Actor Bill Macy should not be confused with actor William H. Macy although both appeared on Broadway before moving to television and movies. Both Macy’s actually appeared in seperate episodes of the series E/R.
Macy’s in New York City is advertised as the largest store in the world, but this is actually no longer true. The biggest store in the world, according to Guinness World Records, is currently the flagship store of Shinsegae in Centum City, South Korea, with an area of 509,810 square metres or 5,487,500 sq ft, almost twice the size of Macy’s.
South Korea was a combatant in the Vietnam War, and its contingent at one point exceeded 50,000 men.
The first appearance of a Vietnam veteran as a character in a motion picture is generally considered to be Robert de Niro’s role in Hi, Mom! De Niro plays a maker of pornographic home movies who decides to capitalize on his military experience by becoming an urban guerrilla.
The Manhattan neighborhood of Tribeca, home of Robert DeNiro’s film festival, is an acronym for TRIangle BElow CAnal street.
The 1954 Kaiser Manhattan was the first post-war US production car to offer supercharging as an option. It was produced by Kaiser-Frazer Corporation, a partnership of automobile executive Joseph W. Frazer and industrialist Henry J. Kaiser of Kaiser Aluminum and Kaiser Steel, and who was responsible for the Liberty Ship program in the just-concluded WW2. Kaiser later bought Willys-Overland and its Jeep brand, which is all that survives following its merger into American Motors and AMC’s purchase by Chrysler (which is now itself controlled by FIAT).
During World War I, the son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, also named Wilhelm, commanded the Fifth Army from 1914-1916, despite his having little command experience and calling the war “stupid and senseless.” Effective command of the army was held by his Chief of Staff, General Konstantin Schmidt von Knobelsdorf.
Screenplay writer Christopher McQuarrie has said he based the character of Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects (1995) on real-life murderer John List, who killed his family and then disappeared for 17 years.
The name of EMILY’s List, a political action committee which raises funds for pro-choice female Democratic candidates in the US, is an acronym for Early Money Is Like Yeast.
EMILY’s List took some heat from Obama supporters for endorsing Hillary Clinton for President in January 2007, just hours after she announced her candidacy and long before a single Democratic caucus or primary vote had been cast. The group endorsed Obama after he won the nomination.
Many of Emily Dickinson’s poems were written in ballad meter and can be sung to the tune of “Yellow Rose of Texas” or the “Gilligan’s Island” theme.
The cover of “Yellow Rose of Texas” by bandleader Mitch Miller, of “Sing Along with Mitch” on the telly, finally knocked Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” from the Number One slot on the charts in 1955. “Yellow” was an old slang term for a mulatto, and the song traditionally refers to one named Emily West who seduced Santa Anna into lowering the guard at San Jacinto, facilitating an easy Texan victory there. The original lyrics are far more blackface minstrel show-ish than the familiar ones, as is typical for American folk songs.
The USS San Jacinto stopped the British mail steamer Trent on the high seas in November 1861, removing two Confederate diplomats by force and causing a major diplomatic incident between the U.S. and the United Kingdom.
The Romance of Helen Trent was a long running radio soap opera, where the title character tried to find love at the advanced age of 35 (and beyond). It’s 7,222 episodes over 27 years was the highest number ever for a radio soap opera.
A 1948 episode of the radio soap The Romance of Helen Trent featured a shocking surprise. As Wiki puts it:
Rolls-Royce Ltd., the jet engine manufacturer that is no longer related to the luxury car manufacturer of the same name, has named its civilian products after British rivers since the 1950’s. The current largest commercial engines it makes are in the Trent family, whilst the Spey and Tay are sized for smaller planes. The Avon, Clyde, Conway, Nene, Tyne, and Welland are out of production.
Stoke-on-Trent is an English pottery town and a sister city of East Liverpool, Ohio, in which many Staffordshire potters settled in the U.S. in the early 1800s.
The name of the unit for fluid viscosity, in the cgs system, is the centistoke, whose name comes from Cambridge physicist Sir George Stokes. He was responsible for the Navier-Stokes equations, which comprehensively describe fluid behavior in the same way that Maxwell’s Equations comprehensively describe electromagnetism. As a CAmbridge student, Stokes had been the “senior wrangler”, for his First in mathematics.
When Carl Stokes was elected mayor of Cleveland in 1967, he defeated Seth Taft, grandson of former president William Howard Taft.
Taft, a Republican of Ohio, had always preferred being a Federal judge to being a member of the executive branch. He served both as a judge of the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals and as Chief Justice of the United States. He was the only former President to hold the latter post.