George Washington was first inaugurated President of the United States in New York City, and Theodore Roosevelt was born there.
Brawling LA Rams football player Roosevelt “Rosie” Grier was also a guitar-strumming folk singer and expert at the art of macramé.
Rosey Grier was guarding Ethel Kennedy when her husband, Robert, was shot in Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel in 1968. Grier (along with George Plimpton, Rafer Johnson, and others) was able to subdue the assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, and disarm him. Even so, five people besides Kennedy were wounded before Sirhan ran out of bullets.
Dead Kennedys vocalist Jello Biafra ran for mayor of San Francisco in 1979. He came in 4th out of 10 candidates with 6000 votes. Supervisor Quentin Kopp soon enacted a law banning people from running for mayor using “funny names.”
Reporter and war correspondent Quentin Reynolds sued columnist Westbrook Pegler for libel after Pegler called him a coward and an “absentee war correspondent.” Reynolds won the suit and got a judgment of over $175,000, the largest in US legal history at the time. The court case became a Broadway play and TV movie, A Case of Libel.
The Phantom of the Opera is currently the longest-running show in Broadway history, with more than 9100 performances.
Adam Sandler’s characters Cajun Man and Opera Man regularly made guest appearances opposite anchorman Kevin Nealon on the “Weekend Update” segment of*** Saturday Night Live.***
Democratic political operative James Carville, a key advisor to Bill Clinton as candidate and then as President, was nicknamed “the ragin’ Cajun.”
Years before joining the Eagles, Joe Walsh was lead guitarist of the James Gang.
Years before joining the Eagles, where he wore #5 and played from 1973-1977, quarterback Roman Gabriel played for the Los Angeles Rams from 1962-1972 and wore jersey #18.
Spenser, the hero of Robert B. Parker’s mystery novels, was a former boxer who once lost a bout with former heavyweight champion Jersey Joe Walcott.
The Jersey pound is the currency of Britain’s Bailiwick of Jersey, just off the coast of Normandy. It is not a separate currency but an issue of banknotes and coins by Jersey denominated in pounds sterling, similar to the banknotes issued in Scotland and Northern Ireland. It can be exchanged at par with other sterling coinage and notes.
Modernist poet Ezra Pound was a fascist sympathizer, who lived in Italy during World War 2 and made regular anti-American radio speeches on behalf of his idol, Benito Mussolini.
In the Protestant Old Testament, the book of Ezra is the 15th book, between 2 Chronicles and Nehemiah.
James II was the last British monarch who was not a Protestant. In Ireland, he was knowan as "Seamus a Chaca, " or James the Shithead.
Poet and playwright Seamus Heaney was the recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature.
After the whole Woody-Mia bruhaha, their biological son Satchell changed his name to Seamus, and now goes by Ronan Farrow.
The initial Pixar staff conception of Sheriff Woody had him much taller - and nastier - in relation to Buzz Lightyear than the character which finally made it on screen in Toy Story.
Folk singer Woody Guthrie died in a New York City hospital of Huntington’s Chorea, a congenital nervous disorder once known as St. Vitus’ Dance. Young Bob Dylan was one of his few visitors.
The White Horse Tavern in Manhattan, built in 1880, holds the dubious distinction of being the place where Welsh poet Dylan Thomas drank his last whiskey. In November 1953, Thomas beat his own personal record by downing eighteen shots. Soon after the last drink, he stumbled outside and collapsed on the sidewalk. He was taken to the Chelsea Hotel and there fell into a coma. The next morning he was transferred to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where he died. In addition to the many portraits of Dylan Thomas that adorn the walls, a plaque commemorating Thomas’s last visit to the White Horse Tavern hangs above the bar.
I drank there last April.