There were initially only nine songs on the Rush album Hold Your Fire. Mercury Records insisted that the band add one more track- which is why the final song they added was called “Force Ten.”
In 1946 Mercury Records hired midget Eddie Gaedel to portray the “Mercury man”, complete with a winged hat similar to its logo, to promote Mercury recordings. Some early Mercury recordings featured a caricature of him as its logo.
The American Mercury was a magazine founded by H.L. Mencken and George Dean Nathan for commentary and stories about the American scene. Editor Lawrence Spivak created the radio show Meet the Press in 1949, and the company started publishing The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction at about the same time. However, in 1952, a new publisher and editorial team turned The American Mercury into an antisemetic and pro-Hitler propaganda organ; it became irrelevant and straggled along venting right-wing screeds until it went out of business in 1981.
Among Henry Ford’s business ventures outside automobile manufacturing was his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, also known as The Ford International Weekly, which he used for anti-semitc screeds, blaming the worldwide Jewish bankers’ conspiracy for WW1 and so forth. He even published *The Protocols of the Elders of Zion *as a historical document. The paper made his views so well-known that Hitler commented upon them approvingly in Mein Kampf. Perhaps ironically, Dearborn today is known for its unusually high concentration of Arab-Americans in its population. Even more remarkably, though, is that Ford was as color-blind as a man of his time could be, and was a leading pioneer in equal rights and equal treatment for Negroes.
Nazi ally Benito Mussolini was critical of Mein Kampf, saying that it was “a boring tome that I have never been able to read” and remarked that Hitler’s beliefs, as expressed in the book, were “little more than commonplace clichés.”
When L Frank Baum needed to come up with a name for the heroine in his new children’s book about a young girl carried off to a magical land by a tornado, he remembered newspaper reports of the sad story of Dorothy Gale, a girl found dead with her head buried in the mud after the terrible double tornado that destroyed Irving Kansas in 1879. He decided to use that name in The Wizard of Oz.
Gale Storm, a singer-actress known for the 1950s TV show My Little Margie among other things, became an early celebrity to publicly discuss her treatment for alcoholism in the 1970s.
One of the nicknames bestowed upon running back Gayle Sayers was “The Kansas Comet”
Gayle Sayers’ rookie baseball card (1965) is a gem of a collectible. In 2010 one sold on eBay for $2,100, and it wasn’t in mint condition.
That is remarkable for a footbal player.
As a rookie in 1965, Gayle sayers had one of the greatest single day performances ever for a running back. Against the San Francisco 49ers, catching or running the ball only 13 times, he amassed 336 yards and scored 6 touchdowns, including an 85 yard punt return for a TD
Dorothy Sayers’ 1942 short story “Talboys” was her last work featuring detective Lord Peter Wimsey. Sayers lived another 15 years after that, and continued to write extensively, but chose to concentrate on Christian apologetics and translations of classical literature.
Both Sauron and Voldemort, two magic-using villains of British literature (in The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter books, respectively), are referred to by friend and foe alike as Dark Lords.
“Vader” (as in Dark Lord Darth) is Dutch for “father” (as in “Luke, I am your…”)
Luke Skywalker, later played by Mark Hamill, was called Starkiller in an early draft of the Star Wars script by George Lucas.
In all likelihood, Luke is the only one of the four Gospel writers who was not Jewish.
Taylor Caldwell wrote a novel called Dear and Glorious Physician, in which Luke was Greek.
Taylor Caldwell wrote a couple of science fiction novels early in her career. One was the recipient of a classic putdown by critic Damon Knight:
“‘This eloquent novel,’ says the jacket of Taylor Caldwell’s The Devil’s Advocate, making two errors in three words,”
Grover Cleveland was born in Caldwell, New Jersey.
The science fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinein sold more than 1 million copies in the original edition.
SFC Schwartz
“stranger in a strange land” comes from the book of Exodus 2:22 (Authorised Version), where Moses, in exile in Midian, names his son “Gershom” (“a sojourner there”) because Moses was a stranger in a strange land.