The TV show The Texas Wheelers was a 1974 TV show about a group of orphans who managed on their own until their ne’er-do-well father returns. The cast included Jack Elam, Mark Hamill (before Star Wars, and Gary Busey. The show was notable in using John Prine’s “Illegal Smile” – a song about smoking marijuana – as its theme song.
Great movie - loved it!
In play:
Jack Kennedy visited Nazi Germany with his best friend LeMoyne “Lem” Billings in the summer of 1937.
Just south of Billings, Montana is the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument where Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer made his last stand.
450 miles NW of Billings, MT is Whitefish, MT. Whitefish is in Flathead County and is 25 miles N of Flathead Lake. Flathead Lake is the largest natural freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River in the contiguous United States.
The curious procedure of head flattening, using a board bound to an infant’s head to deform its skull, has been practiced by numerous historical cultures, including Huns, Alans, Gepids, Ostrogoths, Heruli, Rugii and Burgundians in the Old World, and Maya, Inca, Chinookan, Choctaw, and Lucayans in the New World, and some Australian aboriginal tribes. There is even evidence of it in Neanderthal skulls. However, the Flathead Indians did *not *do it.
The Burgundians left three legal codes, among the earliest from any of the Germanic tribes. The Liber Constitutionum sive Lex Gundobada (The Book of the Constitution following the Law of Gundobad), also known as the Lex Burgundionum, or more simply the Lex Gundobada or the Liber, was issued in several parts between 483 and 516, principally by Gundobad, but also by his son, Sigismund. It was a record of Burgundian customary law and is typical of the many Germanic law codes from this period.
In his original incarnation, Lex Luthor had thick red hair. Due to a mistake in production, he was accidentally portrayed as bald, and that became his trademark.
The red triangle of Bass Ale was the first British trademark. It is still in use today.
The Bass logo is visible in paintings by Edouard Manet and Pablo Picasso. The symbol is also mentioned in James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo is best known for creating imaginative representation portrait heads put together entirely of such objects as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books.
Dr. Demento’s most “honored” song is “Fish Heads” by Barnes and Barnes (actually Billy “Run, Will Robinson” Mumy and Robert Haimer). It tells about fish heads playing baseball, wearing sweaters, dancing, playing drums, or being seen drinking cappuccino in Italian restaurants with Oriental women.
Dr. Demento’s real name is Barry Hansen and he has a master’s degree in sociology with emphasis on folklore and ethnomusicology from UCLA.
Hansen’s Disease is better known as leprosy, the reason for the colony on the island of Moloka’i that was served by Belgian priest St. Damien DeVeuster.
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Harvey Stephens, who played Damien in The Omen (1976), was chosen for this role largely from the way he attacked director Richard Donner during auditions. Donner asked all the little boys to “come at him” as if they were attacking Katherine Thorn during the church wedding scene. Stephens screamed and clawed at Donner’s face, and kicked him in the groin during his act. Donner whipped the kid off him, ordered the kid’s blond hair dyed black and cast him as Damien. In fact, before Stephens came along, Donner was even considering casting a girl as Damien, as the casting process for the child was proving to be so difficult.
West Memphis Three member Damien Echols was born Michael Wayne Hutchison; his surname changed due to being adopted by his stepfather. At his murder trial the prosecution claimed he changed his given name to honor Damien from The Omen movies; Echols claimed he changed it during a flirtation with Catholicism to honor Father Damien of Hawaii.
Honolulu, Hawaii is the largest city in the world – at least it has the longest borders. According to the state constitution, any island or islet not named as belonging to a county belongs to Honolulu. This makes all islands within the Hawaiian Archipelago, which stretches to Midway Island (1,500 miles northwest of Hawaii), part of Honolulu. So the city is about 1,500 miles long or more distance than halfway across the 48 contiguous states.
The Philippine Islands is an archipelago comprising 7,107 islands.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago is a nonfiction account of the Soviet prison camp system, based upon Solzhenitsyn’s experiences as a prisoner.
Due to political objections to the term, “British Isles,” some academics have proposed the term “Northwest European Archipelago” to refer to the set of islands off the northwest coast of France.