Born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Art Linkletter became a United States citizen in 1942. He hosted “House Party”, “People Are Funny”, and “Kids Say the Darndest Things.”
The White House was designed by Irish-American architect James Hoban and was, from the time it was built until well after the Civil War, the largest residence in the United States.
The porn-and-political-commentary (but mostly porn) web site whitehouse.com was created in 1997, and attracted numerous unwitting hits from people trying to access the President’s site, whitehouse.gov. The site now belongs to cybersquatters and is not in use (so don’t bother 
). The site whitehouse.org was set up in 2001 by Chickenhead Productions to satirize GW Bush, but has not been updated since he left office.
The chicken dance (also known as the duck dance) was a song composed by Swiss accordianist Werner Thomas in the 1950s. The song and accompanying dance made its way across Europe to America in the 1970s and has been a favorite of wedding receptions ever since.
The only man executed after trial and conviction for war crimes during the American Civil War, Henry Wirz, commandant of the notorious Confederate POW camp at Andersonville, Ga., was Swiss by birth.
Notable prisoners at Andersonville included Boston Corbett (the deranged English hatter who later killed John Wilkes Booth), James Henry Gooding (a free born corporal of the Massachusetts 54th Colored Volunteers* whose copious letters survived and formed much of the source material for Glory- he died of disease at Andersonville), and at least one woman- Jane Scadden Hunt- who disguised herself as a man to accompany her husband when he was captured and who gave birth inside the camp. (She was immediately released when her gender/baby were discovered.)
*[SIZE]Black prisoners at Andersonville were subject to abuse from both the guards and the white co-prisoners and thus segregated themselves into a large group on the south wall; it apparently worked because of the more than 100 black soldiers known to have been imprisoned there only twelve died, half the mortality rate of white soldiers.[/SIZE]
Boston Corbett, in a fit of religious ecstasy, castrated himself before joining the Union Army. He shot Booth against orders when the presidential assassin was holed up in a Virginia tobacco barn. After the war, Corbett disappeared into the West. No one knows what finally became of him.
Shirley Booth won a Tony, Oscar, and Golden Globe for her 50’s role as Lois Delaney in “Come Back, Little Sheba” (she is the only performer to win both a Tony and an Oscar for the same role), but is best known for her 60’s sitcom title role as the housemaid named “Hazel”, winning 2 Emmys.
“Come Back to Me” was a hit for preternaturally pale American Idol Season 7 winner David Cook. It was written by Espionage, the Norwegian songwriting and music production team of Amund Bjørklund, Espen Lind and Zac Maloy. Time seems to flow in reverse in the song’s official music video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBF6IV8W-80.
Cartoonist Ted Key, the creator of the original Hazel comic strip, also wrote radio plays and several movie screenplays. Key’s other comics field include “Diz and Liz,” which ran in the children’s magazine Jack and Jill. Key also created “Peabody’s Improbable History” for the animated television series The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.
Ted Kennedy graduated from Harvard University as an undergrad (after being expelled for a year for cheating on a Spanish exam), and later the University of Virginia law school. At Harvard he was a football star and was scouted by the Green Bay Packers.
“The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair exposed the deplorable conditions meat packers worked in at the turn of the 20th century. Public outcry led to federal inspection of packing plants and eventually to the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration.
B.J. Upton is an outfielder, formerly an infielder, for the Tampa Bay Rays, and the brother of Arizona Diamondbacks player Justin Upton. “B.J.” stands for “Bossman Junior”, since their father was nicknamed Bossman. The family lives in Chesapeake, Virginia, in the Hampton Roads region.
Baseball pitcher Dennis Ray “Oil Can” Boyd got his nickname from his beer drinking daysin Mississippi, where oversized beer cans are called “oil cans.”
In “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, King Arthur is chastized by a male character that he mistakes for a woman. The character remarks that Arthur could have called him Dennis instead of Old Woman.
In Spamalot, the characters of Dennis (“I’m 38!”) and Sir Galahad are merged into a single role. Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Play speaks one word. (“Sorry.”)
Dennis is an anglicized version of the French Denis, a derivative of Dionysius. Catholic hagiography holds that St. Denis, of Lutetia (now Paris), was beheaded by the Romans, then picked up his severed head and walked north, along the road now named Rue St. Denis, until he finally laid down both his head and his body.
In the musical Les Miserables the character of Gavroche (who in the book but not in the musical is the oldest son [of three] of the Thenardiers [though he doesn’t know it as like his two younger brothers he was abandoned]) refers to his turf as “from St. Denis to St. Michel”, an area that was a slum district in mid 19th century Paris.
Saint-Michel, a neighborhood which was an independent city until incorporated into Montreal in 1968, contains the headquarters of Cirque Du Soleil.
Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey for the Presidency in the election of 1968, winning by almost as small a margin as that by which he had lost to John F. Kennedy eight years earlier. Nixon would resign in 1974 in the aftermath of the Watergate Scandal.