Despite massive critical acclaim, The Dark Knight failed to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Picture in 2009. This oversight is believed to be a key factor in the Academy’s decision to expand the number of nominations to 10 the following year.
The film versions of The Turning Point The Color Purple were both nominated for 11 Academy Awards, and both failed to win any of them. The Color Purple failed to even be nominated for Best Director Steven Spielberg, which begs the question how can a film nominated for 11 Academy Awards not have a best director?
Twelve people played themselves in guest appearances in the film “The Turning Point”.
According to IMDB those twelve are Lucette Aldous, Fernando Bujones, Richard Cragun, Suzanne Farrell, Marcia Haydée, Peter Martins, Marianna Tcherkassky, Clark Tippet, Martine Van Hamel, Nanette Glushak, Charles Ward, and Rebecca Wright.
Baseball player John Montgomery Ward challenged baseball’s reserve clause in 1890, helping to organize the Players League. which attracted nearly half the professional major league players of the time. The league collapsed as its owners sold their team to the National League, though the losses were considered instrumental in the collapse of the American Association, which was hurt financially and only survived another season.
John Montgomery Ward, who went by the name “Monte”, was unrelated to Aaron Montgomery Ward, the founder or Montgomery Ward department stores. John was born when Aaron was 16 years old.
The Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery was born on 30 November 1874 in Prince Edward Island, the site of many of her works. Her most famous creation was the much beloved character Anne of Green Gables.
San Diego’s Montgomery Field is named for John Montgomery, who in 1884 made the first heavier-than-air controlled flights in the US, in gliders he designed, at Otay Mesa. Glenn Ford played him in the biographical film Gallant Journey, directed by William Wellman, one of Wellman’s (and Ford’s) multiple aviation-related films.
Mesa is the word for table in Spanish and Portuguese. It is derived from the Latin word mensa.
The international high-IQ society Mensa adopted the Latin word for its name to emphasis the equality of its members and the ‘round table’ nature of the group.
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable was founded in 1956, one of the first in the country. It still meets monthly between September and May every year for dinner and a speaker program, and a January debate. Members of the Roundtable also take an annual fall field trip, this year to the battlefields of Spring Hill and Franklin, Tenn.
The Summer Olympic Games in 1956 were held in Melbourne. They were the first Olympic Games to be staged in the Southern Hemisphere. The only subsequent Southern Hemisphere Games have been those in Sydney in 2000.
The three most populous countries that lie entirely in the Southern Hemisphere are South Africa, Tanzania and Argentina.
The Sun will move into the Southern Hemisphere at the vernal equinox on Tuesday 23 September at 02:29 UTC.
The designation “UTC” does not stand for anything in any language. English speakers originally proposed CUT (for “coordinated universal time”), while French speakers proposed TUC (for “temps universel coordonné”). The International Telecommunication Union and the International Astronomical Union agreed to use UTC as a compromise.
In the military and aviation, UTC is often called Zulu Time, since it is annotated with the suffix Z, pronounced Zulu in the NATO radio alphabet. It is not the same as Greenwich Mean Time, since the UK goes on daylight savings time in summer while UTC does not.
The famous English composer Thomas Tallis was buried in the chancel of Saint Alfege’s Church in Greenwich.
**Tallis **was one of the worlds described in “Firebird”, a science fiction romance by Kathy Tyers originally published in 1986, and rewritten a decade later to fit into the genre of Christian Fiction…
(Correction to previous post – GMT and UCT are essentially the same. Daylight Savings time adjusted clocks in the Western European Time Zone, but not Greenwich Mean Time, which remained a constant scientific standard until it was renamed UCT.)
Russian composer Igor Stravinsky wrote The Firebird (L’oiseau de feu) for the 1910 season of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. It proved to be Stravinsky’s breakthrough work and was an instant success at its first performance on 25 June 1910.
In Russian the name Igor means warrior for peace.
In 1985, the French foreign intelligence service sank Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior in Auckland, New Zealand, killing one of the people aboard. Two of the French agents were caught by the New Zealanders and pled guilty to manslaughter.