Joanna Russ won the 1972 Nebula Award for her short story, “When It Changed,” originally published in Harlan Ellison’s Again, Dangerous Visions.
The Crab Nebula was first observed in 1731 by John Bevis.
Mike Judge named one his most popular cartoon characters “Beavis” after Bobby Bevis, a football star at the junior high school he atttended.
In the first season of Beavis and Butthead Beavis was a smoker who was constantly saying “Fire! Fire!” whenever he saw anything on TV but this ended when the show was sued for millions of dollars by a woman claiming her 5 year old son burned their mobile home, killing her 2 year old daughter, as a direct result of watching the show.
Beavis occasionally transformed himself into “The Great Cornholio” by pulling his shirt over his head and screaming in a bad Spanish accent that “I need TP for me bunghole!”
When Peter the Great was visiting Amsterdam he and his entourage witnessed the dissection of a cadaver by a famous physician shortly after enjoying a large lunch. When two of the members of his entourage became physically ill from watching it Peter became enraged and forced them to remove some of the pieces of tissue from the cadaver… with their teeth.
After the signing of the Treaty of Westminster in November 1674, the town of New Amsterdam was relinquished to British rule and was renamed “New York.” Suriname became an official Dutch possession in return.
Swimmer Anthony Nesty, who was born in the country of Trinidad and Tobago but moved with his family to Suriname during his early childhood, is his adopted homeland’s only Olympic medalist to date. Nesty took the gold in the 100-meter butterfly at the 1988 Games in Seoul.
Seoul changed hands several times during the Korean War of 1950-53 and was left devastated. Although now rebuilt and bigger than ever, and still South Korea’s capital and economic hub, it remains within range of North Korean artillery. U.S. military planners suspect it would be badly damaged, if not destroyed, in any renewal of hostilities between North and South Korea.
In the still used for the movie Jet Attack in the book The Fifty Worst Films of All time, it shows the US heroes fighting with some North Koreans in order to hijack their plane and fly back to UN lines. The plane clearly has USAF insignia painted on the fuselage.
Jet Attack (I love crappy airplane movies, thanks for bringing up that one) was one of a number of films to show F-86’s to simulate MiG-15’s, but it broke another film convention by also using F-84’s in the role (and the squadron had a mix). Other substitution conventions used in wartime movies were P-51’s as Me-109’s and T-6’s as Zeros. Jet Pilot showed a T-33 as the “Yak-12” flown by Janet Leigh, and the Bell X-1 as a Soviet “parasite fighter” (the B-29 it was dropped from was identical to its Tu-4 copy, however).
The first airplane to successfully cross the Atlantic was the E-N-O-R-M-O-U-S Curtiss Flying Boat, or NC4, which flew from Queens, NY, to Lisbon, Portugal in May 1919. The total flight time was 26 hours and 46 minutes, though the total voyage took 19 days as the craft made frequent stops for maintenance. The plane was very famous in the 1920s but was forgotten to all save trivia buffs and air historians after Lindbergh flew the Spirit of St. Louis from NY to Paris non-stop in 1927; the NC-4 is now restored and on displayat the Naval Air Museum in Pensacola.
The Baby Ruth and Butterfinger candy bars were both originally made by the Curtiss Candy Company.
Candy Cummings (a pitcher, not a porn star) was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, in large part because he was wrongly believed to be the inventor of the curveball.
Rafid Ahmed Alwan, given the code name “Curveball” by the CIA, was a chemical engineer and “informant” who provided invented details about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction program. His “information” was the basis for Colin Powell’s UN speech insisting on war against Iraq.
Ventriloquist Jeff Dunham’s characters include Walter (the foul-mouthed old man), Jose Jalapeno (on a steek), Peanut, and Achmed the Dead Terrorist.
Dancer and political activist Katherine Dunham was also an anthropologist, and studied native dances in a subset of anthropology called ethnochoreology.
Dancer in the Dark was a 2000 Danish musical drama directed by Lars von Trier and starring Icelandic singer Björk, Catherine Deneuve and David Morse. The soundtrack was written mainly by Björk. The film premiered at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival and was awarded the Palme d’Or, along with the Best Actress award for (you guessed it) Björk.
Björk has occasionally attracted controversy for performing her song Declare Independence. When she dedicated the song to Greenland and the Faroes, some Danes (whose country controls all the named islands) were upset. When she dedicated the tune to Kosovo during a concert in Japan, a planned performance in Serbia (to which Kosovo belonged at the time) was cancelled. A dedication to Tibet’s freedom movement during a Shanghai concert, as expected, met with disapproval from China’s Culture Ministry.
Bjork created a bit of a stir upon arrival in Bangkok one time by punching out a female reporter who greeted her at the airport with “Welcome to Thailand!” and shoved a microphone in her face.
(Does that count as trivia?)