Drive through Woodinville, Washington today, and it has the glimmer of an Eastside Seattle suburb about to be born. With its Target, Safeway, and housing developments with names cooked up by marketing departments, Woodinville is fairly unremarkable, a place you’ve seen a million times before. A scant 20 minute drive from Seattle center, via...
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Harry Parke, born Harry Einstein in 1904, was a comedian, and by the 1950s was resting on the laurels of his invented persona, a Greek named Parkyakarkus. This fictive name translates to “park a your carcass.” Remember, in these days nobody blinked at ethnic humor. Harry was one of those clubby, fraternizing comedians who...
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The Hyatt Regency Atlanta, built in 1967, is famous as one of the first–if not the first–example of a large atrium hotel. The inside of this 22 story is scooped out, with rooms facing each other and public spaces below. Built by John Portman, the Hyatt Regency–originally Regency Hyatt House–is an architecturally significant building...
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Quintessential “New England poet” Robert Frost was born in San Francisco. Quintessential “British poet T.S. Eliot” was born in St. Louis, Missouri. The father of Married with Children‘s Katey Sagal was decapitated by a helicopter at Timberline Lodge, Mt. Hood, Oregon. Adding to the weirdness, the Timberline Lodge was the location for filming The...
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This is more about words than it is about nuclear war. But it’s trivia that has been lodged in my brain for years. Herman Kahn Herman Kahn was a well-known military strategist who published On Thermonuclear War in 1960. Kahn, considered a major spear-rattler in the Cold War, was parodied by Walter Matteau in...
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POM pomegranate juice has become popular due to research about the health benefits of pomegranates (it might help with erectile disfunction) and because of a huge marketing push in the last few years. Some time ago, though, I was reading a New Yorker article about how POM went from nothing–was there any kind of...
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In the movie The Shining, Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson, and his wife and son drive up to The Overlook Lodge for a peaceful winter rest. The Overlook Lodge is actually the Timberline in Mt. Hood, Oregon. Exterior shots for The Shining were filmed at the real-life Timberline Lodge, Mt. Hood, Oregon. Find...
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I have always been a fan of weird connections, and this one combines several things I already like: The Shining, the movie made by Stanley Kubrick after the Stephen King novel; the Timberline Lodge, at the base of Mt. Hood, near Portland, Oregon; and the early 1960s TV classic The Twilight Zone. Let’s begin,...
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