Bonnie Erickson and her mother used to live in North Dakota where Peggy Lee sang on the local radio station before she became a famous jazz singer. When Erickson first created Miss Piggy, she called her Miss Piggy Lee—as both a joke and an homage. Peggy Lee was a very independent woman, and Piggy certainly is the same. But as Peggy and Piggy’s fame began to grow, nobody wanted to upset Peggy Lee, especially because they admired her work. So, the Muppet’s name was shortened to Miss Piggy.
Two U.S. Navy warships have been named the USS North Dakota, a battleship which saw service during World War I and was scrapped in 1931, and a Virginia-class nuclear fast attack submarine commissioned in 2014 and still in service.
A 2001 (and earlier) effort to rename North Dakota to simply Dakota, to soften its image as an icy wasteland, failed, apparently due to its inherent silliness.
In 2001, eight year old Dakota Fanning was chosen to star opposite Sean Penn in the movie I Am Sam, playing the daughter of a mentally challenged man who fights for her custody. Her role in the film made Fanning the youngest person ever to be nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award.
The abortive, and widely-ridiculed, effort to drop the first word of North Dakota’s name was a subplot in an episode of the TV political drama The West Wing.
North Dakota is the No. 1 producer of honey in the nation. Check out the North Dakota Bee Map — Apiary Licensing and Registration.
Only four United States have the letters USA in their names: Louisiana, Massachusetts, South Carolina and South Dakota.
The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, commonly known as Rhode Island, is the smallest state by land area in the United States, and the state with the longest official name.
The state’s common name, Rhode Island, actually refers to the largest island in Narragansett Bay, also known as Aquidneck Island, on which the city of Newport is located.
The island of Rhodes (from which Rhode Island probably derives its name) may be named for roses, from the Greek “rhodon” (ῥόδον). It may also be named for the snakes with which the island was infested in ancient times, “erod” being the Phoenician word for snake.
Although Ohio has the only non-rectangular American state flag, Rhode Island’s is otherwise the closest to a square in its legal proportions, 29:33.
The only three national flags to show a firearm are Mozambique’s, with an AK-47; Guatemala’s, with a pair of generic rifles; and Haiti’s, with a pair of cannons.
Lichtenstein and Haiti developed nearly-identical national flags independently of each other. No one realized until the two countries competed against each other in the 1936 Summer Olympics under the same flag.
Flag of Liechtenstein, 1921-1937 — File:Flag of Liechtenstein (1921–1937).svg - Wikipedia
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Flag of Haiti, variant flag — Flag of Haiti - Wikipedia
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Current flag of Haiti — Flag of Haiti - Wikipedia
Current flag of Liechtenstein — Flag of Liechtenstein - Wikipedia
Sheldon Cooper Presents: Fun With Flags (later renamed Dr. Sheldon Cooper and Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler Present: Dr. Sheldon Cooper’s Fun With Flags) is a YouTube/podcast show that Sheldon and Amy make to teach vexillology, the study of flags. There are ten known episodes; however, Sheldon originally planned for 52 weekly episodes though his podcast appeared in episodes over more than a year’s timeframe.
The study of flags is called vexillology. The Latin word for flag is vexillum – a vexillarius came to mean a standard-bearer.
The Flag Act of 1777, passed by the Continental Congress, read in its entirety, “Resolved, That the flag of the thirteen United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.” However, the dimensions of the flag and the arrangement of both the stars and stripes were not specified until an executive order issued by President William Howard Taft in 1912.
William Howard Taft is the only person to have served both as the President of the United States and Chief Justice of the United States. Taft won the 1908 election but, in his 1912 bid for re-election, was defeated by Woodrow Wilson. Taft assumed the role of Chief Justice in 1921, a position he held until shortly before his death in 1930.
Taft is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, the first president and first Supreme Court justice to be interred there.
William Howard Taft, William Henry Harrison and John Quincy Adams were the only three US Presidents that routinely used their middle names.
Lyndon B. Johnson was the only president to take the oath of office from a female official, Judge Sarah T. Hughes.
He was probably the only president to take his oath on an airplane, too.
Barry Lyndon was a 1975 film, directed by Stanley Kubrick, who also wrote the screenplay, based on a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. The film starred Ryan O’Neal as the title character, an 18th-century Irish rogue.
The movie is regarded as highly innovative in its cinematography (including shooting many scenes without using electric lights), and it won four Academy Awards in technical categories (cinematography, production design, costume design, and score). However, the film received mixed reviews at the time, due to its slow pace (it was over 3 hours long) and lack of emotion.
Actor Chris Makepeace was born on April 22, 1964 in Montréal, Québec, Canada. He is an actor and assistant director, known for Meatballs (1979), My Bodyguard (1980) and Vamp (1986). In 1981, he recorded spoken dialogue for “Music From The Elder” KISS album with Producer Bob Ezrin, but it was not used in the final mix. Plans to turn the album into a feature film never came to fruition. He started acting in TV commercials at the age of ten.