The name Cameroon comes from Portuguese. Explorers in the 15th century named the area Rio dos Camarões (“River of Shrimp”). The city of Doualla, Kotto’s ancestral home, was actually built in 1868 by the Hamburg trading company C. Woermann, when the country was the German colony of Kamerun, becoming its capital and leading seaport.
Eddie Murphy played an odd man from Cameroon, offering beef jerky to everyone on the train, in the comedy Trading Places.
“Beef Jerky” was a track on John Lennon’s 1974 album Walls and Bridges.
John Lennon was murdered December 8,1980 (my dad’s 30th birthday) his death was announced on Monday Night Football by Howard Cosell, the teams were the Patriots and Dolphins.
Before the Boston Patriots were founded as one of the AFL’s original teams, the city had last been represented in the NFL by the Boston Redskins, who moved to Washington in 1937. The team’s named allegedly honored coach Lone Star Dietz, who claimed to be Sioux and who played for Carlisle Indian School with Jim Thorpe.
When George Preston Marshall moved the Redskins to Washington, he commissioned a fight song/anthem for the team, which would become known as Hail to the Redskins. In 1960, the rights to the song were purchased by Clint Murchison, who threatened to forbid the Redskins from using the song unless Marshall backed Murchison’s bid to put an NFL franchise in Dallas.
In the most one-sided NFL title game ever, the Chicago Bears beat the Washington Redskins 73-0 in 1940.
Bewitched and Citizen Kane actress Agnes Moorehead died at the age of 73 in 1974. She was survived by her mother, which was unusual for a 73 year old but not extraordinary; what was extraordinary was that her mother survived her by 16 years, dying at the age of 107 in 1990.
Agnes Moorehead died of cancer and was in the John Wayne movie, The Conqueror, which is believed by some to have been filmed amid radioactive fallout from A-bomb tests. (Cecil wrote about it here Did John Wayne die of cancer caused by a radioactive movie set? - The Straight Dope)
President Harry S Truman personally approved the A-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, having known nothing about the Manhattan Project before taking office upon Franklin Roosevelt’s death that April.
Bockscar (as the sobriquet was painted on the nose of the plane) was the name given to the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. The punning reference was to the aircraft’s commander, Captain Frederick C. Bock.
Capt. Bock didn’t actually command Bockscar on the Aug. 9, 1945 mission which resulted in the destruction of Nagasaki; that duty fell to Maj. Charles W. Sweeney. Bock commanded The Great Artiste instead, which accompanied Bockscar and carried scientific instruments to observe the blast and its aftermath.
After the war, a few B-29’s were converted to flying TV transmitters under the Stratovision name, serving the emerging couch potato market in rural areas outside the coverage of new city-based stations. The 1987 film Riders of the Storm (aka The American Way), with Dennis Hopper, showed the system being used as a pirate TV station.
According to the Monthly Meteorological Magazine, a rain of white frogs fell on a suburb of Birmingham England during a severe storm on June 30th, 1892.
The audiobook of Strphen King’s short Story “Rainy Season” about a young couple who come to a town only to be eaten by an army of grotesque black toads the size of footballs, armed with needle-sharp teeth that fall from the sky every seven years was read by Yeardley Smith.
Yeardly Smith uses her actual voice when voicing Lisa Simpson.
When Joseph Smith was killed his widow and only legal wife Emma, pregnant with her ninth child at the time of his death, chose to remain in Nauvoo, IL rather than go west with Brigham Young. With her sons and later her second husband she founded The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of LDS (now the Community of Christ), a much smaller off shoot of the Mormons that among other differences claims that Joseph Smith never preached or practiced polygamy.
The TV show The Avengers was a spin off from a UK show called Police Surgeon, which was supposed to star Ian Hendry. Patrick McNee as secret agent John Steed was a subsidiary character, but when Hendry left to make movies, the part became the focus of the series. At first, McNee had various partners until Honor Blackman took over as Dr. Cathy Gale. When Blackman left to make Goldfinger, they producers looked to adding another woman to work with McNee. Among the characteristics they were looking for was what they termed “male appeal.” When coming up for a name for the character, one producer looked at his notes, where he had written “M. Appeal.” He sounded this out to “Emma Peel” and they hired Diana Rigg. These episodes were broadcast in the US and became the best known version of the show.
Scott Simon of NPR’s Weekend Edition has always been a huge fan of Diana Rigg. He once joked about the first softball interview he ever had with her, in which his first question was something like, “What is it, Ms. Rigg, that makes you so wonderful?”
Diana Rigg was the “girl” in the 1969 James Bond film “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”, George Lazenby’s first starring role, period, and only Bond turn.