Lupe Velez was known as “The Mexican Spitfire.” One of the first Mexican actresses to star in Hollywood, she had a long series of films under that umbrella title.
Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov was murdered in 1978 when he was stabbed in the leg with a poisoned umbrella.
Ricin, from the castor oil plant Ricinus communis, is a highly toxic, naturally occurring protein.
Red meat and peanuts are excellent sources of edible protein.
Before renaming it Peanuts (a name he never liked), Charles Schulz entitled his comic strip Lil Folks.
One of the oddest tributes to an A,erican President, theJimmy Carter Peanut is in front of the Davis E-Z Shop in Plains, GA.At thirteen feet tall, it could be the world’s second largest peanut.
Mr. Peanut, the advertising logo of the Planters Company, was created in 1916 by a 14-year old boy named Antonio Gentile. The boy originally named the character Bartholomew Richard Fitzgerald-Smythe.
In 1961, Jim Gentile of the Baltimore Orioles hit five grand slams. He thus set the American League single-season record in the category, and held it until the Yankees’ Don Mattingly connected for six bases-loaded homers in 1987.
George Lund, who served as a paperboy for American President Harry Truman, had a US$7.50 debt paid off by the Truman Library Institute this past May, 65 years late.
Philip Seymour Hoffman won the Oscar as Best Actor for his portrayal of novelist Truman Capote.
In To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee, who based the character of Scout on herself, based Scout’s friend Dill on her childhood friend and neighbor, Truman Capote, while Lee is the model for a character in Capote’s first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms.
The Truman Show was based on a script by Andrew Niccol and inspired by an episode of The Twilight Zone called “Special Service”.
The character of Shermy in “Peanuts” was based on a childhood friend of Charles Schulz, Sherman Schultz. For many years, Dr. Schultz was the Astronomy professor at Macalester College in St Paul, MN (and one of my mentors).
USN submariners call their branch of the military “the Silent Service.”
Besides protecting the President, the United States Secret Service is also charged with guarding against counterfeit currency.
In “The Wild, Wild West,” James West and Artemus Gordon were Secret Service agents charged with protecting President US Grant. In reality, the first US president to receive Secret Service protection was Grover Cleveland in 1894.
The Muppet character Grover “officially” debuted in the second season of Sesame Street, in 1971.
In Russia, “Sesame Street” is called Ulitsa Sezam. Bert and Ernie are Vlad and Yenik, retaining the B and E initials in Cyrillic.
According to Sesame Street writer Jon Stone, the relationship between Ernie and Bert reflected the real-life friendship between Jim Henson and Frank Oz.
According to popular legend, Frank Baum named his fictional world ‘OZ’ while looking at a file drawer labeled ‘O-Z’ (the previous one being labeled ‘A-N’).