John Adams once commented that John Marshall was Adams’ gift to the American people and was the proudest moment of his life.
Justice Marshall is regarded as the man most singly responsible for the judicial branch’s coequal status among the government, and for its power of judicial review.
Chief Justice John Marshall had as 1st agnatic cousin, 3x removed, George Catlett Marshall, Jr., one of the most distinguished Americans of the 20th century. Marshall served as Army Chief of State (and was the first American soldier to wear five stars), Secretary of State, and Secretary of Defense, and is the namesake of the Marshall Plan.
FDR’s advisers, as well as both Churchill and Stalin, were unanimous in recommending that Marshall move to Britain or Gibraltar and be given Supreme Command over the Invasion of Europe. But at the last moment, FDR told Marshall that he “could not sleep at night with you out of the country” and gave the command to an officer who had been only a Lieutenant Colonel when Marshall received his fourth star: Dwight David Eisenhower.
Eisenhower’s class at West Point was referred to as “the class the stars fell on.” Of the 164 students in his class 59 rose to the rank of brigadier general or higher, 3 to the rank of full general and 2 to the rank of general of the army.
A spectacular Leonid meteor shower in November, 1833 was known as “the night the stars fell.”
Bobby Russell wrote two songs that reached #1 on the Billboard pop charts: “Honey,” a maudlin ballad recorded by Bobby Goldsboro, and “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” recorded by his then-wife Vicki Lawrence.
Russell also wrote O.C. Smith’s hit “Little Green Apples,” which only made it to #2.
Leonid is the Russian/Ukrainian name given the Spartan hero and leader, Leonidas I (“son of the lion”), who is famous for his demise at the battle of Thermopylae.
You Ninja.
Each year Georgia serves as a host to the International Poultry Trade Show, the largest poultry convention in the world.
Young chickens are chicks. Young Guinea fowl are keets. Young ducks are ducklings. Young geese are called goslings. Poult is a term that applies to the offspring of numerous poultry including turkeys, chickens, and pheasants.
NFL coach turned TV announcer and video game tycoon John Madden is also responsible for popularizing the turducken - a Thanksgiving dish made from a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken.
The first Thanksgiving by Europeans in North America was celebrated by Martin Frobisher, the English explorer, in Newfoundland on May 27, 1578, to celebrate that he was on his way home to England after a fruitless and dangerous attempt to find the North-West Passage.
This would have come as a considerable surprise to Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights, Ohio on May 17, 1963, in a sermon which had some of the same themes as his much more famous “I have a dream” speech later that summer in Washington, D.C.
In the lame comedy Americathon, John Ritter played inept U.S. President Chet Roosevelt, who launched a telethon to raise money to bail the country out of bankruptcy.
The Saskatchewan Roughriders may be the only professional football team in North America which once held a telethon to stave off bankruptcy.
The only non-profit, community-owned franchise in a major US pro sports league is the NFL’s Green Bay Packers, who are also thereby the only team whose financial records are public. Such ownership is in direct violation of current league rules, which stipulate a limit of 32 owners of one team and one of those owners having a minimum 30% stake, but the Packers were grandfathered.
The Green Bay Phoenix is the full “official nickname” of a certain Horizon League member’s NCAA athletic teams, even though the school represented by the Phoenix is still known as the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay in all other regards.
Long Beach State, where the famous football coach George Allen finished his career (he died from a heart attack caused by an iced Gatorade shower by his players), calls most of its teams the 49er’s. The sole exception is the baseball team - the Long Beach State Dirtbags. Famous former Dirtbags include Troy Tulowitzki, Jason Giambi, Evan Longoria, and Jered Weaver.
Chuck Berry now receives sole credit and all songwriting royalties for the Beach Boys’ hit “Surfing USA,” which courts ruled was essentially a remake of Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen.”
The preferred ice temperature for an ice hockey rink is 16 degrees (Fahrenheit). For a figure skating ice rink, it’s 22 degrees.
The hero’s girlfriend Lindy, played by Abbie Cornish, escapes from an assassin at the Central Park ice skating rink in the thriller Limitless.