But Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man That he didn’t, didn’t already have
And Cause never was the reason for the evening Or the tropic of Sir Galahad
After seeing a version of “The Wizard of Oz” on stage – especially due to the performance of the actor portraying the scarecrow – Ray Bolger decided to become a dancer and entertainer. When the chance to appear in the Judy Garland film version came up, Bolger was delighted – but he was cast as the tin man and wanted to play the scarecrow. The role had been given to Buddy Ebsen, but Bolger convinced him to exchange roles. Ebsen later was sickened by aluminum dust in his costume and was replaced by Jack Haley.
Bill Haley and His Comets’ big hit was “Rock Around the Clock,” released in 1954 and given new prominence when featured in the George Lucas-directed American Graffiti.
The first jet airliner to be put into production was the DeHavilland Comet. A series of crashes of Comets, followed by the fleet’s grounding, greatly advanced understanding of metal fatigue. It also inspired the Nevil Shute novel “No Highway” and the Jimmy Stewart movie made from it, “No Highway in the Sky”. The RAF is still flying the Nimrod variant of the redesigned Comet IV in the antisubmarine warfare role.
In traditional mythology, “Nimrod” was a great hunter. Bugs Bunny used the term derisively to refer to Elmer Fudd, and it now is pejorative, meaning “idiot.”
Not in play:
No Highway came out in 1948, before the Comet ever went into production, let alone the crashes happening. So, remarkably similar to, yes, inspired by, no.
/Not in play.
For many years, former child star Jane Withers played Josephine the plumber in TV commercials for Comet kitchen cleanswer.
Jane Withers became a star in her own right after she appeared as the spoiled rich kid, the foil of six-year-old Shirley Temple, in “Bright Eyes”, the film in which she debuted “On the Good Ship Lollipop”. The Lollipop was not actually a ship at all, but an airplane, as the lyrics make clear. Temple sang it aboard a DC-2 that was taxiing around the old Glendale, CA airport.
Temple Grandin invented the hug machine, used to calm people with autism spectrum disorders (or other hypersensitive people) in 1965.
The Inns of Court are four professional organizations in the UK that you must belong to in order to act as a barrister (i.e., to try and defend cases). The are Gray’s Inn, Lincoln’s Inn, the Inner Temple, and the Middle Temple.
Mohandas Gandhi enrolled in the Inner Temple upon being called to the bar in 1891, following his graduation from University College London, just before his return to India.
Goa is the smallest state (by area) in India. It was a Portuguese overseas territory for about 450 years before being annexed by the New Delhi-based government in 1961.
The remains of St. Francis Xavier, one of the original seven members of the Jesuits, are kept at the Bom Jesus Basilica in Goa.
Xavier University of Louisiana, established in 1915, is the only historically black Roman Catholic institute of higher learning.
Louisiana’s is the only state supreme court to regularly hold sessions in two different places, and thus to have two different courthouses (in Baton Rouge and New Orleans).
Baton Rouge dates from 1699, when French explorer Sieur d’Iberville leading an exploration party up the Mississippi River saw a reddish cypress pole festooned with bloody animals and fish that marked the boundary between Houma and Bayou Goula tribal hunting grounds. They called the pole and its location “le bâton rouge”, or red stick.
Cypress knees are knobby growths that protrude from the roots of cypress trees. Some folk artists carve them into whimsical images of people, wild animals, and other phenomena.
Muskogee tribes of the southeastern U.S. usually built their summer residences of cypress trees because, as their English name of “Creek Indians” implied, they often lived on the banks of rivers, creeks and other water (and for their Seminole cousins in swamps) and cypress, which grows in water, is exceptionally resistant to water rot.
The world’s oldest cypress tree is in Iran and is over 4000 years old.
Several U.S. presidents have had regular summer residences, including Truman’s Little White House in Key West, Fla., Nixon’s estate in San Clemente, Calif., to which he retired after his 1974 resignation; and George W. Bush’s ranch near Crawford, Tex.
ETA: President George W. Bush considered attacking Iran, which he said was part of an “axis of evil,” to destroy or hamper its suspected nuclear-arms program.