I’d looked him up after he appeared on Svengoolie last Saturday: IRL he was twice Royal Army fencing champ. Also contrived his own ghillie suit so he could prowl no-man’s land in daylight.
That’s on the blurry edge of between being awesome and Batman-level psycho.
A post was merged into an existing topic: Controversial encounters between law-enforcement and civilians - the omnibus thread #2
Michael Jackson’s pet chimpanzee Bubbles is still alive and can be symbolically adopted at the Center For Great Apes in Florida.
Another Rathbone fact I stumbled upon-he was once arrested onstage! They were doing a play called The Captive about a lesbian love affair, and since this was the 20’s it was deemed obscene. “On 9 February, while Rathbone and Menken were in the middle of the second act of The Captive, police marched onto the stage and arrested the pair. With the rest of the cast, they were thrown in the back of a police van with the cast of SEX, who had also been arrested and taken to jail.”
So he ventured into no-man’s land in more than one sense of the phrase.
Jearl D. Walker suggested this some 40 years ago in his Flying Circus of Physics
Two people have died on the Metropolitan Opera stage.
The first, Leonard Warren (1960), had reportedly just finished singing Don Carlo’s Act III aria from La forza del destino which begins “Morir, tremenda cosa” (to die, a momentous thing) when he suffered a massive heart attack and collapsed on stage.
The second, Richard Versalle (1996), was performing Janáček’s The Makropulos Case and had just sung the line “too bad you can only live so long”, when he too had a heart attack and fell ten feet off a ladder.
Don’t sing about death at the Met.
I’m looking forward to the day they can scale them up and have DB-THG farms covering the countryside like we have now with wind farms.
Or reuse the quintessential oil pumpjack I see in movies set in Texas and the South.
did he fare better in word-fights…??
Today I learned that a ship carrying 30 tons of priceless Assyrian artifacts – statues and reliefs and gold and silver objects – sank in the Tigris River in Iraq in 1855. All efforts to recover this cargo have failed.
And did the newspapers have a field day with headlines like “CAPTIVE - SEX TRIAL LATEST!” ?
PS: In one Sherlock Holmes movie, Rathbone did a highly convincing and utterly un-Holmes like turn as an end-of-the-pier song and dance man:
A quick search found that the Daily News bannered “ARRESTS FOR 3 SEX PLAYS” across the front page and “3 BROADWAY SEX PLAYS RAIDED” on the inside article on Feb. 10, 1927. (The third play was The Virgin Man.) A crowd of 40 people were taken to Night Court. I bet Dan Fielding had, ahem, a field day.
The raids were front page news in Brooklyn, Tampa, Danville, VA, and a dozen other cities, mostly because of an AP syndicated report. Only a few of the largest U.S. cities had tabloid newspapers in 1927, so all the headlines were pretty straightforward and didn’t use the word “sex.”
The Times didn’t appear to say anything about it until later, but covered the cases under the banner of censorship. The plays reopened and closed and reopened elsewhere and got hit by more raids. Mae West, the star and writer of Sex, went to jail for a week, and she milked the publicity to become a superstar.
I read this article about soluble bead toys that kids swallow and get obstructions from. The toy designer seems not to have seen it coming.
I can completely relate to that, having fished out about 20 of those from the syphon (P-trap?) of our kids bathroom in the day …
I can only imagine what a handfull of those swallowed would do in the stomach, once getting hydrated and growing to the tune of 5x^3 on all 3 dimensions …
After her husband, Albert, died in 1861 (age 42), Queen Victoria didn’t make a public appearance for the next 13 years. She also wore black for the rest of her life (she died in 1901).
The rooms that Albert had occupied in his various palaces and other residences were kept as they were at the time of his death, with sheets and towels changed daily.
He didn’t want to be memorialized in any way - but he got places like the Royal Albert Hall, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Prince Albert (Saskatchewan) named after him.
Small magnets can also present a problem.
Heh, imagine having a piercing carry your name.
Imagine having that piercing carry your name! 