John F. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, was inaugurated as President of the United States on Jan. 20, 1961.
The Massachusetts capital of Boston built the first subway system in the US, in 1897.
Due to censors’ objections to showing the assassination of a European monarch, Giuseppe Verdi reset his opera Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball), about the death of King Gustav III of Sweden, to colonial Massachusetts (many opera companies produce the original version). As a result, the opera then depicted Riccardo, Earl of Warwick and Governor of Boston, encountering the soothsayer Ulrica when on the way to a costume party (no doubt everyone was in Pilgrim garb). Ulrica warns him of the plot against him by Renato, whose wife he has been considering nailing, who carries out the plot with help from his henchmen Samuel and Tom.
Of all the inductees in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, only 44 players were inducted in their first year of eligibility. They’re known as First Ballot Hall of Famers. Of these 44, who are the best of the best, pitcher Tom Seaver received the highest percentage of votes - 98.8%. Seaver was inducted in 1992.
Tom Seaver’s manager for his first two years with the Cincinnati Reds, after being traded from the Mets in a salary dump, was Sparky Anderson. Both men shared a real first name: George.
WKRP in Cincinnati was videotaped instead of filmed because it was cheaper to get the rights to rock songs for a taped show than for a filmed show.
Fan voting for baseball’s All-Star Game was abolished in 1957, after Cincinnati fans blatantly stuffed the ballot boxes and elected seven members of the Red Legs* to the National League’s starting lineup.
*From 1953-1958, the Cincinnati Reds called themelves the Red Legs, to avoid being associated with communism.
The Mayor of Cincinnati holds a largely ceremonial post. He or she is elected by his or her peers from among the current members of City Council. TV show host Jerry Springer is a former mayor of the city.
Cincinnati mayor Mark Mallory is known for attempting to throw out the first pitch of the Red’s 2007 season. He missed homeplate by 30 feet to the left. The pitch hit umpire Sam Holbrook in the foot who jokingly had Mallory ejected from the game. An attempt to redeem himself on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” was equally unsuccessful.
George Mallory was a mountain climber who vanished while attempting to climb Everest in 1924. His body was found in 1999. Known for his quote that he was climbing Everest “because it’s there” (some think the line was meant as a sarcastic brush-off to keep reporters from asking the question), people are unsure as to whether he made it to the summit before dying.
Archie Bunker’s neighbor, George Jefferson, made his fortune in the dry cleaning business.
Dry cleaning means your laundry is washed in a chemical solvent other than water. The solvent is usually tetrachloroethylene (perchloroethylene), and the ideal flow rate during washing is roughly one gallon per pound of clothing per minute.
New York chemist Henry Martin devised the dry cleaning process known as One Hour Martinizing. The substitution of non-flammable solvents for flammable ones allowed cleaning to be done where clothes were dropped off. Previously, the garments had to be shipped from a storefront to a plant, then back again, before the customer could pick up the cleaned wares.
Kary Mullis shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for improving the PCR Technique - Polymerase Chain Reaction. PCR is used to make copies of a strand (or sequence) of DNA. “Making copies” of DNA is called amplification. Mullis’ improvement came from an idea he had in 1983, where primers would bracket the DNA target sequence, then DNA polymerase would amplify the sequence through cycles of heating and cooling. This chain reaction would exponentially amplify the DNA sequence, thereby creating many identical copies of the target strand.
With any ampilified sequence, scientists could then conduct targeted DNA studies.
The idea apparently came to Mullis while driving to Yosemite one night, and he was a little high from smoking some weed.
Isadore “Friz” Freleng created the character of Yosemite Sam after concluding that Elmer Fudd was too firmly established as a bumbling idiot to be taken seriously as a real threat to Bugs Bunny, who needed a more dangerous adversary.
In the movie “i am sam”, Sean Penn plays Sam Dawson, a mentally disabled man and his efforts to keep custody of his daughter played by Dakota Fanning.
In the Dr. Seuss book, Green Eggs and Ham, the text includes,
“That Sam I Am!
That Sam I Am!
I do not like that Sam I Am!
Do you like green eggs and ham?”
The unnamed old grouch in Green Eggs and Ham eventually slices and eats the ham in the same way, with the same hand motions, that the Grinch uses to carve the Roast Beast in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, in similar endings to both Dr. Seuss books.
In 1997 the Seuss book, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, was translated into Latin:
Quomodo Invidiosulus Nomine Grinchus Christi Natalem Abrogaverit: How the Grinch Stole Christmas in Latin
Avenue Q is a musical about the street in the title, populated by humans and puppets. The only couple made up of two humans are Brian and Christmas Eve. Eve is Japanese and her main solo number (actually a duet) is “The More You Ruv Someone.” (Don’t let the accent bother you, as Eve and the cast point out “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist.”