“Winnie” in Winnie-the-Pooh is short for Winnipeg. “A. A.” is short for Alan Alexander.
Winnipeg is the capital and largest city in Manitoba. Of Canada’s 13 provinces and territories, Manitoba is the 7th largest. It is larger than California, and smaller than Texas. Manitoba occupies the southwest coast of Hudson Bay, which is the second-largest body of water that uses the word “bay” in its name. Only the Bay of Bengal is larger.
Conservationists estimate that only 3,500 wild tigers remain around the world, while there are some 10,000 tigers in captivity worldwide. The most numerous tigers in the wild are Bengal tigers, numbering around 2,700.
The Detroit Tigers are one of the American League’s eight charter franchises. Founded as a member of the Western League in 1894, they joined the AL in 1901. They are the oldest continuous one name, one city franchise in the American League.
The Tigers have won 11 American League pennants and four World Series titles. Their most recent World Series championship was in 1984.
Thomas Magnum (Tom Selleck), the private detective in the Eighties TV show Magnum, P.I., set in Hawaii, often wore a Detroit Tigers ballcap.
Actor Kevin Costner has starred in three films about baseball:
- Bull Durham (1988), in which he played a veteran minor-league catcher
- Field of Dreams (1989), in which he played a farmer who is guided by a voice to build a baseball diamond in his cornfield, and is visited by the ghosts of deceased players
- For Love of the Game (1999), in which he played a veteran Detroit Tigers pitcher facing the end of his career
(Ninja’d but this still works!)
(I still remember when…) The Detroit Tigers had an incredible 1984 season. They started with a 35-5 record, and finished the regular season with a 104-58 record (0.642 pct). In the ALCS they swept the KC Royals 3-0. In the World Series they dominated the SD Padres 4 games to 1. Kirk Gibson was the ALCS MVP. Jack Morris was the pitching leader and their ace, but Willie Hernández won that year’s Cy Young and AL League MVP awards. Alan Trammell was the World Series MVP.
Comment: That was an awesome team, and I’m glad the SF Giants did not face them in their World Series – that was in 2012, so a very different team.
The 1960 World Series is best known for the walk-off home run hit by Bill Mazeroski of the Pittsburgh Pirates, which gave the Pirates a Game 7 10-9 victory over the New York Yankees. In that series, the Yankees outscored the Pirates 55-27…and lost.
Not in play, but may be of interest to some:
As of today, 12/19/19, The Far Side has an official online home!
Still in play:
The 1960 World Series is best known for the walk-off home run hit by Bill Mazeroski of the Pittsburgh Pirates, which gave the Pirates a Game 7 10-9 victory over the New York Yankees. In that series, the Yankees outscored the Pirates 55-27…and lost.
Around the year 1500, the Barbary pirates began to operate out of North African ports in Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco. In 1804 the US Navy and US Marine Corps fought them in the First Barbary War. This is where the last half of the line in the Marine Corps’ hymn comes from:
From the Halls of Montezuma, to the Shores of Tripoli
Halls of Montezuma is a 1951 World War II war film starring Richard Widmark, Richard Boone, Jack Palance and Karl Malden. The film, which is about U.S. Marines fighting on a Japanese-held island, was directed by Academy Award-winner Lewis Milestone. It also starred Robert Wagner in his first credited screen role and featured Richard Boone in his feature film debut. Real color combat footage from the war in the Pacific was incorporated into the film’s cinematography.
The Pacific island hopping campaign of WWII began in late 1943 with Operation Cartwheel and the island of New Britain, New Guinea and then advanced through the Solomon Islands including Guadalcanal and the Santa Cruz Islands, then Emirau Island.
The Pacific island hopping campaign of WWII began in late 1943 with Operation Cartwheel and the island of New Britain, New Guinea and then advanced through the Solomon Islands including Guadalcanal and the Santa Cruz Islands, then Emirau Island.
The Pacific island hopping campaign of WWII began in late 1943 with Operation Cartwheel and the island of New Britain, New Guinea and then advanced through the Solomon Islands including Guadalcanal and the Santa Cruz Islands, then Emirau Island.
You can say that again… and again!
When the crew of the commercial starship USCSS Nostromo believe they are approaching Earth in the sf movie Alien, directed by Ridley Scott, navigator Lambert tries to contact Traffic Control in the Solomon Islands.
Richard Chamberlain portrayed the fictional English adventurer Allan Quatermain, created by novelist H. Rider Haggard, in two films: King Solomon’s Mines (1985) and Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1986).
The two movies were filmed back-to-back, with the intention that there would be a trllogy of Quatermain films. However, due to the poor reception of the second film, and financial woes for the production company, Cannon Films, the third film was never made.
Those darned 50X errors are causing double posts! ETA: oh wow, triple posts! :smack:
In 1904, author Joseph Conrad wrote the novel Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. The lead character is named Nostromo, which is Italian for “shipmate” or “boatswain”, but the name could also be considered a corruption of the Italian phrase “nostro uomo”, meaning “our man”.
In Alien (1979), the escape ship of the USCSS Nostromo is named Narcissus, a reference to another Joseph Conrad work.
Joseph Conrad’s best-known book is probably *Heart of Darkness *, which has been widely re-published and translated into many languages. It provided the inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Heart of Darkness 67th on their list of the 100 best novels in English of the twentieth century.
Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) is widely considered one of the best films of all time, but on IMDB The Shawshank Redemption is rated higher.
A magnificent oak tree is an important landmark in the movie The Shawshank Redemption, filmed in Ohio. It was unfortunately lost, after a lightning strike and severe wind damage, in 2016.