Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” is based on a real event in his life where he was struggling with his sexuality and had become engaged to a woman. He went out drinking with Bernie Taupin and Long John Baldry, and Baldry gave him advice against getting married. “Sugar Bear” in the song is Long John Baldry.
Songwriters Kinky Friedman and Ben Elton are both novelists, and both have penned books called “Blast from the Past.”
Blast From The Past is also the name of a 1999 film starring Brendan Fraser as a man who was raised in a 1950’s bomb shelter being introduced to the modern world.
Talk about collaboration!
In play:
Bill Clinton, only the second President to be impeached, was acquitted on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice by vote of the U.S. Senate on February 12, 1999.
In a Jan. 2014 interview published by The Guardian, George Clinton claims to have been born in an outdoor lavatory, and therefore has “a legitimate claim on the funk.”
George Clinton and John C. Calhoun are the only two people to serve as vice president under two different presidents.
President Andrew Jackson couldn’t stand his Vice President, John C. Calhoun, and strongly opposed Calhoun’s nullificationist views as being destructive of the Federal Union.
In a letter to his wife Abigain (Dec. 19, 1793), the nation’s first vice president, John Adams, said: “My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived; and as I can do neither good nor evil, I must be borne away by others and meet the common fate.”
John Nance Garner, Vice President of the US from 1933 to 1941, once said, “The Vice Presidency is not worth a pitcher of warm piss.” Garner was a former Congressman from Texas, House Minority Leader, and Speaker of the House.
John Nance Garner was from Texas and was known as “Cactus Jack” because while the state legislature was selecting the state flower, he supported the prickly pear cactus. However, in 1901 the bluebonnet was chosen instead.
President John F. Kennedy called Garner by phone on Nov. 22, 1963 and wished him happy birthday, just hours before his assassination. Garner turned 95 that day.
The Raindrops (alias husband and wife songwriting team Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich) enjoyed a Top 40 hit in 1963 with their song “The Kind of Boy You Can’t Forget.”
Their follow-up single, “That Boy John,” was climbing up the charts at the time of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. When that happened, the single was pulled from rotation by all radio stations, and it quickly disappeared.
A similar though not as severe fate befell Billy Joe Royal. After initial success on Top 40 radio with “Down in the Boondocks,” “I Knew You When” and “Cherry Hill Park,” the hits dried up and he wasn’t heard from for several years.
Then he decided to give country music a try. He released a song called “Burned Like a Rocket” in late 1985, and it seemed destined for the top of the country charts. But then the Challenger disaster happened on January 28, 1986. The song was immediately pulled from country radio; it peaked at #10.
After “Teacher in Space” Christa McAuliffe was killed during the 1986 Challenger disaster, her backup, a former math teacher named Barbara Morgan, served as a mission specialist during a 2007 flight of the shuttle Endeavor.
The card game Chrononauts involves using time travel to change historical events. One possible alternate timeline proposes that if John Lennon had lived, he would’ve actually prevented the Challenger disaster — by protesting on the launch pad and preventing its fatal takeoff.
John Lennon lived and was killed at The Dakota apartments; the building was also featured in the film Rosemary’s Baby.
The former Sunnyvale Air Force Station was renamed in 1986 to Onizuka Air Force Station, after astronaut Ellison Onizuka who was killed in the Challenger disaster.
The tiny station’s main landmark is a large, window-less square building nicknamed The Blue Cube which was easily seen from nearby Bay Area freeways US Highway 101 and California Highway 237 which intersected there. For many years The Blue Cube was a landmark of Sunnyvale, which is also the heart of Silicon Valley.
Picture of The Blue Cube: File:Lockheed's "Blue Cube".jpg - Wikipedia
(Wikipedia’s File:Lockheed’s “Blue Cube”.jpg)
The Blue Cube had high security since it was one of only two main network hubs of the USAFSCN, the US Air Force Satellite Control Network. Satellite tracking stations across the globe were linked to The Blue Cube. Inside The Blue Cube were separate MCCs, Mission Control Centers, each focused on specific satellite missions or “constellations”. Examples are MILSTAR (Military Strategic and Tactical Relay, is a constellation of communications satellites in geostationary orbit), or GPS nicknamed “jeeps.” The Blue Cube’s MCCs processed the telemetry gathered from the tracking stations.
The tight security at The Blue Cube was such that in 1968, even the vice president of the United States, Hubert Humphrey, was initially denied entry to the facility.
Onizuka Air Force Station was closed in April 2007, and just a few days ago the dismantling and demolition of The Blue Cube began. It visibly, from the outside began sometime on either Tue 15 or Wed 16 April 2014. Very soon, The Blue Cube will be No More.
Onizuka Air Force Station’s call sign was CUBE (also nicknamed DICE): The Blue Cube
(Contra Costa Times news article: http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_25581169/wrecking-crews-demolish-iconic-blue-cube)
USAFCN centers and Tracking Stations, by call sign:
- CUBE: Sunnyvale, Onizuka Air Force Station
- INDI: The Seychelles (IOS, Indian Ocean Station)
- KODI: Kodiak Island, Alaska
- PIKE: Colorado Springs
- COOK: Vandenburg
- POGO: Greenland, Thule Air Force Base
- LION: RAF Oakhanger, England
- BOSS: New Hampshire’s New Boston AFS
- HULA: Oahu, Hawaii’s Kaena Point
- GUAM: GTS, Guam Tracking Station
- REEF: Diego Garcia
(USAFCN Locations: Satellite Control Network - Wikipedia)
Personal note:
In a former life I worked inside The Blue Cube, as a SW engineer civilian contractor to the DoD, working with 21 SOPS (21st Space Operations Squadron). I worked on the SW module called TRORD, satellite tracking and orbital determination. It included EWSK and NSSK, the east-west and north-south station keeping for geosynch and geostationary satellites.
I attended the base closure ceremony in Apr 2007, a piece of local history. Annually, Onizuka Air Force Station would hold a Family Day and Open House which was open to employees and their families but not to the general public, where we could see and explore many areas of the Air Force Base. It was very cool to climb up into one of the large tracking dishes. My kids had fun doing that, although they all likely don’t remember because they’d have been 8, 6 and 4.
The job required a security clearance, and none of the information I just shared is classified.
Otherwise, I’d have to kill you. 
Lastly, the one time I flew into Kona on the big island of Hawaii, it was the mid- to late-1990s, the airport had a display about the life and many contributions of Ellison Onizuka. It was hosted by a local ladies group. Interested, and striking up a conversation, I met one of the ladies who, it turns out, was Ellison Onizuka’s widow. It was quite an honor to meet her.
And one more, from memory.
The DoD sticker on my bike was from MCB Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. I’d often get comments from the Onizuka base gate guards because they’d never seen a vehicle sticker from there, let alone very few from any USMC installations.
Because of the effects of General Relativity, GPS satellite clocks are designed to “tick” slower than Earth-bound reference clocks so that all of the clocks in the GPS system appear to tick at the same rate to ground observers.
After Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a Boeing 747 carrying 269 people, was shot down in 1983 after straying into the USSR’s prohibited airspace, in the vicinity of Sakhalin and Moneron Islands, President Ronald Reagan issued a directive making GPS freely available for civilian use, once it was sufficiently developed, as a common good.
The two aircraft which typically serve as Air Force One are extensively-refitted Boeing 747s. They first began service during the George H.W. Bush Administration.