Anderson Cooper is Gloria Vanderbilt’s son.
Gloria Vanderbilt’s great grandfather’s included William Henry Vanderbilt (who died the richest man in the world in 1885) and Judson Kilpatrick, a Union general nicknamed “Kill-Cavalry” for his recklessness in battle and most famous during the war for his womanizing. (For a time Kilpatrick’s retinue included mother-daughter prostitutes he called his laundresses in official accounts of civilian troop followers.)
Gloria Vanderbilt’s oldest son Carter Vanderbilt Cooper, committed suicide on July 22, 1988, at age 23, by jumping from the 14th-floor terrace of Vanderbilt’s New York City penthouse apartment
Though Penthouse was his most lucrative publication, Bob Guccione did not live in one. He combined several townhomes into the largest private house in Manhattan, a 30 room/22,000 square foot 5th Avenue mansion that cost an estimated $5 million per year to maintain. His financial problems in later years eventually resulted in the house being foreclosed on and sold at a $10 million loss; the creditors recouped the $10 million loss from an AIG policy shortly before their bankruptcy.
In addition to Penthouse, Guccione also published Omni, probably the most influential science fiction magazine of the early 90s, where, under editor Ellen Datlow, it became known as the home of the cyberpunk movement in SF.
George R.R. Martin’s Hugo and Nebula-winning novella Sandkings, about an amoral rich man who gets more than he bargained for with his small, sentient warrior pets, first appeared in Omni magazine’s August 1979 issue (where I first read it).
The Dodge Omni and Plymouth Horizon were the first front-wheel drive cars produced in America by Chrysler, and the first American-built car with a transverse-mounted engine.
The Omni in Atlanta, with an innovative self-sealing rusting surface (didn’t work), was the former home of the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks and the NHL’s Atlanta Flames. It was also the site of Marquette basketball coach Al McGuire’s final game, a victory in the championship game of the 1977 NCAA Final Four.
The Omni also hosted the 1988 Democratic National Convention. (the 1st election season I was old enough to appreciate.)
Mass. Gov. Michael Dukakis entered the Omni in Atlanta, on the night that he gave his acceptance speech to the 1988 Democratic National Convention, to the tune of Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America.”
And I was there.
Michael Dukakis’ cousin, Olympia, won an Best-Supporting Actress Oscar in 1988 for Moonstruck. At the end of her acceptance speech she said something like (I’m working from memory here): “Now it’s your turn, Mike!”
And if he just hadn’t rode in that damned tank, it might very well have been. 
The other bad ad was the notorious “Willie Horton” ad.
The 1968 Detroit Tigers had an embarrassment of riches in the outfield: the three regulars – Willie Horton, Mickey Stanley, and Jim Northrup – kept future Hall of Famer Al Kaline (and Detroit institution) on the bench. When the team won the pennant, manager Mayo Smith asked Stanley to play shortstop, a position he had never played in the major leagues. After nine games at the position at the end of the season after the Tigers clinched the pennant, Stanley started every World Series game a shortstop, replacing Ray Oyler (who had batted a gaudy .135 that season and had a career BA of .175). Stanley did not make an error as the Tigers beat the Cardinals in seven games.
The alkaline battery was patented in 1960 by the Union Carbide corporation.
Reverend Mother Dolores, prioress of the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut, is the only nun with an Oscar ballot as a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Before taking Benedictine vows, as Dolores Hart, she played Elvis Presley’s love interest in King Creole and Loving You, but her best known role was as the star of the primordial spring break movie, 1960’s Where the Boys Are.
The Billy Joel song “Allentown” is really about Bethlehem, PA.
Sour Billy is a villain of George R.R. Martin’s acclaimed 1982 vampire novel Fevre Dream, set on the Mississippi River before the Civil War. One fan said the book is what Bram Stoker and Mark Twain might have written together.
In Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2010 Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, the American Civil War is revealed to have been a manipulation of the humans by two warring factions of vampires, one of which wanted to preserve slavery to ensure a continuing supply of fresh blood. Lincoln’s lifelong patron and trainer as a slayer, one of the “good” immortals, revives him after his assassination by turning him as well, and he lives among us still.
Written in the form of newly discovered memoirs, in a way Poe and Verne used as well, the book was a follow-up to Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Vampires. Other authors, however, are responsible for Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and Jane Slayre.
When playing Lou Gehrig in Pride of the Yankees, righthanded actor Gary Cooper was able to show a natural lefty swing by wearing a special “reversed” uniform and batting right handed. The film was then flipped to make it look like he was batting lefty like Gehrig.
Because the scenes of Gary Cooper batting in *Pride of the Yankees *were reversed, the catchers appear to be lefthanded.