IN: William George Meany (August 16, 1894 - January 10, 1980) was an American labor union leader for 57 years. He was the key figure in the creation of the AFL-CIO and served as the AFL-CIO's first president, from 1955 to 1979. Meany, the son of a union plumber, became a plumber at a young age, as well. He became a full-time union official 12 years later.

Meany was born into a Roman Catholic family in Harlem, New York City on August 16, 1894, the second of 10 children. His parents were Michael Meany and Anne Cullen Meany, who were both American-born and of Irish descent. His ancestors had immigrated to the United States in the 1850s. His father was a plumber and a strong supporter of the trade union movement and served as president of his plumber's union local. Michael Meany was also a precinct level activist in the Democratic Party. Meany grew up in the Port Morris neighborhood of The Bronx, where his parents had moved when he was five years old. Always called "George," he learned that his real first name was William only when he got a work permit as a teenager. Following his father's career path, Meany quit high school at 16 to work as a plumber's helper. He then served a five-year apprenticeship as a plumber and got his journeyman's certificate in 1917, with Local 463 United Association of Plumbers and Steamfitters of the United States and Canada. His father died suddenly of a heart attack in 1916 after a bout of pneumonia. When Meany's older brother joined the US Army in 1917, George became the sole source of income for his mother and six younger children. He supplemented his income for a while by playing as a semiprofessional baseball catcher. In 1919, he married Eugenia McMahon, a garment worker and a member of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. They had three daughters.
QUESTION: what did he do after his job as a plumber?
IN: Haruki Murakami (Cun Shang Chun Shu , Murakami Haruki, born January 12, 1949) is a Japanese writer. His books and stories have been bestsellers in Japan as well as internationally, with his work being translated into 50 languages and selling millions of copies outside his native country. The critical acclaim for his fiction and non-fiction has led to numerous awards, in Japan and internationally, including the World Fantasy Award (2006) and the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award (2006). His oeuvre received, for example, the Franz Kafka Prize (2006) and the Jerusalem Prize (2009).

Sputnik Sweetheart was first published in 1999, followed by Kafka on the Shore in 2002, with the English translation following in 2005. Kafka on the Shore won the World Fantasy Award for Novels in 2006. The English version of his novel After Dark was released in May 2007. It was chosen by The New York Times as a "notable book of the year". In late 2005, Murakami published a collection of short stories titled Tokyo Kitanshu, or Dong Jing Qi Tan Ji , which translates loosely as "Mysteries of Tokyo." A collection of the English versions of twenty-four short stories, titled Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, was published in August 2006. This collection includes both older works from the 1980s as well as some of Murakami's more recent short stories, including all five that appear in Tokyo Kitanshu. In 2002, Murakami published the anthology Birthday Stories, which collects short stories on the theme of birthdays. The collection includes work by Russell Banks, Ethan Canin, Raymond Carver, David Foster Wallace, Denis Johnson, Claire Keegan, Andrea Lee, Daniel Lyons, Lynda Sexson, Paul Theroux, and William Trevor, as well as a story by Murakami himself. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, containing tales about his experience as a marathon runner and a triathlete, was published in Japan in 2007, with English translations released in the U.K. and the U.S. in 2008. The title is a play on that of Raymond Carver's short story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Shinchosha Publishing published Murakami's novel 1Q84 in Japan on May 29, 2009. 1Q84 is pronounced "ichi kyu hachi yon", the same as 1984, as 9 is also pronounced "kyu" in Japanese. The book was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2011. However, after the 2012 anti-Japanese demonstrations in China, Murakami's books were removed from sale there, along with those of other Japanese authors. Murakami criticized the China-Japan political territorial dispute, characterizing the overwrought nationalistic response as "cheap liquor" which politicians were giving to the public. In April 2013, he published his novel "Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage". It became an international best seller but received mixed reviews.
QUESTION: Was it popular
IN: Born in Dallas, Texas, into a family of Mexican ancestry, Trevino was raised by his mother, Juanita Trevino, and his grandfather, Joe Trevino, a gravedigger. Trevino never knew his father, Joseph Trevino, who left when his son was small. Trevino's childhood consisted of attending school occasionally and working to earn money for the family. At age 5, he started working in the cotton fields.

Throughout his career, Trevino was seen as approachable and humorous, and was frequently quoted by the press. Late in his career, he remarked, "I played the tour in 1967 and told jokes and nobody laughed. Then I won the Open the next year, told the same jokes, and everybody laughed like hell." At the beginning of Trevino's 1971 U.S. Open playoff against Jack Nicklaus, he threw a rubber snake that his daughter had put in his bag as a joke, at Nicklaus, who later admitted that he asked Trevino to throw it to him so he could see it. Trevino grabbed the rubbery object and playfully tossed it at Nicklaus, getting a scream from a nearby woman and a hearty laugh from Nicklaus. Trevino shot a 68 to defeat Nicklaus by three strokes. During one tournament, Tony Jacklin, paired with Trevino, said: "Lee, I don't want to talk today." Trevino retorted: "I don't want you to talk. I just want you to listen." After he was struck by lightning at the 1975 Western Open, Trevino was asked by a reporter what he would do if he were out on the course and it began to storm again. Trevino answered he would take out his 1 iron and point it to the sky, "because not even God can hit the 1-iron." Trevino said later in an interview with David Feherty that he must have tempted God the week before by staying outside during a lightning delay to entertain the crowds, saying "I deserved to get hit...God can hit a 1-iron." Trevino said: "I've been hit by lightning and been in the Marine Corps for four years. I've traveled the world and been about everywhere you can imagine. There's not anything I'm scared of except my wife."
QUESTION:
Did people find this funny?