Author Joseph Heller had a fondness for giving characters alliterative names in his novel Catch 22. Among the characters in the book are Col. Cathcart, Doc Daneeka, Milo Minderbinder and Major Major Major Major, who was given his rank by an IBM machine “with a sense of humor,” and who can be neither promoted nor demoted.
Catch 22 was originally titled Catch 18, but Heller’s agent requested he change it so that it wouldn’t be confused with Leon Uris’s recently published Mila 18.
Leon Degrelle was a Belgian politician who became a top Waffen-SS officer during World War II. With the fall of the Third Reich, he fled to Spain, where he remained - a prominent Holocaust denier who often wore his Waffen-SS uniform at public events, including his daughter’s wedding - until his death in 1994. When asked if he had any regrets, he said, “Only that we lost!”
Belgian waffles were originally called Brussells waffles but the originator changed the name because Americans’ geography skills sucked.
The ice-cream cone may have been invented by a Syrian pastry-maker at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. According to legend, said pastry-maker took his waffle-patterned pastries, and rolled them into cones, to help out a neighboring ice-cream vendor who had run out of dishes.
Among Ohio Boy Scouts in the 1970s, Vibram soles on hiking boots were called “waffle stompers.”
Singer Gladys Knight owns- along with Ron Winans- a small chain of Chicken and Waffle restaurants in the Atlanta area; local gay activists have called for Atlanta’s large gay population not to patronize them due to Knight’s Mormonism and Winan’s comments against gay marriage.
According to Cecil Adams the definition of the word “gay” to denote a homosexualbegan appearing in print in the 1930s, and the dual definitions of the word were firmly established by 1955.
Cecil Adams has been fighting ignorance through his Straight Dope since 1973. It’s taking him longer than he thought it would.
Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent was the animated sidekick of Beany Boy on “Beany and Cecil”, created by Bob Clampett, and which ran on ABC in 1962. Beany’s propeller beanie allowed him to fly, and inspired the briefly top-selling Beaniecopter in toy stores. Their adventures were based on the ship Leakin’ Lena, commanded by Captain Horatio Huffenpuff, Beany’s uncle. The title of AC/DC’s hit “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” comes from the business card of villain Dishonest John.
Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs had a number 1 hit on the country charts with The Ballad of Jed Clampett (aka the themesong for The Beverly Hillbillies). By far their biggest hit was Foggy Mountain Breakdown, written by Scruggs and first recorded in 1949 and many times afterwards. The instrumental gained huge popularity from Bonnie & Clyde (though it had been used in several films and performed on The Beverly Hillbillies before then) and frequent Scruggs accompanist Steve Martin says it his favorite piece of music.
Steve Martin declared on one of his early comedy albums (I think it was Comedy Is Not Pretty) that Richard Nixon could maybe have saved his Presidency if he played the banjo. Martin joked, “He could step off Air Force One and say, I’d like to talk to you about the economy, but first a little ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’…” and then launched into a spirited rendition of the song.
Like Harry Truman, Richard Nixon played the piano, and in 1961 performed a concerto of his own composition (accompanied by “15 Democratic violinists”) on the Jack Paar show.
Peter Schickele created the fictional classical composer P.D.Q. Bach for his own parodies of classical music, including the “Concerto for Horn and Hardart.” The “hardart” was a musical instrument of Shickele’s devising, though the title refers to Horn and Hardart, which ran the automat restaurants.
In Texas, too.
Frank Hardart and Joe Horn opened the first Automat at 818 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia on June 9, 1902, the birth date of modern fast food.
Joe Horn, a then 61 year old semi-retired computer programmer in Pasadena, Texas, became famous when he shot and killed two men who were burglarizing his neighbor’s house while on the phone to 911. The men were revealed to be Colombian nationals with lengthy criminal records. While a few led by activist Quanell X called Horn a murderer public sentiment was overwhelmingly on his side and a grand jury refused to indict.
(More about Joe Horn, for those who are interested: Joe Horn shooting controversy - Wikipedia)
By 1964, Joe Kennedy has become President of the United States and is about to have a summit meeting in Berlin with Adolf Hitler in Robert Harris’s bestselling alternative-history novel Fatherland.
SS Vaterland, built for the Hamburg-Amerika Line, was seized by the US in 1917, renamed SS Leviathan, and given to United States Lines. The largest passenger ship afloat at her launching at the Blohm und Voss shipyard in Hamburg, she lost the title to her sister ship SS Bismarck, herself seized and renamed RMS Majestic. Nicknamed “Levi Nathan”, she fell out of favor in the transatlantic passenger market during Prohibition due to being dry.
Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan as a philosophical justification for a strong government and an absolute soverign – in his case, to show that the king should be supported or chaos would result. Later, John Locke wrote his Two Treatises on Government as a rebuttal, arguing that government ruled by the consent of the governed, not divine right.
Bill Watterson refuses to license any merchandise from his comic strip Calvin & Hobbs. He believes that art should stand on its own merits.