March 12, 2024: Answers
Hey, everyone.
Here’s the key for yesterday’s list.
1. On February 23, 1846, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s iconic Liberty Bell – originally known as the State House Bell - cracked beyond all repair after it was rung to commemorate the birthday of what former American president, then out of office for nearly 45 years?
· George Washington – Alas, a typo. Nearly *50 years out of office, not 45.* Math. Math is hard.
Anyway, it wasn’t the first time the Bell cracked, but rather the third or fourth, so the story goes. The first time was in 1751, when it was given a test ring just after it was originally cast at Whitechapel Foundry in London. It was so badly mangled after the fact that it had to be remade from almost from scratch, and so wasn’t delivered to the Philadelphia State House until August of 1752, more than a year and a half after the legislature paid £100 for it.
When exactly it cracked the second time remains a matter of debate, but there are two primary theories. It happened either…
In 1824, when it was rung to commemorate the arrival of the Marquis de Lafayette, who was then doing a ceremonial tour around the U.S.
Or,
In 1835, when it was rung on the birthday of the U.S. Supreme Court’s first Chief Justice, Jon Jay.
Both could be true, theoretically, but in any case, it was cracked for the final time on February 23, 1846 - the day after George Washington’s actual birthday, which fell on a Sunday. The bell never rang on Sundays. It was retired thereafter, but it remained on top of the State House until 1976, when it was moved across the street to the pavilion at the new Liberty Bell Center, where it’s been on display ever since.
The abolitionist publication The Anti-Slavery Record is often credited with coining the term ‘Liberty Bell’ in 1835, but it was likely already a colloquialism for it by that point. The name is derived from the inscription on the front of the Bell, taken from a line in the Book of Leviticus (King James version). It reads:
‘Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants thereof…’
It officially became the ‘Liberty Bell’ shortly after the end of the Civil War and the ratification of the 13th Amendment.
2. In its nearly 110 year history, the Pulitzer Prize in Music has been awarded to a non-classical composer/jazz musician just one time: in 2018, when what 17-time Grammy winning rapper was honored for his album Damn, described by the selection committee as ‘a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism?’
· Kendrick Lamar - The committee went back to their old ways in 2019, and since then, each of the winners have either been operas:
2019: Prism, by Ellen Reid
2020: The Central Park Five, by Anthony Davis the composer
2023: Omar, by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels
Or classical works:
2021: Stride, by Tania Leon
2022: Voiceless Mass, by Raven Chacon
Along with the Pulitzer, Damn also earned the 2017 American Music Award for Favorite Rap Album, the 2018 Juno Award for International Album of the Year, the 2018 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding album, and, of course, the 2018 Best Rap Album Grammy (it came up short in Album of the Year to Bruno Mars’ 24K Magic, which was not in consideration for the Pulitzer).
It’s since been certified triple platinum by the RIAA, and in 2020, it was ranked 175th on Rolling Stone magazine’s updated list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
3. Debuted in 1976, the original logo for tech giant Apple Inc. featured a detailed black and white image of what legendary English scientist – among many other things - who famously, but apocryphally, developed his ‘law of universal gravitation’ after seeing an apple fall from a tree c. 1665?
· Isaac Newton – It’s a nice enough logo, but Steve Jobs thought it was way too old fashioned for his pioneering tech company, so he commissioned graphic artist Rob Janoff to redesign it after just a year. What he came up with was the first version of the modern logo: a rainbow-colored apple with a bite taken out of the right side to distinguish it from a cherry. It’s been redone four more times since then. The timeline:
4. Since its mainstream release in 1935, all the properties on a standard Monopoly board have been both named for and based on real locations in what New Jersey resort town, today home to around 40,000 people?
· Atlantic City, New Jersey – The photo archive Scouting NY, founded by professional Hollywood location scout Nick Carr in 2009, has created a pretty thorough visual guide to what the actual Atlantic City properties look like in our era:
https://www.scoutingny.com/what-the-monopoly-properties-look-like-in-real-life/
5. In 1934 and 1938, respectively, two industry mainstays independently developed the original formulas for the first varieties of soft-serve ice cream: Focus Brand subsidiary and ice cream cake pioneer Carvel, and what Minnesota-based fast-food chain, owned by Berkshire Hathaway since 1998?
· Dairy Queen - In Carvel’s case, its namesake founder Tom Carvel (born Athanasios Karvelas in Greece in 1906) developed it serendipitously on a particularly hot Memorial Day weekend in 1934. While the young entrepreneur was making his way out to the packed beaches of Long Island, New York, one of the front wheels on his new ice cream truck blew out, forcing him to pull off the road and cut the trip short. Not wanting to just eat the loss, as it were, he decided to unload his supply of rapidly melting hard pack ice cream and sell it to passers-by from the parking lot of a nearby pottery shop. It was a massive hit, and by the end of the day he’d sold almost his entire inventory.
Not only did the experience convince Carvel to create a formula for a softer style of ice cream, which both he and his customers found to be more flavorful than traditional hardpack, but it also demonstrated the value of selling out of a fixed location, rather than a truck. Within just a few months, he’d opened his first brick and mortar store in Hartsdale, New York, and perfected the soft-serve recipe that he ultimately built his entire company around.
Dairy Queen’s soft-serve recipe, meanwhile, was the brainchild of its founder John Fremont ‘J.F.’ McCullough, who, like Carvel eventually came to realize that hard pack ice cream had much more flavor and a more pleasant texture when it was slightly melted, rather than when it was still frozen. His version hit the market four years after Carvel’s, but at first, it was a complete commercial failure. It was new and unfamiliar to consumers in central Illinois - where they were then based - and so, untrustworthy. The solution to that problem was simple, though, McCullough believed. They just had to give people a taste for it. To that end, he and his son/business partner Alex threw a kind of soft-serve expo in nearby Kankakee, Illinois, where they handed out free samples of their new product to anyone who cared to try it. Within two hours of this ‘all you can eat’ special, so claims the company’s official website, the McCullough’s had handed out 1,600 servings, and simultaneously turned ‘soft ice cream’ - as it was then known - into their flagship menu item.
Like Carvel, Dairy Queen went on to build their whole business around what would later brand ‘soft-serve,’ and now, 86 years later, they have 6,800 locations around the globe, making them the world’s second largest ice cream chain behind only Baskin-Robbins.
6. ‘Give and go,’ ‘dribble drive,’ ‘finger roll,’ ‘air ball,’ and, most notably, ‘slam dunk,’ are just a few of the many common turns of phrase coined by the legendary sportscaster Chick Hearn, the long-time play-by-play man (1960-2002) for what iconic NBA franchise?
· Los Angeles Lakers – A true legend of the game, he was. He first took over as the Lakers’ play-by-play man in 1960, and from 1965 to 2001, he called 3,338 consecutive games either on TV or radio – a record, if you can believe it.
Some other Chick-isms and coinages that have since entered the basketball lexicon:
‘Charity Stripe’ (free throw line)
‘Boo Birds’ (specifically in reference to unhappy Laker fans)
‘Ticky-Tack Foul’ (cheap call)
‘No-Look Pass’
‘Finger Roll’ (layup)
‘Nervous Time’ (last minutes of a tight game)
‘Throws up a Brick’ (hits only the backboard)
‘Didn’t (Doesn’t) Draw Iron’ (an alternative to air ball)
Have a great rest of your week, everybody.
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