Benjamin “Scatman” Crothers provided the voice of inept cartoon crimefighter Hong Kong Phooey, and of Meadowlark Lemon on the “Harlem Globetrotters” cartoon series. He also played the ill-fated chef Dick Halloran in Stanley Kubrick’s version of “The Shining.”
Meadowlark Lemon left the Globetrotters in 1980 to form a similar team called the Bucketeers, but his career with that squad only lasted until 1983.
Citroen, the name of a leading French auto manufacturer, is very close to “Citron,” the French word for lemon.
In French, of course, “lemon” is not a slang term for “lousy car,” as it is in the USA.
Almost all of the lemons consumed in the US and 1/3 throughout the world come from California.
While the folk song “Lemon Tree” was written by Will Holt in the 1960s, the tune is based on the Brazilian folk song Meu limão, meu limoeiro, arranged by José Carlos Burle in 1937 and made popular by Brazilian singer Wilson Simonal.
When Bob Feller pitched his second no hitter, his center fielder was another Hall of Fame pitcher – Bob Lemon.
Among the U.S. artists who covered Lemon Tree was Trini Lopez. Lopez also played the convict/soldierPedro Jiminez in the movie The Dirty Dozen, in which he was the first of the team to be killed.
Jiminez broke his neck in the jump, leaving the black guy available as the first to get killed by the bad guys, per film tradition.
Jim Brown, the top running back in the NFL at the time, announced his retirement at age 29 during filming of The Dirty Dozen.
(Huh ? What are you talking about ? The black guy is the next-to-last to die : he’s the one who drops grenades down the underground bunker’s air shafts, then gets shot as he’s running towards the escape vehicule.)
Dirty Dozen, through a nasty remark by Telly Savalas’ character Maggot, reminds us that the US Army was still fully segregated during WW2 - blacks fought in their own regiments (with white officers, of course).
The principle of desegregation would have to wait until an executive order of Harry Truman, in 1948 ; although the Army only announced it would actually do it three years later. Even during the Korean War, the percentage of “negroes and others” in each unit was carefully monitored and maintained at low levels (~14% according to Wiki).
Harry Truman is the first person mentioned in Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire.
We Didn’t Start the Fire is on Joel’s album Storm Front, which is also the name of a neo-Nazi white supremacist organization that owns and administers Martin Luther King dot org.
His Girl Friday is a remake of the movie The Front Page. However, it still was unable to use the closing line from the play. That first appeared in film in the 1974 Billy Wilder version with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon: “That son of a bitch stole my watch.”
In the opening scene of the movie MASH*, the motor pool sergeant yells after Hawkeye and Duke, “get that son of a bitch! He just stole my Jeep!” The stolen jeep reappears several times, and Hawkeye and Duke use it to leave the 4077th at the movie’s end.
The novel MASH* established that Pierce’s nickname of “Hawkeye” was given to him by his father. It comes from the novel The Last of the Mohicans, which Pierce, in Richard Hooker’s book, claimed was "the only book my old man ever read."It was also mentioned in the TV episode “A Full Rich Day”.
Mark Twain hated Last of the Mohicans author James Fenimore Cooper’s writing so much that he was inspired to write “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” one of the funniest put downs of any author – as well as a good guide on how to write well.
Born Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain took his pen name from a water depth measurement of riverboatmen. Clemens served in a unit of Confederate militia from Missouri during the Civil War, but later cheerfully admitted that they spent most of their time hiding in the woods.
Though he wrote “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”, Rudyard Kipling met Mark Twain at Twain’s Elmira, New York home in 1889.
Truman Capote played Lionel Twain, in the mystery spoof Murder by Death.
Alec Guiness, who played blind butler-who-did-it (or* did he *?) Jamesir Bensonmum in Murder By Death was only in Star Wars for the money and thoroughly despised both the films and his role in it.
Arthur Guiness began brewing ales in the St. James’s Gate Brewery, where he took out a 9000 year lease in 1759. He soon started to brew a porter, which was a new beer style at the time. The West India Porter was first recorded as brewed in 1801, and late became known as Guiness foreign export stout, then just Guiness stout.