Sean Penn is the only male actor besides Woody Allen himself to be nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for a Woody Allen film, for Sweet and Lowdown (1999).
Guitarist George Barnes made the first recordings of an electric guitar in 1938, backing up blues singer Big Bill Broonzy on “Sweetheart Land” and “It’s a Low-Down Dirty Shame”.
Bucky Barnes was Captain America’s sidekick in Timely (later Marvel) Comics during World War 2.
Buckyballs are molecules that look like a soccer ball. They are truncated icosahedrons made up of 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons.
Harold Kroto, Robert Curl, and Richard Smalley were jointly awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their contributions to the discovery of buckyball, which is formally known as buckminsterfullerene.
Curl - Curling is a fun sport, kind of like shuffleboard on ice using a heavy stone. If you have a chance to try it, find a curling club that offers lessons. I took my family once, and we all had a great time.
I’ve gone curling once, and only once, while taking my family to Niagara Falls. It was fun. We went to the historic Niagara Falls Curling Club, founded in 1891.
The USS Niagara and the USS Lawrence were Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry’s two largest warships during the Battle of Lake Erie.
Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, the “Hero of Lake Erie”, has a monument on Presque Isle in Erie PA. The USS Niagara is on display in Erie PA.
Commodore Matthew Perry is known for “opening” Japan to western trade in 1852.
Lionel Richie and a group of fellow students at the Tuskegee Institute formed the band the Commodores. Their first hit was the funky synthesizer instrumental “Machine Gun.”
With soft (and nice) songs like Lady, Sail On, Still, and Three Times a Lady, it’s somewhat surprising the Commodores also sang Brick House.
The third little pig, who built his house of bricks, provided shelter to his brothers who built their houses of non-wolf-resistant straw and sticks.
William L. Shirer, an American journalist, wrote the bestselling The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich based on much of his own personal reporting and interviews with the top Nazi hierarchy.
Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, came up with the term “The Third Reich”. Hitler is believed to have disliked it.
Backup quarterback Frank Reich led the Buffalo Bills to the biggest comeback win in NFL playoff history, against Warren Moon’s run-and-shoot Houston Oilers.
Jack Kemp parleyed his fame as quarterback of the Buffalo Bills to a congressional seat and eventually to the Republican nomination for Vice President.
Gov. Sam Houston of Texas remained loyal to the Union when the Civil War broke out in 1861, and left office when it became clear that the Texas legislature was overwhelmingly pro-secession.
He never served as Vice President.
Sam Houston had previously served as Governor of Tennessee, and remains the only man to hold the office in two different states.
Though he adopted the pen name Tennessee Williams, playwright Thomas Lanier Williams was born in Mississippi and grew up in Missouri.
The song “Sixteen Tons”, whose recording by Tennessee Ernie Ford reached #1 on the Billboard charts, is a reference to the truck system and debt bondage. Under this scrip system, coal miners were paid in coins that could only be redeemed at company-owned stores. This helped to ensure that they could never save enough money to do anything else, and would be in debt to the company forever. “I owe my soul to the company store.”
The scrip system was finally ended after a United Mine Workers strike forced its removal.