Neal Ball, playing for Cleveland, was the first major league baseball player to pull off an unassisted triple play.
The current mayor of Cleveland, Ohio is Frank G. Jackson, who was born in 1946. Unusually for that era, he had an Italian mother and a black father.
A.Y. Jackson was one of the members of the Group of Seven, a group of Canadian painters in the post WWI era who established a distinctly Canadian style of painting, focused on the Canadian wilderness. One of his iconic paintings is Red Maple from 1914. He was also an official Canadian war artist and member of the Order of Canada.
Between 40 and 60 gallons of maple sap must be boiled down in order to obtain one gallon of maple syrup. The sap is harvested when it begins to flow in the early spring by drilling a small hole into the tree and hammering in a tap. A bucket is hung from the tap and allowed to collect the dripping sap.
The only jockeys to ride Secretariat were Paul Feliciano (first two races), Ron Turcotte, and Eddie Maple (Secretariat’s final race; Turcotte had been suspended).
When Secretariat won the 1973 Belmont Stakes by a breathtaking 31 lengths, the second-place finisher was the now-forgotten “Twice a Prince.”
In 1995 the New York Public Schools renamed PS 155 Jose Feliciano School (of the Performing Arts).
Jose Feliciano appears briefly in the movie Fargo, performing a concert which the Steve Buscemi character and his hooker date attend.
Steve Buscemi has been cast in six movies by the Coen Brothers, more than any other actor and exceeding by two films Frances McDormand, John Turturro and John Goodman. His character dies in three of them – Miller’s Crossing (1990), Fargo (1996) and The Big Lebowski (1998).
John Goodman has played a conservative Speaker of the House (The West Wing), an escaped convict (Raising Arizona), a blue-collar dad (Roseanne), a borderline-crazy bowler (The Big Lebowski) and a demonic killer (Barton Fink), among many other roles.
In the 1968 pilot for “Hawaii Five-O,” Steve McGarrett (played by Jack Lord) calls the US official (played by Andrew Duggan) who has gone over to the Red Chinese a “dirty, double-dealing fink!”—evidently strong language for prime-time TV back then.
“It’s a Gas!” was a vinyl insert in one of the Mad Magazine annuals that could be played on a record player. It was billed as “Alfred E. Neuman vocalizes!” Neuman’s “vocalizations” were a series of belches. The song was later collected on the Mad Magazine album, Fink Along with Mad.
“Je t’aime… moi non plus,” a French duet by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin contained a series of groans, moans and gasps, leading to it being banned by many radio stations.
French troops and supplies were key to George Washington’s victory in 1781 at Yorktown, the last major battle of the American Revolution.
In Gene Roddenberry’s original treatment of STAR TREK, the starship was the USS Yorktown, not Enterprise.
Brian Aldiss wrote a novel entitled Non-Stop about a group of people in a primitive tribe start exploring their mysterious environment only to discover in a twist ending that it was a vast generation ship. When the novel was published in the US, it was renamed to Starship, giving away the twist as soon as anyone saw the cover
Capt. James T. Kirk’s command, the USS Enterprise, NCC-1701, was a Constitution-class starship. The original sail frigate USS Constitution, moored in Boston and still crewed by the U.S. Navy, is the oldest commissioned warship still afloat.
Rear Admiral Grace Hopper was the oldest commissioned officer in the US Navy at the time of her retirement at age 79 years, eight months and five days. A celebration was held in Boston on the USS Constitution, where she was awarded the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the highest non-combat award possible by the Department of Defense. Also a computer scientist, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer and developed the first compiler for a computer programming language.
Computer scientist Grace Hopper reportedly coined the term “debugging” back in the 1940s, when she was found removing a moth who had gotten trapped in the Harvard Mark I.
In Canada, Her Majesty’s official Royal Style and Title is: “Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom, Canada and Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.”