10 Downing Street, London, is commonly believed to be the official residence of the UK Prime Minister. It is in fact the official residence of the UK First Lord of the Treasury. Since the end of 1905, the First Lord of the Treasury has also held the position of PM.
Similarly, 11 Downing Street is the official residence of the Second Lord of the Treasury, who has long been synonymous with the current Chancellor of the Exchequer. Currently, 11 Downing is the home of George Osborne
John Chancellor was the anchor of *NBC Nightly News *from 1970 to 1982. He had previously been a correspondent on the show’s predecessor, The Huntley-Brinkley Report, making his initial mark by reporting on the Little Rock school integration crisis. He was arrested on-air at the 1964 Republican convention for refusing to yield his spot to the “Goldwater Girls”. As NBC’s anchor for Election Night in 1980, he is credited with creating the red/blue concept for states’ returns, although he had the Republicans as blue.
The upstairs apartments of 11 Downing Street are actually larger than those of 10 Downing Street. Since Prime Minister Tony Blair had a wife and kids and Chancellor of the Exchquer Gordon Brown was a bachelor in the late 1990s, they swapped apartments.
Herman’s Hermits, fronted by Peter Noone, brought “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” to #1 on the US charts in April, 1965.
The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, was founded by Catherine the Great in 1764. It is one of the oldest and largest museums in the world – its collections contain nearly three million items, and it has the largest collection of paintings in the world.
When Andrew Jackson was dying at his plantation, The Hermitage, in 1845 he was offered an unusual gift from an admirer, Commodore Jesse Elliot of the U.S. Navy: a sarcophagus made for Alexander Severus (emperor of Rome from 222-235). Jackson refused it in writing in a long letter expressing his appreciation but stating “my republican feelings and principles forbid it”. When he died a few weeks later he was buried in a regular coffin in the limestone and copper gazebo tombhe built for his wife Rachel. (The sarcophagus, incidentally, was probably from the 3rd century but was almost certainly not that of the emperor’s.)
The Starfleet rank of commodore has not been mentioned in any incarnation of Star Trek since the original series. The U.S. Navy no longer has commodores, either, but instead has the (idiotically-named, IMHO) rank of Rear Admiral (Lower Half).
David Farragut – best known for saying, “Damn the torpedoes – full speed ahead” at the Battle of Mobile Bay in the Civil war, was the US Navy’s first rear admiral (one of nine), vice admiral (alone), and full admiral (also alone). Congress was reluctant to establish the rank of admiral, thinking it too connected with royalty.
The Commodore 64 was the bestselling home computer of all times in terms of market share and annual sales. In the mid 1980s it sold an average of 400,000 units per month, more home computers than Apple and IBM sold combined.
Steve Wozniak, a cofounder of Apple, made a guest appearance - playing himself - on the TV geek comedy The Big Bang Theory.
Steve Wozniak was briefly involved romantically with Kathy Griffin of My Life on the D List and Suddenly Susan.
Archie Griffin of Ohio State is the only two-time Heisman trophy winner.
The National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) named the Archie League Medal of Safety Awards after Archie League, considered to have been the first air traffic controller. League used a flag system to direct traffic at what is now Lambert-St. Louis International Airport in 1929. After his war service, he went on to direct the formation of the ATC system as a senior FAA manager.
Lambert-St. Louis International Airport was named after Major Albert Bond Lambert the first person to receive a pilot’s license in St. Louis. He bought Kinloch field, which had been used for balloon flying and exhibitions, and added hangars and a passenger terminal. Lambert was a scion of the Lambert Pharmacal Company that first sold Listerine.
The wings of Lindbergh’s “The Spirit of St. Louis” were built by Ryan Airlines employee Douglas Corrigan, who later became famous himself, under the nickname “Wrong Way”, for his own transatlantic flight. Having been denied permission to take his ramshackle Curtiss Robin from New York’s Roosevelt Field (now a shopping mall) to Ireland, but granted it to take back home overland to California, he always maintained with a grin that he had simply gotten lost.
Lindbergh’s The Spirit of St. Louis is now on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., and was undergoing conservation as of last summer (when I saw it there).
Reeve Lindberg lost her son Jon at age 18 months, the same age her brother Charles Jr. was at the time of his kidnapping and death. In her memoir Under a Wing, Reeve describes sitting with her mother Anne Morrow Lindberg by the crib with her son’s body in it, and her mother saying “I never got to see my child after he died. I never got to say goodbye to him”
New Hampshire towns traditionally elect an official “Hog Reeve” at their annual meetings, a holdover from colonial times in which someone had to take charge of rounding up stray livestock. Historically chosen from among men who had married in the previous year, and were presumably young and healthy enough for the task, the custom has evolved to assign the job jointly to a young newlywed couple.
NH Town Meetings also often elect a Fence Viewer - whose job is to settle property line disputes.
“Mugwump” was a term given to Republican politicians who supported Democrat Grover Cleveland for president in 1884. It was supposedly derived form Algonquin words meaning “Important person,” but the joke was quickly made that, because they were part Democratic and part Republican, they were people who sat with their mugs on one side of the fence and their wumps on the other.