In 1932, a representative of Charles Lindbergh met at Woodlawn Cemetery with the kidnappers of Lindbergh’s son to arrange for ransom payment. Although ransom money was paid the child was eventually found dead, and kidnapping was changed from being a local crime to a federal crime.
Professor Elwin Ransom, a character based largely on J.R.R. Tolkien, was the hero of C.S. Lewis’ Space trilogy.
CS Lewis, Clive Staples Lewis, was know to friends and family as Jack. Lewis was born in Ireland, and he died in England. His Christian faith had a profound effect on his work, and his WWII radio broadcasts on the subject of Christianity brought him wide acclaim.
The Staples Center, which opened in 1999, is home of both the Los Angeles Lakers and the Los Angeles Clippers.
The Staple Singers, whose top hits were “Respect Yourself” and “I’ll Take You There”, were founded by Roebuck “Pops” Staples and his children Cleotha, Pervis, Yvonne, and Mavis, who was the lead singer. The group broke up gradually, with Mavis and Pops going on to distinguished solo careers, in the 80’s.
Many people used to buy dentures from the Sears & Roebuck catalogue, and as a result, in several parts of the country, “Roebuckers” became a common synonym for false teeth.
Dentures date back to at least 700BC in northern Italy when the Etruscans made them out of human and animal teeth.
Jeopardy! has used “Those Darn Etruscans” as a category title. “Questioning the answers” does not require any real knowledge of the Etruscans: instead, logic may be used to respond to such clues as “Etruscans did this by gazing into sheep entrails, not crystal balls”.
Jeopardy! was created in 1964 by Merv Griffin. Art Fleming hosted the show until 1979, and Alex Trebek has hosted it since 1984. The current version of the show is in its 29th season.
Peggy Fleming was the only American to win a gold medal (in figure skating) in the 1968 Winter Olympics. Speed skater Terry McDermott was the only American to win medals in both 1964 (the US’s only gold) and 1968 (silver)
In George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, Winston Smith eventually betrays Julia after a rat cage has been strapped to his face. In desparation, he screams “Do it to Julia!”
Crap! Ninja’d by RealityChuck.
Peggy Fleming was born in San Jose, CA and currently lives nearby there, near Los Gatos, CA.
Woody Guthrie’s song, popularized by his friend Pete Seeger, “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” memorialized the 1948 deaths of a planeload of Mexican *bracero *laborers being returned to their native country. Guthrie was upset that only the names of the white Americans on the plane were reported.
Arlo Guthrie had a hootenanny-style bar mitzvah when he was 13 (his mother was Jewish). His Hebrew tutor was the then-unknown Rabbi Meir Kahane, who later became founder of the Jewish Defense League.
Christian crosses, Jewish Stars of David, Muslim crescent moons and several dozen other religious symbols are available for carving on official U.S. Department of Defense grave markers.
Calverton National Cemetery in New York state is the largest and one of the most active national cemeteries overseen by the US National Cemetery Administration. Calverton National Cemetery is located in eastern Long Island between the towns of Manorville and Riverhead in Suffolk County.
The National Security Agency, which handles signals intelligence, cryptography and electronic intercepts for the U.S. Government, is based at Ft. Meade, Maryland.
NSA Mathematicians spend their days focusing on some of the most distinctive challenges and problems. They apply Number Theory, Group Theory, Finite Field Theory, Linear Algebra, Probability Theory, Mathematical Statistics, Game Theory, Chaos Theory, Combinatorics, and other mathematical fields of study. The NSA encourages Mathematicians to participate in interdisciplinary assignments and train with professionals in such fields as Computer Science and Signals Analysis.
John Nash, the subject of*** A Beautiful Mind,*** won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his contributions to Game Theory.
But for many years, science students at Princeton University knew him only as “The Weird Guy in the Library.”
Nash’s Nobel was a rare achievement for a mathematician, since there is no Nobel category for it. The highest award for mathematics is the Fields Medal, awarded every 4 years instead of 1, and which is limited to awardees under the age of 40. Oddly, or perhaps because of his schizophrenia, Nash was never awarded a Fields, although physicist Edward Witten was.