The Vlasic brand of pickles has used an animated stork as a mascot since the 1970s. The stork plays on the tropes that pregnant women crave pickles, and that storks deliver babies. In television ads featuring the Vlasic stork, the character speaks in a voice similar to Groucho Marx, and uses a pickle as a prop similar to how Marx used a cigar.
A pilot’s pre-takeoff checklist can be, Controls, Instruments, Gas, Attitude, and Run-Up. Its mnemonic is the acronym CIGAR.
The opera Carmen opens in a town square in Seville, outside the cigar factory where the title character works.
The opera initially played to half empty houses and was not successful until after its composer’s death. Georges Bizet died of a heart attack after the 33rd performance, age 36.
Georges Clemenceau was twice Prime Minister of France (1906-1909 and 1917-1920), who led the country to victory in World War I and afterwards insisted on harsh terms against Germany in the Treaty of Versailles. He has been portrayed on TV and film by eleven different actors since 1931.
Georges Clemenceau once said, " War is too important to be left to the generals." In Dr. Strangelove, General Jack Ripper said that although that may have been true back then, that now “War is too important to be left to the politicians.”
The film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was co-written, produced, and directed by Stanley Kubrick. Columbia Pictures agreed to finance the venture only if Peter Sellers played four major roles. Columbia felt that much of the success of Kubrick’s previous film Lolita, released in 1962, was based on Sellers’s performance in which his character assumes a number of identities. Sellers in fact did play three roles in the film; he balked at playing the fourth role, because he didn’t think he correctly portray the Southern accent of Air Force pilot T.J. ‘King’ Kong. The role of Kong was eventually played by actor Slim Pickens.
To make the film, Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960, Kirk Douglas, Jean Simmons, Laurence Olivier, Tony Curtis), it took over 10,000 people and 160 days.
Kirk Douglas was born in 1916, the son of Jewish immigrants from present-day Belarus. His birth name was Issur Danielovitch; he changed it to Kirk Douglas before joining the US Navy during WWII. His first film appearance was in 1946, and his last was in a TV movie in 2008. During his career, he appeared in more than 90 films. He died in 2020 at the age of 103.
Both the US Navy and the British Royal Navy conducted joint operations with the Free French battleship Richelieu during World War II, which was refit in early 1943 in the Brooklyn Navy Yard: French battleship Richelieu - Wikipedia
Among the actors who have played Cardinal Richelieu, the antagonist of The Three Musketeers, in film, have been Vincent Price (1948), Charlton Heston (1973), Tim Curry (1993), and Christoph Waltz (2011).
The 1967 British comedy show At Last the 1948 Show once included a fake advertisement for “Cardinal Richelieu’s Special Anthracite Pudding Mix.” Anthracite, or hard coal, would of course hardly be an ideal ingredient for pudding.
Laurence Olivier, Jean Simmons, Anthony Quayle, and Peter Cushing all starred in the movie Hamlet (1948). Of this group, Jean Simmons and Laurence Olivier also starred with Kirk Douglas in Spartacus (1960).
Dan Quayle was the 44th vice-president of the United States, serving under President George H.W. Bush from 1989-1993. Prior to that, he served as a Congressman from Indiana’s 4th District from 1977-1981, and then as Senator from Indiana from 1981-1989.
Quayle was succeeded both in Congress and in the Senate by Dan Coats.
“Quail” is a general term for a number of species of mid-sized ground-feeding game birds, most of which are in the order Galliformes. There are several collective nouns for groups of quail, including “covey,” “bevy,” and “flock.”
A collective noun of bees is colony. Other collective nouns are bike, cast, cluster, colony, drift, erst, grist, hive, nest, rabble, stand, and swarm.
A queen bee lives for about 2-3 years. She is the busiest in the summer months, when the hive needs to be at its maximum strength, and lays up to 2500 eggs a day. In contrast, worker honey bees live for about 4 weeks in the spring or summer but up to 6 months during the winter.
There are about 4,000 species of bees that are native to North America. The honey bee is not one of these species. Honey bees were introduced to North America by European settlers in the 17th century.
“Don’t Bug the Mosquitoes” is the name of an episode of the television sitcom Gilligan’s Island, which was originally broadcast in 1965. In the episode, a rock band called “The Mosquitoes” (a spoof of The Beatles) arrives on the castaways’ island, looking to get away from the pressures of fame.
Inspired by The Mosquitoes, and hoping to convince the band to take them along when they leave the island, the castaways form two bands of their own: the male castaways become “The Gnats” (but they are terrible), and the female castaways become “The Honeybees” (who are very good). The Mosquitoes wind up leaving the island without the castaways, as they feel that The Honeybees would be too much competition for them.
Mosquitos are considered by some as the most deadly animal to humans, causing an estimated 700k to a million deaths a year by spreading disease.
Not in play: Bingo Bango Bongo and Irving
Love that episode
