The names of the Simpsons are taken from Matt Groening’s family: Homer (father Homer Groening), Marge (mother Marge Wiggum Groening), Lisa, and Maggie. The one exception is Bart, which is an anagram for “brat.”
Homer Groening was a newspaper ad executive who co-wrote a column calleed “Phoebe Get Your Man” with future cookbook writer Peg Bracken.
Phoebe Buffay, the “Friends” character, had a twin sister, Ursula, who used Phoebe’s name to do porn.
Christopher Columbus named the Virgin Islands in tribute to St. Ursula and her 11,000 virginal handmaidens.
Christopher Columbus was NOT trying to prove the Earth is round (educated people knew that already). He was merely trying to prove you could reach India by sailing west. His problem-he underestimated the size of the Earth by about 5,000 miles.
Director Chris Columbus (his real name), who grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, is best known for Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s/Philosopher’s Stone.
Columbus Circle, at the sothwest corner of Central Point in Manhattan, is the official measuring point for all distances calculated for New York City. It was used in the movie Ghostbusters as the site where the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man began his journey to the Shandor Building, at 55 Central Park West.
John Belushi was originally supposed to be a Ghostbuster. Harold Ramis replaced him.
Though Ayn Rand died one day after John Belushi, she was buried two days sooner.
Rand emigrated from communist Russia.
32 Nobel Prize winners were associated at one time or another with The RAND Corporation, one of the oldest and most successful “think tanks.”
Remington Rand Company, the first company to market typewriters with a QWERTY keyboard, also produced the UNIVAC line of computers, originally developed by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly.
John Pecinovsky, a tavern owner in Lime Springs, Iowa was known as the “Half-and-Half Man” because he dressed in completely different colors on both sides of his body. He also shaved differently and cut his hair differently on both sides–giving the impression of two halves of different people joined together as one man.
Lime Street was a short-lived TV series which featured Samantha Smith, a Maine teen who had become famous after writing to then-Soviet leader Yuri Andropov and asking if he desired a nuclear confrontation with the USA.
The U.S. Navy’s Iowa-class battleships were the last on active duty in the world. Probably the best-known of the class was the USS Missouri, on which the Japanese surrendered in Sept. 1945, ending World War II. The Missouri is now moored as a museum ship near the sunken USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
The USS Maine, another famous American warship, blew up and sank in the harbor of Havana, Cuba under mysterious circumstances. Either a coal-bunker explosion or a Spanish underwater bomb or mine are the most likely explanations; most historians go for option #1.
Boulder Dam, in Arizona, is otherwise known as Hoover Dam. Built in 1933, it stands at over 726 feet. Ansel Adams photographed it in 1942.
Boulder Dam was build under the supervision of the WPA during the Depression.
Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman helped to found the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 1974 by Tibetan Buddhist teacher and Oxford University scholar Chögyam Trungpa, the university is named for the eleventh-century Indian Buddhist sage Naropa, an abbot of Nalanda.
Thing – a disembodied hand in the TV show The Addams Family was generally portrayed by Ted Cassidy, who stared as Lurch, the butler. Other actors portrayed the hand when the scene required that Lurch and Thing were present, but the writers tried to avoid that happening.
Lurch ad libbed his famous line,“You rang?” in the pilot. Producers liked the line so much, they left it in.