Alexander McCall Smith’s popular No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series is set in Bostwana.
Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man detective novels, was himself a real Pinkerton operative.
Scottish born Allan Pinkerton, founder of the agency that bears his name, slipped on a piece of ice that had fallen from a wagon and bit his tongue. Three weeks later he died a painful death due to gangrene from that injury, resulting in many sermons about it being the wrath of God by ‘activist’ ministers. (Pinkerton was one of the most hated men of his time by members of labor unions, Cuban revolutionaries, immigrant political factions and other groups his ‘agents’ or ‘thugs’ [depending on the source] had broken up.)
Despite the offical story that diet Robert Atkins slipped on the icce and hit his head, causing massive trauma which killed him, some people still believe he died of a heart attack caused by his high-fat diet.
Though the true story was suppressed for a decade, Isaac Asimov died of AIDS from a blood transfusion he received for triple bypass surgery in 1983 (he had had a heart attack in 1977). Asimov wanted to go public when he was diagnosed, but his doctors persuaded him not to, partly to keep people from fearing transfutions and partly because of how the public might show their anti-AIDS prejudice and take it out on his family. His widow finally released the story in 2002.
Asimov wrote in the last volume of his autobiography, “If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is ‘God, God, God,’ and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.”
[del]The biggest hit by Nervous Norvus (real name Jimmy Drake), was 1956’s “Transfusion”, still often played by Dr. Demento. Graphic sounds of a car crash are included after each verse. Each stanza concludes with the refrain “Never never never gonna speed again” followed by lines such as “Slip the blood to me, Bud” or “Pour the crimson in me, Jimson.” “Transfusion” also appears on Kenny Everetts’ “The World’s Worst record Show” (K-Tel label 1978). [/del]
Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the founder of American Atheists, was murdered along with her son and granddaughter in an embezzlement scheme by one of the group’s employees, David Waters.
Chicago’s Orchard Depot Airport was reanmed in 1949 to honor Lieutenant Commander Edward Henry “Butch” O’Hare. O’Hare was a U.S. Navy aviator, the Navy’s first flying ace and Medal of Honor recipient in World War II. The destroyer USS O’Hare (DD-889) was also named in his honor.
The Orchard Depot name lives on in O’Hare International Airport’s official airport code designation, ORD.
Lt. Alonzo Cushing, a Union officer who died while heroically manning his artillery battery during Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg on July 3, 1863, was recently approved for the Medal of Honor. Cushing, born in Wisconsin but raised in New York, was nominated by U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), who was defeated in his race for reelection on Tuesday.
General George Pickett, most famous for his failed charge at Gettysburg, had been married to a Haida woman before the war (his second wife) whose name translated as Morning Mist and who he allowed to braid and scent his hair in the Haida fashion. She died from childbirth and when his own family refused to accept their son and he paid to have him raised by Haida family, and though he remarried to a white wife he continued to wear his hair long and perfumed (but not braided) in his second wife’s honor.
While Pickett’s Charge and the battle of Little Round Top at Gettysburg are well known, the fighting at Culp’s Hill – the north end of the Union line – gets short shrift. Meade took soldiers away from the Hill for reinforcements further south along the line, so that when the rebels attacked, they were undermanned and in a similar position as Joseph Chamberlain more famous stand on Little Round Top. General George Greene held the hill in the face of a much stronger rebel force.
However, the units involved were quickly redeployed elsewhere after the battle and the reports were slow in getting out. By the time the account was sent to headquarters, the public knew about the other areas of battle and the news was overshadowed.
Gettysburg College is the oldest degree-granting Lutheran institution in the USA. Among its alumni are Carson (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy) Kressley; Texas Congressman and 2008 presidential contender Ron Paul; and Newbery Award-winning novelist Jerry Spinelli, who wrote Maniac Magee.
Dwight David Eisenhower was a native of Abilene, Kansas and is buried there on the grounds of his Presidential Library, but he rarely returned there after joining the service (where like most servicemen he lived pillar to post) and the only home he ever owned was a farm in Gettysburg where he and Mamie lived after he retired from public life.
After serving as President Dwight Eisenhower and his wife Mamie retired to a working farm adjacent to the battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. In 1964 he appeared with Barry Goldwater in a Republican campaign commercial from Gettysburg. Before his death Eisenhower donated the farm to the National Park Service.
In every presidential election from 1868 until 1968, at least one of the candidates for president or vice president for the Republican or Democratic party was a resident or was born in the State of New York. Eisenhower kept the streak alive because he was a NY resident in 1952, as President of Columbia University. Nixon set his legal residence in New York state for voting purposes in 1960. The streak was finally broken in 1968; Nixon had returned to California after he lost in 1960.
The phrase “only Nixon could go to China” emerged by the late 1970s, attributed to, among others, congressmen Tom Foley in 1977, who stated, “It took a Nixon to go to China.” The phrase became popular from in the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, where Spock calls it “an ancient Vulcan proverb”.
Richard Nixon and Herbert Hoover were the only two Quaker presidents, though first lady Dorothea Payne Todd “Dolley” Madison was raised Quaker. Her father was a North Carolina planter who freed his slaves upon converting and died in near poverty in Philadelphia. Her first husband was a Quaker, though Madison was Episcopalian and her marriage to him caused her to be “churched”, or expelled, from the Quakers.
In the 1970s, Quaker Oats financed the making of the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, obtaining in return a license to use a number of the product names mentioned in the movie for candy bars.
Joseph was the British politician; Joshua was the American soldier and polymath.
Willy Brandt served as Mayor of West Berlin before becoming Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971 for his outreach efforts to East Germany. He was finally forced from office in 1974 when a top aide was revealed to be a spy for East German, although he is now believed by most historians to have been personally blameless.
Berlin Tegel “Otto Lilienthal” Airport was originally built during the 1948 Berlin Airlift to relieve the load on downtown West Berlin’s Tempelhof, whose Albert Speer-designed terminal was the world’s largest building by volume. Tegel was built from the rubble of bombed-out buildings, using hand tools almost exclusively, by a workforce composed almost entirely of German women. It remains the reunited city’s primary airline facility, although work is almost complete on renovating Schoenefeld, the former East Berlin transport field, to take over for it.