Sir Thomas More was sainted within the Catholic Church and during his life was a leading humanist, a philosophy that lead to the diminishment of Theism in general and the Catholic Church in particular.
Thomas More College is a small liberal arts college located in Crestview Hills, Ky., in Northern Kentucky near Cincinnati. It was founded in 1921 by the Benedictine Sisters as Villa Madonna College.
Sir Thomas More coined the term “Utopia” (literally “Nowhere land”), a name he gave to an imaginary ideal country in the Americas.
The Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency (UTOPIA) is a consortium of 16 Utah cities working together to deploy a fiber optic network.
Keanu Reeves plays a former college football quarterback named Johnny Utah (inspired by “Joe Montana”) in “Point Break.”
The State of Deseret, from a word in the Book of Mormon said to mean “honeybee”, was organized and governed by Brigham Young and consisted of what are now the states of Utah and Nevada and parts of New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming, Idaho, and California. It was never recognized by the Federal government though Utah’s nickname is still “The Beehive State”.
Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young is a great-great-great-grandson of Brigham Young, and attended Brigham Young University.
Brigham Young succeeded LDS founder Joseph Smith, who was killed by an angry mob while awaiting trial on various treason counts in Illinois.
Illinois is one of the few U.S. states with a mostly-white state flag; Rhode Island is another.
Porn star Marilyn Chambers and singer Nelson Eddy were both born in Providence, Rhode Island.
Admiral Horatio Nelson has a monument, Nelson’s Column, dedicated to him in London’s Trafalgar Square.
Two years after playing Scarlett O’Hara in GWTW, Vivien Leigh played Lord Nelson’s mistress, Lady Emma Hamilton, opposite her lover Laurence Olivier (who was also later a Lord) in the film That Hamilton Woman.
Vivien Leigh, who was British, won both of her Academy Awards for Best Actress for playing characters from the American South (Scarlett O’Hara and Blanche DuBois).
Margaret Mitchell’s earlier considerations for the name Scarlett O’Hara included Pansy Fontenoy and her earlier working titles for the novel included Tomorrow is Another Day, Tote the Weary Load, and simply Georgia.
Georgia on My Mind was written for Hoagie Carmicheal, and eventually became a hit for both Ray Charles (who reached #1 with it in 1960) and Willie Nelson (who did the same - albeit on the country and western charts - in 1978).
Hoagy Carmichael appeared in a film derived from Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, in which Lauren Bacall debuted as a character named Slim.
Immigrant workers at the Hog Island shipyards (now the site of the Philadelphia International Airport) used to order submarine sandwiches from street vendors which they called “hoggies” and “hog eyes” and hoagies for Hog Island, though only hoagie remains in common usage.
Some word origin scholars believe the same sandwiches/same naval yards is why they’re called “submarine” sandwiches (because submarines were built there) but other scholars dispute this so I’ll leave it out of play
Chicago is known as “Hog Town” or “Hog Butcher to the World” from the Carl Sandburg poem “Chicago”. Other nicknames, such as “City of the Big Shoulders” and “Freight Handler to the Nation” also come from that poem.
The original name of the pop group Chicago was The Big Thing.
There have been four warships named the USS Chicago, the most recent of which is a Los Angeles-class attack submarine launched in 1984 and still on active duty.