Another (American) football team mentioned in a popular song is the University of Alabama, in the Stealy Dan song, Deacon Blue.
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide, call me Deacon Blue.
TV Guide listed this as a memorable line by Big Bang’s Sheldon Cooper: : I grew up in Texas. Football is ubiquitous in Texas. Pro football, college football, high school football, peewee football, in fact, every form of football except the original, European football, which most Texans believe to be a Commie plot.
The national TV Guide magazine’s first issue was released on April 3, 1953. The 4-month old baby, Desi Arnaz Jr., was on its cover.
Image of Desidario Alberto Arnaz IV on TV Guide magazine: https://is.gd/yyi4hg
Dino, Desi & Billy were one of the first teen heart throb boy bands. Beach Boy Carl Wilson married Billy Hinsche’s sister Annie, divorced her and married Dino Martin’s sister Gina. If he had divorced her and married Desi Arnez Jr.'s sister Lucy he would have scored a trifecta!
Both Desi Jr. and Lucy Arnaz co-starred in Lucile Ball’s third TV series, Here’s Lucy. Among the many guest stars on that show were Liz and Dick, Wayne Newton, and Lawrence Welk.
Liz and Dick — I had to look that up: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton! Elizabeth Taylor married eight times: Conrad “Nicky” Hilton Jr. (heir to the Hilton Hotels), Michael Wilding (British actor), Mike Todd (producer), singer Eddie Fisher, Welsh actor Richard Burton (married twice), Republican politician John Warner and construction worker Larry Fortensky.
Aware of their glamour (and youth at 39 and 32 respectively), Burton and Taylor actively tried to make themselves “uglier” for their roles in ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’
Although the state of Virginia is the twelfth most-populous state in the U.S. (with a population of over 8.5 million people), the state is not home to a team in any of the four major North American sports leagues (the National Football League, Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, or the National Hockey League).
Northern Virginia is part of the D.C. metro area, which is home to four teams (the NFL’s Washington Redskins, the NBA’s Washington Wizards, the NHL’s Washington Capitals, and MLB’s Washington Nationals), but the Redskins play in Maryland (though their offices and training facilities are in Virginia), and the other three teams play in the District of Columbia.
Chicago has won the Super Bowl, the World Series, both National and American league teams, the Stanley Cup, and NBA Championships, multiple times, all within the last 50 years, making Chicago one of the greatest sports cities.
Journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley is known for the line “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”, which was probably his later embellishment of the event. Stanley tore out of his diary the pages relating to the encounter, and neither man mentioned it in any of the letters they wrote at this time.
Stanley’s birth name was John Rowlands, he grew up in a workhouse in Wales, emigrated to New Orleans when he was 18 and claimed to have been adopted by a rich merchant, Henry Hope Stanley, and took his name. Biographers have concluded that he probably never met Stanley.
Explorer David Livingstone (1813-1873) traveled to Zanzibar, Tanzania in 1866 to search for the source of the Nile. He searched for over four years and never did find it, but in his many African explorations he became the first European to see the waterfall named Mosi-oa-Tunya (or “the smoke that thunders”, in the Kololo language). Livingstone named it Victoria Falls after Queen Victoria, although it is still called Mosi-oa-Tunya throughout Zambia and in parts of Zimbabwe.
The source of the Nile comes from two main tributaries: the longer White Nile River which flows out of Lake No in South Sudan, and the shorter Blue Nile River which flows out of Lake Tana in Ethiopia. Lake No is more south than Lake Tana is. During the rainy season, the Blue Nile supplies about 80% of the water in the Nile River.
The most remote White Nile source is actually believed to be in either Rwanda or Burundi. It flows through Tanzania and Lake Victoria long before reaching the Sudan.
Queen Victoria of Great Britain was born in 1819. She assumed the crown in 1837 and ruled for 63 years until her death in 1901.
Between 1840 and 1857, Queen Victoria gave birth to nine children.
The Victoria Cross, the UK’s and Commonwealth’s highest award for valour, is struck using metal from Russian cannon captured at Sevastopol during the Crimean War. In fact, some of the captured cannon were actually Chinese in origin and it is those from which most VCs have been made.
In some Christian traditions, the True Cross is held to be the actual cross on which Jesus was crucified. Some early Christian historians believed that Empress Helena (mother of Constantine) discovered the True Cross while in the Holy Land, circa 320 AD.
It is not uncommon for churches in some older denominations (particularly Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox) to be in possession of reliquaries, containing wooden fragments which they believe are fragments of that True Cross.
The Iron Cross was established as a Prussian, later German, military order of distinction by King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia on March 17, 1813 during the Napoleonic Wars. During World War II, the Iron Cross had a Nazi swastika in the middle. The award was abolished after the German defeat in 1945. A comparable German military decoration, the Badge of Honour, was not reestablished until 1980.
In 1980, the Iranian Hostage crisis contributed to the defeat of Jimmy Carter in the presidential election of that year.
Carter’s decorations included the China Service Medal.
Ali-Reza and Leila Pahlavi were the youngest children of the Shah of Iran; they were 13 and 9 when the Iranian revolution sent them into exile. Both of them suffered from severe depression. Leila died of an overdose of Seconal in London in 2001, age 31, and Ali-Reza died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Boston in 2011, age 44.
Laila Ali, the daughter of boxing legend Muhammad Ali, became a professional boxer, as well. Laila won her first professional fight at age 21, and she finished her career undefeated, going 24-0 from 1999 to 2007. At various times, she held the female super middleweight belt from four different boxing organizations, as well as a light heavyweight title, and in 2001, Laila defeated Jacqui Frazier-Lyde, herself the daughter of a boxing legend (Joe Frazier).
Muhammad Ali was originally named after Cassius Clay, a prominent border-state abolitionist appointed US minister (ambassador) to Russia by President Abraham Lincoln. Both Clays, the diplomat and the boxer, were natives of Kentucky.