George Reeves was best known for his role as Superman; his film career began in 1939 when he was cast as Stuart Tarleton, one of Scarlett O’Hara’s suitors in Gone with the Wind. It was a minor role, but he and Fred Crane were in the film’s opening scene. Reeves and Crane both dyed their hair red to portray the Tarleton twins.
Steve Reeves was an American body builder, capturing Mr. World, Mr. America and Mr. Universe titles. He was also a film actor who was hugely popular in Europe. Reeves was best known for his Italian sword and sandal films such as Hercules and Hercules Unchained, which were also hits in the United States.
The British Coronation Regalia include three swords: the Sword of Temporal Justice, with a regular point; the Sword of Spiritual Justice, with a slanted point, supposedly to symbolize that only the temporal courts have the authority to impose the death penalty, and the Sword of Mercy, or Curtana, which is blunt, to symbolize mercy.
The only stanza of “Maryland, My Maryland” (to the tune of “O Tannenbaum”) that is officially part of the state’s official song is
*Thou wilt not cower in the dust
Maryland, my Maryland
Thy beaming **sword *shall never rust
Maryland, my Maryland
Remember Carroll’s sacred trust
Remember Howard’s warlike thrust
And though thy slumberers with the just
Maryland, my Maryland!
Unfortunately, that leaves out the rest of the lyrics calling for the slave state to secede from the Union, such as
Avenge the patriotic gore
That flecked the streets of Baltimore
and
She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb—
Huzza! she spurns the Northern scum!
She breathes! she burns! she’ll come! she’ll come!
Maryland! My Maryland!
Ahh, the Preakness States, won last Saturday by the strong War of Will. The Preakness Stakes is traditionally held on the third Saturday in May.
In 1996 the winner was Louis Qatorze, and in 1952 it was Blue Man.
The St. Louis Blues are the oldest active NHL team never to have won the Stanley Cup, although they played in the Stanley Cup Finals three times, in 1968 (their inaugural season), 1969, and 1970. In 2019, tonight actually, the Blues returned to the Stanley Cup Finals for the first time in 49 years and as was the case in 1970, the opposing team was the Boston Bruins.
Go Blues! Go get that cup!
(ETA: Maryland, My Maryland is traditionally sung every year before the Preakness Stakes.)
The famous photo, and statue outside TD Garden, of Boston Bruins legend Bobby Orr diving to celebrate a Cup-winning goal comes from the final game of the 1970 Stanley Cup series at Boston Garden against the St. Louis Blues, who were named for a W.C. Handy song. That was Boston’s first Cup since 1941.
As for Bobby Orr, he recalls vividly waking up from his Stanley Cup hangover and seeing the photograph.
“I remember where I was. In those days, we didn’t stay at home; we stayed at a hotel. We were out in Lynfield, Massachusetts, at the Hilton hotel. My father was staying there also,” Orr says.
“I went down for breakfast to meet my dad. In those days it was the Record-American, the newspaper. My dad had one and opened it up. I was in the centre page. That was the first time I saw it. I don’t think I was thinking about how high I was; I just thought, ‘Oh, that’s a different picture.’ ”
The Bruins defeated the Blue in 1970 in part because of an odd expansion decision… the St. Louis Blues reached the Stanley Cup finals in each of the first three years of their existence, actually, but only because the NHL had doubled in size in 1967 and set it up so that one of the six new expansion teams HAD to make the Finals.
In 2018, the expansion Vegas Golden Knights also made the Stanley Cup Finals, but did so purely on merit, not because the league was structured to allow it.
Great article in that link. Thanks ElvisL1ves
The first and (so-far) last time a city won three sports championships in one calendar year was Detroit in 1935: Lions and Red Wings and Tigers, oh my.
In 1973-74, the Bruins shared Boston Garden with not only the Celtics but with their AHL affiliate, the Boston Braves, *and *with another team that is now in the NHL. That was the New England Whalers of the World Hockey Association, who moved to Hartford, joined the NHL in the merger, and later became the Carolina Hurricanes, who the Bruins just beat to advance to the Finals. Occasionally, Boston sports teams will play “Brass Bonanza”, the instrumental fight song used by “The Whale”, as a way to build their fan base in Hartford, where a coterie of diehard Whalers fans remains.
ETA: If the Celtics had gotten rid of Kyrie Irving when they should have, they’d have a chance at giving Boston a championship sweep this year. I’d still have bet on the Warriors, though.
The movie based on John Irving’s book The Cider House Rules won two Academy Awards: Irving won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published, while Michael Caine won his second Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, along with four other nominations at the 72nd Academy Awards. Irving documented his involvement in bringing the novel to the screen in his book, My Movie Business.
In addition to The Cider House Rules, four other best-selling books by John Irving have been adaapted into movies: The World According to Garp, * A Prayer for Owen Meany*, A Widow for One Year, and The Hotel New Hampshire.
In The World According to Garp, the filming location for Jenny Fields’ beach house was on Fishers Island, Long Island NY, near here: gMap, Lat / Long 41.260335, -72.023780. Some of the school scenes were filmed at Eastchester High School, Eastchester NY and Millbrook Private School, Millbrook NY.
Gorp is an American term for trail mix; the term is likely an acronym for its common ingredients, either “good old raisins and peanuts” or “granola, oats, raisins, and peanuts.” Despite not being mentioned in either list of ingredients, gorp / trail mix commonly also contains some form of chocolate (often M&Ms) and / or other nuts.
Peanuts are nuts in the culinary sense, but in the botanical sense they are legumes, more closely related to beans than to tree nuts like almonds.
The botanical definition of a “nut” is a fruit whose ovary wall becomes hard at maturity. Tree nuts include almonds, Brazil nuts, cashews, chestnuts, hazelnuts, macadamia nuts, pecans, pistachios, shea nuts, and walnuts.
During the 1970’s, Peter Paul used the jingle “Sometimes you feel like a nut / Sometimes you don’t / Almond Joy’s got nuts / Mounds don’t”, written by Leo Corday and Leon Carr and sung by Joey Levine, to advertise Almond Joy and Mounds together. In a play on words, the “feel like a nut” portion of the jingle was typically played over a clip of someone acting like a “nut”, i.e., doing something unconventional, such as an equestrian riding on a horse backward or a bride carrying her groom over the threshold, and then showing the same act being done “normally” for the lyric “sometimes you don’t.”
The Peter and Paul Fortress is the original citadel of St. Petersburg, Russia, founded by Peter the Great in 1703 and built to Domenico Trezzini’s designs from 1706 to 1740 as a star fortress. In the early 1920s, it was still used as a prison and execution ground by the Bolshevik government. The first person to escape from the fortress prison was the anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin in 1876. Other people incarcerated in the “Russian Bastille” include Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Tsarevich Alexei Petrovich, Artemy Volynsky, Tadeusz Kościuszko, Alexander Radishchev, the Decembrists, Grigory Danilevsky, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Bakunin, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Leon Trotsky and Josip Broz Tito.
Fyodor Dostoevsky used his experiences as an epileptic to create the character of Prince Myshkin, the protagonist of The Idiot. Neurologists have compared symptoms of patients who experienced ecstatic epilepsy to Dostoevsky’s descriptions in the book and have also attempted clinical diagnoses of Prince Myshkin and of Dostoevsky .