Legendary Celtics coach Red Auerbach played his college ball at George Washington University.
Auerbach’s given 1st name was Arnold, and Bob Cousy was the only Celtic to call him Arnold.
Benedict Arnold’s Tory wife was in on his treacherous scheme, but deceived Gen. Washington and his officers by pretending to be very distraught when they came looking for her husband at West Point. She later joined her disgraced husband in exile in London.
Young London-born actor Benedict Cumberbatch (no, not a Harry Potter or Charles Dickens character) has portrayed Stephen Hawking in the BBC drama *Hawking *(2004); William Pitt in the historical film Amazing Grace (2006); the protagonist Stephen Ezard in the miniseries thriller The Last Enemy (2008); Paul Marshall in *Atonement *(2007); Bernard in Small Island (2009); and Sherlock Holmes in the modern BBC adaptation series *Sherlock *(2010).
Former General of the Army and U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall was once asked how he “felt” about a particular bill proposed in Congress, and gently told the reporter, “Son, I reserve my feelings for Mrs. Marshall.”
Eerie, Indiana, is the center of weirdness for the entire universe, but only Marshall Teller and his friend Simon seem to notice it. It is the sister city of Normal, Illinois, though it does seem to have a lot of people in common with the residents of Rome, Wisconsin.
The Normal CornBelters of baseball’s Frontier League play their home games in a stadium known as the Corn Crib.
The Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD includes domes and minarets and is completely covered with an annually-replaced design made of different-colored corn. It hosts the home basketball games of Dakota Wesleyan University and the Mitchell High School Kernels, as well as many other civic functions. In 2007, the Corn Palace received Department of Homeland Security funding for a camera system to watch over a fiberglass statue of its mascot, Cornelius.
Tom Ridge, then governor of Pennsylvania, became the 1st Sectretary of Homeland Security.
Andrew Curtin was Governor of Pennsylvania from 1861-67. He was host to President Abraham Lincoln and other dignitaries in Nov. 1863, during the dedication of the national cemetery at Gettysburg, when Lincoln made the “few appropriate remarks” he had been invited to deliver.
The keynote speaker at Gettysburg was not Lincoln, but the noted orator Edward Everett, whose speech lasted more than two hours. Lincoln’s “appropriate remarks” took less than three minutes.
Edward Everett Horton was the voice of Fractured Fairy Tales for the various incarnations of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Horton also appeared in threel Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movies – Top Hat, The Gay Divorcee and Shall We Dance – as Fred’s non-threatening friend.
Edward Everett Horton also played Chief Screaming Chicken, Egghead’s henchman on the Batman series in the 1960’s.
Burt Ward had to decline the Dustin Hoffman role in *The Graduate *due to his Batman commitment.
Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann is based on several children’s stories by Romantic Period author E.T.A. Hoffmann (for Ernst Theodor Amadeus), who is used as the protagonist in the opera. The show’s structure of an author telling his stories was also used in the musical Man of La Mancha, based on Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha.
Another E.T.A. Hoffman story, The Nutcracker, became a ballet by Tchaikovsky. The ballet flopped badly in its premiere, but the music for it was extracted and the basis for “The Nutcracker Suite,” one of his most popular works. This led to a rediscovery of the full ballet in the mid-1950s. It’s now the most popular ballet in America.
In honor of the Boston Bruins’ impending win of the Stanley Cup: Bruins’ TV broadcasts use “Nutty” by The Ventures, a ripoff of “Nut Rocker” by B. Bumble and the Stingers, as a theme song. It is an uptempo arrangement of “March of the Wooden Soldiers” from The Nutcracker, and was also a popular concert piece by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.
The town of Palmer Lake, Colorado is best known for an illuminated Star of David, measuring 500 feet across, erected on the side of nearby Sundance Mountain.
The town of Nederland, Colorado annually hosts Frozen Dead Guy Days, in honor of a former resident who had his grandfather’s body brought over from Norway and kept it on dry ice in his shed, where it reputedly remains. His planned cryonic-preservation business never got beyond that stage due to a new town ordinance against body storage, although Grandpa was “grandfathered in”.
The festival’s highlights are the Frozen Dead Guy Lookalike Contest and the Coffin Race, in which teams of costumed contestants carry specially-built and decorated coffins through an obstacle course. Other events include a tour of the Tuff Shed where Grandpa is still frozen; a “polar plunge” for those brave enough to go swimming in Colorado in early March (which generally requires breaking through the ice); a dance, called “Grandpa’s Blue Ball”; pancake breakfasts; a market showcasing local artists; snowshoe races, and snow sculpture contests. Glacier Ice Cream, headquartered in the nearby city of Boulder, makes a flavor specifically for the festival (named, appropriately enough, Frozen Dead Guy), consisting of fruit-flavored blue ice cream mixed with crushed Oreo cookies and sour gummy worms.
Colorado is not a rectangle. Since the eastern and western borders follow lines of longitude on a sphere, the northern border is slightly shorter than the southern boundary making the state a trapezoid. To be even more pedantic, the Utah/Colorado border is not straight with one kink just south of Hwy 46 (Utah) / Hwy 90 (Colorado). There is also a major kink just north of the Four Corners monument which is easy to find on google maps.