The pitcher holding the MLB record for most strikeout in a game (extra innings) is obscure journeyman Tom Cheney, who struck out 21 Baltimore Orioles on September 12, 1962. Cheney got the win, 2-1, after pitching 16-innings.
The longest game by innings in Major League Baseball was a 1-1 tie in the National League between the Boston Braves and Brooklyn Dodgers in 26 innings, at Braves Field in Boston on May 1, 1920. The Braves’ Joe Oeschger and the Dodgers’ Leon Cadore both pitched the complete game, which was called on account of darkness.
The Boston Braves were originally called the Boston Red Stockings. The team and its successors can lay claim to being the oldest continuously playing team in American professional sports
Boston is still called “The Hub” by some of its citizens, continuing the tongue-in-cheek designation of the Massachusetts capital city as “the hub of the Universe” by poet and native Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Holmes actually wrote “[The] Boston State-House is the hub of the solar system. You couldn’t pry that out of a Boston man, if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar.” That was in a series of humorous articles he wrote for The Atlantic, titled “The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table”.
The sentiment is echoed in an old joke about a young man asking his wealthy Boston Brahmin aunt on Beacon Hill why she never traveled. Her reply: "My dear, why should I? I’m already there!’
The concept of a “Great White Hope” in boxing began when Jack Johnson won the heavyweight championship and whites could not stand a black man being champion. Various white boxers were hyped as being able to beat Johnson, though they did not succeed until he face Jess Willard when Johnson was 37. The term came up from time to time whenever there was a black champion, but slowly faded away as racism became less mainstream. Probably the last heavyweight boxer to be given that sobriquet (though it was meant more ironically) was Gerry Cooney, who fought Larry Holmes in 1982.
Sherlock Holmes’s older and considerably larger brother Mycroft was a senior British civil servant and at times, Dr. Watson’s friend and companion said, “was the Government” to all intents and purposes. He was just as smart and insightful as Sherlock, but much lazier and set in his ways. He first appeared in the story “The Greek Interpreter.”
Dimetrios Georgios Synodinos was the real name of Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder, who became known as an oddsmaker and television personality before losing his NFL Today job after “explaining” that American blacks were superior athletes because “during the slave trading, the owner — the slave owner would breed his big black to his big woman so that he could have a big black kid.”
In typography, “greeking” means to fill a document with gibberish text as a placeholder to show the design element. It probably derives from the phrase, “it’s Greek to me,” since the words – traditionally in Latin and starting with the words "Loren Ipsem . . . " are generally not understandable by their reader. In Word 2007, you can create this text by typing =lorem() at the beginning of a line and pressing Enter. A second set of text for greeking (using English words) uses the formula =rand()
Crime fiction author Loren D. Estleman’s latest book featuring Michigan private investigator Amos Walker is American Detective (2007). Bill Clinton has said Estleman is a favorite of his.
Sophia Loren (born Sofia Scicolone) is the oldest of two daughters born to her father (a construction company executive with aristocratic ancestry) and mother (an unsuccessful actress and singer and musician) but she did not know her father as he refused to marry her mother and wanted no relationship with their children. Her sister Maria married Romano Mussolini, son of Benito, and their daughter Allesandra became a famous model and conservative politician.
Alessandra Mussolini entered the Parlamento Italiano in 1992, representing a Naples district, the year after Ilona Staller lost her bid for re-election. Previously a porn starlet who performed under the name “La Cicciolina”, or “Cuddles”, while in Parliament and before the outset of the Gulf War she offered to have sex with Saddam Hussein if he would release the foreign hostages. Hers had also been the first breasts to be shown bare on Italian TV. She renewed her offer to have sex with Saddam Hussein in October 2002, when Iraq was resisting international pressure to allow inspections for weapons of mass destruction, and in April 2006 made the same offer to Osama bin Laden.
Doubles for Saddam Hussein appeared in the movie comedies Hot Shots: Part Deux (floating in a swimming pool, sipping a tropical drink as a bomb is dropped atop him) and The Big Lebowski (offering bowling shoes to The Dude in a dream while wearing a bowling shirt enscribed “Saddam”).
Elizabeth Halaby, an American who grew up in Washington, DC, married King Hussein of Jordan in 1978, the fourth of his four wives (two were divorced and another died in a plane crash), taking the name of Queen Noor.
According to the Oscar-winning movie The Queen, His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh’s affectionate nickname for his wife, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, is “Cabbage.”
ABBA’s hit single Dancing Queen, considered to be their signature song, reached #1 on the following hit singles charts: Australia, Belgium, Britian, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Rhodesia, South Africa, Sweden and the US of A.
The German battleship Tirpitz was moored in a fjord in Norway when she was atacked by British warplanes, repeatedly hit and finally capsized in November 1944. She was later cut up for scrap. Sections of her armor plate are still used by the Norwegian Road Authority as temporary road surface material.
The fjord horse, a Norwegian breed, is considered one of the oldest and purest lines of domesticated equines. A versatile breed, it is variously employed in plowing fields, pulling timber, transporting tourists, driving competitions, and therapeutic riding, and is often used to introduce children and other beginners to horsemanship.
The current Norwegian king is Harald V, born February 21, 1937. He succeeded to the throne of Norway upon the death of his father, King Olav V, on January 17, 1991. The son of the then-Crown Prince Olav and Princess Märtha of Sweden, Harald was born at the Crown Prince Residence at Skaugum, Akershus, Norway. He is in the line of succession to the British throne, too.
Rose (Betty White) used to torture her roommates on Golden Girls with endless tales of her weird childhood in the extremely Scandinavian influenced town of St. Olav, Minnesota.