Motown: The Musical was nominated for 4 Tony Awards. Lin-Manuel Miranda would write the opening number to the 2013 Tony Awards, and include these wonderful lyrics for Neil Patrick Harris to sing, and would an Emmy Award for his efforts:
Hats off to Berry Gordy, he runs Motown like a boss,
He dominates Top 40 and banged Diana Ross.
He wrote his own libretto, which is really kind of ballin’
He took every Motown classic and he said ‘I’ll put em all in.’
Diana Churchill, daughter of Sir Winston Churchill, lived from 1909 to 1963. She was his eldest daughter with his wife Clementine. Diana was an officer in the Women’s Royal Naval Service during the Second World War. Diana also had several nervous breakdowns. In 1962, she began working with the Samaritans, an organisation created for suicide-prevention. In 1963 at age 54, she died from an overdose of barbiturates. A coroner later concluded that the death was a suicide.
She is buried with her parents (who both outlived her) and siblings at St Martin’s Church, Bladon, near Woodstock, Oxfordshire.
The Women’s Royal Naval Service (popularly known as the Wrens) was first formed in 1917 during World War I. It was disbanded in 1919, but was revived in 1939 at the beginning of World War II. At its peak in 1944 it had 75,000 active servicewomen.
The Cactus Wren is by far the largest of North America’s dozen species of wrens. It’s loud mechanical call is commonly dubbed into the sound track of movie desert scenes, even those in states far from the range of the Cactus Wren, which rarely ranges more than 200 miles from the Mexican border. But Hollywood is within their range, so Foley editors think they live in all deserts.
“Jenny Wren” is a song by Paul McCartney from his 2005 album Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. “Jenny Wren” is also the nickname of a character in Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, as well as a bird in the nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence”, which probably dates back to the 1700s.
The sixpence was a little larger than a US dime, and both being made if silver, worth a bit more. After WWII, sixpence was about 12 US cents. The sixpence was always silver, from its first minting in 1551, but changed to base metal with the sterling devaluation in 1947. With the 1980 decimalization, it became 2.5 new pence.
The British coin known as a shilling was worth one twentieth of a pound sterling, or twelve pence. It was first minted in the reign of Henry VII, and was originally known as the testoon.
Brian May, guitarist for the rock band Queen, uses a British sixpence coin as a plectrum (guitar pick) when he plays, as he feels that plastic picks flex too much.
In the USA, May is both Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, and also National ALS Awareness Month.
May is also the celebration of Cinco de Mayo, both in Mexico and in the USA. May 5th is the commemoration of the Mexican victory over the French at the Battle of Puebla in 1862.
West Virginia is a state where dozens of oddly-named towns sprang up around coal mines. The town of Cinco was named by a mining official, who preferred Cinco brand cigars.
West Virginia, admitted to the Union in 1863, was the 35th state. Nevada, the 36th state, was admitted in 1864. These two states were the only states admitted during the Civil War.
Only about 25% of Nevadan residents were born in Nevada, the lowest percentage of native-born residents of any U.S. state.
Nevada started a promotional campaign in the 90s, to encourage people to pronounce the state in the traditional way, with the middle syllable like Mad, Bad or Sad. Californians were pronouncing it like the Sierra Nevadas, = Ne-vah-da. The city in Missouri is pronounced like Ne-vay-da.
The famous statement that the poet Lord Byron was ‘‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’’ was made by his lover, society beauty Lady Caroline Lamb. They had a tempestuous affair, culminating at a ball where Byron publicly rejected Lady Caroline, who responded by breaking a wine glass and trying to slash her wrists. He responded to her plea “Remember me!” with a poem:
Remember thee! Remember thee!
Till Lethe quench life’s burning stream
Remorse and shame shall cling to thee,
And haunt thee like a feverish dream!
Remember thee! Ay, doubt it not.
Thy husband too shall think of thee!
By neither shalt thou be forgot,
Thou false to him, thou fiend to me!
Lady Caroline’s husband, mentioned in Byron’s verse, was Lord Melbourne, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. A number of quotations are attributed to him, including two statements on the Church of England:
«Here’s another bishop dead! I verily think they do it to annoy me!». (The recommendation for new bishops at that time was one of the PM’s duties, and could be politically controversial.)
«I am like a buttress. I support the Church, but from the outside.»
(Piper’s paraphrases - don’t have time to track down the exact quotes.)
The city of Melbourne, Australia, was founded in the British colony of New South Wales 1835 by settlers from the colony of Van Diemen’s Land (now known as Tasmania). In 1837, it was incorporated as a Crown settlement, and was given its name by Governor Richard Bourke, in honor of William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, who was, at that time, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Another quotation attributed to Lord Melbourne, on discussing with his Cabinet colleagues whether or not to repeal the tariffs on imported grains («corn laws» in Brit-speak):
«By the way, there is one thing we haven’t agreed upon, which is, what we are to say. Is it to make our corn dearer or cheaper, or to hold the price steady? I don’t care which - but we had all better be in the same story.»
Although the remark sounds flippant, it was one of the earliest statements of the principle of Cabinet solidarity: that cabinet ministers are free to express their opinions in the Cabinet room, to hash out the government policy, but once a decision is made, all Cabinet ministers support it.
Cabinet solidarity, as stated by Melbourne, is now one of the bedrock principles of the Westminster parliamentary system, in the Uk and in other Commonwealth countries.
In the United Kingdom and its colonies, “cabinets” began as smaller sub-groups of the English Privy Council. The term comes from the name for a relatively small and private room used as a study or retreat.
The Oxford English Dictionary credits Francis Bacon in his 1605 Essays with the first use of “cabinet counsel”, where it is described as a foreign habit, of which he disapproves: “For which inconveniences, the doctrine of Italy, and practice of France, in some kings’ times, hath introduced cabinet counsels; a remedy worse than the disease”.
Charles I began a formal “Cabinet Council” from his accession in 1625, as his Privy Council, or “private council”, was evidently not private enough.
Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626) is the father of the scientific method which involves formulating hypotheses, via induction, based on such observations; experimental and measurement-based testing of deductions drawn from the hypotheses; and refinement (or elimination) of the hypotheses based on the experimental findings. His Baconian method (the scientific method) was put forward in his 1620 book Novum Organum, or ‘New Method’, and was supposed to replace the methods put forward in Aristotle’s Organon, the standard collection of his six works on logic that dates from the 300s BC.