Four Fifths is urban street slang for a .45 caliber handgun or pistol. Other such expressions include deuce being a .32, deuce deuce being a .22.
The fifth as a measure of liquor did not come into general use in the US until after Prohibition. Prior to that ( and in the first years after Repeal), liquor was always sold in quarts. However, as liquor prices rose, bottlers moved from quarts to fifths to hide the price increase. After WWII, nearly all liquor was sold in fifths.
The repeal of Prohibition in 1933 with the passage of the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution marked the first and, to date, only time an amendment was entirely voided by a later amendment.
The Equal Rights Amendment passed Congress, but failed to win approval from
enough states for ratification. Several states muddied the waters by approving,
then rescinding approval. Since there was a time limit for ratification the ERA
may be dead, although some of its partisans have adopted the position that
deadlines and rescindments are not permissible and so the ERA may after all
be ratified if three more states approve.
First Lady Betty Ford, who recently died, was a prominent supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment, despite the opposition of many in her husband’s party.
Betty Ford is the third longest-lived First Lady, after Bess Truman, died at age 97, and Lady Bird Johnson, died at age 95.
President Harry Truman, Democrat of Missouri, referred to his beloved wife Bess in speeches as “the boss,” which she hated but put up with since the voters got such a kick out of it.
For all his musical success, Bruce “The Boss” Springsteen has never recorded a #1 hit. “Hungry Heart” (believed to be a #1 by some) only hit #5. The closest he came was #2, with “Dancing In the Dark.” He did, however, write “Blinded by the Light”, which hit #1 when recorded by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band.
Great Timing Award: Springsteen has just revealed that his 1984 hit song “Glory Days,” was inspired by the singer’s real-life Little League baseball teammate, Joe DePugh.
DePugh and Springsteen also were seatmates in seventh grade at St. Rose of Lima School in Freehold, N.J., and DePugh even gave Springsteen the nickname “Saddie.”
Hugh Downs, the American broadcaster whose record for most hours performed on TV was broken by Regis Philbin, was born in Lima, Ohio.
The fictitious William McKinley High School on the TV show Glee is in Lima, Ohio.
*Glee *character Kurt is boyfriends with Blaine, who attends all-male Dalton Academy in Westerville, Ohio, a Columbus suburb that is not nearly as close to Lima as the show makes it appear. The Dalton show choir, The Warblers, has its musical numbers performed for the show by the Beelzebubs, the real-life Tufts University choir that competed on the first season of NBC’s “The Sing-Off”.
Lima, Peru is one of two cities considered the “Capital” of Peru; the other is Sucre.
Tufts University sports teams are nicknamed “The Jumbos” after Jumbo, the elephant exhibited by P. T. Barnum. The stuffed hide of the elephant was donated by Barnum to the college. A fire destroyed the remains, but the ashes, kept in a peanut butter jar, are kept for good luck.
There is a test cricket series between England and Australia
known as “The Ashes”.
How it got that name I haven’t a clue. Don’t know why the word
“test” crops up either.
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust” is frequently believed to be scriptural but is actually a part of the Anglican funeral liturgy. It does have roots in two Old Testament passages (from Genesis and Ezekiel respectively) but the conjoined phrase does not appear in the Bible.
It has been conjectured that Nazaratus Assyrius, one of the teachers of Pythagoras of theorem fame, was the same man as the prophet Ezekiel.
The prophet Ezekiel, who wrote that he had seen chariots of fire high in the sky, inspired later “ancient astronaut” writers such as Erich von Daniken.
Quoth Wiki: “The series is named after a satirical obituary published in a British newspaper, The Sporting Times, in 1882 after a match at The Oval in which Australia beat England on an English ground for the first time. The obituary stated that English cricket had died, and the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia. The English media dubbed the next English tour to Australia (1882–83) as the quest to regain The Ashes.”
The 19891 British film Chariots of Fire, about the track events fo the 1924 Paris Olympics, is not named directly from the Bible verse, but from William Blake’s poem/hymn “Jerusalem”, which is strongly associated with the identity of England. It tells the invented story of a visit to Glastonbury, England by Jesus, and laments the existence in that country of the “dark Satanic mills”.
Despite its name, the Jerusalem artichoke has no relation to Jerusalem, and it is not a type of artichoke, even though both are members of the daisy family. The origin of the name is uncertain. Italian settlers in the USA called the plant girasole, the Italian word for sunflower because of its resemblance to the garden sunflower Over time the name girasole may have been changed to Jerusalem. To avoid confusion, some people have recently started to refer to it as sunchoke or sunroot…The artichoke part of the Jerusalem artichoke’s name comes from the taste of its edible tuber