Aficionados of aviation movies know Joe Mantegna best for his roles as a handwringing father: of a teenage Elisha Cuthbert in “Airspeed”, in “First Flight”, and in “Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal”.
In the mid-1970s, while publisher Leonard Mogel was in Paris to jump-start the French edition of National Lampoon, he discovered the French science-fantasy magazine Métal Hurlant which had debuted December 1974. He licensed an American version, which became Heavy Metal magazine.
The name “heavy metal” originates in the lyrics of Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild”:
I like smoke and lightning
Heavy metal thunder
Racin’ with the wind
And the feelin’ that I’m under
Steppenwolf is the title of a 1927 novel by Hermann Hesse, who also wrote Siddhartha (1922), and The Glass Bead Game (1943).
Many of J.D. Salinger’s short stories featured the fictional Glass family.
The epic disaster movie*** The Towering Inferno ***was based on a pair of novels dealing with a fire in a high rise building: The Tower and The Glass Inferno.
The Tower is XVI of the Major Arcana in modern fortune telling Tarot decks. The Major Arcana evolved from the trumps of the game Tarot, which more typically have no specific imagery, save for the predecessor of the Fool (called the excuse), which also evolved into the Joker of non-Tarot decks.
The Helsinki Jokerit (Jokers) are one of the leading hockey teams in Finland’s SM-Liga. NHL star Teemu Selanne played for them before starring with the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim. The Bruins’ Tim Thomas, last year’s Vezina Trophy winner, also once played for the Jokers.
The first pro hockey team to go by the name of “Ducks” were the Long Island Ducks of the Eastern Hockey League of the 1960s, so named because Long Island was famous for providing ducks to restaurants.
The team played in the Commack arena, later the home of the New York Islanders in their first seasons. The arena was also the site of one of the few playoff forfeits in pro basketball history, when the New York/New Jersey Americans (later the Nets) were forced to play one game playoff since their original arena in Teaneck, NJ was unavailable. The floor of the arena was a mess, with boards missing and not secured and was covered with water that had condensed due to the ice surface below.
Judge Roy Bean, who was neither a judge nor a bean by the legal definition of either, operated from a saloon called ‘The Jersey Lilly’, a misspelling of the nickname of 19th English century actress and courtesan Lillie Langtry.
The Philadelphia Eagles fans’ behavior during a Monday Night Football loss to the San Francisco 49ers in 1997 and a 34-0 loss to Dallas a year later was such that the City of Philadelphia assigned a Municipal Court Judge, Seamus McCaffrey, to the stadium on game days to deal with fans removed from the stands.
Philadelphia was specifically founded by William Penn to be a city of complete religious toleration and for this reason was given a name meaning brotherly love (philos: love of, adelphos: brother).
There are four types of love in the Greek Language. Storge (family affection), Eros (physical love), Philos (friendly love) and Agape (generous and unselfish love).
In many languages, the equivalent of the English word “so-so” (as in “How do you feel?” “So-so.”) is also a reduplicative (i.e., a word that repeats, either in its entirety or with a slight variation). Some examples are “comme si, comme ca” from French; “asi-asi” in Spanish; “maa-maa” in Japanese, “baik-baik” in Indonesian, “mezzo-mezzo” in Italian, “shway-shway” in Arabic; and “etzky-ketzky” in Greek.
In opera, a mezzo-soprano is a female singer whose voice is lower than a soprano, but higher than a contralto. They often have secondary roles in operas (stereotypically referred to as “witches, bitches, and britches”).
Three witches appear in the Shakespeare drama MacBeth, often simply called (due to thespians’ superstitions) “the Scottish play.”
The historic Macbeth reigned from 1040 to 1054, and was called “Macbethad the Renowned” by one chronicler. No incidents of ambulatory trees during his reign have been discovered.
The Ents were a race in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy which resembled ambulatory trees. They were immensely strong, but very deliberate.
Roscoe Ent, in Douglas Wallop’s “The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant” (the basis of the musical and movie “Damn Yankees”), was an untalented entertainer at Washington Senators’ games who was put out of business when Joe Hardy’s arrival made the team itself the attraction.
The Washington Nationals are the District of Columbia’s current pro baseball team. “The Nats” have done very poorly in the MLB standings since their first season in 2005.