Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper may also have loosely inspired The Prisoner of Zenda, in which a lookalike impersonates the kidnapped prince of a fictitious Eastern European country; Double Star, in which one impersonates an ailing interplanetary leader; and Dave, in which one impersonates the disabled President of the United States.
The Legend of Zelda is a long-running series of fantasy adventure video games, primarily published by Nintendo. The original game, also entitled “The Legend of Zelda,” was released in Japan in 1986, then in the U.S. and Europe the following year. The various games center on the adventures of a young man named Link, and the Princess Zelda, as they fight to save the kingdom of Hyrule, often from the plans of the demon warlord Ganon.
“Beautiful Zelda” is a song by the Bonzo Dog Band about an alien temptress.
Zelda Gilroy was a recurring character played by Sheila Kuehl (stage name ‘Sheila James’) on the American TV show, “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis”. Bright in academics, athletic, and somewhat plain-looking, Zelda was smitten with the handsome, clean-cut title character (Dobie Gillis, played by Dwayne Hickman).
Zelda especially irritated Dobie by wrinkling her nose at him. He always wrinkled back but claimed it was a reflex action (often admonishing her “Now cut that out!”), while she took it as proof that he loved her but didn’t recognize it yet. Zelda assured Dobie that he would eventually come to realize his love for her through the influence of “propinquity”: because they were classmates – and his last name was Gillis and hers was Gilroy – they were always going to be seated together through high school and college and would eventually fall in love.
And apparently she was correct; in two reunion projects (a 1977 pilot for a proposed sequel series, and a made-for-TV movie in 1978) they were depicted as married with a family, and having taken over the Gillis’ Grocery Store from Dobie’s father.
-“BB”-
The Dobermann (or “Doberman Pinscher” in the U.S. and Canada), sometimes referred to as a “Dobie” or “Dobe,” is a breed of dog which was developed in Germany in the late 19th Century. The breed, which was originally bred to serve as guard dogs, is an intelligent, medium-sized working dog, and is known for being loyal and highly trainable.
There have only been two reigning Queens of Canada, Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II.
The death of Princess Charlotte in November of 1817 led to a succession crisis in the UK. There were now no legitimate descendants of George III and there was a fear that the crown would pass to a foreign king. George had several sons, but most were unmarried (though some did have children) and there was an incentive to get them married and produce and heir. The Duke of Kent married first and fathered Victoria, relieving the crisis.
The Duke of Cumberland also produced a son, which helped eliminate the issue. The son, George of Hanover, was blind by the time he was 20.
Queen Elizabeth II took the throne in 1952 at the age 25, and she is the longest-serving monarch in British history. Her oldest child, Prince Charles, 72, is next in line for the throne. He has been next in the line of succession for 69 years, making him the longest serving heir apparent in history.
A new and reform-minded king, very much like Prince Charles but never actually named, was played in the second series of the British dark political satire House of Cards by actor Michael Kitchen, later better known for Foyle’s War.
That segment of the trilogy was called To Play the King, BTW.
The term “kitchen cabinet,” in a political sense, was originally used, by opponents, to describe U.S. President Andrew Jackson’s group of friends and advisors, who served as an unofficial cabinet to the President in 1831-32, after he had purged many of the members of his official Cabinet.
The term has since come to be used for a leader’s group of trusted allies and advisors, who do not serve in an official governmental role.
The first cabinet meeting of the United States government was held on November 26, 1791. In attendance were President George Washington, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of War Henry Knox, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph. Notably absent was Vice-President John Adams.
Actor John Randolph was blacklisted from working in Hollywood films and in New York film, television, and radio after 1948 for his affiliation with the Communist Party, and was one of the last blacklisted actors to regain employment in Hollywood films when director John Frankenheimer cast him in a major role in Seconds in 1966.
Actor Randolph Mantooth, who portrayed firefighter-paramedic John Gage on the 1970s TV series Emergency!, became an advocate for firefighters and EMS personnel, and has served as a spokesman on health and safety for the International Association of Firefighters.
Lord Randolph Churchill (1849-1895), father of Winston Churchill, was a British politician and statesman. He was elected to Parliament in 1874 and served as the leader of the House of Commons for several months in 1886 and 1887. He died in 1895, possibly from syphilis.
Winston Churchill, badly neglected by his father Lord Randolph throughout his childhood, nevertheless admired him greatly. He wrote a well-reviewed biography of his late father and, upon becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer long after his father had served in the post, wore Lord Randolph’s robes of office.
When addressing the United States Congress, Winston Churchill joked, “If my father had been an American and my mother British, instead of the other way around, I might have gotten here on my own.”
Winston Churchill is apocryphally said to have responded to a draft government memo in which a civil servant edited his writing so as not to end a sentence with a preposition, “This is the sort of errant pedantry up with which I will not put.”
The website englishclub.com lists 150 prepositions that are part of the English language. 94 of these are one-word prepositions, and 36 are ‘complex prepositions’, which are phrases of two or more words that function as a one-word preposition. Examples of the latter include ‘contrary to’ and ‘in spite of’.
I just learned on the Wikipedia article for “Extinct language” that “as of the 2000s, a total of roughly 7,000 natively spoken languages existed worldwide. Most of these are minor languages in danger of extinction; one estimate published in 2004 expected that some 90% of the currently spoken languages will have become extinct by 2050.”