Star Trek: Voyager actress Kate Mulgrew is married to Tim Hagan, a former commissioner of Cuyahoga County, Ohio (the greater Cleveland area). Both have Irish Catholic backgrounds.
Nellie Elizabeth “Irish” McCalla was best known as the title star of the 1950s television series “Sheena, Queen of the Jungle”, co-starring Chris Drake. Irish McCalla was also a “Varga Girl” model for pinup girl artist Alberto Vargas.
President John F. Kennedy presented a historic regimental flag of the Civil War’s Irish Brigade to the Irish legislature when he spoke to them in the summer of 1963.
John Kennedy, an infielder for the Senators, Dodgers, and other teams in the late 50s and early 60s, shared a birthday with John F. Kennedy, and played while JFK was president.
The Dodgers received their name in their original home of Brooklyn. It derived from the reputed skill of Brooklyn residents at evading the city’s trolley street cars on their way to the stadium.
The ironclad USS Monitor was built in Brooklyn, New York. She fought the Confederate warship CSS Virginia to a draw in Hampton Roads, Va. in March 1862, and was lost in a storm off Cape Hatteras, N.C. in December 1862.
Le Moniteur (“The Monitor”) was the official newspaper and propaganda organ of Napolean’s goverment. It survived his downfall, only ceasing publication in 1901.
Woody Allen’s Love and Death portrayed Napoleon as trying to create a pastry to bear his name, in a race to beat the British, who were working to invent Beef Wellington.
A Cornish pastry and a pasty, although pronounced similarly, are two entirely different things.
The lovely Mabel in Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance encourages the faint-hearted police to “die for every Cornish daughter,” if necessary, in fighting the Pirate King’s men.
Mabel Talvas of Bellême, wife of the 1st Earl Shrewsbury (a key friend of William the Bastard) and whose father murdered her mother, has been described as an evil and cunning woman. She was beheaded, circa 1078, as she lay in bed.
“Hey Mabel! Black Label!” was an advertising campaign for Carling Black Label Beer that ran in the 1950s and 60s. Mabel, a waitress, was played by model/actress Jeanne Goodspeed.
A British army which included the famous Black Watch regiment tried and failed to capture Ft. Ticonderoga during the French and Indian War.
Fort Ticonderoga, then controlled by the British, was captured 10 May 1775 by a small force led by Ethan Allen and Colonel Benedict Arnold.
The birth records of Gracie Allen, of the comedy team Burns and Allen, were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. Both Allen and Burns insisted they knew only the day, not the year of Allen’s birth, which has been listed in various sources anywhere from 1895 to 1906.
The largest earthquake measured on a seismograph reached magnitude 9.5, on May 22, 1960, with an epicenter near Cañete, Chile. The 1976 Tangshan, China earthquake killing between 240,000 and 655,000 is believed to be the largest earthquake of the 20th century by death toll. But the most devastating in recorded history may have occurred on January 23, 1556 in China’s Shaanxi province, killing more than 830,000 people.
The dragon is a good luck symbol in China. The origin of the creature is unclear, but it’s believed that it’s an amalgam of tribal symbols. An ancient Chinese tribe might have had a snake as its symbol; another had a bird. When the two tribes merged, the resulting symbol became a winged snake. Other amalgamations like this led to the dragon.
The People’s Republic of China has no independent navy of that name. What it has is a People’s Liberation Army Navy.
Patty Hearst was kidnapped by a militant group calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army, although it’s believed no more than 20 people were ever in the group.
In Canada, the federal Minister of Health is discouraging Members of Parliament from voting on a private members bill which would aim at increasing clinical trials for liberation therapy for MS.