On “The Simpsons”, Principal Seymour Skinner’s real name is Armen Tamzarian. This was revealed in the episode “The Principal and the Pauper”, when the Army comrade Tamzarian stole his identity from after he thought he had been killed in Vietnam (not while under the command of a descendant of Robert E. Lee) reappeared in Springfield.
Lincoln’s only close friend in Springfield, IL, was Joshua Speed, the man who more than a century after his death became the nucleus of the gay rumors about Lincoln. He had many close acquaintances, among them his law partner (and biographer) William Herndon, his barber the Creole mulatto William de Fleurville, and his wife’s aristocratic brother-in-law Ninian Edwards, but few considered him a friend as he was very private (in part it is believed due to his wife’s erratic behavior curtailing his social life).
Donald Bogle wrote a history of the portrayal of Blacks in American films with the thesis they fell into five general categories: Toms (dignified and often subservient), Coons (comic relief), Mulattos (people who were of mixed birth and thus unable to fit into either group), Mammies (mother/caretaker figures), and Bucks (sexually threatening). The book’s title listed these five categories.
The rising land prices of the Scots Irish heavy population of Bucks County PA (where many had settled and raised families) led many Scots Irish born there and many who emigrated from Ireland to move south into Virginia and the Carolinas via the Great Wagon Road. Not known for their refinement, Scots Irish place names in VA and the Carolinas included Tickle C*nt Creek, Shitty Britches River, and Old Woman Pissing Falls, all of which meant exactly the same thing then as now and all of which were later renamed.
The Irish Brigade was part of the Union Army of the Potomac during the American Civil War, composed primarily of Irish immigrant troops who served under distinctive green regimental flags. It earned glory in many battles, but suffered particularly heavy casualties during the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, and never had quite the same high profile thereafter.
1862 was, in addition to being the year the IRS (grab yer ankles!) was created, was also the year that Bismark became PM of Prussia, and the author O. Henry was born.
O. Henry’s opening line to “The Gift of the Magi”:
is often called an error by modern readers. However, at the time the story was written, there were still two- and three-cent pieces in circulation. The extra 27 cents could have consisted of a quarter and a two-cent piece, for example.
Introduced in 1864, the two-cent piece was the first American coin to bear the motto “In God We Trust.”
The heartrate of a black bear in hibernation drops from 40 or so to 8 beats/min. Bears don’t eat/drink/urinate/defecate during the roughly 7 months they are in hibernation, but they are somewhat alert.
Stephen Colbert paraphrased a famous Anglican hymn about animals by saying “All things bright and beautiful/All creatures great and small/All things wise and wonderful/God made them one and all… except for bears, who are soulless killing machines.”
Stephen Jay Gould wrote a book called Full House, which thankfully has nothing to do with that horrid television show of the same name.
Jay Gould and Jim Fisk were the Odd Couple of Wall St.; Gould was a sickly skinny devoutly religious (in a hypocritical way) anemic family man while"Jubilee Jim" was an obese swinger who was shot to death in a fight over his favorite mistress. Together they attempted to corner the Gold Market in 1869 by buying all they could before convincing the Grant administration to stop the federal sale of gold; this led to a crash when the government, realizing it’d been tricked, released so much gold it crashed the market in an incident called Black Friday.
Click hereto watch your favorite sports heroes “powder their equipment” with well-known jock-itch treatment Gold Bond Medicated Powder.
Ian Fleming named his spy hero, James Bond, after a previously-obscure British ornithologist whose book he owned.
Peggy Fleming was one of only two Americans to win medals in the 1968 Olympics, winning in women’s figure skating. The other medal was a silver won by Terry McDermott in the 500 meter speed skating. McDermott had been the only US gold medalist in the 1964 Winter Olympics in the same event.
Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin because he was goofing around. He liked to put a few small samples of various cultures in specimen dishes and then let them grow into patterns. (“Check it out. I used the black fungus and the yellow mold to make a smiley face.”) Then one day he checked his dishes and found something had killed off the cultures he had used. So he investigated to see what it was that had been able to kill off a bunch of different cultures.
Art Fleming, the original host of the game show ***Jeopardy!, ***appeared in the video for Weird Al Yankovic’s “I Lost on Jeopardy!”
Weird Al’s song mentioned in the previous post was a parody of Jeopardy, which was performed by the Greg Kihn Band. The bandleader’s surname led to such punning album titles as Next of Kihn and Kihnspiracy.
Surprising as it may seem, Weird Al Yankovic is no relation to “Polka King” Frankie Yankovic in spite of the uncommon last name and the fact that both play accordion professionally; Al even read Frankie’s book on the accordion while learning to play.
Up until 2009, there was a Grammy Award category for polka music; the Recording Academy dropped the category at that point, because there was only one qualifying “wide release item” for the year.