In play: Because Gromyko opposed many of Gorbachev’s reforms following the Brezhnev and (brief) Andropov regimes that marked the end of communism, but had to much stature to be dismissed, the Birthmarked One kicked him upstairs to the Chairmanship of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, nominally head of state but with no significant powers.
MiKhail Gorbachev himself was the last Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, taking the seat in 1988 after Gromyko tendered his resignation and serving until 1989, when the title was changed to Chairman of the Supreme Soviet. The title was again changed in 1990 to President of the Soviet Union, until the position was dissolved in 1991, when the Soviet Union was dissolved.
He mentioned it as a possible destination, but we don’t know that they became “Free French soldiers… who joined a garrison at Brazzaville.”
In play:
Alice Roosevelt was Theodore Roosevelt’s famously free-spirited daughter. He once joked, “I can be President of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.”
Alice B. Toklas was born in 1877 in San Francisco. When she was 30 years old she travelled to Paris, and on her first day there she met Gertrude Stein. They eventually hosted a salon that attracted expatriate American writers, such as Ernest Hemingway, Paul Bowles, Thornton Wilder, and Sherwood Anderson, and avant-garde painters, including Picasso, Matisse, and Braque.
Upon learning the Oakland, California neighborhood in which she had lived as a child had been torn down to make way for an industrial park, Gertrude Stein famously commented “There is no there there.”
Depends on what you consider canon. [
The Oakland Hills Firestorm, which lasted from 19-23 Oct 1991, was one of the largest urban wildfires in history. The fire destroyed 3,791 homes, caused $1.5 billion in damages, injured 150 people and killed 25.
Alfred Hitchcock added the character of the psychologist Fred Richmond – played by Simon Oakland – to “explain” why Norman Bates was a killer, but Hitchcock never intended the explanation to explain everything. It was there as a sop to audience members who wanted to know why, even though there was not “why.”
British actor Anthony Hopkins, in character as Alfred Hitchcock, appears in a recent public service ad shown in some American movie theaters asking guests to turn off their cell phones and pagers.
According to Wikipedia …
the first commercial system for personal paging was the Bellboy from the Bell System, or “Ma Bell” in 1962. The Bellboy was introduced at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair; and…
in 1947 AT&T commercialized MTS (Mobile Telephone Service). From its start in St. Louis in 1946, AT&T then introduced Mobile Telephone Service to one hundred towns and highway corridors by 1948.
In 1946, the Dick Tracy comic strip introduced the 2-way wrist radio, allowing Tracy characters to interact as if they were using mobile telephones.
Cyclone Tracy, which struck the city of Darwin, the capital of the Northern Territory, on Christmas Day 1974, destroyed 80 per cent of the city’s houses.
Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on exactly the same day, Feb. 12, 1809.
The Lincoln Highway was the first transcontinental improved highway for automobiles across the United States of America. Formally dedicated October 31, 1913, the Lincoln Highway spanned coast-to-coast from Times Square in New York City to Lincoln Park in San Francisco, originally through 13 states: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California.
Today, most of U.S. Route 30 from Philadelphia to western Wyoming, portions of Interstate 80 in the western United States, most of U.S. Route 50 in Nevada and California, and most of old decommissioned U.S. Route 40 in California are alignments of the Lincoln Highway.
The Mormon theocratic state known as Deseret (included all of what are now Utah and Nevada and chunks of Idaho, Wyoming, Arizona, and eastern California. Neither the name nor the state were ever acknowledged by the US government. The name was said to be a pre-Tower of Babel Hebrew word for honey bee.
Sales of Hormel’s SPAM increased dramatically during the Great Recession of 2008-12.
(Also, reported.)
Napoleon adopted the bee as his personal logo.
The fourth book of the Georgics, Virgil’s didactic poem about agriculture and husbandry, is devoted to bees and the hive. In line with the understanding at that time Virgil uses the Latin word rex (‘king’) to refer to the ‘chief’ bee, rather than regina (‘queen’).
Astronaut Gus Grissom’s real first name was Virgil, and that was the name used by the corresponding Tracy brother in “Thunderbirds”. Those characters all took their first names from Mercury astronauts.
In 1983, Annie Glenn, wife of Mercury astronaut John Glenn, received the first national award of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association for “providing an inspiring model for people with communicative disorders.” In 1987, the association honored her by asking her to present the first annual Annie Glenn Award for achieving distinction despite a communication disorder
Actor James Earl Jones was the first recipient. Jones has overcome a childhood stuttering problem he had for several years.