Michael Kennedy died in a skiing accident six days before Sonny Bono did the same thing. They both died from skiing into trees.
At the time of his death, Kennedy was under investigation for having an affair with his family’s baby-sitter, an affair that some claimed started when she was 14
After a stint as chairman of the Security and Exchange Commission, Joseph Kennedy Sr. was appointed ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, the top U.S. diplomat to Great Britain, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Kennedy took his entire family with him and made quite a splash in London high society. He continued to use the title “Ambassador” to the end of his days.
St. James’s Palace, located in Pall Mall just north of St. James’s Park, is the senior palace and official residence of the sovereign of the United Kingdom, even though it is not actually used as such (Princess Anne lives there when in London, though). Its pride of place makes it the official location of the Court, which is the body that receives ambassadors and high commissioners through its member, the Marshal of the Diplomatic Corps. The palace was commissioned by Henry VIII and was built on the former site of a leper hospital dedicated to St. James the Less.
St. James Park in London has a large pond that is home to a wide variety of very tame birds, including pelicans.
The limerick
is often attributed to Ogden Nash but was actually written by Dixon Merritt, a Tennessee humorist and bird watcher.
The husband/wife team of Jack Blanchard and Misty Morgan had a minor hit in 1970 with their novelty song “Tennessee Birdwalk”, which describes what the birds would do if their wings, feathers, chirps, birdbaths, and common sense were all taken away:
“Remember, my darling, when spring is in the air
And those bald-headed birds are whispering everywhere
And they’ll all be walking southward in their dirty underwear,
Tennessee birdwalk (chirp chirp)!”
Gen. Daniel Morgan, victor of the Battle of Cowpens and famed Revolutionary War leader, is buried in Winchester, Va.
Winchester, VA changed hands twixt Union and Confederate forces more frequently than any other city in the war- at least twice it changed hands several times on the same day. At one point Stonewall Jackson was attacking the city while his sister Laura Ann (Jackson) Arnold was trapped inside as she had separated from her husband and was staying with friends there; Jackson sent men to guide her out and she briefly moved into his home in Lexington VA (which she had a partial interest in) but never spoke to her brother for the same reason she separated from her husband: they were both Confederate officers and she was a Unionist and an abolitionist in her sympathies.
General Thomas Jackson received the nickname “Stonewall” at the first Battle of Manassas during the Civil War. General Barnard E. Bee of South Carolina is said to have called to his troops, “Yonder stands Jackson like a stone wall; let’s go to his assistance.” Whether Bee’s words were meant as a tribute to Jackson’s steadfastness or a criticism of his failure to advance are not known, as Bee was shot to death moments later.
The name Sue Bee Honey and its logo of a Native American girl came about from the company being based in Sioux City, Iowa.
The song “I’m an Indian, Too,” dramatizing Annie Oakley’s initiation into the Sioux tribe, was omitted from the most recent Broadway revival of Annie Get Your Gun because it was felt to be insensitive.
Despite controversy, the University of North Dakota continues to use the Fighting Sioux nickname for its athletic teams, but employs no costumed mascot to represent the tribe.
The costumed mascot for the Cleveland Indians, a Major League Baseball team which plays at Progressive Field in Cleveland, Ohio, is Slider, a furry beast of no known phylum.
Another mascot of dubious species is Montgomery, Alabama’s “BIG MO”, the mascot of their Minor League team The Biscuits*. Originally he was a biscuit with a pad of butter as a tongue but now he’s some kind of furry creature with a tail and a trunk but not a woolly mammoth which would be historically accurate as mastodon remains have been found in the area. (Perhaps it was decided that a mascot named Big Mo with a buttery tongue wasn’t gay enough in of itself and the city needed something that would actually eat the Biscuits.)
*Worst name for a team ever imho- who has a carbohydrate as their mascot?
“Mr. Met” of the New York Mets was the first live costumed mascot in major league baseball, originating in 1964, ten years before the (San Diego) Famous Chicken (though Mr. Met did go missing for about 20 years).
President Lyndon Johnson, Democrat of Texas, was elected in a landslide in 1964 over Sen. Barry Goldwater, Republican of Arizona, who had joked about lobbing a nuke into the Kremlin’s bathroom and was regarded by many as reckless. A Goldwater slogan stated, “In your heart, you know he’s right.” LBJ partisans responded, “In your guts, you know he’s nuts.”
In MYC’s 1977 mayoral celection, incumbent Abe Beame, Bella Abzug and Mario Cuomo ran against lifelong bachelor Ed Koch. Posters appeared around NYC stating “Vote for Cuomo, not the homo.”
Cuomo denounced the posters, but Koch had the last alugh when he won the election.
Y’know, I’ve always wanted to have an alugh, but I hear Koch got the last one.
And where’s MYC, anyway?
Mario Cuomo electrified the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco with a speech blasting President Ronald Reagan and proudly recalling his family’s immigrant heritage. His son Andrew was just elected Governor of New York.
At the subsequent 1984 Republican National Convention, keynote speaker Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s UN ambassador, delivered a speech that was a notable example of what is now called “dog whistle politics”, repeatedly denouncing the “San Francisco Democrats” for almost everything *but *supporting equal rights for gays.
The two original commentators in 60 Minutes’ “Point Counterpoint” segment were James Kirkpatrick and Nicholas Von Hoffman. Von Hoffman was fired for referring to Richard Nixon as “a dead mouse on the kitchen floor” after the Watergate hearings (he apologized on air, and was defended by Kirkpatrick) and replaced with Shana Alexander, where the format was satirized in Saturday Night Live with the catchphrase, “Jane, you ignorant slut.”
