The Georgetown section of Washington DC does not have a stop on the Metro (which goes on the edge of the district). Reports are that the residents didn’t want people from other parts of the city to be able to get there too easily.
No one is sure why Georgetown athletes are called the Hoyas, but the most popular theory is that Georgetown students used to chant “Hoia saxa” (a cockeyed mixture of Greek and Latin, which translates crudely as “What rocks!!”) while cheering for their baseball team, which was then known as the Stonewalls.
Confederate Gen. Thomas Jackson earned the nickname “Stonewall” during the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861, when Gen. Barnard Bee said to his troops, “Look at Jackson, standing there like a brick wall.” Some historians have suggested that this was not an admiring comment, but a criticism by Bee, who might have expected Jackson to come to his aid. Bee was killed soon after, so we’ll never know for sure.
Before the Civil War, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson was an unpopular professor of chemistry at the Virginia Military Institute, where students generally mocked him as a pompous, boring old fuddy duddy.
Stonewall Jackson’s sister, Laura Ann Jackson Arnold, was a staunch abolitionist* (though she did own slaves) and Unionist. When her home in Winchester, Virginia (a city which changed hands constantly during the war) became unsafe she moved into Jackson’s house- which she had inherited a lifetime estate in from the uncle who left it to him- and communicated with her brother when he was home only through notes; they saw each other many times during the war but literally never spoke.
*Not that uncommon.
In Shaun of the Dead, Shaun tries to lead his parents, his friends and his ex-girlfriend to safety at his favorite hangout, the Winchester Pub.
In Shaun of the Dead, there is a scene where Shaun, played by Simon Pegg, comes barrelling out a door thumping zombies with a cricket bat while the other actors in the scene look on. According to IMDB, only Pegg could swing at the zombies because there was only one stunt bat on the set.
Richard L. Simon and Max Schuster began their publishing company when Simon’s aunt asked Richard whether there were any books of crossword puzzles on the market. Simon discovered that there weren’t, even though the conversation happened in 1924, over a decade after the New York World had published the puzzle now considered the first crossword.
Publishing magnate Richard L. Simon had a daughter named Carly, who wrote the song “Anticipation” about an upcoming date with… Cat Stevens. She later sold the song to Heinz, for use in a ketchup commercial (Heinz ketchup being so thick that you have to wait a long time, in anticipation, for the stuff to come out of the bottle).
Earlier this month several media outlets announced that the subject of Simon’s hit You’re So Vain, which had been speculated to be Warren Beatty or Mick Jagger or James Taylor or her father, was David Geffen, the now openly gay entertainment billionaire whom she dated in the 1970s. Simon says the reports are not only wrong but she didn’t even know Geffen when she wrote it.
The red brick H.J. Heinz’s family home from Sharpsburg was moved to the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan.
One of Matt LeBlanc’s first TV appearances was in a Heinz ad in which he carefully positions a ketchup bottle to pour from a rooftop onto the hot dog which he then runs down to buy from a street vendor. LeBlanc later went on to fame as Joey Tribbiani on Friends.
Lisa Kudrow’s character on Friends, Phoebe Buffay, was written to be the twin sister of Ursula, the ditzy waitress whom Kudrow had played on several episodes of Mad About You.
Actors who have identical twins in real life include Nicholas Brendan, Conrad Bain and Tia & Tamela Mowry. (The most famous twins in show business, Mary Kate & Ashley Olsen, are fraternal, not identical.)
ETA: removed Joseph Fiennes- his twin is fraternal.
Mark Twain’s 1881 novel The Prince and the Pauper is posited on the ahistorical notion that the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VI, looked almost identical to another boy, Tom Canty, and that the two briefly swapped places shortly before the death of Edward’s father, King Henry VIII.
King Henry VIII never divorced any of his wives. He had his marriages to Catherine of Aragon (because it was incestuous*) and Anne of Cleves (due to non-consummation – though that was Henry’s decision) annulled.
*She was his brother’s widow. That was considered incest at the time and he had to get a special dispensation from the Pope to marry her. Later, he broke from the Pope, saying that the Pope did not have the authority to give dispensation.
Catherine of Aragon was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, the first king and queen of Spain most famous in the U.S. elementary schools (at least in my day) as the monarchs who gave Columbus the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria.
To further confuse the matter the Old Testament was used to argue both ways and with no clear verdict. Lev. 18:16 forbids carnal relations with your brother’s wife, while the Levirate- named for the same source as Leviticus- orders you to marry your brother’s wife to provide him with heirs if he is dead and had no sons.
A non-sailing replica of the Santa María is moored in Ohio’s capital city, Columbus.
Santa Claus, a mythical figure popular in Western Christian culture, is featured in the Willa Cather story “The Strategy of the Were-wolf Dog”.
In the Czech Republic, the baby Jesus (Jezisek) brings presents on Christmas Eve. Saint Nicholas, or Svaty Mikulas, comes on December 6th accompanied by an Angel and a Devil and gives candy, nuts and treats to good children and coal to bad ones.