On October 3, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that the fourth Thursday of November would be the official celebration of Thanksgiving for the United States. The fourth Thursday of November remained the annual day of Thanksgiving from 1863 until 1939. Then, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, hoping to add more shopping days to the Christmas season, moved Thanksgiving to the third Thursday in November. This lasted for just two years, and in 1941 the celebration was moved back to the fourth Thursday in November.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt and several members of his Cabinet appear in the 1977 Broadway musical Annie.
Actor Edward Herrmann portrayed U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt several times: in the 1976 TV miniseries Eleanor and Franklin, in the 1977 TV movie Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years, and in the 1982 film adaptation of the musical Annie.
If Franklin Roosevelt had been born six months earlier or later, he could not have been president. Like his summer-born siblings, he would have been born at their summer home in Canada.
I question that. A person born abroad in wedlock to a U.S. citizen mother and a US. citizen father acquires U.S. citizenship at birth under section 301(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), if at least one of the parents resided in the United States or one of its outlying possessions prior to the person’s birth.
-“BB”-
Franklin Delano Roosevelt had only one sibling, his half-brother James, born in Manhattan and 28 years older than him.
FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt had 6 children; only one of them, the fifth child, FDR Jr., was born on Campobello Island, their summer home in New Brunswick, Canada. FDR Jr. was a U.S. citizen and served in the US Navy during World War II.
According the infallible Delano wiki page, the first member of the family to arrive in the United States was Philippe de Lannoy, who arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in the early 1620s. Descendants of Philippe include Laura Ingalls Wilder, Calvin Coolidge, Alan Shepard, Ulysses Grant, and Hunter S. Thompson.
Journalist Hunter S. Thompson died on February 20, 2005, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound; he had been suffering from health issues and depression, and had long discussed intending to leave the world via suicide.
Thompson’s funeral was held on August 20, 2005, and was funded by his friend Johnny Depp. During the funeral, Thompson’s ashes were fired from a cannon, as per his request. Reports vary as to the cost of the funeral, but in a 2018 interview with Rolling Stone, Depp indicated that the total cost was $5 million.
Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide exactly one month to the day after George W. Bush was inaugurated for a second term as President of the United States. The two events are not thought to be directly connected although, as I recall, Thompson was not a fan.
George W Bush flew the Convair F-102 Delta Dagger fighter/interceptor (pics, https://is.gd/heeYOa) with the Texas Air National Guard.
The dagger scene in Macbeth has been controversial in terms of staging since the 1600s. Many directors opt to keep the dagger invisible, following the line in the soliloquy where Macbeth says that he sees “A dagger of the mind”. However, in some productions (including a late 1600s musical version) a real weapon was apparently dangled on stage on a string, and whisked out of sight as Macbeth lunged. In others, the witches appear, holding multiple daggers. Recent film and stage versions have used CGI and special lighting effects.
“Dagger of the Mind” is an episode from the first season of the original Star Trek; it borrows its name from a line in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
The episode depicts a penal colony, at which the director is using a device (the “neural neutralizer”) to gain control of the inmates’ minds. The episode contained the first depiction of Spock performing a Vulcan mind meld.
William Gould was sentenced to the penal colony at Van Dieman’s Land, where he spent his years painting detalied illustrations of the exotic fishes of the southern oceans. His originals are on display at Hobart Airport, and Richard Flanagan’s wonderful fictionalized account of his captive life, “Gould’s Book of Fish” was a best-seller
Van Diemen’s Land is what Tasmania was called until 1856. It’s now named after Abel Tasman, the first European to discover it.
The Australian state of Tasmania encompasses the main island of Tasmania, plus 334 surrounding islands. The Island of Tasmania is the 26th-largest island in the world. The state has a population of 537,000, forty percent of whom live in the metropolitan area of the capital city, Hobart.
The thylacine, also known as the “Tasmanian tiger” or “Tasmanian wolf,” was a carnivorous, predatory marsupial species, which was native to Tasmania, the Australian mainland, and New Guinea. Though it resembled a dog, and filled a similar ecological niche to canine species on other continents, it was not related to canines; its closest relatives were the Tasmanian devil and the numbat.
The last documented example of a thylacine was captured in 1933, and died in the Hobart Zoo in 1936, though there was evidence of wild thylacines in Tasmania through the 1960s. The species was declared extinct by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 1982, and by the Tasmanian government in 1986.
Two great actors of Hollywood’s golden age had a connection to Tasmania.
Errol Flynn was born in 1909 in Battery Point, Tasmania. His father, Theodore Thomson Flynn, was a professor of biology at the University of Tasmania.
Merle Oberon was born in Bombay in 1911 to an Irish father and South Asian mother. To avoid the prejudice that she had experienced growing up as a mixed race child, she created a “cover story” of being born and raised in Tasmania, Australia, and her birth records being destroyed in a fire. The story eventually was revealed after her death. Oberon is known to have been to Australia only twice.
Bollywood, the Hindi-language film industry centered in Bombay, produces only about 20% of the annual output of some 2,000 titles released by Indian Cinema annually. Each year, about 3.5 billion tickets are sold to Indian films, compare to 2.5-billion for US films. Masala, the predominate genre of Indian film , is a blend of action, romance and comedy knit together by several song/dance routines voiced by hugely popular singers never seen on the screen.
Bombay, known since 1995 as Mumbai, is the most populous city in India and the seventh-most populous in the world, with a population of roughly 20 million.
Welsh actor Bernard Fox had recurring guest roles on two popular American situation comedies in the 1960s. On Bewitched, Fox played the witch doctor Dr. Bombay; on Hogan’s Heroes, he played RAF officer Rodney Crittendon.