The tiny town of Gander, Newfoundland, has a full size miltary airport that handled 39 ground planes on 9/11.
In Hitchcock’s film of the same name, The 39 Steps refers to a ring of foreign spies operating in Britain.
The French Foreign Legion was so named because its membership was SUPPOSED to be restricted to non-Frenchmen, who could be sent on dangerous missions and killed in action without raising many serious objections from the French citizenry.
In reality, a large percentage of the Legionaires has always been French.
Both France and Belgium claim they invented French fries. Belgians claim their street vendors sold “Belgian fries” from pushcarts before the French adapted the idea in the middle of the 19th century. They crossed the Atlantic to America in the 1880s.
McDonald’s sells roughly a third of all the french fries consumed annually in the U.S.
Germany is the only country in which McDonald’s sells the McRib sandwich as a permanent part of the menu, not a repeated temporary special items.
Germany produces more than 5000 varieties of beer.
Catherine the Great of Russia was actually born in Germany, in the state of Anhalt-Zerbst.
The cartoon canines Scooby Doo and Marmaduke are both Great Danes.
Queen Alexandra, consort to King Edward VII, was a Dane. She disliked Germany because it had annexed parts of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark. She was upset when her son, Prince George, was given honorary membership in a German regiment and was seen wearing the uniform of the regiment.
Greenland, owned by Denmark and lying off the northeast coast of Canada, is the world’s largest island. It was discovered by Eric the Red in the 10th century AD and is now self-governing in its internal affairs.
(Side note: I think Australia is bigger, but since it’s a continent, no one counts it in the island running too.)
Terry Jones and Michael Palin wrote Monty Python sketches as a team, and John Cleese wrote sketches with Graham Chapman. Eric Idle preferred to write alone.
One name for the show considered early on by the Monty Python troupe was Owl Stretching Time.
Owls are found in every part of the world except for Antartica and some remote islands.
The existence of Antarctica was posited as early as the first century, but the continent was not actually seen by human eyes until the 19th.
An icy, unexplored and dangerous region of Antarctica is the setting of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. Director Guillermo del Toro has been trying to interest Hollywood for several years in a movie adaptation of the story, but with no luck.
In the World War 2 era, long before the creation of the Fantastic Four, the superhero known as the Human Torch was a Nazi-fighting android with a sidekick named Toro.
The Suzuki Sidekick was produced as a joint venture between Suzuki and General Motors.
Keith Giffen introduced the superhero General Glory in his run of the Justice League. A parody of Captain American (I love that cover), the General was a geriatric Johnny Jones, who, by saying a magic oath, was able to return to his World War II era superhero identity, untouched by the ravages of time. Guy Gardner idolized him.
George M. Cohan’s standards “Give My Regards to Broadway” and “Yankee Doodle Dandy” (as well as justly forgotten tunes like “March of the Frisco Chinks”) were first performed in the musical Little Johnny Jones.