In the movie version of the board game Clue, Mr. Mustard was played by Martin Mull a stubborn militant American who deep down is a rather weak-hearted individual, having stolen essential radio parts during war-time and sold them on the black market to supplement his income.
The board game Candy Land was at the center of one of the first disputes over domain names on the web, as in the mid-'90s candyland.com was a porn site. Hasbro successfully sued for control of the domain.
You can check it out. www.candyland.com redirects to https://hasbrogaming.hasbro.com/en-us.
A little itty bitty bit of trivia that has always annoyed the hell out of me:
A trilogy of tales was put out called Candy Cane Murder. A story by Joanne Fluke had the title role, The Dangers of Candy Canes by Laura Levine, and Candy Canes of Christmas Past by Leslie Meier. Fine cozy holiday mysteries.
Two years later, Gingerbread Cookie Murder. Title tale by Joanne Fluke, The Dangers of Gingerbread Cookies by Laura Lecine. And Leslie Meier starts her story by having title character Lucy Stone give the little boy who later gets kidnapped a present of a Gingerbread Cookie.
Is the story entitled Gingerbread Cookies of Christmas Present? NO! Some idiot decided on Gingerbread Cookies and Gunshots. Not only a stupid title, but also inaccurate: Only one gunshot in the whole story.
The three writers never did another trio of holiday stories, though Meier has put out three books with stories by herself, Le Hollis and Barbara Ross, three cozy mysteries set in Maine: Eggnog Murder, Yule Log Murder, and Haunted House Murder.
Cane by Jean Toomer was a collection short sketches about the Black experience in America. Because of its unconventional structure, the novel was ignored when it first came out, but is now a highly regarded classic of the Harlem Renaissance.
The Harlem Globetrotters, a globally-known exhibition basketball team, are not actually based in Harlem (and, apparently, never have been).
The team, consisting entirely of black players, was founded in Chicago in 1928, as a barnstorming team playing in the Midwest. Manager Abe Saperstein soon renamed the team the “New York Harlem Globetrotters” (and, soon after, just the “Harlem Globetrotters”), both to recognize Harlem as a center of black culture, and to lend a mystique to the team.
The Harlem Globetrotters did not actually play a game in their “home city” of Harlem until 1968. The team is currently headquartered in suburban Atlanta, Georgia.
Harlem, in Manhattan NY, is named after the city of Haarlem (population about 160,000) in the Netherlands. In Haarlem NLD, beer brewing dates back to the 1400s. In 1995 for the city’s 750th anniversary, some beer enthusiasts recreated an original Haarlem beer called Jopenbier, or Jopen for short.
Haarlem NLD is a twin city of:
- Osnabrück DEU
- Angers FRA
- Harlem USA
*Netherlands *literally means ‘lower countries’, which refers to the nation’s low elevation and flat topography. Only about 50% of the land in the Netherlands exceeds 1 meter above sea level, and nearly 17% is below sea level.
The Zuiderzee (Dutch for “Southern Sea”) was a shallow bay off of the North Sea in the northwestern Netherlands.
In the 1920s, the Dutch began construction of a 20-mile-long dam, the Afsluitdijk, which closed off the Zuiderzee from the North Sea. After the completion of the Afsluitdijk in 1932, the formerly salt-water bay became a freshwater lake, the IJsselmeer, while much of the area which had been underwater was reclaimed as land through the building of polders.
Worldwide, dams generate about 16% of the world’s electricity from the approximately 50,000 dams that have been built at an average height of 15 meters or more and the millions of smaller dams that have been built on the world’s rivers. About 5,000 dams have a height of 60 meters or more. All the dams in the world have flooded land the size of Spain, and their reservoirs contain three times the amount of water in all of the world’s rivers.
Through evaporation, all of these dams lose nearly four Niagara Falls’ worth of water.
Worldwide, dams generate about 16% of the world’s electricity from the approximately 50,000 dams that have been built at an average height of 15 meters or more and the millions of smaller dams that have been built on the world’s rivers. About 5,000 dams have a height of 60 meters or more. All the dams in the world have flooded land the size of Spain, and their reservoirs contain three times the amount of water in all of the world’s rivers.
Through evaporation, all of these dams lose nearly four Niagara Falls’ worth of water.
The city of Rotterdam was founded in the 13th century when a dam was built along the river Rotte.
When Hoover Dam was finished in 1936 it was the world’s largest hydroelectric power station.
A janitor (and inventor) in Canton, Ohio, named James Spangler, developed the first upright vacuum cleaner. In 1908, Spangler received a patent for his design, the “Electric Suction Sweeper.”
Spangler had given one of his early units to his cousin, Susan Hoover. Susan’s husband, William, and son, Herbert, impressed by the device, bought the patent from Spangler, and started the Electric Suction Sweeper Company. The Hoovers retained Spangler on their staff, and Spangler developed several additional patents for their cleaners.
After Spangler’s death in 1915, the Hoovers changed the name of the firm to the Hoover Suction Sweeper Company.
Canton, Ohio, population 73,000, is the adopted home of President William McKinley (1843 - 1901) who was President from 1897 to 1901. McKinley was born in Niles OH, 50 miles to the northeast of Canton. Around 1867 McKinley first practiced law in Canton. Canton is now the site of the William McKinley Presidential Library and Museum and the McKinley National Memorial, dedicated in 1907.
So, Canton OH — home to Hoover vacuum cleaners, NFL football, and William McKinley.
At 58 years and 228 days, William McKinley was the oldest President to die of assassination. Of course, if Ronald Reagen’s assassination attempt had been successful he would have been the oldest at 70 years.
At 20,310’, Denali is North America’s tallest mountain. Denali’s topographic isolation is 4,629 miles, and its topographic prominence is 20,156’.
The topographic isolation of a summit is the minimum great-circle distance to a point of equal elevation, representing a radius of dominance in which the peak is the highest point.
Topographic prominence measures the height of a mountain or hill’s summit relative to the lowest contour line encircling it but containing no higher summit within it.
Denali is the third most prominent and third most isolated peak on Earth, after Sagarmatha and Aconcagua.
Ninja’ed!
The Seven Summits are the highest mountains of each of the seven continents. The first person to climb to the top of each of these mountains was Richard Bass, who achieved this feat on April 30, 1985.
On December 14, 1955, author Richard Brautigan was arrested for throwing a rock through a police station window, supposedly to be sent to prison and fed. He was arrested for disorderly conduct and fined $25. He was then committed to the Oregon State Hospital on December 24, 1955, after police noticed patterns of erratic behavior.
At the Oregon State Hospital Brautigan was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and clinical depression, and was treated with electroconvulsive therapy 12 times.h the papers of the last of those editors, Harry Hooton.) On February 19, 1956, Brautigan was released from the hospital and briefly lived with his mother, stepfather, and siblings in Eugene. He then left for San Francisco, where he would spend most of the rest of his life except for periods in Tokyo and Montana.
Brautigan would die of a self-inflected gunshot on September 16, 1984.
President Richard M. Nixon had an after-hours drinking problem in the White House which was known only to his top aides, including National Security Advisor Dr. Henry Kissinger.