Orson Welles, Anthony Quinn and Marlon Brando were among the many actors who turned down the lead role of Tevye in the film version of Fiddler on the Roof (1971). Frank Sinatra and Danny Kaye both wanted the role and were passed over. Zero Mostel, who created the role on Broadway, was reportedly bitter that he did not play the role in the movie, and years later, when his son Josh received a phone call offering him the role of Blotto in the TV series Delta House, he (Josh) reportedly yelled: “Tell them to ask Topol’s son if he wants the job!”
Anthony Zerbe played a shifty Starfleet admiral in Star Trek: Insurrection, and a smooth Zion politico in The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions.
In 1909, President Taft named a Utah tract of land Mukuntuweap National Monument. Nine years later, the director of the National Park Service changed the name to Zion, fearing that the difficulty of spelling and pronouncing “Mukuntuweap” might deter potential visitors from traveling to the site.
The Melodians’ rendition of the reggae classic “By the Rivers of Babylon” was their only song on the soundtrack of the Jimmy Cliff film The Harder They Come. It takes its lyrics from Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.” That psalm also inspired the gorgeous choral aria “*Va Pensiero *(Fly, My Thoughts)” in Verdi’s opera Nabucco, about Nebuchadnezzar and the “Babylonian Captivity”.
Psalm 137 also inspired Don McLean’s song, By the Waters of Babylon, on his American Pie album.
Don King was a small-time Cleveland gangster and numbers runner, pardoned for manslaughter by Ohio Gov. Jim Rhodes, before becoming a boxing promoter.
Eliot Ness, the man who brought gangster Al Capone to justice, was a former Cleveland safety director.
America’s first electric traffic light made its debut in Cleveland on August 5th, 1914.
The Cleveland Browns were named after their first coach, Paul Brown. Later in his career, he coached for the Cincinnati Bengals. The Bengals named their stadium in his honor.
The San Francisco 49ers have beaten the Cincinnati Bengals twice in the Super Bowl:
26-21 in Super Bowl XVI, and
20-16 in Super Bowl XXIII
GO NINERS!!
In 2007, the Indianapolis Colts won their second Super Bowl in franchise history by defeating the Chicago Bears (and first in Indianapolis). It was Indianapolis’ first major-league sports championship since the days of the ABA’s Pacers.
(GO COLTS!)
The Indianopolis Colts were once the Baltimore Colts. After they bolted from the stable, Baltimore had a CFL team, the Baltimore CFL Colts, but the other Colts fussed over the name, and they changed their name to the Baltimore Stallions. In 1995, the Stallions won the Grey Cup in Regina, Saskatchewan, becoming the only American team to hoist Earl Grey’s mug. When the CFL American expansion collapsed, the Baltimore Stallions moved to Montreal and became the Montreal Allouettes, reviving football in Montreal.
Robert Irsay, former owner of the Colts, is buried in the same cemetery as the US’s 23rd president, Benjamin Harrison: Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis. I saw both gravesites last Monday. Irsay’s is quite a proud Colts fan one: oriented vertically, taller than it is wide, it simply has his last name with the Colts logo (horseshoe) below it.
ETA: Irsay’s name is below the horseshoe, not above. Picture.
I apparently have CRS: can’t remember shit.
Both the Indianapolis Colts and the Kansas City Chiefs were previously named the Dallas Texans. The Texans name is now used by the Houston franchise.
Owner Lamar Hunt settled on Hank Stram as the first head coach of the Dallas Texans/Kansas City Chiefs after Bud Wilkinson and Tom Landry turned down offers.
Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October was originally published by the Naval Institute Press. It is the only novel ever published by that organization, which specialized in nonfiction works about naval subjects. Clancy had done work for them, and they published it as a favor.
It’s probably the oddest publisher for a successful novel, next to Chilton Press, which is best known for car repair manuals, but also was the publisher of Frank Herbert’s Dune.
“Clancy, of the Overflow”, is a poem by Banjo Patterson, an Australian poet of the Outback who has often been compared to Canada’s Robert Service.
The oldest daily newspaper in the Southern Hemisphere is Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald, founded 1831.
The name and address of the dentist/hobbyist diver who “rescued” Nemo in Finding Nemo was P. Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It’s notable as being the first thing (aside from her own name) that Dory was able to remember long-term in the film.
Marie Bashir currently serves both as Governor of New South Wales (a position appointed by Queen Elizabeth II) and Chancellor of the University of Sydney.