Lady Caroline Lamb famously described her lover Lord Byron as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”, a phrase John DeLancie used to describe his character Q on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
General James Wolfe was successful on the field but had his detractors at court, in part because he made more senior generals look lazy or incompetent.
One of his critics commented to King George II that Wolfe was mad.
“Mad, is he? Then I hope he will bite my other generals!” the King replied.
Tom Wolfe is sometimes considered one of the best living American writers. His Bonfire of the Vanities and The Right Stuff have both been adapted into films. Although acclaimed by many, Wolfe has detractors: John Updike wrote that one of his novels “amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form.”
Ouch! I don’t know what happened. Once I was good with numbers, but lately fear my brain is turning to cheese.
The annual Cheese Rolling Competition took place on May 30, 2016 on Cooper’s Hill in Gloucestershire. The competition dates back at least to the 1800’s. Racers chase a cheese down an impossibly steep hill; the winner takes the cheese.
The event was formally cancelled in 2010 because of the number of injuries suffered by racers tumbling down the hill, but it still continues without any formal organization or sponsorship.
That cheese rolling competition, when it first started, used to happen on Whit Monday which is the Monday after Pentecost and so called because of the white garments worn on Pentecost.
Modern commercial American cream cheese was developed in 1872, when William Lawrence, from Chester, New York, while looking for a way to recreate the soft, French cheese Neufchâtel, instead came up with a way of making an “unripened cheese” that is heavier and creamier; other dairymen came up with similar creations independently, but Lawrence was the first one to commercialize it
President Chester Arthur was a 1-star Quartermaster General.
Arthur Godfrey learned to fly in 1929 while working in broadcast radio in the Washington, D.C., area, starting with gliders, then learning to fly airplanes. He was badly injured on his way to a flying lesson one afternoon in 1931 when an oncoming truck lost its left front wheel and hit him head on. Godfrey spent months recuperating, and the injury would keep him from flying on active duty during World War II. He served as a reserve officer in the United States Navy in a public affairs role during the war.
Arthut Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, the first made-for-TV amateur hour in America, was the top-rated sho0w in 1948. It carried on with the radio tradition of Major Bowes Amateur Hour, that started in 1934. The radio versions, which also later aired on TV with host Ted Mack, had the interesting quirk that they were simply radio broadcasts of live thaeter stage shows, in which the radio audience would sometime listen to tap dancers, ventriloquists and even magicians.
The earliest reference to the legendary Brittonic warrior Arthur may be a poem commemorating a battle fought against Angles at Catraeth circa 600 AD:
[QUOTE=Y Gododdin (translated)]
He charged before three hundred of the finest,
He cut down both centre and wing,
He excelled in the forefront of the noblest host,
He gave gifts of horses from the herd in winter.
He fed black ravens on the rampart of a fortress
Though he was no Arthur.
Among the powerful ones in battle,
In the front rank, Gwawrddur was a palisade.
[/QUOTE]
The Baltimore Ravens of the National Football League are the onlymajor league sports team named after a fictional character. The team is named for the eponymous bird in the poem “The Raven”, by Baltimore native Edgar Allen Poe. (But the fictional argument can be made for the Los Angeles Angels.)
The Baltimore Ravens have a 2-0 record in Super Bowls. Of the nineteen different teams to have won at least one of the fifty Super Bowls to date, they are the only team to have won more than one and also be undefeated in the Super Bowl. The San Francisco 49ers used to be the best, 5-0 in Super Bowls, until they lost to the Ravens in Super Bowl XLVII. That is when the Ravens won their second Super Bowl, and is when the 49ers dropped to 5-1.
Among many other things, the raven is the Native American bearer of magic, and a harbinger of messages from the cosmos. In some tribes, the raven is considered a trickster because of its transforming/changing attributes.
Edgar Allan Poe, author of The Raven, died in Baltimore on Oct 7, 1849, under strange circumstances.
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”
The Common Raven is one of relatively few species of passerine birds that occur widely on both sides of the Atlantic. There is one other North American species, the Chihuahuan Raven, of the southern plains and northeast Mexico.
One year, the annual Christmas Bird Count in Nome, Alaska, recorded only four birds – all of them Common Ravens.
Some years after the Gunfight at the OK Corral, Wyatt Earp moved to Nome, Alaska where he built the first two story wood building and opened the largest saloon in town.
In 2014, over 10,000 newborn boys in the US were given the name Wyatt.
And exactly 63 newborn girls were., too.
Robert Wyatt started out his career as drummer and songwriter for the British groups Soft Machine and Matching Mole and eventually went solo. His solo album Rock Bottom was completed after Wyatt fell from the fifth floor window, an accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down. Some thought the album was a reference to the accident, but Wyatt has said he had completed most of the songwriting before.
He also put out a cover version of “I’m a Believer” about this time, a song that was completely unrepresentative of his work, but which hit #29 on the British charts. It created controversy when the UK TV show Top of the Pops demanded he not perform in a wheelchair, calling it “unsuitable for family viewing.” After an outcry, Wyatt performed the song in his wheelchair.
Katherine Kennicott Davis wrote “The Little Drummer Boy” (originally titled “The Carol of the Drum”), in 1941. It became famous when recorded by the Harry Simeone Chorale in 1958: the recording sailed to the top of the Billboard charts, and remains a familiar standard. It is virtually the only “traditional” song added to the repertoire of Christmas music in the 20th Century. Davis wrote about 600 choral songs in her career as a composer, while teaching music at Wellesley College…
In the nineteenth century, door-to-door salesmen were called “drummers.” In a horse-drawn wagon, the drummer visited village homes and outlying farmhouses in order to sell trinkets and necessities. He was a seller of small goods.
Wholesale drummers “traveled on trains and wagons, hauling trunks filled with merchandise samples or carrying thick catalogs, and were usually paid a mixture of salary and commission.” So, the drummer or canvasser was an early form of the modern-day sales rep.
The term “drummer” carries several different meanings. First, “drummers” carried trunks or “drums” full of merchandise. Secondly, the term might have come from the salesmen trying to “drum up” business or being persistent in their sales pitches (i.e. “beating a drum”). This idea of drumming up business was also similar to the musician drummers that preceded traveling shows.