Christie Todd Whitman, Jim McGreevy, and Jon Corzine all broke their legs while serving as Governor of New Jersey.
Gov. Howard Dean, MD, and his Vermont State Police bodyguard/driver once stopped to help an injured motorist on I-91 while the governor was on his way to a public event.
Howard the Duck was comic book of the 1970s, with the title character an talking, intelligent duck from a parallel dimension and living in Cleveland. It was critically acclaimed, so much so that Howard the Duck #1 was one of the most valuable comics of that era. George Lucas made a film of the book, making all sorts of dumb changes, and the value of that book has dropped considerably.
Lawrence Block wrote a wonderful short story about a dream of driving to Cleveland, but is much more famous for crime thrillers like The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling.
[SPOILER]Howard the Duck sure seems to have stumped trivialiasts for a few days. I’m sure we were all reluctant to segue into Dickens via Scrooge McDuck; fortunately Cleveland gives us a direct path to a preferable British poet.
Mornington Crescent in eleven.[/SPOILER]
Yes, can we please let Howard recede into oblivion?
Rudyard Kipling wrote his famous apologia for racist imperialism, “The White Man’s Burden”, in 1899, to encourage the US to proceed with annexation of the Philippines.
What is often cited as the best-selling postcard of all time was one with art by Donald McGill. It shows a young man holding a book and woman:
Young man: Do you like Kipling?
Young woman: I don’t know, you naughty boy. I’ve never kippled!"
Notable alumni of Montreal’s McGill University, on the edge of Mount Royal Park, which was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, include eight Nobel Laureates, one hundred and thirty-two Rhodes Scholars, three astronauts, two Canadian prime ministers, four justices of the Canadian Supreme Court, three foreign leaders, nine Academy Award winners, three Pulitzer Prize winners, and twenty-eight Olympic medalists.
Earlier this year James Earle Jone became the 13th person to complete the EGOT. He received a special Academy Award to close it out.
James Earl Jones is the voice of the tagline: “This is CNN.”
(Or did he shoot Martin Luther King Jr? Dang, I’m always getting them mixed up.)
James Earl Jones’ first film role was as one of Slim Pickens’ B-52 crew members in Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove”.
In one scene from Dr. Strangelove the Slim Pickens character says “Shoot! A fella could have a pretty good weekend in Dallas with all that stuff,” but Pickens was called back just before final release to reread the line, replacing “Dallas” with “Vegas.”
Slim Pickens was cast against type as Sam Ferguson, patriarch of a clan of mass-murderers and thieves, in the One Big Happy Family episode of (the original) Hawaii 5-0.
Grant Fuhr and Ferguson Jenkins are the only two black Canadian athletes in the US major pro sports halls of fame.
Ulysses S. Grant, lieutenant general of the U.S. Army and later President of the United States, was tone-deaf and once allegedly said, “I know just two songs. One of them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn’t.”
Ulysses S. Grant’s widow, Julia Dent Grant, and Jefferson Davis’s widow, Varina Howell Davis, became very close friends during the last decade of Julia’s life when both were living in New York City. In a letter to friends Varina explained the seeming oddity (which mortified a south that was already shocked at Varina for moving to NYC) by saying that in addition to having many of the same interests they were two of the only women on Earth who knew what it was like to host White House receptions and to live in poverty as they had each done both in their lives.
Varina Davis had often acted as White House hostess under Franklin Pierce as his wife suffered from depression and social anxiety.
The mercantile interests of New York made it something of a haven for Confederate sympathizers, just as the British textile industry led that government to support the rebel cause. Theodore Roosevelt Sr.'s wife (the future president’s mother), Martha Bulloch, a Georgia native, was a key leader in the pro-South community of NYC, and likely kept her husband from joining the Union military as so many other civic leaders had. Before the war, NYC Mayor Fernando Wood went so far as to ask the city council to secede the city from New York state rather than put it in opposition to cotton interests.
President Abraham Lincoln is said to have mocked Mayor Fernando Wood’s proposal by saying, “I reckon it isn’t time for the front door to set up housekeeping on its own just yet.”
Fernando’s Hideaway was a popular song from the 1950s musical comedy The Pajama Game and also the name of a Billy Crystal sketch on SNL in which he parodied Fernando Lamas with the catch phrase “You…look… mahvelous”.
“Fernando’s Hideaway” was the talk show hosted by Billy Crystal as Fernando Lamas, on “Saturday Night Live”. If Crystal is known for any one tag line, it’s Fernando telling a guest “You look mahvelous!”
For more than a century, mathematical physicists thought they’d enumerated all types of crystal, but in the early 1980’s Israeli scientist Dan Shechtman constructed an Al-Mn alloy whose crystals had five-fold symmetry, hitherto thought impossible. There was much amazement when it was later noticed that the 550-year old Darb-e Imam shrine in Isfahan, Iran was tiled in a quasi-periodic fashion, similar to the structure of Shechtman’s crystals.