Lenny Bruce called his autobiography “How To Talk Dirty and Influence People.,” a takeoff on Dale Carneige’s bestseller “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”
The Official Roy Rogers & Dale Evans Museum, which included among other things the stuffed remains of Roy’s horse Trigger, Dale’s horse Buttermilk, and their German Shepherd Bullet, moved from Victorsville CA to Branson MO in hopes of boosting its tourism, but too few people remember Rogers/Evans to have much interest and it folded. The horses and dog were offered to the Smithsonian and other museums who declined them due to cost of transporting/insuring/displaying them and limited interest, thus they were auctioned along with the other contents. (Trigger sold for $265,000, Buttermilk for $25,000 and Bullet for $35,000.)
Among the items in the Smithsonian’s collection are a 50-foot chunk on highway taken from the Oklahoma portion of the old Route 66.
Also on display in the Smithsonian is the sun-face cornerstone from the Mormon temple in Nauvoo, Illinois.
In the 1880s. baseball had an early “World Series” competition between the champions in the National League and the American Association. When the AA folded, there was nothing to take its place so the the owner of the second place Pittsburgh Pirates, William Chase Temple, donated a special award – the Temple Cup – to go to the winner of a postseason series. The cup was first contested in 1894, but the players were not all that interested in playing, and the fans were just as apathetic. The Temple Cup was discontinued after four attempts, three of which were won by the second place team.
The teams that played in the World Bowl (AKA NFL Europe’s Super Bowl) were the top 2 teams in the league’s regular season.
The championship of the only season of the XFL, 2001, was won by the Los Angeles Xtreme over the San Francisco Demons. The game was originally named “The Big Game at the End of the Season”, but was later dubbed the Million Dollar Game, after the amount of money awarded to the winning team.
The league is best remembered for a side-effect of its lack of a rule that a player’s jersey show his name - Las Vegas Outlaws RB Rod Smart’s read “HE HATE ME”. When Smart and the Outlaws played LA , two Xtreme players put “I Hate He” and “I Hate He Too” on the back of their jerseys to express their disdain for Smart. In a later game between those two teams, those two players changed their nicknames to “Still Hate He” and “Still Hate He Too”. Smart’s future Carolina Panthers teammate Jake Delhomme named one of his thoroughbreds, “She Hate Me”.
The XFL was founded by Vince McMahon, chairman of the WWE wrestling organization. The league folded after NBC canceled its contract to televise the games, due to low ratings.
Although Major League Baseball pitcher Don McMahon made 874 appearances on the mound during a career which lasted from 1957 to '74, he never once spent time on the disabled list.
Ed McMahon was a flight instructor for 2 years in the U.S. Marine corps during WW2 and later flew 85 combat flights in Korea. He retired as a colonel in the Marine Reserves and was eventually promoted to Brigadier General in the California National Guard.
Baseball legend Ted Williams was future astronaut John Glenn’s Marine Corps wingman during the Korean War.
Every sitcom and nearly all dramatic shows of the 60s used Glen Glenn Sound to handle their audio post production. For sitcoms it was essential: Glen Glenn had the only laugh track equipment in Hollywood.
Glen Glenn Sound also handed audio for the original Star Trek series, which was produced by Desilu, Lucille Ball’s production company.
David Mamut’s stage pay “Glengarry Glen Ross” has so much profanity in it that the Broadway cast dubbed it “Death of a Fucking Salesman.”
The movie version starred Alec Baldwin, Jack Lemmon, among others.
Jack Lemmon was born in an elevator.
The Eiffel Tower was supposed to be built entirely by French manufacturers. However, one element had to be designed by a non-French firm: the elevators. Otis Elevator of the US was the only company able to design one that would work given the design of the tower. The French, though, still delayed approval of the finished elevator because they did not trust the design, where the elevator cab was lifted by a cable (French elevators used a piston). They feared that a broken cable would cause disaster, but eventually Otis was able to show them that their fail-safes worked.
French singer Yannick recorded a French rap cover of The Fourt Seasons December 1936 (Oh, What a Night!) called "Ces soirées-là-The record was phenominally successful: In France, the song debuted at #13 on March 25, 2000, then climbed and reached #1 three weeks later. It stayed there for 15 consecutive weeks, then dropped rather slowly. It totalled 24 weeks in the top ten, 36 weeks in the top 50 and 37 weeks on the chart (top 100).Certified Diamond disc by the SNEP, it is to date the 13th best-selling single of all time with more than 1,5 million copies sold.
“Ces soirées-là” was also successful in Belgium. It went to #33 on May 6, 2000 and reached number-one three week later. After 10 weeks atop, it kept on dropping and fell of the chart (top 40) after a total of 24 weeks.
The song was #4 for two weeks in July 2000 in Switzerland, but remained on the chart for 30 weeks, 14 of them in the top ten.
The record is now used as an openin number in The For Seasons’ jukebox musical Jersey Boys.
After the U.S. Supreme Court’s bitterly contested 5-4 decision in the December 2000 Bush v. Gore election dispute, Justice David Souter, who was in the minority (and had been appointed by Gov. Bush’s father), considered resigning from the court, but decided to stay after all. He did not resign until June 2009, when President Barack Obama appointed Sonia Sotomayor to replace him.
Souter is a native/resident of New Hampshire.