General Trivia thread (the more obscure the better)

Simo Hayha was a sniper with the Finnish army during the 1939-'40 winter war with Russia. His division commander credited him with 219 sniper kills during the three-month war. He was credited with an equal number of kills with a submachine gun as a squad leader, about 500 in total. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simo_Häyhä

He reportedly preferred shooting with open sights to telescopic, believing the scope made him too visible to the enemy.

 

Which former president and Berry Gordy Jr. are blood relatives?

 

Alaska for both? Is there an island on the wrong side of the date line?

EDIT: Didn't see you answered.

 

Thomas Jefferson? There's thousands of ways to have unexpected ancestry but I'm going with the one who is rumored to have children with his slaves.

 

No, not Jefferson.

 

Which former president and Berry Gordy Jr. are blood relatives?

Jimmy Carter. His maternal great-grandfather (James Thomas Gordy) fathered a son (named Berry Gordy) with one of his slaves (Esther Johnson). After emancipation, that son, the original Berry Gordy, became the largest black landowner in Washington Co., Georgia. His grandson was Berry Gordy Jr. So Carter and Gordy Jr. share the blood of their great-grandfather.

I am reading Jonathan Alter's bio of Carter, "His Very Best." It's fascinating. Carter was the first president born in a hospital. He was the first (and only) president to ever live in a public housing unit. He started at Georgia Tech, received a USNA appointment after his freshman year, and is the only Naval Academy graduate to become president. He was very high in the nuclear sub part of the Navy before resigning his commission to return home to run the family business.

His mother, Lillian, was a nurse and midwife and delivered his future wife, Rosalynn.

 

IIRC, the two islands -- and thus the westernmost and easternmost points -- are also something like 20 miles apart.

 

That's some really cool info in more ways than one.

 

What U.S. city has a a population of 22,000 and change, and one skyscraper (a building 450 feet or taller) for roughly every 1,000 residents?

 

The city in the Dakota's that has all the banks' operations?

White Plains or something like that? Small city next to a big city.

 

The latter is on the right track, but it is not White Plains. The big city has more than 50 skyscrapers and this city has about a dozen.

 

Wouldn't 'this city' have about 22?

Some city in LA County?