Three ships of the Confederate States Navy were named the CSS Florida, the best-known of which was a commerce raider captured by the USS Wachusett, the captain of which violated Brazilian neutrality in Bahia harbor in order to seize her in October 1864. He was convicted in a court-martial but Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles set the verdict aside.
Mandy Patinkin abruptly left the show Criminal Minds in 2007, just as his character Jason Gideon abruptly quit from the Behavior Analysis Unit, due to emotional distress. In 2012, Patinkin opened up about why he left stating that the show “was very destructive to my soul and my personality. After that, I didn’t think I would get to work in television again.”
According to Oxford Research Encyclopedias, the first police drama on television was a show called Stand By For Crime, which aired on ABC in 1949. The plot focused on the murderer’s point of view, in which the lead police detective would uncover and analyze the clues. Audiences were than invited to guess the identity of the killer by phoning the network.
One of the stars of the show was newsman Mike Wallace, under his real name, Myron Wallace.
Wil Wheaton starred as Gordon “Gordie” Lachance and Jerry O’Connell as Vernon “Vern” Tessio in Rob Reiner’s 1986 adaption of Stephen King’s The Body, a movie entitled Stand By Me. The two would next appear together at the 2017 Sheldon & Amy wedding episode of Big Bang Theory, with Wheaton playing himself and O’Connell playing Sheldon’s older brother George Cooper Jr.
Stand by Me (1986) was filmed in locations including Brownsville, Oregon which stood in for the 1950s small town, and also on the McCloud River Railroad, above Lake Britton Reservoir near McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial State Park in California.
Denis Weaver, who starred in the TV series McCloud, lost a daughter-in-law, Lynne Ann Weaver, wife of son Robby Weaver, in Santa Monica, California, when a car driven at high speed plowed through shoppers at the Santa Monica Farmers Market on July 16 2003. She was one of ten people killed in the incident. After he was found guilty of ten counts of vehicular manslaughter, the sentencing judge noted that driver George Weller “showed enormous indifference” and "unbelievable callousness.
Actor Dennis Weaver was 6’ 2 tall. Born in Joplin MO in 1924, he had Osage and Cherokee ancestry in his lineage. In college at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, he was a track star and set several school records. In the Navy during WWII he flew the F4U Corsair, the same plane flown by US Marine Greg “Pappy” Boyington. He tried out for the 1948 US Olympics team in the decathlon, for the games in London, but he finished sixth behind Bob Mathias who won Gold in those games (and — Hey! — is another US Marine).
Dennis Weaver died in 2006 at the age of 81.
Actor/comedian Cliff Arquette was best known for his trademark character, Charley Weaver, a hick who specialized in corny and double-entendre jokes. Arquette played the Weaver character on numerous televisions shows from the 1950s through the 1970s, including a long-running stint as a regular on Hollywood Squares.
Cliff Arquette’s son Lewis was also an actor, as are five of Lewis’s children: Patricia, Rosanna, Richmond, David, and Alexis Arquette.
The Hollywood Squares debuted in 1965 and ran on and off until 2004. TV Guide magazine ranked it at #7 of its 60 greatest game shows ever, in 2013.
The original version of The Hollywood Squares aired from 1965 through 1981. Paul Lynde was featured in the important middle square from 1968 through 1979.
Bert Parks (longtime emcee of the Miss America pageant) was the host for the pilot episode of The Hollywood Squares in 1965. When the show was picked up by NBC in 1966, Parks wasn’t available, and comedian Morey Amsterdam recommended fellow comic actor Peter Marshall for the position.
Marshall was apparently unenthusiastic about hosting a game show, but believed that the show would not run for long, and took the role. As it turned out, Marshall hosted The Hollywood Squares for its entire original 15-year run, from 1966 until 1981.
Marshall, whose given name is Ralph Pierre LaCock, is the father of Pete LaCock, who was a first baseman/outfielder for the Chicago Cubs and Kansas City Royals from 1972 until 1980.
Cool trivia, kenobi65.
Fort Sill, Oklahoma’s School of Fire for Field Artillery was founded in 1911, and it continues to operate today. The world-renowned US Army Field Artillery School operates out of Fort Sill, as does the US Marine Corps’ Field Artillery MOS school, and the Army’s Air Defense Artillery School, their 31st Air Defense Artillery Brigade, and their 75th Field Artillery Brigade.
When Peter Marshall graduated high school he was drafted into the army in 1944 and stationed in Italy. He was originally in the artillery, and as such it is highly likely he trained at Fort Sill or at least with Fort Sill trained soldiers Marshall was later recruited to be a disc jockey at a radio station in Naples. Marshall was discharged in 1946 with the rank of SSG, or Staff Sergeant.
SSG is the typical Army abbreviation for Staff Sergeant.
SSgt is the typical Marine Corps abbreviation for Staff Sergeant. Because we gotta be different, dontchaknow.
Prior to September 2019, it was against regulations for a male United States Marine to carry an umbrella while in uniform. Under the new regulations, umbrellas must be plain black, they cannot be carried in formations, they must not be used as walking sticks and they must be carried in the left hand to leave the right hand free for saluting.
No kidding? Cool. I was in for 13 years and never used an umbrella. I must’ve forgotten that reg.
The rank of E-7 in the Marine Corps is the Gunnery Sergeant. Abbreviated GySgt and informally nicknamed “Gunny”, Gunnery Sergeant is unique to the Marine Corps. An E-7 in the Army is SFC, Sergeant First Class, in the Navy and Coast Guard it is CPO, Chief Petty Officer, and in the Air Force it is MSgt, Master Sergeant.
The Gunny’s rank insignia is three chevrons above two rocker bars, and with a pair of crossed M-1 Garand rifles (image). The rank was created in 1899 by a Naval act, and from 1946 to 1959 the rank was temporarily replaced by Technical Sergeant. In 1959 the Gunny rank was restored.
One famous Gunnery Sergeant in history is John Basilone who, in World War II in the Guadalcanal campaign was awarded the Medal of Honor, and then in the Iwo Jima Battle where he died, was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross. Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone was the only enlisted Marine to receive both of these decorations in World War II.
One notable Gunnery Sergeant in fiction, in the movie An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), was played by Louis Gossett, Jr. as Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley.
Emil and the Detectives, a children’s book, was the only pre-1945 work by German author Erich Kästner to escape Nazi censorship. Kästner, a pacifist, was interrogated by the Gestapo several times, the national writers’ guild expelled him, and the Nazis burned his books as “contrary to the German spirit” during the book burnings of May 1933, instigated by Joseph Goebbels. He left Berlin in early 1945, after a warning that the SS planned to kill him and other Nazi opponents before arrival of the Soviets. He was nominated for the Nobel prize in Literature four times.
‘Gestapo’ is a shortened version of Geheime Staatspolizei, which is German for Secret State Police. The Gestapo was created in 1933 by Herman Goering, who combined the various security agencies of the country into one organization. Leadership of the Gestapo was transferred to Heinrich Himmler in 1934.
The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party is a book first published in 1995 by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams, in which they argue that homosexuality in the Nazi Party contributed to the extreme militarism of Nazi Germany. According to the authors, homosexuality found in the Nazi Party contributed to the extreme militarism of Nazi Germany. The title of the book, as well as the book itself, is a reference to The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals, a book in which Richard Plant details homophobia in the Nazi Party and the homosexual victims of Nazism. he book has been widely debunked and drawn extensive criticism from historians.
In the mid-1930s, Adolf Hitler had a close friendship, possibly even a sexual relationship, with English socialite Unity Mitford. A daughter of English nobility, Mitford was obsessed with the Nazi leader. She travelled to Germany, learned German and manipulated her way into Hitler’s inner circle. Mitford was a self-proclaimed anti-Semite who was described as being “more Nazi than the Nazis”. Ironically, Unity Mitford had been conceived in a small Canadian town named Swastika while her parents were travelling abroad.
The Unity Temple is a Unitarian Universalist Church in Oak Park, Illinois (just west of Chicago). The building was designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright (who was living in Oak Park at the time), and completed in 1908.
Due to its design, and use of reinforced concrete as a building material, the Unity Temple is considered by many architects to be one of the world’s first examples of “modern architecture.”
The thinnest and most vulnerable part of the skull is the pterion, roughly corresponding to the temple. Under the temple lies the junction of four skull bones: the frontal, parietal, temporal and sphenoid. It is a hazard zone because it is so thin, and because of a big artery, the middle meningeal, which runs immediately beneath it.
A direct blow to the pterion, or even an indirect blow to another part of the skull, may cause a fracture to this weak area, with a rupture of the underlying blood vessels.