In the movie Casablanca, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) inspires the crowd in Rick’s Cafe Americain by telling the band to play the Marseillaise.
[del]Peter Graves is the name of a book by William Pène du Bois, who worked at the Paris Review with George Plimpton.[/del]
The movie Casablanca is based on a play called Everybody Comes to Rick’s.
In 1996, owner/trainer/vet William Livingston entered and ran Rick’s Natural Star, a lowly $3000 claiming horse who hadn’t run in 15 months nor won in 3 years, in the Breeders’ Cup Turf against the world’s best turf horses. He lost by 200 lengths.
William Livingston, the first revolutionary governor of New Jersey, was one of the signers of the US Constitution.
New Jersey was named after the Channel Island, Jersey.
Matthew Webb was the first person to swim the English Channel without the use of artificial aids. On August 25, 1875, he swam from Dover to Calais in less than 22 hours.
Stella Taylor (1929-2003), called “The Swimming Nun” because she’d once been a novice, swam the English channel twice in her 40s and made three attempts to swim from the Bahamas to Miami (she never made it, saying the shark cage she was in slowed her down, but she did set records for age and distance swimming).
When Jack Webb (creator of Dragnet) died, he was given a funeral with full police honors, and the LAPD retired Joe Friday’s badge number (714).
Jeanine Deckers (properly Sister Luc Gabriel, popularly Soeur Sourire) recorded the song Dominique and became known as “the Singing Nun” in 1963.
Georgia forward Dominique Wilkins was originally drafted by the Utah Jazz, but never played for them.
Lenny Wilkens has been inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame twice: as a player, and as a coach.
Lenny Bruce’s autobiography was entitled “How to Talk Dirty and Influence People.”
Lenny Bruce is mentioned in the songs; ‘La Vie Boheme’, ‘A Simple Desultory Philippic’, ‘Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah’ and ‘End of the World as We Know it’ amongst many many others.
Bruce Sutter was one of the best closing pitchers in baseball history, playing for the Chicago Cubs, St. Louis Cardinals and Atlanta Braves from 1976 to 1988. He was a 6-time All-Star and won the 1982 World Series, striking out Gorman Thomas of the Milwaukee Braves for the final out. Sutter was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2006.
The St Louis Cardinals have retired the jersey #42 twice, Bruce Sutter "Ol Engine # 42, as Jack Buck used to call him. Also Major League Baseball retired Jackie Robinson’s #42 in honor of breaking the color line in 1947.
Seven U.S. states (North Carolina, West Virginia, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and Virginia) count the Northern Cardinal as the state bird, more than any other species.
For many years, the leader of the Catholic Church in the Philippines was Cardinal Sin- to be specific, Cardinal Jaime Sin.
The Cardinal Sins, also known as the Seven Deadly Sins, are wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony.
Unlike most mammals, the hair of sloths grows away from the extremeties to better protect them from the elements while hanging upside down.
Visitors on tours of Grand Canyon Caverns can see 15 foot tall statue of a Giant Ground Sloth (named Gertie) in one of the underground chambers.