William Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom! is largely narrated by a character named Quentin Compson, who commits suicide in another Faulkner novel, The Sound and the Fury.
Quentin Kopp is a retired judge and politician. He served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. I-380, a less-than-two mile spur near SFO Airport is named after him.
The flamboyant Quentin Crisp, author of The Naked Civil Servant, was the subject of Sting’s song “Englishman in New York.”
While living in New York City, Crisp kept his phone number listed in the White Pages, and would answer anyone who called him.
The cereal originally called Sugar Crisp became Super Sugar Crisp, then Super Golden Crisp, before arriving at its current designation as simply Golden Crisp.
Quisp and Quake were very similar sugar cereals marketed by Quaker Oats from the late 60’s to the mid-70’s. Their mascots and advertisements were cartoons created by Jay Ward (of Rocky and Bullwinkle) - Quisp was a space alien and Quake was a miner. Daws Butler and William Conrad provided their TV ad voices.
The space ship in Ridley Scott’s Alien was called the Nostromo, in honor of a novel by Joseph Conrad.
Nipomo, CA is a town near San Luis Obispo and along Hwy 101. When I’d drive that route in the early 1980s I thought of The Nostromo when I saw the freeway sign.
This famous Dust Bowl photo of a mother of seven was taken in Nipomo in 1936.
Dorothea Lange took that picture in 1936, but the woman shown, Florence Thompson, wasn’t identified until 1978. Lange took five other pictures of Thompson’s family that day, but that one is by far the most famous, an iconic image of the Great Depression.
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Dorothea Lange was born in Hoboken NJ in 1895, and she died in San Francisco CA in 1965.
Jessica Lange is one of the select few women who has earned an Oscar both as Best Actress and as Best Supporting Actress. Helen Hayes, Ingrid Bergman, Maggie Smith and Meryl Streep have pulled off the same trick.
Helen Hayes’s sound film debut was in 1931’s The Sin of Madelon Claudet, for which she won the Best Actress Academy Award.
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge, better known as “Galloping Gertie,” finally collapsed into Puget Sound on November 7, 1940.
The current Tacoma Narrows Bridge didn’t open until 10 years after Galloping Gertie collapsed because of WWII steel shortages. It connects Gig Harbor to Tacoma on State Route 16.
When Jim Myers began wrestling in Pittsburgh, he adopted a name that honored both the “Steel City” and a high school football coach he’d long admired, becoming "George “The Animal” Steele.
In an attempt to trick a shady publisher and prove they were a vanity press (despite their protests), a group of writers wrote Atlanta Nights as the worst possible novel and submitted it to them. It was accepted.
Alan Steele later confessed that only way he could overcome his instincts and write something so bad was to get roaring drunk before writing.
Atlanta GA is the USA’s ninth largest city, and 498th largest in the world.
Atlanta, GA hosted the 1996 Summer Olympics with a record 197 nations participating. 1996 was also the first year the Summer and Winter Olympics were staged in different years.
SFC Schwartz
In 1996, Super Bowl XXX was played between the Dallas Cowboys and Pittsburgh Steelers. In this third Super Bowl matchup between these teams, the Cowboys finally beat the Steelers.
In the mid-1960s, someone wrote to TV Guide complaining about their approval of more Black actors on TV, saying that it was ridiculous in a western because there were no Black cowboys, and called it as wrong as showing a Black slave.
TV Guide replied that after the Civil War, some freed slaves traveled west and worked as cowboys, and, by the way, the word “slave” come from “slav,” an ethnic group that was white.