The Howard Hughes Medical Institute is in San Francisco, located near AT&T Baseball Park.
The original Three Stooges were Larry Fine, Moe Howard, and Moe’s brother Shemp. Moe and Shemp’s brother Jerome joined the team as “Curly” when Shemp moved West to appear in movies (he had small roles in several Abbott & Costello pictures).
Shemp rejoined the team years later, after Curly suffered a debilitating stroke.
Shemp Howard appeared as the bartender at the Black Pussy Cafe in W. C. Field’s The Bank Dick. The name of the bar raised questions with the film censors; Fields argued that there was a bar by that name in L.A. run by comedian Leon Errol. The issue was settled by having the sign of the bar being “The Black Pussy Cat,” but “Cat” was not used in dialog.
There have been three black cats in the White House since World War II: Tom Kitten, the Kennedy children’s cat; Socks, the Clintons’; and India, the George W. Bush family’s feline.
In the Peanuts comic strip, there’s an unseen (except one one claw) cat next door whom Snoopy taunts and who regularly slashes Snoopy’s doghouse to bits.
The cat’s name is Word War II.
The last original Peanuts strip was published on Sunday, February 13, 2000, just hours after Charles Schulz died in his sleep on the evening of Saturday, February 12, 2000. Schulz had a clause in his contract with United Features Syndicate that dictated that the Peanuts comic strip had to end with his death.
Charles Seymour is a wealthy and elitist Tory Member of Parliament vying to become Prime Minister in Jeffrey Archer’s 1984 political thriller First Among Equals.
Detective Lew Archer was the hero of Ross MacDonald’s novel The Moving Target. When the novel was adapted into a movie starring Paul Newman, the character was given a new last name, for no special reason, and the movie’s new title was the character’s new last name: Harper.
British author Jeffrey Archer once topped a poll of literary agents as “the client we would least like to represent.” He was notorious for being mean, self-centered and demanding.
Ian Anderson, leader of Jethro Tull, wrote several songs inspired by former Tull bassist Jeffrey Hammond-Hammond: “A Song for Jeffrey,” “Jeffrey in Leicester Square,” and “For Michael Collins, Jeffrey and Me.”
Michael Collins, the Command Module pilot on the Apollo 11 mission, later became the director of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.
Between 1978 and 1979, Joan Collins starred in the sleazy films ***The Stud ***and ***The ***Bitch, both based on novels written by her sister Jackie.
Hillary duPre’s book A Genius in the Family (and the subsequent movie made of it called "Hillary and jackie), about her sister the enormously talented Jacqueline duPre, has been totally discredited by people who knew both of them. Apparently Hillary was so jealous when Jackie achieved world fame and she didn’t have enough talent to equal her sister that she wrote a bunch of half-truths and all out lies.
Bill Clinton forgot his own name when Hillary Rodham marched up to him and introduced herself in the Yale Law Library while both were law students.
The Yale lock was the first device mass produced in non-identical form.
Alexander Pope’s ***The Rape of the Lock ***was a mock-epic poem inspired by a real life incident in which a British nobleman clipped a bit of his beloved’s hair without permission.
Alexander Pope once wrote, “Indeed I am proud, and must be proud to see/Men not afraid of God afraid of me.”
Then Lord Hervey came up with, “The great honour of that boast is such/That hornets and mad dogs may boast as much.”
Joe Cocker’s album Mad Dogs and Englishmen reused the title of the Noel Coward song about British colonials in tropical climates keeping their habits from home despite the examples of the locals, who went indoors and slept rather than “go out in the midday sun”.
Folk Singer “Country Joe” McDonald, who performed at Woodstock both with and without The Fish, was born into a family of ardent Communists who named him after Joseph Stalin.
His daughter, Seven Anne McDonald, was a child actress who co-starred on the TV series*** The Eddie Capra Mysteries
*** and Archie Bunker’s Place.
The Battle of Bunker Hill, June 17, 1775, was fought mostly on and around Breed’s Hill during the Siege of Boston early in the Revolutionary War. The battle is named after the adjacent Bunker Hill, which was peripherally involved in the battle and the original objective of both colonial and British troops. It is occasionally referred to as the Battle of Breed’s Hill.