The name “Dennis” is a Roman-French version of the Greek name Dionysus.
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s husband was not Dennis but Denis, spelled with just one “n.” Made a baronet after his wife left office in 1990, he is the most recent commoner thus honored. The most recent baronetcy before that been created in 1964. Sir Denis Thatcher died in 2003 and his son Mark inherited the title.
English actor/musician/screenwriter Christopher Guest is, formally, Christopher Haden-Guest, 5th Baron Haden-Guest. The Haden-Guest title was created in 1950, for Labor politician Leslie Haden-Guest (Christopher’s grandfather).
As Christopher Guest has no sons, the current heir presumptive to the title is his younger brother, actor Nicholas Guest; as Nicholas also has no sons, the Haden-Guest line and title will end with the two of them.
(Christopher’s wife, actor Jamie Lee Curtis, is styled “The Lady Haden-Guest,” but she does not use the title.)
Except for the occasional restaurant reservation while in the UK, she’s said.
Labour politician Leslie Haden-Guest (This Is Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind star Christopher’s grandfather) was described by British philosopher, social activist and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell as “a theosophist with a fiery temper and a considerable libido.”
Theosophy was founded in the late 19th century by a Russian immigrant to the United States, named Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Along with Blavatsky, William Quan Judge and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott formally established the Theosophical Society in November 1875 in New York City. The group characterized itself as an unsectarian group of searchers for the truth, aspiring to foster brotherhood and assist humanity.
To the end of his days, Theodore Roosevelt liked to be referred to not as “Mr. President,” but as “Colonel” in recognition of his Rough Rider service during the Spanish-American War.
The sinking of the battleship USS Maine in Havana Harbor was one of the catalysts of the Spanish-American War. A Naval inquiry concluded that a Spanish mine had sunk the ship, but later investigations disagreed with that conclusion, speculating that it was an internal explosion that caused the sinking of the vessel.
Battleship (aka Sea Hunt) is known worldwide as a pencil and paper game which dates from World War I. It was published by various companies as a pad-and-pencil game in the 1930s and was released as a plastic board game by Milton Bradley in 1967. It is thought to have its origins in the French game L’Attaque played during World War I, although parallels have also been drawn to E. I. Horsman’s 1890 game Basilinda, and the game is said to have been played by Russian officers before World War I.
Battleship, a 2012 movie based on the game, “won” the Razzie Award for Rihanna as Worst Supporting Actress. Its four other Razzie nominations were for Worst Screen Ensemble, Director, Supporting Actor, and Supporting Actress.
Battleship Potemkin is a 1925 Soviet silent film, a dramatization of the events of a mutiny aboard a Russian Navy battleship, which was part of the Russian Revolution of 1905.
It is widely considered to be one of the greatest films made, and one particular scene – the “Odessa Steps” sequence – is one of the most influential single scenes in film, and homages of it frequently appear in other films.
The Odessa Steps sequence was copied almost frame by frame by Brian de Palma for his 1987 Eliot Ness/Al Capone crime drama, The Untouchables, set in Prohibition Chicago and not Bolshevik Russia.
“Brian Boru’s March” is a traditional Irish tune, popularized by The Chieftsins, James Galway, and Horslips.
The “Colonel Bogey March” is a British march that was composed in 1914 by Lieutenant F. J. Ricketts (pen name Kenneth J. Alford), a British Army bandmaster. The march is often whistled. During the Second World War, British soldiers sang the lyrics “Hitler Has Only Got One Ball” to accompany the tune.
The “Colonel Bogey March” appears in several movies, including The Lady Vanishes (1938), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), and The Parent Trap (1961), among others.
In military parlance, a bogey is an unidentified aircraft while a bandit is one that has been positively identified as an enemy aircraft.
In the game of golf, the term “bogey” refers to scoring one stroke above par on a given hole. The term originally was applied to the score that a good golfer would shoot on a hole; around 1890, at the Great Yarmouth Golf Club in England, players competed against an imaginary player, “Colonel Bogey,” who received a predetermined score on each hole. The “Colonel Bogey” character was also the namesake of the song “Colonel Bogey March.”
Tiger Woods, who was three when he made his television debut, made his first hole-in-one shot at Heartwell Golf Course in Long Beach, CA. He was six years old at that time.
Tiger Woods and Sam Snead are tied for the most wins on the PGA tour with 82. Snead won 7 majors, while Woods won 15. The career leader for most major victories is Jack Nicklaus with 18.
Sam Snead’s numbers for PGA tour wins (82) and major championships (7) would likely have been even higher had it not been for World War II.
Between 1940 and 1945, fourteen major championships were cancelled due to the war (preventing Snead from competing in them), and he served in the U.S. Navy in 1942 through 1944, precluding him from participating in Tour events while he was on active duty.
Sam Snead appeared as himself on The Phil Silvers Show in 1957, in the episode “The Colonel Breaks Par”.