Former college and NFL defensive end Deacon Jones played a Viking named Thall in the movie The Norseman, despite being an African-American from central Florida.
Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx plays an assassin-for-hire named “M_f_ Jones” in the recent comedy Horrible Bosses.
Jimmy Foxx was the second baseball player to hit 500 home runs, after Babe Ruth.
Although the name of the Baby Ruth candy bar sounds like the name of the famous baseball player Babe Ruth, the Curtiss Candy Company traditionally claimed that it was named after President Grover Cleveland’s daughter, Ruth Cleveland. The candy maker, located on the same street as Wrigley Field, named the bar Baby Ruth in 1921 as Babe Ruth’s fame was on the rise, over 30 years after Cleveland had left the White House and 17 years after his daughter, Ruth, had died. The company did not negotiate an endorsement deal with Ruth, and many saw the company’s story about the origin of the name to be a devious way to avoid having to pay the baseball player any royalties. Curtiss successfully shut down a rival bar that was approved by, and named for, Ruth, on the grounds that the names were too similar.
“Baby” Ruth’s mother, Frances Folsom Cleveland, was the first presidential widow to remarry. After Grover died in 1908, Frances married archaeology professor Thomas Preston in 1913. She died in 1947, and Thomas survived her by eight years.
Johnny Cash wrote “Folsom Prison Blues”, arguably his best-known song, in 1951 while still in West Germany with the US Air Force. He never explained why the culprit of a murder in Reno would be sent to a California prison, however, even when he performed it at Folsom Prison itself, to a closely-guarded audience, in 1968.
Simple answer: because he’s not in prison for that murder.
Back to game: the musical Anything Goes features the evangelist turned nightclub singer Reno Sweeney, who was reportedly based upon evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.
Reno Nevada was a member of Buckaroo Banzai’s entourage, and is the narrator of the novel based on the film. Others in Buckaroo’s orbit included Dr. Hikita, Perfect Tommy, Rawhide, New Jersey, Pinky Carruthers and Penny Priddy.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s full name is Christopher James Christie. Curtis Sliwa’s nickname for him is Chris “El Hefty” Christopher.
Thomas Edison’s son Charles was Governor of New Jersey from 1941 to '44. Previously, he had run Edison Records, among other duties in the “family business”, before serving as Assistant Secretary of the Navy.
George B. McClellan, former top Union general and unsuccessful Democratic nominee for the Presidency in 1864, later served as Governor of New Jersey. His son served as Mayor of New York City.
In the Batman TV show, the mayor of Gotham City was Mayor Lindseed and the governor of the state in which Gotham City was a part was Governor Stonefellow. Today, you need to explain that these were references to then-current NYC mayor John Lindsay and NYS governor Nelson Rockefeller.
In her memoir Life Is Not A Stage, Florence Henderson claims she got “the crabs” from John Lindsay during a one-night stand in Beverly Hills.
Lindsay “The Bionic Woman” Wagner and Meryl Streep were born on the same day: June 22, 1949.
The made-for-TV movie of Wendy Wasserstein’s first play “Uncommon Women and Others” included Meryl Streep, Swoosie Kurtz and Jill Eikenberry
Karl Eikenberry is the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, in the news for a leaked secret memo to Hillary Clinton describing Afghan President Karzai as unwilling and unable to lead Afghanistan without U.S. assistance, and believing that the U.S. covets Afghanistan as a stage for a “never-ending war on terror.”
Although French is not one of the many languages each spoken by a significant number of residents of Afghanistan, the country’s stamps were generally inscribed with the French Postes Afghanes from 1928 to 1989. One contributing factor to the decision was the fact that French is the official language of the Universal Postal Union, which is headquartered in the Swiss city of Geneva.
Herbert Hoover, U.S. Secretary of Commerce, was elected President in Nov. 1928 when popular incumbent Calvin Coolidge decided not to run again. Hoover took office in March 1929, and the Stock Market Crash occurred on his watch just seven months later.
Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot is a fix-up of several of his robot short stories, many featuring Susan Calvin, the chief robopsychologist of US Robots and Mechanical Men.
Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist Bill Watterson insists that cartoon strips should stand on their own as an art form and has resisted the use of Calvin and Hobbes in merchandising of any sort. Almost no legitimate Calvin and Hobbes merchandise exists outside of the book collections. Exceptions produced during the strip’s original run include two 16-month calendars (1988–1989 and 1989–1990) and the textbook *Teaching with Calvin and Hobbes, which has been described as “perhaps the most difficult piece of official Calvin and Hobbes memorabilia to find.” And on July 16, 2010, the United States Postal Service released a set of postage stamps honoring five comic strips, one of them Calvin and Hobbes.