Ray Bloch composed the theme music for The Ed Sullivan Show, and led the program’s orchestra.
Marcel Bloch was the original name of Marcel Dassault, the French aviation pioneer. After his release from Buchenwald, he adopted the code name used by his brother, a general in the Resistance, converted to Catholicism, and revived his prewar company Société des Avions Marcel Bloch under the new name Avions Marcel Dassault.
Robert Clary, who played French POW LeBeau on the sitcom “Hogan’s Heroes,” was a French Jew who spent more than two years in the Buchenwald concentration camp.
The most famous French Jewish actor was probably Sarah Bernhardt, whose mother Judith Van Hardt was a Dutch Jewish courtesan. “The Divine Sarah” (as Oscar Wilde labeled her) was raised Catholic but always felt strong attractions to her Jewish heritage.
Sarah Palin was considered a feisty, reform-minded Republican governor of Alaska by those few outside of the state who had even heard of her before Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., selected her as his vice presidential running mate in 2008. Cagey about her plans for 2012, she recently agreed to host a TV show for Fox.
Michael Palin wrote Monty Python’s famed “Dead Parrot Sketch” after a series of frustrating meetings with an automobile dealer, who adamantly refused to acknowledge that there was anything wrong with a defective car Palin had recently purchased.
In his post-Python days, Michael Palin has hosted a series of travel documentaries, including Michael Palin: Around the World in 80 Days (in which he attempted to recreate the journey from the Jules Verne book, as closely as possible), Pole to Pole (in which he traveled from the North Pole to the South Pole, attempting to stay as close to 30 degrees longitude as possible), and Full Circle with Michael Palin, in which he circumnavigated the lands around the Pacific Ocean.
Santa’s Workshop, an attraction in the New York hamlet of North Pole, bills itself as the oldest theme park (as distinct from amusement park) in the USA.
Games Workshop, the British board- and wargame empire, started off as one single London shop that sold chess, backgammon and similar “old fashion” games paraphernalia, as well as distributing imported Dungeons & Dragon books through a rinky dink mail order service ran from the room above the shop.
30 years later, the company that literally managed to turn lead into gold reports 8 million pounds of profits per annum. Who knew how deep the piggy banks of 14 yr olds were ?
As of 2006, Dungeons & Dragons remains the best-known and best-selling role-playing game. An estimated 20 million people have played the game and D&D has more than $1 billion in book and equipment sales.
One of Tom Hanks’ early acting jobs was as a player of Mazes & Monsters, a TV horror movie about a role playing game clearly inspired by D&D and featuring a camp favorite scene of Hanks’s character on a telephone crying and saying “I have blood on my hands” (which he did- literally- with no idea how it got there).
Recent evidence has called into question whether Alexander Graham Bell really did invent the telephone. His original patent application has the key paragraph about the telephone added in the margins, and only lists the principle as the final item in the summary.
Also, his method of developing a speaker uses the same drawing as used by Elisha Gray in his patent application for the telephone – and appears full-fledged out of nowhere in Bell’s notes after he had an opportunity to see Gray’s application.
Gray is often cited as handing in his application a few hours after Bell’s, but evidence shows he actually handed it in first, though due to procedures it was entered in the the ledger afterwards. However, time of application is not a requirement for patent claims; it depends on when the device was invented. Since there is no record of Bell creating the microphone used on the phone prior to the application, while there is a record of Gray using the same principle before his application, the law should have given primacy to Gray. Gray did not choose to go to court over the issue until years later, when AT&T was big enough to hire better lawyers.
For a time following the theatrical release of “The Life of Alexander Graham Bell”, a popular slang term for a telephone was “Ameche”, named for the film’s star. Loretta Young played his wife, although the character’s deafness was not apparent in her performance.
Also not shown was Bell’s failed attempt to sell his patent to Western Union. The company did not see a commercial advantage in being able to tell customers vocally that they had telegrams arriving.
In Godfather 3 Michael Corleone received the Meucci Award from Joey Zaza, an award for Italian-Americans named for Antonio Meucci, honored by many as the true inventor of the telephone before Alexander Graham Bell. MEUCCI was also the vanity plate of the Cadillac being raffled in the street fair where Zaza was killed.
Cadillac abandoned the variable lift inlet valve design in 1907 due to patent issues - the individual who held the patent rights had left Cadillac and required royalty. The variable lift is now, a hundred years later, used by BMW in their four cylinder cars.
Cadillac was founded by, and originally named for, Henry Ford. The name was changed when the investors fired Ford over differences in strategy - he wanted to mass produce low cost cars, which he did at the company he founded later, while the investors wanted an exclusive, low-volume, high-price market.
The Cadillac brand is named for French explorer Antoine Laumet de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac, who founded the city of Detroit. (Rumors that the state of Michigan are attempting to find his heirs, to give it back, are unfounded.)
Jennifer Granholm, governor of Michigan, is ineligible for the Presidency, as she was born in Canada, and came to the U.S. with her family and was naturalized when she was four years old.
Richard “Cheech” Marin moved to Canada to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War. He met future partner Tommy Chong while working as a busboy and dishwasher at a topless bar that Chong’s father was operating in British Columbia…
[del]The Michigan-Ohio State football rivalry originated in the “Toledo War”, an actual armed conflict over the proper location of the state border. Michigan also lost a strip of land to Indiana so that the Hoosiers could get Gary. As compensation, the mineral-rich Upper Peninsula was taken from the Northwest Territories and given to Michigan. Consequently, the true loser of the Toledo War was Wisconsin.[/del]
Most of British Columbia, including its entire coastline, would have been in the United States had the 1844 Oregon Territory dispute not ended by treaty, instead of following through on the “Fifty-four forty or fight!” threat. The incident spawned the term “Manifest Destiny” to define the American attitude.