Johnny Horton’s country-style song “Sink the Bismarck” was commissioned by 20th Century Fox for trailers for US audiences for the British movie of the name, but was not actually used in the film. The Blues Brothers’ cover version for their own self-titled film was edited out.
Johnny Horton’s first #1 country and western hit was in 1959 with “When It’s Springtime in Alaska (It’s Forty Below)”, and his second was in 1960 with “North to Alaska.” He is the only atist to score twice with “Alaska” songs.
Johnny Horton appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in this precursor to the MTV music video <grin>:
The Doors made their first and only appearance on the Ed Sullivan show on Sept. 17, 1967. About 15 minutes before they were scheduled to perform, the show’s producer asked them to change a lyric in “Light My Fire” – specifically, the line “Girl, we couldn’t get much higher,” to “Girl, we couldn’t get much better!” While it’s not known for sure whether or not the band actually agreed to change the line, one thing is for certain – Jim Morrison sang the song as written, with no changes. The producer was furious, and immediately banned The Doors from the show for life. When told that he would never play the Ed Sullivan show again, Jim Morrison smiled and said, "Hey man, we just DID the Ed Sullivan show!"
Jim Morrison’s Cub Scout uniform and some of his elementary school report cards (he was an average student IIRC) are on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio.
Casual Doors fans no doubt believe that Jim Morrison was the principal songwriter in the band. However, many of their most iconic songs (including “Light My Fire”) were in fact written by guitarist Robbie Krieger.
Some of the confusion stems from the fact that the band agreed to give a group songwriting credit (“The Doors”) on most of their albums, regardless of which member wrote the songs.
James James Morrison Morrison
Whetherby George Dupree
Took good care of his mother
Though he was only three.
James James said to his mother
“Mother,” he said, said he
“Don’t ever go down to the end of the town without consulting me.”
Disobedience by A. A. Milne
George Washington wished, as a young man, to serve in the Royal Navy, but his widowed mother, who was quite strong-willed, put the kibosh on the idea.
Betty Johnson Neumar was dubbed the “Black Widow” because while she was under arrest for arranging the murder of her fourth husband, it was learned that she had five husbands and all died somewhat mysteriously:
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Clarence Malone (1950–1952) remarried twice after the couple split and died November 27, 1970 in Medina, Ohio;
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James Flynn (? – 1955) was shot dead on a pier in New York in 1955;
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Richard Sills (? –1965) died from an allegedly self-inflicted gunshot wound sustained during an argument the couple was having in a closed room in their Big Coppitt Key, Florida home;
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Thomas Harold Gentry (1968–1986) was found dead in the couple’s Norwood, North Carolina home, shot multiple times; and
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John Neumar (1991–2007) was found dead from apparent natural causes.
Bobbie Gentry’s biggest hit song “Ode to Billy Joe” is analyzed in Professor John Howard’s history of gay Mississippi entitled Men Like That: A Queer Southern History as an example of what Howard calls the “gay suicide myth”.
Bobbie Gentry’s one-time husband Jim Stafford had several novelty songs that made the Top 40 in the 1970s. One of them, “My Girl Bill,” played off of gender confusion in a humorous way.
After several verses of Stafford sharing his feelings about “my girl Bill,” it turns out in the last verse that what he’s really saying is “she’s my girl, Bill” (i.e., “Bill” is the person the singer is talking to, not his girlfriend).
P.S. I’m sure Professor Howard’s “analysis” of “Ode to Billie Joe” is filled with the usual scholarly claptrap — since there is absolutely nothing in the song’s lyrics that points explicitly or even implicitly to the titular character being gay. Of course, this interpretation is one of many possibilities for why a young Southern boy of this era might have taken his life. It’s just that there’s not a shred of evidence in the song itself that points to this.
James Francis Stafford is an American cardinal of the Catholic Church. In late November 2008, he gave an interview to The National Catholic Reporter in which he said that then-President-elect Barack Obama had “an agenda and vision that are aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic.”
Apocalyptic Raids is the debut EP by Hellhammer, a heavy metal band from Switzerland who later changed their name to Celtic Frost. Along with other bands such as Bathory and Mercyful Fate, Hellhammer/Celtic Frost is often credited with creating the genre of black metal music.
The Curtiss SB2C Helldiver and the Grumman F6F Helldiver were US WWII airplanes, hell yes.
A joke about the Helldiver was that SB2C stood for “Son of a Bitch, Second Class”.
The F6F was the Hellcat.
As part of Taffy 3, the *USS Kalinin Bay *prevented a Japanese penetration into Leyte Gulf and saved General Douglas MacArthur’s beachhead in the Philippines. At a cost of five ships and hundreds of men, Taffy 3, aided by her own planes and those of Taffy 2, sank three enemy cruisers, seriously damaged several other ships, and turned back the most powerful surface fleet which Japan had sent to sea since the Battle of Midway.
[Playing off the Grunman. My dad was a radioman on the *Kalinin Bay *during the Battle of Leyte Gulf]
Clan Douglas was one of the most powerful clans during the early medieval period in Scotland. There are traditionally two divisions to the clan, the Black Douglases and the Red Douglases.
Oh yes! A brain fade on my part. Thanks for the correction.
The feud between the Black Lectroids and the Red Lectroids over control of Planet 10 is the framing story of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension. The good-guy Black Lectroids look like Rastafarian Jamaicans to Banzai after he receives a shock treatment from them that lets him see through their camouflage. They team up with the Hong Kong Cavaliers, the Blue Blaze Irregulars, and others to defeat the evil Red Lectroids, led by John Yaya, John Smallberries, and John Bigbooté, who arrived on Earth at Grover’s Mill, NJ in 1938, and try to return by stealing the Hyperdimensional Overthruster from Buckaroo.
MARPAT is the new digital camouflage pattern used by the United States Marine Corps. MARPAT stands for MARine PATtern, and this pattern replaced the “woodland” camo pattern in use since the Vietnam war.
MARPAT uses patterns generated by highly complex fractal equations, from chaos theory.
This picture (here) demonstrates the effectiveness of MARPAT against two other “camouflages” - the woodland pattern (called NATO), and simple olive drab.
One funny story about my woodland camouflage uniform (I served before MARPAT came out in 2002; I retired in 1993) - a couple of years ago my wife, son and I were at a Christmas Tree farm to cut down our tree. I wore my field jacket with the woodland camo pattern, with t-shirt, blue jeans and boots. Wending my way between the trees, I rounded one tree and came upon a young boy, alone but a few feet from his family. I smiled, said Hi, and then kept looking for my tree. A few seconds later I heard the boy say,
“Mom, I just saw a homeless man.”
I guess the woodland camo pattern has become the official uniform of many homeless people. 