The Nashville Teens were an English rock band, from Surrey, and were one of the “British Invasion” groups in the early 1960s. They are best known for their 1964 garage-rock version of the song, “Tobacco Road,” which was a top 20 hit in the U.S., Canada, and the UK.
The 1955 film musical, Oklahoma!, had a song called The Surrey with the Fringe on Top that was sung by the characters Curly McLain, Laurey Williams, and Aunt Eller who were Gordon MacRae, Shirley Jones, and Charlotte Greenwood, respectively. Here, a surrey is a light four wheeled carriage, typically with two sets of two seats and able to seat four people. The “fringe on top” was a decorative material roof able to keep occupants in the shade or protect them from a minor rain shower.
A surrey was commonly known as the station wagon of its time.
Oscar Hammerstein, in his lyrics for “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top”, describes it as having “isinglass curtains you can roll right down in case there’s a change in the weather”. Isinglass is a form of collagen derived from fish swim bladders, and the wiki article on it says that in the song, the term actually refers to mica, commonly used for windows in vehicle side screens, and not rollable, being totally inflexible.
In The Neverending Story, the forgotten dreams of Fantastica were pictures on isinglass.
The Neverending Story was the most expensive movie ever produced in Germany until that time (1984), costing fifty million Deutsche Marks, or the equivalent of $27,000,000.
The most expensive movie ever made, per wiki, was Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens (2015). Adjusted for inflation, it cost $575M.
The film grossed $2.07 billion worldwide, breaking various box office records and becoming the highest-grossing film in the United States and Canada, the highest-grossing film of 2015, and the third-highest-grossing film at the time of its release.
It was also the subject of a major lawsuit for fraudulent advertising.
In play:
The 1977 novelization for Star Wars was ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster for George Lucas. Foster has since, under his own name, written three other Star Wars-related novels.
Splinter of the Mind’s Eye (1978), written by science-fiction novelist Alan Dean Foster, was the first original-storyline Star Wars novel to be published. The story was initially developed by Foster, under contract with Lucasfilm, as a potential low-budget sequel to the Star Wars film, but the film’s tremendous success allowed for a sequel with a large budget, and so, the story was released as a standalone novel.
The novel focuses on Luke and Leia; Han and Chewbacca do not appear in it, primarily because Harrison Ford had not yet signed a contract to appear in sequels to Star Wars at the time that the story was developed.
Allen Welsh Dulles was the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), and its longest serving director to date. He was also head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the early Cold War.
His older brother, John Foster Dulles, was the Secretary of State during the Eisenhower administration and is the namesake of Dulles International Airport.
Thomas Jefferson was the USA’s first Secretary of State. He of course went on to become the nation’s third President.
There are five other men who have served as Secretary of State and later became President: James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, and James Buchanan.
The surname “Van Buren” has sometimes been used by members of the Dutch royal family as an alias to give themselves some degree of anonymity. Castle Buren in the Gelderland province is one of their possessions and “Count of Buren” is one of the family’s lesser titles. For example, before he succeeded to the throne in 2013, Willem-Alexander, for his University application, used the name “Alex van Buren”. He completed the Elfstedentocht (a 200 km ice skating tour) and the NYC Marathon under the name “W.A. Van Buren”.
When they were kids, Alex Van Halen played guitar and his younger brother Eddie played drums. Alex would sneak into Eddie’s room and play his drums, eventually becoming better at it than on guitar. After Eddie heard Alex play the drums to “Wipe Out” he decided he should learn to play guitar.
Bill Muncey is considered by many to be the greatest unlimited hydroplane racer of all time. He raced for Atlas Van Lines and died in Acapulco, MX in a blowover accident in the final heat after adjusting his boat since it was “sticking to the water” too much. He was well in the lead at the time.
Acapulco is both the ninth deadliest city in Mexico and the tenth-deadliest city in the world as of 2022; the US government has warned its citizens not to travel there.
Per Wiki: “In September 2018 the city [of Acapulco, Mexico]'s entire police force was disarmed by the military, due to suspicions that it had been infiltrated by drug gangs.”
Hurricane Florence was a major hurricane, forming in the Atlantic Ocean in September of 2018. The hurricane twice peaked at Category 4 intensity, reaching peak sustained winds of 150 miles per hour on September 11th.
Though the storm weakened as it neared the U.S. Atlantic Coast, Florence was still a Category 1 hurricane (sustained winds of roughly 90 mph) when it made landfall in North Carolina on September 14th. Despite the relatively lower winds, Florence caused severe damage in both North Carolina and South Carolina: the very slow-moving storm dumped torrential rainfall in the area, resulting in large-scale flooding in the region.
There are a multitude of routes that one can take to drive across the United States from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. One of the shortest (according to Google Maps and several minutes of research on my part) starts in Atlantic Beach, Florida, and ends in San Diego, California. The specific addresses are 100 Atlantic Boulevard in Atlantic Beach and 2112 Spray Street in San Diego. The route travels on I-10 across Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and New Mexico into Arizona, where it makes a turn onto I-8 into California. The total distance is 2,358 miles and has a driving time of 34 hours.
ETA: I tried to embed the link, but failed miserably.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, originally intended to deter Soviet aggression during the Cold War, now has 32 member states and is keeping a watchful eye on Russia. Sweden is the most recent country to join NATO, over strong Russian objections, in March of this year.
Eight of the NATO members are constitutional monarchies. Sweden was the most recent to join.
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