Glenn Close is (gasp) 76 years old. She began her career on the stage in 1974, and made her movie debut in 1980 opposite Robin Williams in The World According to Garp. She has won three Tony awards, three Emmys, and three Golden Globes. She has been nominated for eight Academy Awards in acting but has not won an Oscar, which ties her with Peter O’Toole for most nominations without a win.
Robin Williams won Best Supporting Actor for his role in Good Will Hunting.
Glenn Close was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role in The Natural (1984). (Peggy Ashcroft win it for A Passage to India.)
Glenn Miller died in 1944. 59 years later he received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
Reggie Miller scored 8 points in 9 seconds to lead the Indiana Pacers to victory over the New York Knicks in Game 1 of the 1995 NBA Eastern Conference Semifinals. Ultimately, the Pacers would take that series in seven.
«The Miller’s Tale» is one of the bawdier of the Canterbury Tales.
Told by the Miller (who plays an English bagpipe), it involves a gullible older man married to an attractive younger women, who in turn is pursued by two different young men.
They all get come-uppances, including some use of a hot iron, and become figures of fun to the neighbourhood.
In one popular modern translation, the Tale ends with;
ETA:
During Spock’s funeral in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Commander Montgomery Scott plays “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes. This is one of the very few references to Christianity in the entire franchise.
“Amazing Grace” is now firmly associated wtih the bagpipes, but that is a recent innovation. It came about with the release of a record by the Scots Greys pipe band in the 1970s which incorporated “Amazing Grace”, which in turn has led to it being a popular tune for funerals.
Prior to “Amazing Grace”, the traditional funeral tune, especially for military funerals, was “The Flowers of the Forest”, which laments the defeat of the Scots at the battle of Flodden, the loss of the flower of Scots youth, and the death of King James IV.
Because of its close association with the battle and death, some pipers will only play the tune at funerals, or in private, or to teach the tune to other pipers.
The uilleann pipes (also known as “union pipes”) are the national bagpipes of Ireland. Unlike the Great Highlands bagpipes of Scotland, which are inflated by the piper blowing into the bag with their mouth, uilleann pipes are inflated by use of a bellows, which the piper operates with movements of one elbow.
An example of uilleann pipes being played:
A union suit is a type of one-piece long underwear, most often associated with menswear in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Originally it was designed for women.
The late Paddy Maloney, one of the founders of the Irish musical group The Chieftains, was a master player of the union or uilleann pipes, and contributed to a revival of their use.
uilleann is believed to come from the Irish Gaelic word for « elbow », a reference to how they are played. It is a relatively modern term. « Union pipes » is the older term.
The main difference between a bank and a credit union is a bank is for-profit and a credit union is non-profit.
I heard “Amazing Grace” played on the pipes at a memorial service last Monday, as it happens. (IMHO, it’s become overplayed and cliched. I wouldn’t mind if I never heard it again in that context).
In play:
The credit is the unit of currency of the United Federation of Planets in the Star Trek franchise. There have been inconsistent references in various shows to the Federation being either a post-scarcity cashless interstellar society or one in which money is still used.
Australia became a nation on 01 January 1901 when six British colonies (New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania) united to form the Commonwealth of Australia in a process called Federation.
Australia has an unofficial time zone of +8:45 known as Central Western Standard Time used by about 200 people. It splits Western Time +8 and Central Time +9:30. There is no +9 time zone in Australia.
One common fact shared by both Australia and the US: both were originally designated as English penal colonies before assuming independence.
Cite for that? Some prisoners were certainly sent here to what would become the U.S., but none of the original colonies was a penal colony as such, I don’t think: Penal colony - Wikipedia
In play:
In the 1957 Nevil Shute novel On the Beach, the captain of the USS Scorpion orders his submarine to sail to Melbourne, Australia and turns her over to the Royal Australian Navy for further service, as the U.S. has been devastated, along with most of the Northern Hemisphere, by the catastrophic nuclear exchanges of World War III.
USS Scorpion (SSN-589) served from 1960 to only 1968 when she sank and lost all 99 of her crew on 22 May 1968.
She was located about 1,300 miles west of Morocco in the North Atlantic. Theories about the cause of her sinking include explosions of hydrogen from recharging her batteries, and activation of one of her Mark 37 torpedoes either accidentally or intentionally.
May her souls rest in peace.
She was the second US Navy submarine named Scorpion. The first, SS-278, served during WWII until she was reported “sunk and lost at sea” in early 1944.
May her souls also rest in peace.
Since then, no other US Navy ships of any kind have been named Scorpion.
The USS Thresher was the lead boat in the class of nuclear-powered attack submarines in the US Navy. She was launched in July of 1960 and commissioned in August of 1961. She sank on April 10, 1963 during deep-diving tests off the coast of Cape Cod. All the 129 people on board were lost.
Thresher was also the third of four submarines lost with more than 100 people aboard, the others being the French Surcouf, sinking with 130 personnel in 1942, USS Argonaut, lost with 102 aboard in 1943, and Russian Kursk, which sank with 118 aboard in 2000.
By some accounts, the Colonies in the New World were seeded with “undesirables” (not necessarily “criminals”, but close enough by English standards of the times) who were sent here as indentured servants. Georgia in particular was frequently cited as a designation for convicted prisoners.