F. Scott Fitzgerald alluded to the fixing of the 1919 World Series in his novel The Great Gatsby, recently remade as a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire.
In The Godfather Part 2, gangster Hyman Roth took his name as a tribute to Arnold Rothstein, the man who paid the White Sox to lose the 1919 World Series.
U.S. Sen. Arnold Vinick (Alan Alda), Republican of California, defeated by U.S. Rep. Matt Santos (Jimmy Smits), Democrat of Texas, in the Presidential election in the final season of The West Wing, agrees to serve as Santos’s Secretary of State.
Alan Alda did not sign on to play Hawkeye Pierce on “MAS*H” (1972) until 6 hours before filming began on the pilot episode.
Alan Alda’s father, Robert Alda, born Alphonso Giuseppe Giovanni Roberto D’Abruzzo, was the original Sky Masterson in the Broadway musical Guys and Dolls, based on the short stories of Damon Runyon. Robert Alda appeared twice on his son’s TV show as a visiting surgeon.
Damon Runyon wrote a story about an eating contest called “A Piece of Pie”, in which Nicely-Nicely Johnson, a character in Guys and Dolls, appears.
Joey Chestnut of San Jose, CA is currently ranked first in the world by the International Federation of Competitive Eating, largely on the strength of his championships in the last 6 annual Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contests at Coney Island. In his first win, he dethroned the diminutive Japanese champion, Takeru Kobayashi, previously the dominant figure in the sport.
Fresh chestnut fruits have about 180 calories per 100 grams of edible parts, which is much lower than walnuts, almonds, other nuts and dried fruit. Chestnuts contain no cholesterol and contain very little fat, mostly unsaturated, and no gluten.
“The Christmas Song” (commonly subtitled “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”) was written in 1944 by Mel Tormé and Bob Wells. According to Tormé, the song was written during a blistering hot summer. In an effort to “stay cool by thinking cool”…
“I saw a spiral pad on his piano with four lines written in pencil”, Tormé recalled. "They started, "Chestnuts roasting…, Jack Frost nipping…, Yuletide carols…, Folks dressed up like Eskimos.’ Bob (Wells, co-writer) didn’t think he was writing a song lyric. He said he thought if he could immerse himself in winter he could cool off. Forty minutes later that song was written. “I wrote all the music and some of the lyrics.”
Gordon Lightfoot reputedly wrote “Song for a Winter’s Night”, featuring a jingle bell in the background, in the middle of a blistering summer, while holed up in a New York hotel room.
Sherlock Holmes had a picture of martyred British military leader Charles “Chinese” Gordon, slain by the Mahdi’s forces at Khartoum in 1885, hanging in his rooms at 221B Baker Street.
At the time that Gordon was killed, an expeditionary force was making its way to him; it arrived two days after his death (and was criticized for waiting several extra days on the trip). However, the force was an overreaction: though sent ostensibly to rescue British residents of the city, the only British resident at the time was Gordon. The UK government didn’t want to waste men in the Sudan, but Gordon went into Khartoum and demanded they bring him out. Many historians think he had a martyr complex.
Raphael Ravenscroft played the saxophone in Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street, from the 1978 album City to City.
ETA: ninja’d by RealityChuck, but it still works. Connection: “city.”
Before adopting the NATO standard phonetic alphabet for radio transmissions, in which A through E are “Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo”, the US Army used a code which began “Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, Easy”.
Of the 26 NATO standard phonetic letters only two begin with a sound identical to the sound of the names of the letters they represent: Uniform, and X-ray.
A study published in The Journal of Educational Research by David L. Brunsma, of the University of Alabama, and Kerry A. Rockquemore, of the University of Notre Dame, (1998) states: “The findings indicate that student uniforms have no direct effect on substance use, behavioral problems, or attendance. A negative effect of uniforms on student academic achievement was found.” Viva Diversity!
In the Lynyrd Skynyrd song, Sweet Home Alabama the famous “Turn it up” line uttered by Ronnie Van Zant in the beginning was not intended to be in the song. Van Zant was simply asking producer Al Kooper and engineer Rodney Mills to turn up the volume in his headphones so that he could hear the track better. None of the three writers of the song were originally from Alabama. Ronnie Van Zant and Gary Rossington were both born in Jacksonville, Florida. Ed King was from Glendale, California.
King Edward VIII, uncle of Queen Elizabeth II, ruled so briefly before abdicating in 1936 that he was never actually crowned.
There were only three calendar years when three kings ruled England/the United Kingdom: 1066 (Edward the Confessor, Harold, and William the Conqueror), 1483 (Edward IV, Edward V, and Richard III), and 1936 (George V, Edward VIII, and George VI).
Johnny Depp said only 169 words in Edward Scissorhands (1990).