More than half a million Armenians are now in the US, Canada and Mexico, two-thirds of them in the US West and Midwest.
Million Dollar Legs was a 1932 comedy starring Jack Oakie. W.C. Fields played the president of the country of Klopstokia, whose inhabitants had world-class athletic ability. Oakie was an American who convinced Fields (who could lift enormous weights) to send a team to the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, and who fell in love with Fields’s daughter.
Jack Nicholson used to be a messenger boy for MGM’s cartoon department.
Jack the Ripper committed his murders in late 1888. Today there are still several “Ripperologists” - people whose hobby is trying to solve the mystery of who he really was. One of the foremost is Donald Rumbelow who still leads walking Ripper Tours in the Whitechapel District.
Sterling Hayden, an accomplished sailor turned actor who later played General Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove, was famous enough to require an alias when he joined the Army. As OSS agent “John Hamilton”, his World War II service included sailing with supplies from Italy to Yugoslav partisans and parachuting into fascist Croatia. He also participated in the Naples-Foggia campaign and established air crew rescue teams in enemy-occupied territory, and was decorated by Marshal Tito.
The city of Naples, Italy means “New City”, from the word Neapolis. It was founded by Greek settlers in 470 BC. Its Historic Centre has a wealth of outstanding monuments such as the Church of Santa Chiara and the Castel Nuovo. The Historic Centre of Naples is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Nostradamus is said to have predicted the 9/11 terrorists attacks in quatrain I.87:
Ennosigée feu du centre de terre
Fera trembler au tour de cité neufve:
Deux grands rochiers long temps feront la guerre
Puis Arethusa rougira nouveau fleuve.
English translation:
Earth-shaking fires from the world’s centre roar:
Around ‘New City’ is the earth a-quiver.
Two nobles long shall wage a fruitless war,
The nymph of springs pour forth a new, red river.
Um, okay.
The word nymph means “bride” but also “any married woman” or “marriageable maiden.” The etymology indicates that nymphs were perceived as nubile girls or young brides.
The etymology of “dog” is unknown. It appears in the later Old English period (as “dogca”) and gradually replaced “Hound” as the common word for a canine.
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) was the first of 14 Sherlock Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone in the lead role and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson.
Former Memphis State basketball forward Baskerville Holmes was the 3rd round pick in the 1986 NBA draft by the Milwaukee Bucks. He failed to make the team but played in Finland, Spain, and Sweden, later succumbed to drugs and depression, and died along with his girlfriend in a murder-suicide.
Some key moments from 1986 - a trip down memory lane for the old farts here (includes me):
12 Jan: Space Shuttle Columbia launches with the first Hispanic-American astronaut, Dr. Franklin Chang-Diaz
28 Jan: Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, 73 seconds after liftoff
03 Feb: Pixar Studios opens
09 Feb: Halley’s Comet reaches its perihelion, its closest point to the Sun
19 Feb: The Soviet Union launches the Mir space station
28 Feb: Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme is assassinated
09 Mar: US Navy divers find the Challenger crew compartment wreckage on the ocean floor with all seven astronauts’ bodies still inside
25 Mar: Out of Africa wins Best Picture Oscar
26 Apr: Chrenobyl nuclear plant disaster; over 4,000 die
25 May: Hands Across America - over 5,000,000 people join hands from LA to NYC
19 Jun: basketball player Len Bias, University of Maryland star and Boston Celtics top draft pick (#2 overall), dies from cocaine overdose
23 Jul: Andrew marries Fergie
21 Aug: the Lake Nyos disaster in Cameroon kills over 2,000
09 Oct: the Fox Broadcasting Corporation is launched when News Corporation completes its acquisition of the Metromedia group of companies
27 Oct: Mets defeat Red Sox in World Series game 7 (let’s not mention game 6, okay?)
11 Nov: Sperry Rand and Burroughs merge to form Unisys, the largest computer merger at that time
22 Nov: Mike Tyson wins his first world boxing title by defeating Trevor Berbick in Las Vegas
14 Dec: Voyager, designed by Burt Rutan and piloted by Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager, begins its flight around the world, non-stop and unrefueled
Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley has already begun making trips to Iowa and New Hampshire, and is widely considered to be in the race for the 2016 Democratic Party’s nomination for President.
New Hampshire is the only US state that ever played host at the formal conclusion of a foreign war. In 1905, Portsmouth was the scene of the treaty ending the Russo-Japanese War.
On September 1, 1905, Saskatchewan became a province, carved out of the North-West Territories by the Saskatchewan Act passed by the Parliament of Canada. Prime Minister Sir Wilfred Laurier and the Governor General, Earl Grey, attended the formal ceremonies in Regina, inaugurating the new province with all due pomp and circumstance.
On September 2, 1905, political shenanigans began.
On September 27, 1905, Albert Einstein submitted his paper Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content? in which he developed his argument for the famous equation: e = mc2 (squared).
Super Dave Osborne is a comedic character, created by Albert Brooks’ brother Bob Einstein, a stuntman who doesn’t know how bad he is.
Dave Madden, who played manager Reuben Kincaid on The Partridge Family, served in the US Air Force, Specials Services, and did a magic show before the King of Libya.
The destroyer USS Reuben James (DD-245) was the first US ship sunk by Germany in World War II. It was named for a boatswain’s mate who served under Stephen Decatur in the First Barbary War, apocryphally saving Decatur from what would have been a fatal saber strike while boarding a Tripolitan ship.
Decatur’s most famous quote is usually truncated to “My country, right or wrong,” which misleads as to his intention. The full line is ““Our Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!”