Division Street historically denoted the separation line between the white and black neighborhoods of Orlando, Florida. African-Americans, even those who worked in the white area, had to be back west of the street after sundown. Local activism exists to change the name to Vision Street, but so far unavailingly.
There was talk of cancelling the traditional Army-Navy Football Game after the 1963 assassin of President John F. Kennedy. Jackie Kennedy urged the teams to hold it, and the game was postponed from November 30th to December 7th, and Calvin Huey of Navy became the first African-American to play in the series.
Calvin and Hobbes was a popular newspaper comic strip in the 1980s and 1990s, written and drawn by Bill Watterson. The strip depicted the adventures of Calvin (a precocious, imaginative, and mischievous six-year-old boy) and his best friend, his stuffed tiger toy, Hobbes (who, when no one other than Calvin is around, interacts with Calvin).
The strip contained a number of recurring gags, such as “The Noodle Incident” (an apparently horrible event, which Calvin refuses to discuss), and Calvin’s favorite children’s book, “Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie.”
In Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin’s parents are never given actual names. Per Bill Watterson, their names are never needed. The characters’ only functions are as Calvin’s parents, and so to a child, the parents are simply called “mom” and “dad.”
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John Calvin, the Protestant reformer, starting in 1541, installed a kind of “theocratic republic” in the city of Geneva based on the ascetic work ethic and strict morality of Protestantism. The church governed all matters of daily life, banned Catholic “superstition”, enforced puritan sexual morality, regulated opening hours for taverns and imposed heavy penalties on dancing, gambling and swearing. Theater plays were banned and the theaters closed.
One of King Charles II’s most popular acts upon taking the throne of England after the fall of the Puritan, anti-monarchist Commonwealth was reopening the theaters of London.
London’s Apollo Victoria Theatre became a venue for musical theatre, beginning with The Sound of Music in 1981, and including the long-running Starlight Express, from 1984 to 2002. The theatre is currently the home of the musical Wicked, which has played at the venue for almost thirteen years.
In Boston slang, “wicked” is an adverb for superlativeness, as in “wicked awesome” or “wicked pissah”.
As a city/locality, Boston is second in the number of professional sports championships in the ‘Big Four’ sports: baseball, basketball, football, and hockey. Boston has 39 of these championships; 17 of them come from professional basketball.
New York City tops this list with 54 championships. 35 of these come from baseball.
According to a Boston Magazine article, where a reader asks, “Where did “wicked” come from, and who popularized it in Boston and New England?”…
The year was 1942 and it was an election year. Former Boston Mayor James Michael Curley was running for the U.S. House of Representatives. Curley, married, had an affair with The Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West, actress Margaret Hamilton. (Umm, really, Margaret Hamilton?) According to the article, once Curley dumped his Hollywood mistress, he swept to victory, thanks to an endorsement from Cardinal O’Connell, who exclaimed, “Our wicked man has become wicked good!” And the rest is local slang history.
(And this play still works!)
The U.S. House of Representatives, like the British House of Commons and many other parliaments in former British colonies, has a mace which is displayed in the chamber when the House is in session.
The Sacred Cod is a four-foot eleven-inch carved-wood effigy of an Atlantic codfish, “painted to the life”, hanging in the House of Representatives chamber of Boston’s Massachusetts State House—“a memorial of the importance of the Cod-Fishery to the welfare of this Commonwealth” (i.e. Massachusetts, of which cod is officially the “historic and continuing symbol”).
About 10% of the world fish catch is cod. The cod is the official state fish of Massachusetts.
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Indiana doesn’t have a state fish, but it does have a state stone: limestone.
The 1979 film Breaking Away deals with the town vs. gown problem in Bloomington, Indiana, where the more affluent Indiana University students habitually refer to “cutters”, a derogatory term for locals related to the local Indiana limestone industry and the stonecutters who worked the quarries. (The term “cutters” was invented for the movie, because the real name "stoners” was deemed unusable because of its perceived link to marijuana.) One of the local friends “escapes” by pretending to be an Italian professional bicycle racer.
Actor Dennis Christopher plays the lead role in Breaking Away as a young man pretending to be an Italian bicycle racer. Christopher is actually Italian-American; his birth name is Dennis Carrelli. Although the four “cutter” friends are supposed to be 19 years old, the actors were all of different ages - none of them 19. Dennis Quaid was 24, Dennis Christopher 23, Daniel Stern 21, and Jackie Earle Haley just 17. Dennis Quaid, ultimately the most successful actor of the four, did not play a first-billed leading role in a film until two years later, in The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia.
Breaking Away was ranked #8 on the American Film Institute’s 100 Most Inspiring Movies of All Time (2006) and #8 on the American Film Institute’s list of the 10 greatest films in the genre “Sports” in June 2008.
Actor Dennis Christopher reunited with his Breaking Away (1979) “father” Paul Dooley, again as his son, in an episode of TV’s Law & Order: Criminal Intent (2001 was its series premier). The two had first played father and son in Robert Altman’s A Wedding (1978).
In the NCIS Season 6 episode 13, actor Mark Sheppard (best known as Bowler in Firefly or Crowley in Supernatural) played the younger, flashback version of the character being portrayed by his father, William Morgan Sheppard.