On March 4, 1841, President William Henry Harrison gave the longest address, at about 8,500 words. Harrison delivered the 100-minute speech outdoors without an overcoat in bitterly cold weather. He caught pneumonia and died on April 4, 1841, one month after taking office. What president gave the shortest inaugural address? At his second inaugural in…
Yes, the man behind the “Sherman Anti-Trust Act” was related to the man behind “Sherman’s March to the Sea”. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act, passed in 1890, was sponsored by John Sherman, the younger brother of William Tecumseh Sherman. It was the latter Sherman who, as a Union general, led the destructive march across Georgia in…
Genesis 4:13-15 explains that the mark was placed on Cain to protect him from anyone who might want to kill him in retaliation for his murder of Abel. The mark was not itself meant as a punishment.
Black-Bag Job. An agent’s work, from bribery to breaking and entering. Demote Maximally. To purge an organization by killing. The Firm. The British Secret Service. The Company. The CIA. Measles. A murder handled so deftly that death appears to be accidental or from natural causes. Legend. An agent’s fake biography, used as a cover. Ladies….
The word salary evolved from salarium argentium, or “salt money”. Salt money was fees paid to Roman soldiers to buy the then precious commodity. In some instances, salt was indeed used as money.
In alphabetical order, the executive departments are: Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Justice, Labor, State, Transportation, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs.
Yes, Mr. Memory (Wylie Watson) in The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935) was based on a real person. Director Alfred Hitchcock said the man with the phenomenal memory was based on a music hall performer known as Datas.
A United Nations mission that visited Iraq on March 10-17, 1991 after the Gulf War, made this report, saying: “the recent conflict has wrought near-apocalyptic results upon the infrastructure of what had been until January 1991 a rather highly urbanized and mechanized society.”
Ten-year-old Tatum O’Neal won an Oscar in 1973, for Best Supporting Actress in Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon.
Between 1850 and 1860, when it was generating 3 to 4.8 million bales of cotton per year, the South provided over 75 percent of the cotton in the world.
Playwright Mary Chase placed Harvey, the invisible rabbit companion of Elwood P. Dowd, at six feet, one and a half inches tall. Elwood P. Dowd was played by James Stewart in the movie version of Harvey (1950). James Stewart was six feet, three and a half inches tall.
Every Which Way But Loose (1978) and Any Which Way You Can (1980) featured an orangutan. The orangutan’s name was Clyde.
Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry first brought an armed squadron to Tokyo Bay in 1853, when he delivered a letter from President Millard Fillmore to the emperor of Japan. In 1854, on a second expedition, Perry succeeded in persuading the Japanese to open their previously isolated society to U.S. trade.
The name of the playboy in J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World is Christy Mahon. He’s a young fugitive who thinks he has killed his domineering father and is therefore lionized by villagers, especially women.
According to many historians, the single bloodiest day of the Civil War was September 17, 1862, when General George McClellan’s Union forces and Robert E. Lee’s Confederate troops clashed in the Battle of Antietam. The savage struggle took place at Antietam Creek near Sharpsburg, Maryland, ending with the retreat of Lee’s army into Virginia on…
Paul Clifford (1830) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton novel begins, “It was a dark and stormy night”. It is also the opening line of numerous novels by Snoopy.
Bulls do not charge because a cape is red. They charge because of the movement of the cape. It does not have to be red or any other bright color.
The four Lennon Sisters were Diane, Peggy, Kathy, and Janet. They were regulars on “The Lawrence Welk Show” (ABC, 1955-71) from 1955 to 1968.
The subtitle of Melville’s short story “Bartle by the Scrivener” is “A Story of Wall Street.”
Ann Sheridan was “The Oomph Girl”. Veronica Lake was “The Peekaboo Girl”. Lizabeth Scott was “The Threat”.
Martha Mitchell, wife of Richard M. Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, was known as the Mouth That Roared. She was so called for her sometimes outrageous comments on liberals, protesters, reporters, and other menaces to society.
American Nintendo Company employees took the name “Mario” for Super Mario Brothers from the landlord of their building. The Nintendo system first appeared in the U.S. in 1986.
The chimp from Bedtime for Bonzo died in a trailer fire in the early 1950s, along with his four stand-ins, on the day he was scheduled to help present the first Patsy Awards for animal achievement.
The Broadway play The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams was drawn from a screenplay called The Gentleman Caller, which Williams wrote while he was under contract as a screenwriter for MGM in the early 1940s.
The name of the bear that played “Gentle Ben” (CBS, 1967-69) was Bruno.
Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? was the film in planning that set director John L. Sullivan on the road. He had become famous doing popular movies like Hey Hey in the Hayloft and So Long, Sarong.
Yes, and it still is a crime to kiss in public in some places. In 1656 in Boston, a Captain Kimble was placed in the stocks for kissing his wife in public on the Sabbath. To this day, it is illegal in Indiana for a mustached man to “habitually kiss human beings.” In Cedar Rapids,…
De Tocqueville based his work, Democracy in America, on a ten-month visit to study the American prison system for the French government, from May 1831 to February 1832. A study of American social and political institutions, Democracy in America was published in two parts in 1835 and 1840.
The Great Fire of London happened in September 1666. The worst fire in London’s history, it destroyed many civic buildings and churches, along with 13,000 houses.
There were no male actors that appeared in The Women (1939). The all-female cast includes Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, and Paulette Goddard.
The TV game show “The $64,000 Question” (CBS, 1955-58) cost only a small fraction of that to produce each week, about $15,000 per weekly episode. This was much cheaper than another top-rated half-hour show of the period, “The Jack Benny Show” (CBS, NBC, 1950-65), which cost $42,000 an episode.
Claudette Colbert says she’s proven that “The limb is mightier than the thumb” by revealing her leg to hitch a ride in It Happened One Night (1934).
Hans Conried played Danny Thomas’s Uncle Tonoose on the TV series “Make Room for Daddy” (ABC, CBS, 1953-64).
Little Sheba was the name of Lola Delaney’s (Shirley Booth’s) dog in Come Back, Little Sheba (1952).
No, long-term constipation does not cause poisoning. There are several cases on record in which fecal material has been stored in the bowels for over a year without causing any ill effects. Aside from the discomfort of carrying around an extra 60 to 100 pounds of weight.
The National Football League was founded in 1920 in Canton, Ohio. Originally called the American Professional Football Association, it adopted its name in 1922. Athlete Jim Thorpe was its first president. The NFL and the American Football League merged in 1970 to create the new 26-team NFL.
King Edward VIII of England gave up his throne for the love of Wallis Warfield Simpson on December 10, 1936. His younger brother George VI, who reigned until 1952, took the throne in his place when Elizabeth II became queen.
C. J. Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously is set in 1965, the year of Suharto’s overthrow of Sukarno’s Indonesian government.
Truman said, “He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he’d lie just to keep his hand in” of Richard Nixon.
Book I: Holiness/The Red Cross Knight Book II: Temperance/Guyon Book III: Chastity/Britomart Book IV: Friendship/Cambel and Triamond Book V: Justice/Artegall Book VI: Courtesy/Calidore
Edmond O’Brien is an accountant dying of radiation poisoning (caused by iridium) in the original D.O.A. (1950). In the 1988 remake, Dennis Quaid is a college professor also dying of radiation poisoning.
Isabel Archer’s stepdaughter in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady was Pansy. Her father, Isabel’s husband, is Gilbert Osmond; her mother is Madame Merle.
The surprise Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii began at 7:55 A.M. local time on December 7, 1941, and lasted nearly two hours. Over 2,300 Americans were killed; an additional 1,100 were wounded. More than ten ships were sunk or severely damaged; more than 140 aircraft were destroyed.
Bountiful in A Trip to Bountiful (1985) was in Texas. It was the hometown to which Mrs. Watts (Geraldine Page) wanted to return before she died.
In the 1920s, John Wayne was a University of Southern California student who worked as a laborer and bit player on the Fox lot, where he got to know director John Ford. In 1929, Wayne and fellow USC football player Ward Bond came out to Annapolis with the entire USC football team to appear in…
June Allyson took the role of madcap heiress Irene Bullock (played by Carole Lombard in the original 1936 version) in the remake of My Man Godfrey (1957). David Niven took the role of Godfrey Parke, the rich man posing as a butler (played by William Powell in the original).
Tradition gives the names of the two thieves crucified at the same time as Jesus Christ as Dismas’ and Gestas. The New Testament does not say.
Jack Kingman had small parts on Ed Norton’s favorite TV series, “Captain Video,” (DuMont, 1949-55).
Fitch Fulton, father of special-effects man John P. Fulton, painted the backgrounds for Gone With the Wind (1939). There were about two hundred backgrounds all together.
Clara Blandick, who often played aunts, such as Aunt Polly in Tom Sawyer (1930) played Auntie Em in The Wizard of Oz (1939).
Hitchcock used the word MacGuffin to mean a pretext for a suspense plot, an object or secret, such as military plans, of vital importance to the characters but of no real importance to the filmmaker. He thought his best MacGuffin was the set of vague “government secrets” in North by Northwest (1959), because this MacGuffin…
Marlon Brando played American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell in “Roots: The Next Generation” (ABC, 1977).
This first great Chinese empire the Chin dynasty ran from about 221 to 206 B.C. It established the approximate boundaries and governmental system of China for the next 2,000 years, and gave its name to the nation. The effects of the dynasty lasted until the 1911 revolution, which overthrew the empire and created a republic.
First Base. Who Second Base. What Third Base. I Don’t Know Shortstop. I Don’t Give a Darn (I Don’t Care) Catcher. Today Pitcher. Tomorrow Left Field. Why Center Field. Because Right Field. Not mentioned in the routine
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924) was born V. I. Ulyanov. Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein. Josef Stalin (1879-1953) was born Josef Dzhugashvili.
Spencer Tracy’s last words on film were “Well, Tillie, when the hell are we going to get some dinner?”. It was the last line of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967).
Spiro Agnew resign from the vice-presidency on October 10, 1973. Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency less than a year later, on August 9, 1974, at 11:35 A.M. Gerald R. Ford replaced both of them. As representative from Michigan and House minority leader, Ford was chosen to replace Agnew as vice-president, then succeeded to the…
Sony introduced the Betamax (or Beta) videocassette recorder in 1975. In 1976, JVC (the Victor Company of Japan) introduced the competing VHS system. By the end of the 1980s, VHS had pushed Beta out of the market, and VCRs had spread across the U.S.
The phrase, which has come to refer to a completely inebriated person, derives from sailing, but not from the sails, as one might think. In the early 1800s, chains were used to regulate the angle of the sails, and these were called sheets. When the sheets were loose, the boat would become unstable and “tipsy,”…
Sidney Howard is credited with the screenplay for Gone With the Wind (1939).
Rachel, Rachel (1968) was Paul Newman’s directorial debut. The movie starred his wife, Joanne Woodward.
The first Superbowl was held in 1967 between the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs. The Packers won, 35-10.
Popularized by baseball announcer Red Barber, “sittin’ in the catbird seat” means sitting pretty or being in an enviable position. The Mississippi-born Barber used this 19th-century Southern expression while announcing games for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s and 1950s, and in the 1950s and 1960s for the New York Yankees. A catbird is the…
The title of Boccaccio’s The Decameron means “ten days” and refers to the number of days the narrators spend telling stories. One hundred stories are told by seven women and three men during the Black Death of 1348.
John Wayne directed two films. He directed The Alamo (1960) and codirected The Green Berets (1968) with Ray Kellogg and (uncredited) Mervyn LeRoy. Wayne also directed some scenes (uncredited) of The Comancheros (1961, directed by Michael Curtiz).
In President Eisenhower’s farewell address of January 17, 1961, a few days before Kennedy took office, Eisenhower said: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”
The middle names of the following U.S. Presidents are: Dwight D. Eisenhower—David Gerald R. Ford—Rudolph James A. Garfield—Abram Ulysses S. Grant—Simpson Warren G. Harding—Gamaliel Rutherford B. Hayes—Birchard James K. Polk—Knox Ronald W. Reagan—Wilson
No, Mount Rushmore is not the largest sculpture in the world. The prize goes to the sculpture of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas (“Stonewall”) Jackson that covers 1.33 acres on the face of Stone Mountain near Atlanta, Georgia. It was created between September 12, 1963, and March 3, 1972.
The rear window in Rear Window (1954) was located in Greenwich Village in New York City.
Will Rogers called Guinn “Big Boy” Williams for his large size. Williams supported Rogers in movies like Almost a Husband (1919).
Rubaiyat is the plural of the Persian word meaning “a poem of four lines.” The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam of Naishapur is a poem composed of such quatrains. The twelfth-century Persian poem was translated freely into English by Edward FitzGerald in 1859.
Ethel Merman in Call Me Madam (1953) said, “When you call me madam, smile”.
Twenty-nine “Carry On” films were produced in Great Britain, beginning with Carry On Sergeant (1958), and ending with Carry On Emmanuelle (1978).
A bestseller in its time, the 1931 “informal history” Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen was the first popular recreation of the Jazz Age and the 1920s. The book is still in print.
Published in several versions from 1728 to 1743, the mock-epic poem The Dunciad satirized bad writing and attacked critics of Pope’s poetry. In the final version, the king of the Dunces is Colley Cibber, England’s Poet Laureate from 1730 to 1757. Other targets of Pope’s venom were dramatists Nahum Tate and Lewis Theobald. Published in…
The oldest letter in the alphabet is o, first used by Egyptians in about 3000 B.C. The newest letters are j and v. The consonant j was not distinguished from the vowel i until the 1600s, and not until the Renaissance was the consonant v distinguished from the vowel u.
A regulation basketball hoop is 10 feet above the floor.
Ten years separated parts one and two of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Part One was published in 1605; Part Two in 1615.
The 16th president Abraham Lincoln was born in Hardin County (now Larue County), Kentucky on February 12, 1809. He eventually settled in Springfield, Illinois. He was assassinated on April 15, 1865.
Four years separated the publication of Milton’s Paradise Lost and its sequel, Paradise Regained. The first was published in 1667, the latter in 1671.
John Ford played a Ku Klux Klan member in The Birth of a Nation.
Wicked Stepmother (1989) was Bette Davis’s last film.
Lucy’s character’s name on “I Love Lucy” (CBS, 1951-57) was Lucy McGillicuddy Ricardo. On “The Lucy Show” (CBS, 1962-68) it was Lucy Carmichael. On “Here’s Lucy” (CBS, 1974) it was Lucy Carter.
On October 1, 1946, in Nuremberg, 12 of the original 24 defendants were condemned to death by hanging. They were: Hermann Goring, Joachim Ribbentrop, Field Marshal General Wilhelm Keitel, Ernest Kaltenbrunner, Dr. Albert Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Julius Streicher, Fritz Sauckel, Colonel General Alfred Jodl, and Arthur Seyss-Inquart. Martin Bormann, who succeeded Rudolf Hess…
In November 1775, the Continental Congress advised that a regiment have eight companies of 91 officers and men apiece, for a total of 728. The actual size of the regiments varied per state.
James Dickey has written two novels, Deliverance (1970) and Alnilam (1987). Dickey also wrote the screenplay for the 1972 movie Deliverance, and appeared in the film as a sheriff. A poet and critic, Dickey received the National Book Award for poetry in 1966 for Bucketdancer’s Choice (1965).
The Hotel Pennsylvania was located at Seventh Avenue and Thirty-third Street in Manhattan. It was built in 1918. The phone number Pennsylvania 6-5000 was that of the hotel’s Club Rouge, where Miller and his band often appeared. The hotel is now the New York Penta Hotel.
The last Americans, about 1,000, were evacuated from Saigon on April 29, 1975. The Saigon government surrendered a few hours later.
James K. Polk, photographed by Matthew Brady in 1849, was the first president photographed while in office. The first president of whom there is any known photograph was John Quincy Adams.
Sir Philip Sidney suffered a mortal wound in The Battle of Zutphen in 1586. The author of Arcadia (1590) was fighting in the Netherlands against the Spanish. He was shot in the thigh after lending his leg armor to another soldier. He died of infection three weeks later, at the age of thirty-two.