The first actor to portray Simon Templar was Louis Hayward in a 1938 film The Saint in New York.
King Louis was the king of France in 1789.
He was worse than Louis the Fifteenth.
He was worse than Louis the Fourteenth.
He was worse than Louis the Thirteenth.
He was the worst
Since Louis the First.
St. Louis, Missouri is one of 41 “independent cities” in the United States, which are not legally part of a county or similar administrative district. 38 of those cities are in Virginia; the other two, beyond St. Louis, are Baltimore, Maryland, and Carson City, Nevada.
Allan Sherman of ‘Hello, Muddah, Hello, Faddah’ fame, right?
-“BB”-
Got it.
Louis XIV (AKA The Sun King), the French king behind the Palace of Versailles, had a portable orange grove. The trees were planted in silver pots and were wheeled outside on sunny days. Some of those original trees are still alive today.
Side two of the Beatles’ 1969 album Abbey Road is dominated by a sixteen-minute medley of eight songs / song fragments, most of them between one and two minutes in length. All of them are credited to Lennon-McCartney as the songwriters; three of the songs (indicated with asterisks below) have lent their names to SDMB members. In order, the songs are:
- You Never Give Me Your Money
- Sun King *
- Mean Mr. Mustard *
- Polythene Pam *
- She Came In Through the Bathroom Window
- Golden Slumbers
- Carry That Weight
- The End
Paul McCartney took the lyrics for “Golden Slumbers” from a poem by the dramatist Thomas Dekker, who used it as a lullaby in the 1599 play Patient Grissel. Before Abbey Road, the lyrics had been set to music by at least four different composers.
The story of “Patient Griselda” first appears in Boccaccio’s Decameron. Geoffrey Chaucer also tells in in The Canterbury Tales, as “The Clerk’s Tale”.
The Archbishop of Canterbury is the top cleric of the Church of England, although the British monarch is, like King Henry VIII and all of his successors, Supreme Governor of the church. The American offshoot of the Church of England, the Episcopal Church, does not have archbishops; the top cleric of that church is instead called the Presiding Bishop.
There are two archbishops in the Church of England: the Archbishop of York, and the Archbishop of Canterbury.
York has the title “Primate of England”, which one might think made him the top dog, until one realises that Canterbury is the “Primate of All England”. Sucks to you, York!
Comedic sketch actor Dan Aykroyd created The Coneheads, a fictitious family of extraterrestrials with abnormally large foreheads, while working on SNL. He played the father, Beldar; Jane Curtin played his wife, Prymaat (“Primate”), and Lorraine Newman played their teen daughter, Connie.
Aykroyd said he was inspired to create the Coneheads by marijuana consumption and based the characters’ appearance on the Moai, the mysterious and ancient stone statues of Easter Island, which have similarly long heads, and the (LSD-inspired) people of the Land of Point from Harry Nilsson’s fable The Point.
A “Cheesehead” is a triangular, foam-rubber hat, styled to look like a wedge of bright yellow Swiss cheese. The Cheeshead hat was originally created in 1987 by a Wisconsin resident, Ralph Bruno, who cut such a hat out of foam rubber from his mother’s old couch, and wore it to a Milwaukee Brewers baseball game.
After a positive reaction from fellow fans at the game, Bruno started a business to make the hats, and other similar novelty merchandise. The hat quickly became popular headwear at Green Bay Packers games, and the term “cheesehead” became synonymous with Packer fans, and Wisconsinites in general.
In the hierarchy of hats, the highest is a top hat which is too formal for daily use. Second highest and most formal for daily use is the homburg.
Irving Berlin wrote the song “Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails” for the 1935 movie Top Hat. Fred Astaire sang it in that film.
Fred Astaire was an avid fan of horse racing; he frequently attended races, and owned several race horses over the course of his life.
Astaire’s third and final wife, Robyn Smith, was a jockey, and one of the first women to achieve success in the U.S. in that profession. Smith retired from racing in 1980, the same year in which she and Astaire married.
Robyn Davidson traveled solo with camels and her dog Diggity from Alice Springs, AUS to the Hamelin Pool on the Indian Ocean. Unfortunately Diggity never made it as he was poisoned near the end by bait that ranchers put out to kill dingos.
From its founding, motorcycle manufacturer Harley-Davidson had worked to brand its motorcycles as respectable and refined products, with ads that showed refined-looking ladies with parasols, and men in conservative suits as the target market. That began to shift in the 1960s, partially in response to the clean-cut motorcyclist portrayed in Honda’s “You meet the nicest people on a Honda” ad campaign, when Harley-Davidson sought to draw a contrast with Honda by underscoring the more working-class, macho, and even a little anti-social attitude associated with motorcycling’s dark side.
Except for two years between 1922 and 1924, Winston Churchill was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1900 to 1964. The British statesman was, for most of his career, a member of the Conservative Party, and served as its leader from 1940 to 1955. He was, however, a member of the Liberal Party from 1904 to 1924.
Winston cigarettes, introduced by R. J. Reynolds in 1954, is a brand named after the town where Reynolds started his business, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Winston was the number one selling cigarette in the world from 1966 until 1972, when it was overtaken by Marlboro.