Showing results by author "Dan Lewis" in All Categories

By many estimates, the world's Jewish population hovers around 14 million. Most of those people – around 12 million – live in either the United States or Israel.

Robert Campbell served as a captain in the British military in World War I. As the conflict went on, so did the number of prisoners of war held by both sides, and by the summer of 1916, Germany held more than 1.6 million such POWs.

Two all-beef patties. Special sauce. Lettuce. Cheese. Pickles. Onions. On a sesame seed bun. Those words were first penned by an advertising agency in the mid-1970s, and then set to music.

You already know the story of the RMS Titanic. On April 10, 1912, it set out on its maiden voyage from Southampton, United Kingdom to New York City, but late on the evening of April 14th, it struck an iceberg.

The "Furby," a toy that resembles a monstrous chinchilla-esque, owl-like creature, was originally released in 1998 by Tiger Electronics – and, if you were a kid back then (or a parent, for that matter), you can attest to how wildly popular it was. Retailing for about $35, but with a secondary market price easily tripling that, the Furby was a combination of next-generation technology and nightmare-inducing fur.

The term "government bailout" emerged in the collective consciousness in 2008, when the US government threw gobs of money at big banks, insurance companies and the automotive industry, all in hopes of propping up businesses. The term "too big to fail" was a part of that conversation – many economists and politicians believed that if major companies in those sectors were to go under, the general economy would fall down the sinkhole after them.

Beginning in December 1968, whenever the United States sent a manned spacecraft into space, it did so from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with the flight directed by the Kennedy Space Center located on nearby Merritt Island. Both the launch site and the Space Center are located an hour east of Orlando, on the Atlantic Ocean.

Charles Schulz, creator of the iconic comic strip Peanuts, saw the stripe's protagonist, Charlie Brown, as a laughable loser. According to the Peanuts Wiki website, Schulz once said that "Charlie Brown must be the one who suffers, because he's a caricature of the average person. Most of us are much more acquainted with losing than winning. Winning is great, but it isn't funny."

For the almost the entire first half of the 20th century, African Americans were barred from playing for Major League Baseball teams. But on April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking the color barrier.

"You can't win if you don't pay"—that's a slogan used by a number of different state-run lotteries in the United States. It's a truism of sorts—the statement is obviously correct (both in the context of lotteries and more generally) and says nothing really interesting, but it makes for good ad copy.

In 1999, a 22-year-old Missouri man named Cornealious Michael Anderson held up a Burger King at gunpoint, making away with more than $2,000 in cash. He was captured two months later, and in July 2000, Mike Anderson was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to 13 years in prison.

In 1953 North and South Korea entered into an armistice, ending the Korean War and providing a shaky basis for something close to peace between the two nations.

The Kiss Cam is a time-honored tradition of American sporting events. During time outs and other stoppages of play, the stadium events team – having already scoured the crowd for a target – focuses the cameras on a couple and puts their picture on the scoreboard.

Silly String is liquefied plastic compressed in an aerosol can. Point it at your friend, hit the button and the liquid plastic comes shooting out.

Winnie the Pooh is a fictional cartoon bear, created by writer A.A. Milne in 1924. He likes honey, his red T-shirt and his friends (Piglet, Christopher Robin, Eeyore, Roo and – on most days – Tigger).

At the close of World War II, the victorious Allies split Germany into four parts—one controlled by France, another by the United Kingdom, another by the United States and another by the Soviet Union. And Berlin, although it was embedded within the Soviet-controlled sector, was itself divided into four similarly managed parts.

"Don't scream if you meet a cow. If she sees you first, she will run/Don't undertake a long ride if you are not confident of performing it easily/Don't contest the right of way with cable cars/Don't emulate your brother's attitude if he rides parallel with the ground"—those four "don'ts" are from the now-defunct New York World newspaper.

In the 1971 book The Lorax, the incomparable Dr. Seuss tells the story of an environmentally conscious monster (the Lorax) and his efforts to protect Truffula trees (a fictional species) from an industrialist named the Once-ler who is chopping them down.

That's a quote from a Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority train rider named Alicia Porter from December 2013. As she and many others told the Atlanta Constitution-Journal, it was best to avoid the Atlanta subway's elevators unless one wanted to take a large whiff of – and this is gross – someone else's urine.

EMI was a British music company that once had many different labels under it. But the company's history is more robust than simply putting music onto records, cassettes, CDs and iTunes.