ninth-largest country in the world, with an area of just over 1 million square miles. It is the world’s largest land-locked country. The number of inhabitants is just over 18 million, and it has one of the world’s lowest density of population. There are 131 ethnicities within the country.
There are seven countries in Central Asia with the suffix “-stan”: Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The suffix comes from the Persian root istan, or “land”—hence the “land of the Uzbeks,” “land of the Kazakhs,” and so forth. Pakistan is somewhat different: Its name means “land of the pure.”
The -stan suffix is sometimes used humorously or satirically, as in Doonesbury’s Berzerkistan or The Onion’s Ethniklashistan and Nukehavistan. A December 2002 cover of the New Yorker featured a New Yorkistan map that included various districts ending in -stan, e.g., Bronxistan, Cold Turkeystan, Fuhgeddabouditstan, Gaymenistan, Central Parkistan, Taxistan, and Youdontunderstandistan.
Uzbekistan is one of only two countries in the world (the other is Liechtenstein) that are doubly land-locked - not only do they lack seacoasts, but all the countries surrounding them do, too.
Uzbekistan is the 6th largest producer and the 11th largest exporter of cotton in the world.
Prospective 2012 Republican candidate for President Herman Cain, CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, drew derision not only for a tax plan he called “9-9-9” (which no one, even him, could explain), and for the disinterest he showed in world affairs by telling CBN host David Brody: