Cal Hubbard is the only person to be in both the Baseball Hall of Fame (as an umpire) and the Football Hall of Fame (as a lineman).
According to her Wikipedia article, “Old Mother Hubbard” of the nursery rhyme may have been named in honor of Saint Hubert of Liège, patron of dogs. Though those who know only the truncated version of the rhyme probably feel sorry for the dog, in the full version he fares somewhat better.
Hubert Humphrey was a rather loquacious fellow, and there is an apocryphal story that President Lyndon Johnson once pushed him out of the Cabinet Room when VP Humphrey kept talking past a three-minute deadline that LBJ had set for him.
According to the late David Halberstam, writing in The New York Times on October 31, 1971, President Johnson once said of FBI director J Edgar Hoover: “Well, it’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”
David Halberstam was a reporter for the New York Times in Saigon just as the U.S. military effort in South Vietnam was dramatically increased in the mid-1960s. He later wrote The Best and the Brightest, criticizing the decision-making processes of the Kennedy and Johnson White Houses.
When Jonathan Pryce was signed for the role of Miss Saigon’s Engineer, who is half-Asian & half-French, Asian groups complained about the role not going to an Asian actor.
Pryce won the Best Actor in a Musical Tony for the role.
Once ranging throughout Arabia, most of the ME and India,
and as far north as Kazakhstan, the Asian Cheetah is now
critically endangered, with only about 100 surviving in the
Iranian deserts.
The Cheetah Conservation Fund, led by Dr. Laurie Marker and headquarted in Namibia, is making valiant efforts to save the 10,000-some wild cheetahs that remain in Africa. A major part of its efforts is persuading local farmers that cheetahs aren’t pests, but are worthy of protection. CCF provides Anatolian Shepherd dogs to the farmers; the dogs fend off cheetahs, which then are much less likely to be shot.
The first Tarzan movie to include Cheeta, his chimpanzee sidekick, was 1932’s Tarzan the Ape Man, which was also the first starring former Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller. The first chimp to play the role was Jiggs, although many other animals have been cast as Cheeta since. The animal was never in any of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, but none of the movies resembled them much anyway.
In either 1915 or 1919, Burroughs purchased a large ranch north of Los Angeles, California, which he named Tarzana. The citizens of the community that sprang up around the ranch voted to adopt that name when their town was formed in 1927 or 1928.
Novelist William S. Burroughs was the basis for the character “Old Bull Lee” in fellow Beat Generation figure Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road.
Willie Nelson’s signature song “On the Road Again” was featured in his 1980 film “Honeysuckle Rose”, also starring Dyan Cannon and Amy Irving, who won a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Supporting Actress.
The U.S., along with most Western democracies, boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, in protest of their invasion/occupation of Afghanistan.
In response to the American-led boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, 14 Eastern Bloc countries including the Soviet Union, Cuba and East Germany (but not Romania) boycotted the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. For differing reasons, Iran and Libya also boycotted.
Queen Marie of Romania was Queen Consort of that country 1913-1927 as the wife of King Ferdinand !, following a successful run as Princess Marie of Edinburgh. Bahá’ís recognize her as the first member of royalty to have declared her belief in Bahá’u’lláh, the founder of the Bahá’í Faith. She is best known in the West, however, for her appearance in Dorothy Parker’s poem “Comment”:
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong,
And I am Marie of Roumania.
Jim Seals and Dan Crofts are both members of the Bahá’í faith, and often returned to the stage after concerts to discuss their religion while local Baha’is offered religious literature to the curious fans who hung around.
In Genesis when Rachel was unable to conceive by her husband-cousin Jacob she gave him her maid, Bilhah, who had two sons with him- Dan and Naphtali. Later Rachel gave birth to Joseph and Benjamin. All four boys were considered legally her sons, and the tribes of Dan, Naphtali, Benjamin, and the two named for Joseph’s sons- Ephraim and Manasseh- are called “The Rachel Tribes” in some texts.
The band Genesis, after Peter Gabriel departed, auditioned over 400 people for his replacement. Ultimately the drummer, Phil Collins, took over lead vocalist duties.
A Phil Collins song featured in a 90 second TV commercial involving drums and a ‘gorilla’
That commercial was a takeoff of Trenton, NJ’s Ernie Kovacs’ Nairobi Trio sketch, performed several times on his show (and which demonstrates that you can, in fact, do a slow burn while wearing a gorilla mask). Kovacs’ wife and co-star Edie Adams played the piano, while several persons played the guest “drummer” at different times, including Jack Lemmon and Frank Sinatra.