The Byzantine emperor Basil II is famous for one particularly bloody act: he brought thousands of captive Bulgarians into Constantinople (accounts range from 4,000 to 15,000) where he blinded 99 out of every 100; every 100th man he blinded in one eye only so they could lead the rest back home, where it is said the Tsar of Bulgaria died of heart failure upon seeing those who returned. He is known as Basil the Bulgar Slayer.
There are an estimated 50 to 150 varieties of basil. The types most commonly used for cooking are varieties of sweet basil.
Isabella, or The Pot of Basil was a poem by John Keats based on a story Boccacio’s Decameron.
Isabella Rossellini, daughter of Ingrid Bergman, starred in David Lynch’s surreal thriller Blue Velvet. She was dating Lynch at the time.
Ingrid Bergman’s pregnancy with Isabella Rosselini’s older brother, Renato, was one of the greatest scandals of any Hollywood star to that time as she and Roberto Rossellini were openly cohabiting while both were separated from but legally married to other spouses; a speech denouncing her and calling for her deportation was read into the Congressional record as she was one of the first stars to openly give birth out of wedlock.
The closest that anyone comes to saying “Play it again, Sam” in Casablanca is during this exchange involving Ingrid Bergman’s character, Ilsa:
Ilsa: Play it once, Sam, for old times’ sake.
Sam: "I don’t know what you mean, Miss Ilsa.
Ilsa: Play it Sam. Play “As Time Goes By”
Sydney Greenstreet, Signor Ferrari in Casablanca, was in real life a former tea planter, brewer, and failed businessman who did not make his first film appearance until he was 62 (The Maltese Falcon); George Lucas’s original Jabba the Hutt was an obese elderly human and was based on Greenstreet.
Jabba the Hutt appears in three of the six live-action Star Wars movies; episodes I, II, III and VI. He is a crime lord who has a bounty out on Han Solo because Solo owes him money for dumping illegal cargo.
Jabba was originally supposed to be in episode IV on Tatooine as well, and was added in the digitally remastered version.
The title of Terence Rattigan’s play, The Browning Version, refers to a copy of Robert Browning’s translation of Aeschylus’ play Agamemnon, which a student gives to a schoolteacher as a gift (or bribe, depending on your interpretation).
The Browning Automatic Rifle was designed by John Browning in 1917 and used up until the 1960s.
Baseball slugger Pete Browning, who played for Louisville in the National League in the 1880s, was the recipient of the first Hillerich and Bradsby baseball bat (made to his specifications by Hillerich). Hillerich later named his bats “Louisville Sluggers.” When Browning signed with Pittsburgh in 1891, the team got the nickname “The Pirates” for the players (including him) that they took from other clubs.
Hall of Famer Joe Sewell, the record holder for lowest strikeout rate in a single season and career, had 2226 hits in his career - all with the same bat, which he conditioned with tobacco juice rubbed into it with a Coke bottle. He replaced Ray Chapman as Cleveland’s shortstop after Chapman’s death from beaning, which led to the batting helmet rule.
The Coke contour “hobble skirt” bottle was designed in 1915, and produced for the first time in 1916.
Misery (including its famous hobbling scene) by Stephen King was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1988. It was later made into a movie and an Off-Broadway play.
Kathy Bates (who won an Oscar for Misery) and Jessica Tandy (who won for Driving Miss Daisy) were the first two consecutive Oscar winners to star in a movie together (Fried Green Tomatoes) as their first post-Oscar venture.
A 2001 study found that Oscar winners liver 3.9 years longer than non-winners.
Katharine Lee Bates, who wrote the poem that became the lyrics to the song America the Beautiful, was a professor of English literature at Wellesley. While living at the college, she shared a home with Katharine Coman, the founder of the school’s economics department. Whether their relationship was lesbian or platonic is the source of debate even today.
ETA: Bates’s patriotic verse was famously sung by Ray Charles, who was depicted by Jamie Foxx in the film Ray, for which Foxx won an Oscar and thus potentially prolonged his life by 47 months or so!
The line “Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimm’d by human tears” is thought to have been inspired by Bates’ visit to the “White City”, an arrangement of white-painted classical-style buildings surrounding a central “Court of Honor”, at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
Norman Bates, the “nice boy” killer in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, comes from a novel by the same name by SF writer Robert Bloch, and is based upon the mass murderer Ed Gein