The song “Have a Cigar” by Pink Floyd is a direct repudiation of how the band was received following the success of their single, “Money”. It begins with a first-person account welcoming the band to “Come in here, dear boy, have a cigar. You’re gonna go-far.” Further lyrics describe the executive failing to understand, asking them “Oh, by the way, which one’s Pink?”
The vocalist on the song is Roy Harper, a well-known session player, and one of outside vocalists used by Pink Floyd. The other two are Claire Tory (“The Great Gig in the Sky”), and Andriy Khlyvnyuk (“Hey Hey Rise Up”).
The Order of the Stick is a long-running web comic strip, about the adventures of a party of Dungeons & Dragons characters. Among the adversaries to the group of heroes is another adventuring group, the Linear Guild, all of whom are “opposites” to their counterparts in the Order of the Stick.
In the Order of the Stick, the party’s wizard is an elf named Vaarsuvius (the character’s name based on the volcano Mt. Vesuvius); Vaarsuvius’s “opposite” in the Linear Guild is a half-elf wizard named Pompey – whose name is, of course, based on the city of Pompeii, which was wiped out by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD.
Scott Glenn played Stick, the man who taught Matt Murdock how to use his enhanced senses (other than sight) as well as hand to hand combat in the TV series Daredevil.
Scott Glenn served in the US Marine Corps, for 3 years. His military survival skills came in handy when filming for 1979’s Apocalypse Now when he was in the Philippines, which served as the backdrop for Vietnam, and a bad typhoon hit. He and some of the crew were on an isthmus and the heavy rains and storms turned it into an isolated island. Scott Glenn and a production assistant named Doug Claybourne, both former Marines, took the lead in recovering the situation and setting up camp facilities for the film crew until the storms subsided and they could continue filming.
Apocalypse Now is considered one of the greatest films ever made. It has been assessed as director Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece and it appeared on various best-of films in 20th-century and of all time lists. In 2000, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the U.S. Library of Congress as “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”.
The R. Lee Ermey Musical Highway is in Palmdale, CA. If you drive eastbound on it at 45mph the rumble strips in the road will try to sound out the Marine Corps Hymn.
Former U.S. Marines drill instructor Lee Ermey was originally hired as a technical advisor [for Full Metal Jacket]. Ermey asked [director Stanley] Kubrick if he could audition for the role of Hartman. Kubrick, who had seen Ermey’s portrayal of drill instructor Staff Sergeant Loyce in The Boys in Company C (1978), told Ermey that he was not vicious enough to play the character. Ermey improvised insulting dialogue against a group of Royal Marines who were being considered for the part of background Marines in order to demonstrate his ability to play the character and to show how a drill instructor attacks individuality in new recruits. Upon viewing the videotape of these sessions, Kubrick offered Ermey the role, realizing he “was a genius for this part.” Kubrick incorporated the 250-page transcript of Ermey’s rants into the script. Ermey’s experience as a drill instructor during the Vietnam War proved invaluable; Kubrick estimated that Ermey wrote 50% of his character’s dialogue, particularly the insults.
At one late night drinking and gambling party, Charles II saw how many empty wine bottles were cluttering the room. He told a servant to “take away those dead marines,” slang for empty bottles.
His brother James, colonel-in-chief of the Royal Marines, sensed an insult and asked Charles why he used that phrase.
Charles, ever quick-witted, replied “Because they have done their service to their King, and once cleaned will be ready for further service.”
In play — The British Royal Marines, officially the Corps of Royal Marines, trace their origins back to the formation of the “Duke of York and Albany’s maritime regiment of Foot” in 1664. That’s 111 years before the US Marine Corps birth year of 1775. They were formed at the grounds of the Honourable Artillery Company, while the US Marines were formed in a bar (and were proud of that).
They have close ties with allied marine forces, particularly the United States Marine Corps and the Netherlands Marine Corps.
Chautauqua Lake is a long, narrow lake located in extreme western New York. The southern tip of the lake is a few miles north of the Pennsylvania state line, and the northern end is less than 10 miles from the shore of Lake Erie. Despite its proximity to the Great Lakes, however, the Chautauqua drains to the southeast, where it eventually flows into the Allegheny River. The Allegheny, of course, is a major tributary of the Ohio River, which flows into the Mississippi River, which drains into the Gulf of Mexico, well over 1,000 miles from Chautauqua Lake.
According to Wiki, the name “Gulf of Mexico” (Spanish: golfo de México; French: golphe du Mexique, later golfe du Mexique) first appeared on a world map in 1550 and a historical account in 1552.
No American leader insisted it ought to be called the “Gulf of America” until 2025.
The name Erdapfel can be translated as Earth Apple. Behaim’s globe’s name may be inspired by the Reichsapfel, the Imperial Orb which was part of the regalia of the Holy Roman Empire. The name is not related to the modern meaning of Erdapfel in southern Germany and Austria, which is “potato”—potatoes had not yet been brought from America to Europe when this globe was named.
The distant-future decay and long fall of the Galactic Empire is at the heart of Issac Asimov’s Foundation sf trilogy. The Imperial capital is Trantor, an almost entirely urbanized world, known as an ecumenopolis.
After Mace Windu’s failed attempt to arrest Chancellor Palpatine in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Palpatine frames it as an assassination attempt and an attempted coup, and forms the Galactic Empire from the remnants of the Galactic Republic.
Ian McDiarmid portrayed Chancellor Sheev Palpatine, also known as Darth Sidious. He also portrayed Arthur in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) with Steve Martin and Michael Caine, and Glenne Headly.