“The Hound of the Baskervilles” was written by Arthur Conan Doyle as a reminiscence of an earlier case of Sherlock Holmes’s, since Holmes was, at the time of publication, still supposed to be dead according to Conan Doyle’s timeline of the stories.
Baskerville Holmes played basketball for Memphis State University. He was drafted in 1986 by the Milwaukee Bucks.
Dave Holmes, comedian, actor and author, is perhaps best known for not winning a competition to become an MTV VJ in 1991. Despite losing, Holmes went on to host more hours of programming on the network than the actual winner, Jesse Camp.
Jesse “The Body” Ventura, a former pro wrestler, served as governor of Minnesota from 1999 to 2003.
The TV series LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE was set in Walnut Grove, Minnesota and last 9 seasons. The book LHOTP took place in Kansas and in reality the Ingalls family only lived in Walnut Grove for 3 non-consecutive years; they spent far more time in South Dakota.
Before he embraced Islam, Malcolm X’s last name was Little.
The XFL was a professional football league founded by WWE owner Vince McMahon. The league operated for one season. An XFL telecast was notable for receiving the lowest rating for a prime-time major network program to that time.
The WWE was known as the WWF, but had to change its name and acronym after being sued by the World Wide Fund for Nature (an organization formerly known as the World Wildlife Fund).
Lloyd Bernard Free of the NBA had his name legally changed to World B. Free in 1980, to recognize his playground nickname.
Jimmy Carter considered U.S. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, Democrat of Texas, as his running mate in 1976, but picked Fritz Mondale instead. Mike Dukakis picked Bentsen as his running mate in 1988, but they lost. Bentsen later served as Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration.
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In the musical Damn Yankees, baseball fan Joe Boyd sells his soul for the chance to become a Washington Senator.
The term Yellow Journalism comes from when William Randolph Hearst stole away the cartoonist Richard F. Outcault and his super popular comic strip character “The Yellow Kid” from Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper and published it in color to sell more copies, which worked even though Hearst’s paper was considered far inferior.
The title character in Orson Welles’s masterpiece Citizen Kane was not-so-loosely based on William Randolph Hearst, who did all he could to scuttle the picture.
Randolph and Mortimer Duke, who were bankrupted in Eddie Murphy’s comedy “Trading Places,” make a brief appearance as derelicts in Murphy’s “Coming to America.”
Ralph Bellamy told a story about the filming of TRADING PLACES: On the set he observed “this is my 99th movie”, to which Don Ameche said “This is my 49th movie”, to which Eddie Murphy said “Hey, isn’t that something? Between the three of us we’ve made 150 movies!”
Along with his acting career, Eddie Murphy has fashioned himself a singer, releasing music including duets with Michael Jackson, Shabba Ranks, Rick James and former SNL co-star Joe Piscopo.
Black Shabbos is an all-Jewish Black Sabbath cover/parody band. Their songs include “Iron Mensch”, “War Tref” and “Meshuggah Train”.
Blue Oyster Cult’s songs “I’m on the Lamb, But I Ain’t No Sheep” and “Heavy Metal: The Red and the Black” have different music but the exact same lyrics.
In the Simpsons episode “The Great Money Caper”, lampooning “Paper Moon”, Abe Simpson’s getaway line is “Just call me mint jelly, 'cause I’m on the lam!”