Did You Know

 

By Mark Howell

 

Did you know that the American poet Allen Ginsberg, while attending a literary conference in Havana Union in January 1965 sponsored by the Cuban Writers, announced that Fidel Castro’s brother Raul Castro was gay?

 

 

Of course you know that President Harry Truman, founder of the Little White House in Key West, started out as a bank clerk and bookkeeper before opening his own men’s haberdashery store in Kansas City with a friend.

 

 

But did you know that President Grover Cleveland, the 22nd President, was actually a hangman by virtue of serving as sheriff of New York’s Erie County and carrying out hangings personally to save himself the $10 executioner fee.

 

 

And did you realize that, according to Greenpeace, there are 92 known cases of nuclear bombs lost at sea to date?

 

 

Did you also know that when NATO bombs started raining down on Belgrade during the siege of Sarajevo in 1999, most of the pregnant animals in the city’s zoo aborted their young or delivered prematurely?

 

 

Did you know that Dan Brown, author of “The Da Vinci Code,” started out as a singer-songwriter and released two CDs in the early 1990s, one of them called “Angels & Demons”?

 

 

Did you realize that Graham Chapman of “Monty Python” once studied at the London School of Medicine and Dentistry?

 

 

Did you realize that the four citizen-astronauts due to journey aboard Mars One to the planet of Mars in 2025 have no intention (nor the ability) to return? CNN has labeled the one-way trip a “suicide mission” and reports that Mars One co-founder and chief executive officer Bas Lansdorp of the Netherlands has no intention of taking the trip himself. “I have a really nice girlfriend and she doesn’t want to come with me,” he says, so I’m staying right here.” In a decade’s time the four citizen astronauts will cram themselves shoulder-to-shoulder in a tiny capsule with no shower or restroom for the seven-month ride to the red planet with no hope of ever coming home, since no existing technology can do so. The purpose of the trip is to colonize Mars. The travelers’ lives will be difficult and inevitably include performing surgical procedures on each other. Medical consultation with Earth, calculates reporter John Steward “will take a painful 20 minutes each way, 40 minutes from question to answer. All aspects of their existence will be stressful or debilitating.”

 

 

Did you know that the two planned Marx Brothers movies that never saw the light of day were “Giraffes on Horseback Salads” written by surrealist artist Salvador Dali and planned to featured Harpo catching dwarves in a butterfly net until nixed by MGM head Louis B. Mayer; and “A Day at the United Nations,” which would have been directed by Billy Wilder in 1960, when all the brothers were in their 70s. Production was delayed by Harpo’s heart attack that year and finally halted by Chico’s death a year later.

And finally, did you know that our

 

 

 

Quote of the Week:

“The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class, it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity”

 

 

— was written by Anna Julia Cooper, born into enslavement in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1858, who became one of the most prominent African-American scholars in United States history with a PhD in history from the Sorbonne in Paris. Annie died in Washington, D.C. in 1964 at the age of 105.

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