James Brown, “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business,” had a long-running feud with rival soul singer Joe Tex.
Singer Tex Ritter was the father of John Ritter of Three’s Company fame.
John Lennon published two books of prose/poetry, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works, showing a series of short weird vignettes and poems, often with a very black humor. Both books garnered serious critical acclaim, but are not very well known today.
The cover of Rolling Stone magazine featuring a nude John Lennon hugging and kissing a fully clothed Yoko Ono taken by photographer Annie Liebovitz was voted the top magazine cover of the last 40 years by a panel of magazine editors, artists and designers chosen by the American Society of Magazine Editors. The photo was the cover of Rolling Stone’s tribute to Lennon after his death. Ironically, the picture was taken on the last day of Lennon’s life.
Yoko is a commune (an administrative subdivision) in the department of Mbam-et-Kim which itself is a part of the Centre Province in the country Cameroon.
Eddie Murphy pretended to be a man from Cameroon in the comedy Trading Places, offering beef jerky to the others in his train compartment.
Ken Osmond portrayed Eddie Haskell on Leave it to Beaver. As a result of being typecast, Osmond left acting and joined the Los Angeles Police Department. In 1908, he was shot three times while chasing a suspect. Two bullets struck his bullet-proof vest and the third bounced off of his belt buckle. He retired from the force in 1988.
He was a time traveler! :eek:
In play: California holds two of the top 10 most populous cities in the US: Los Angeles and San Diego.
I didn’t even know they had bullet-proof vests in 1908.
California now holds about one-fifth of the entire U.S. population.
Prior to and just after Prohibition, whiskey and other spirits were sold in quarts. However, prices began to rise in the 30s, cutting into sales. Distillers started selling their product in bottles that were four fifths of a gallon – a fifth.
The ancient Romans called distilled liquor “aqua vitae,” which meant “Water of life.” In Gaelic, the words for water of life are “Uisce beatha.” A bastardized pronunciation of “Uisce beatha” gave us the word whiskey.
As it ages, nearly a third of the whiskey poured into a barrel is lost to evaporation. Distillers refer to this as the “angel share.”
The first Cracker Barrel restaurant was located in Lebanon. It was opened September, 1969.
Lebanon, Tennessee, that is.
Lebanon derives its name from the Arabic word lubnan, meaning white, due to its snow-covered mountains.
The cedar tree, a national symbol of Lebanon, appears on its flag and in the logo of its national airline, Middle East Airlines. Old-growth cedars are in fact now rare in Lebanon, but have recently come under government protection.
Lebanon is the county seat of Laclede County Missouri.
Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan each sent U.S. troops to Lebanon; the latter deployment ended badly when a barracks was destroyed by a car bomb in October 1983, killing 241 U.S. Marines.
President Taft started the tradition of the presidential “first pitch” of the baseball season, on April 4, 1910 during an opening day game between the Washington Senators and the Philadelphia Athletics. Since then, every US president but one has opened at least one baseball season during their tenure, President Carter being the exception.
The Constitution requires that U.S. Senators be over 30 years of age- however, Henry Clay was elected to the Senate by the Kentucky legislature when he was only 29, and he was sworn in as a U.S. Senator three months before he turned 30.
While a teller at the First National Bank of Austin, William Sydney Porter – the real-life name of short-story writer O. Henry – was accused of embezzlement. He jumped bail and fled to New Orleans, then to Honduras, where he coined the term “banana republic” while writing Cabbages and Kings there. When he learned his first wife, Athol Estes Porter, was seriously ill, he returned to face trial in what is now O. Henry Hall, part of the University of Texas System complex on West Sixth Street. He left Austin a federal prisoner in 1898.