Robert B. Parker never much cared for the TV series Spenser: for Hire, or for star Robert Urich, but thought actor Avery Brooks was brilliant as Hawk.
Avery Brooks is a graduate of Oberlin College,* and recently returned to campus to star in a production of Arthur Miller’s Death of A Salesman.
*as am I.
Avery Brooks is a tenured professor of theatre at Rutgers University. As a singer, he performed the lead role in the premiere of Anthony Davis’ 1985 opera X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X.
Comedian Albert Brooks’s real name is Albert Einstein; he’s the son of the radio comedian Parkyakarkus. His brother is Super Dave Osborne.
Osborne House is a mansion on the Isle of Wight used as a favorite country home of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Per legend, after Albert died Queen Victoria began a huge collection of photographs of various friends and relatives in their coffins and stored it at Osborne House; not per legend is that she died there in 1901.
In the Beatles song “When I’m 64”, Paul proposes to his sweetheart that every summer they could have a cottage in the Isle of Wight, if it’s not too dear.
The Beatles began their rise to fame by playing in Hamburg nightclubs. The “Negroid wailings” of the then-obscure band are mentioned in passing in Robert Harris’s alt-history crime thriller Fatherland, set in 1964 Nazi Germany.
George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, was an award-winning commercial artist whose parents were vaudeville performers.
Painter Norman Rockwell once said, “People are always telling me 'I don’t know much about art, but I love your work,” as if that’s a compliment. Just once, I’d like someone to say, ‘I know a lot about art, and I love your work.’ "
Also… Rockwell, who recorded the Eighties hit “Somebody’s Watching Me,” is the son of Motown Records founder Berry Gordy.
The Norman Conquest of England in 1066 resulted in a compiling of all English property and landholders and revenue sources compiled in 1086 and called “The Domesday Books”. The name comes from the Old English word dom meaning “reckoning” (as in accounting), which is the basis of the word doom and thus the book is often misspelled as or pronounced Doomsday.
William, Duke of Normandy, received a blessing and a special flag from the Pope for his invasion of England in 1066.
Though politically they are British Crown Dependencies, the Bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey are geographically part of the otherwise French region of Normandy.
Faye Dunaway, who played Steve McQueen’s lover in the original ***The Thomas ***Crown Affair, played Pierce Brosnan’s psychiatrist in the remake.
Baseball pitcher Jim Brosnan’s book The Long Season, an account of the 1959 campaign in which he was traded from the St. Louis Cardinals to the Cincinnati Reds, was criticized by such players as Joe Garagiola for “violating the sanctity of the clubhouse”. However, it was hardly as salacious as such later volumes as Jim Bouton’s Ball Four and Sparky Lyle’s The Bronx Zoo.
One of Pierce Brosnan’s first screen roles was a bit part as an IRA terrorist in the British crime thriller The Long Good Friday, starring Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren.
According to the OED, the “Good” in Good Friday comes from the a middle English definition of “good” meaning “pious.”
In 17th century New England most married women were addressed as Goody (short for goodwife) rather than as Mrs., which came from mistress and even then had more salacious connotations in addition to its proper meaning.
The symbol for New England on many Revolutionary War-era flags was a green pine tree, as seen perhaps most famously on the Bunker Hill flag (no original example of which now exists, although it was depicted in several contemporary paintings).
At the Battle of Bunker Hill, fought on Breed’s Hill, Colonel William Prescott supposedly said “don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes”.
William Howard Taft was the fattest U.S. President yet. He lost a lot of weight and was later appointed to his life’s ambition, a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court (as Chief Justice, no less), by President Warren G. Harding.