I’m not seeing the connection here.
Captain Matthew Webb/Jimmy Webb
in play:
Donna Summer performed in a touring company of Hair.
D’oh! :smack:
Donna Douglas, who played Ellie May Clampett in The Beverly Hillbillies, was Miss Baton Rouge and later Miss New Orleans.
Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge complex in Dearborn, MI was once the world’s largest integrated factory, famously able to take iron ore in one end and send Model A’s out the other. The last cars produced there were Mustangs, although F-150’s are now assembled in a building on the site.
Standing anywhere in Michigan, a person is within 85 miles of one of the Great Lakes.
There have been reports of persons spotting a creature in Lake Erie akin to the Loch Ness Monster, but there have been no confirmed reports. There were reports in 1990 of people seeing a “large creature moving in the water about 1,000 feet (300 m) from their boat” described as black in color, about 35 feet (11 m) long, with a “snakelike head”, and moved as fast as a boat. Five other people reported seeing something similar on three separate occasions but there is no scientific evidence of such a creature. There is a beer named after the Lake Erie Monster as well as a hockey team. There were reports of people spotting a sea creature in the 19th century which was sometimes called Bessie or South Bay Bessie.
Kinda like this?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJSqkwyL1Zo
I always heard it was a set of encyclopedias with A-N and O-Z on the spines, but whatevs.
In play:
The Lake Erie Monsters pro hockey team plays at the Q Arena in downtown Cleveland, Ohio.
A French engineer named Andre Cassagnes invented a toy that allowed children to draw pictures on a screen covered with powdered aluminum- he called it the Telecran.
He sold his toy to the Ohio Art company, who revised it and renamed it the Etch-a-Sketch.
Buddy Ebsen was originally cast as the Tin Woodsman in MGM’s The Wizard of Oz, but had to withdraw after filming started because of his severe allergic reaction to the powdered aluminum in his face makeup. A safer paste was used by his replacement, Jack Haley, who took over the role while Ebsen recuperated.
In his role of Barnaby Jones, Buddy Ebsen once sang “Wind Up” by Jethro Tull in an episode about a murdered songwriter.
The above trivia was no doubt a nod to Ebsen’s role as Jed Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies, where the son of his cousin Pearl Bodin was named Jethro.
Beverly Hillbillies star Irene Ryan’s last major role was as Charlemagne’s lusty mother, Bertha, in the Broadway premiere of Pippin; a line in her big musical number was “It’s hard to believe I’m being led astray/by a man who calls me Granny”, which usually got thunderous applause. A chain smoker with many health problems, she suffered the massive stroke that would ultimately end her life during the run of that show.
Beverly Sills (1929 – 2007) was an American operatic soprano whose peak career was between the 1950s and 1970s. In her prime she was the only real rival to Joan Sutherland as the leading bel canto stylist.
Dame Joan Sutherland, “La Stupenda”, was instrumental in establishing the career of Luciano Pavarotti, whom she and her conductor husband, Sir Richard Bonynge, chose to accompany them on a performance tour of her native Australia, most notably in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. Pavarotti made the grade not only because of his voice, but because he was one of the few tenors available who was taller than Sutherland.
The Bride of Lammermoor is a novel by Sir Walter Scott.
The musical soundtrack for The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) proved so popular, it was used again in the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials starring Buster Crabbe.
Robert LeRoy “Buck” Rodgers was a Major League Baseball catcher and manager. In the former capacity, he caught a no-hitter thrown by Los Angeles Angels teammate Bo Belinsky in 1962.
In the Canadian tv series Corner Gas, set in Dog River, Saskatchewan, all of last names of named characters are names of actual small towns in east-central Saskatchewan, where the series creator, Brent Butt, grew up.
The lead character, played by Brent Butt, was named Brent Leroy, after the town of Leroy.
Puppets Who Kill is a Canadian television comedy co-produced by The Comedy Network. It premiered in Canada on the Comedy Network in 2002. In Puppets Who Kill, Rocko the Dog, Cuddles the Comfort Doll, Buttons the Bear, and Bill the Dummy are four live, anthropomorphic puppets with a history of delinquency and recidivism. Canadian courts sent each of them to a halfway house for puppets, operated by a man named Dan Barlow.
Tiffany and Company was founded by Charles Lewis Tiffany, whose father was Comfort Tiffany and whose son was the famous glass designer, Lewis Comfort Tiffany. The company started as a small stationary store but grew into an international jewelry business making Tiffany one of the richest Americans of his day. In 1872 Tiffany, along with Horace Greeley and Baron von Rothschild, fell victim to an elaborate diamond hoax perpetrated by Philip Arnold and John Slack. The hoax was dramatized twice on TV, once in a Great Adventure episode starring John Fiedler, John McGiver, Barry Sullivan, and J. D. Cannon.