Prime Minister Mackenzie King was the third Prime Minister of Canada to serve terms separated by another Prime Minister. The other three who have served separated terms are John A., Meighen, and Pierre Trudeau.
When Justin Trudeau was a few months old, Richard M. Nixon said, “I’d like to toast the future prime minister of Canada, to Justin Pierre Trudeau”.
In the 1977 NBA draft the Los Angeles Lakers chose a point guard as their first pick in the first round. This point guard would have his college jersey number retired by his university, be an NBA All-Rookie First Team selection, would go on to win NBA championships with the Lakers, and be an NBA All Star for multiple years.
This point guard was the focal point of the Laker offense. However when in 1979 the Lakers held the #1 overall draft pick, the Lakers chose to draft yet another point guard. That 1979 point guard was Magic Johnson. The 1977 point guard, Norm Nixon, stayed with the Lakers a few seasons together with Johnson, but eventually the Lakers realized they didn’t want Magic sharing the ball with Nixon, and the popular Norm Nixon was traded to the San Diego Clippers for the draft rights for who would eventually be another strong Laker guard, Byron Scott.
The dribbling basketball player shown in outline onthe NBA logo is former Lakers great Jerry West.
It was Jerry West’s decision as General Manager of the LA Lakers to trade Norm Nixon in 1983 and free Magic Johnson to own the ball and drive the offense.
Jerry West is currently a Member of the Executive Board for the Golden State Warriors.
In its original run, Hanna and Barbera produced 114 Tom and* Jerry ***shorts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1940 to 1958. During this time, they won seven Academy Awards for Animated Short Film, tying for first place with Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies with the most awards in the category.
Molotov Cocktails were coined and used by Finnish citizens in the 1940 Winter War to repel Soviet invasions of tanks. They were named by the Finns for Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. When throwing the cocktails at the tanks, Finns would yell, “Here’s a drink to go with your food, Molotov!”
The only time I was ever the target of a Molotov Cocktail, it didn’t work. The bottle was thrown through a window, and the assailants used a sturdy green Coke bottle, which went through the window glass without breaking the bottle. So it just lay there on the floor and the wick burned out. A Molotov Cocktail has to be custom made by a person familiar with the circumstances under which it will be used.
Foreign Minister Molotov was so scared of his boss, Soviet leader Josef Stalin, that he would always have an aide carrying a suitcase with a complete change of clothes accompany him to the Kremlin. Molotov occasionally soiled himself while meeting with Stalin.
(No cite; learned this in my reading for a college Soviet History course).
According to Kruschev, when Stalin suffered his fatal stroke and was lying on the floor his Chief of Secret Police Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria mocked him and spat on the body. When Stalin twitched, proving he was still alive and possibly conscious, Beria fell to his knees and kissed his hands, then began mocking him again when it was clear he was either dead or dying. Beria was arrested by Kruschev two months later and charged with spying for the English (among other things); at his trial a few months later he was sentenced to die and the execution was carried out immediately.
At former NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria’s trial after his June 1953 arrest, it was disclosed that he had abused his authority by raping large numbers of young women, who were picked off the streets by his agents and brought to his mansion, as well as of using threats and intimidation to extract sexual favors from the wives of Soviet officials.
Beria was portrayed by actor Bob Hoskins in the HBO movie Inner Circle which was based on the memoir of Ivan Sanchin (played by Amadeus star Tom Hulce), Stalin’s private projectionist. Sanchin’s wife Anastasia was among those Beria raped.
Over the course of a long career, Bob Hoskins has played a British gangster (The Long Good Friday), a pirate (Hook), both Beria and Khrushchev (The Inner Circle and Enemy at the Gates) and a down-on-his-luck American private eye (Who Framed Roger Rabbit), among other roles.
September 30, 1955 is a movie ***of a young adult named Jimmy and played by *** Richard Thomas of The Waltons about the effect of James Dean’s death on that date on their lives. Dean died driving his Porsche 550 Spyder at an intersection near Cholame, CA. The film was the first for a young Tom Hulce.
ETA - ninja’d, so added the ***bolded, italicized ***part (played)
Tom Hulce adapted John Irving’s novel Cider House Rules into a two evening six-hour play that was not a major commercial success but won many awards in NYC and Seattle. The novel spans approximately 50 years in the existence of a Maine orphanage where the resident doctor secretly performs safe but illegal abortions, and the title comes from the irritation by migrant workers in the apple fields that all the rules for people who work in the cider house were developed by people who have never worked in a cider house, a microcosmic echo to abortion legislation.
Actress Amy Irving was born in Palo Alto CA and her first film was in Carrie (1976).
Amy Irving and Steven Spielberg had a turbulent on-again/off-again relationship during the 1970s and 1980s. At one point she was supposed to play Marion in Raiders of the Lost Ark but their breakup ended that. Later they got back together and had a baby but did not marry until shortly after his birth. Gossip mags said it was because she wanted to be presented to the queen when Spielberg met her; the marriage was so hasty that the prenup was written on a cocktail napkin, which was vacated by a judge when she divorced Spielberg in 1989 and was awarded a $100 million settlement.
Queen Ranavalona I of Madagascar was one of the most brutal tyrants in world history. Her dracoinan policies reduced the population of Madascar by half during six years of her reign, from 1833-39. But she also successfully defended Madagascar against colonial domination by European powers at a time when virtually all of Africa was ruled by Europeans.
In a remarkable understatement, Wikipedia says “These statistics have contributed to a strongly unfavorable view of Ranavalona’s rule in historical accounts.”
ninja’d
Madagascar is one of the few islands named on the board of the game, Risk. The others are Japan, Iceland, Indonesia, New Guinea, Great Britain, and Iceland. Are Australia and Greenland islands? They are also named on the board.