The Samaritan was sent from the future to prevent a catastrophe. While he was successful, he altered the timeline so that he never actually existed in his own time. Trapped in an alternative history, he adopted an identity as Asa Martin, and lives in Astro City.
The first indoor baseball stadium was the Astrodome in Houston. It originally was supposed to have a grass surface, but the sunlight coming through the glass panels caused too much glare for the players. The panels were coated, but there wasn’t enough sun, so the grass died. It was replaced with artificial turf, named Astroturf. The first game played on a full Astroturf field was on July 19, 1966, when the Astros beat the Phillies (though the infield has been Astroturf since the start of the 1966 season).
The first recorded indoor ice hockey game took place at the Victoria Skating Rink in Montreal, Canada on March 3, 1875.
The beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers was captured by an amateur with a video camera on March 3, 1991.
Superman encountered Batman and Robin for the first time on Mutual Broadcasting System radio on March 3, 1945.
In the Superman TV show, his adopted parents were named Sarah and Eban Kent. The names of the two varied in the early years of the comic, finally settling on Jonathan and Martha in 1951.
Brent Butt, from Tisdale Saskatchewan, started out as a stand-up comic before he came up with the Corner Gas tv show. He’s explained that he got the idea for it when someone asked him what he would have done if he’d never been successful as a comic. His reply was that he’d probably be pumping gas in a local gas station.
The 1970’s Jimmy Castor Bunch hit “The Bertha Butt Boogie” was a sequel to their “Troglodyte (Cave Man)”, a rap about the discovery of sex. The caveman’s repeated lines “Gotta find a woman”, and “Sock it to me”, were met by Bertha (Bertha Butt. One of the Butt Sisters) with “I’ll sock it to ya, daddy!”
In the latter part of the 19th century, the Conservative Party of Quebec had two distinct wings: the moderate Bleus, and the socially conservative Castors, which garnered support from ultramontanist Roman Catholics. “Castor” is French for "beaver. "
“Bleu cheese” only comes from France; “blue cheese” can come from anywhere.
Le Cordon Bleu’s roots as a culinary institute go back centuries, predating the French Revolution and possibly the Renaissance. In the 20th century it began to expand and open other campuses; today it is a for profit corporation and the world’s largest cooking school with more than 20,000 students at any time enrolled at its many international campuses and online version.
The first copyrighted blues music compostion was Hart Wand’s “Dallas Blues,” in 1912.
Early-1900’s New Orleans cornetist and bandleader Buddy “King” Bolden is sometimes credited with creating jazz (he was certainly a pioneer) by adding blues to ragtime. Although predominantly an improviser, his best-known composition was “Funky Butt”, referring to flatulence, and which is one of the earliest known usages of the word “Funk”.
Wittenburg College classmates I.K. Funk and Adam Willis Wagnalls teamed up to publish religious books, then branched out to general reference books, including a dictionary and eventually the encyclopedia that bore their names.
Frank Herbert’s Dune was first published by Chilton Press. It’s probably the only novel they ever published; nearly all of Chilton’s publications are automotive reference books.
The Athabasca Sand Dunes is on the south shore of Lake Athabasca. It’s one of the most northerly dune systems in the world, and the largest active one in Canada.
Actress and pin-up model Veronica Lake’s name was commonly reversed to become a comic geographic name. For example, in an episode of The Bob Newhart Show, Carol Kester tells how the girls in her summer camp swam across Lake Veronica to visit the boys.
Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry’s victory in the Battle of Lake Erie is memorialized by a statue of him in Huntington Park in Cleveland. The Stuttgart art museum interior scenes from The Avengers were filmed in the Old Cuyahoga Courthouse next door.
Huntington College is a small Methodist liberal arts school in Montgomery, AL, that is perhaps best known for it’s resident ghost, a specter known as “The Red Lady” that many have claimed to see over the years. (She seems to especially love materializing in shawdowy places around attention seeking drunk girls.) The Red Lady is featured in several ghost story books and appears in mannequin and drawing form throughout the campus.
“The Ballad of Eskimo Nell” is a classic of bawdy poetry, recounting the sexual exploits of Dead Eye Dick and Mexican Pete in Red Mike’s saloon. The title character is more than a match for them, since she comes from Canada “where even the dead lie two in a bed/And the babies all masturbate.” (One of the milder lines in the poem.)