Patrick Stewart lost his hair (due to alopecia) at age 19; in some of his early auditions and roles he would wear a toupee. This is the case in Hedda Gabler (1975) where he played Eilert Lovborg opposite Glenda Jackson; this character is compared to the god Dionysius, with “vine leaves in his hair”.
This December, “Matysiakowie” will celebrate sixty years on Polish radio, as the longest running radio drama in the world. Over 250 actors have played roles on the weekly radio drama, which first aired in 1956, and through 35 years of communist rule in Poland, was never politicized to present propaganda.
http://www2.polskieradio.pl/matysiakowie/opinie/?id=4
(Click a red title from the right menu under “Podcasty”)
The longest running radio drama in the world is not “Matysiakowie”.
It might be BBC Radio’s “The Archers”, “an everyday story of country-folk”, which first piloted on 29 May 1950, and has been running continuously since the 1 January 1951 for over 18,000 episodes.
In the History Channel’s 101 Gadgets that Changed the World, the smart phone ranked number one.
Radio ranked number two.
The first handheld mobile phone was demonstrated by John F. Mitchell and Martin Cooper of Motorola in 1973, using a handset weighing about 4.4 lbs.
Radio stands out as one of very few inventions that could not have been intuitively imagined by an ordinarily observant person. The smart phone is just one in a series of incremental refinements of principles that were widely understood and in use by the general population.
The Cooper Car Company was founded in December 1947 by Charles Cooper and his son John Cooper who, together with John’s boyhood friend Eric Brandon, began building racing cars in in Surbiton, Surrey, in 1946.
The first cars built by the Coopers were single-seat 500 cc Formula Three racing cars using Japanese motor cycle engines driving the rear wheels via a chain. For convenience the driver at in front of the engine. Cooper Cars graduated via Formula Two in 1952 until, in 1959, Jack Brabham and the Cooper works team became the first to win the Formula One World Championship in a rear-engined car.
Both team and driver repeated the feat in 1960, and every Formula One World Champion since has sat in front of his engine.
Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill have written over 80 hit songs, including Eric Burdon and the Animals We Gotta Get Out of this place. In 1987, Mann and Weil were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987, and in 2011, they received the Johnny Mercer Award, the greatest honor from the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Alexander Cavalié Mercer (28 March 1783 – 9 November 1868) was a British artillery officer.
Whilst he retired as a General, his fame largely rests on his role as acting commander of G Troop Royal Horse Artillery.
He was in the thick of the fighting throughout the Battle of Waterloo, and wrote a very entertaining and informative “Journal of the Waterloo Campaign” which remains in print to this day.
English writer Georgette Heyer, 1902 - 1974, wrote fifty five novels, starting in her teens. She did meticulous research for the historical details in her novels, ranging from the medieval era to the Regency Period.
She lectured once at the Royal Military Academy, more generally known as Sandhurst. The Battle of Waterloo was described in the last 10 chapters of her novel ‘An Infamous Army’. The details of the battle are so exact that the novel was on the list of ‘recommended’ reading for the Military Cadets.
King Hussein of Jordan was a cadet at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, wnen at the age of 15, his grandfather Abdullah was killed by an assassin, and the crown thrust upon the teenager.
No Canadian Prime Minister has been killed by an assassin.
Stephen Sondheim’s musical Assassins premiered off-Broadway in 1990 starring Victor Garber and Terence Mann and had several successful runs in NYC and in regional theaters by 2001, but had never played Broadway. A production was in rehearsal open in Fall 2001, but after September 11 it was scrapped as being the wrong time/wrong place for a musical that anybody could possibly call unpatriotic or mistake for glorifying murder (which it didn’t, but could be mistaken for that by jingoists). It opened on Broadway in 2004 starring Neil Patrick Harris as the balladeer and as Lee Harvey Oswald.
Jonathan Larson’s first musical tick, tick… BOOM! opened in London at the Menier Chocolate Factory on May 31, 2005, running until August 28, 2005. Directed by Scott (son of Stephen) Schwartz, the cast featured Neil Patrick Harris as Jon – later replaced by Christian Campbell – Tee Jaye as Michael, and Cassidy Janson as Susan.
George Takei of Star Trek fame made his Broadway debut at age 78 in October 2015. Takei starred in the musical Allegiance and helped transform his childhood memories of being forced into a Wyoming internment camp during World War II into the show.
An early governor of Wyoming attended his own inauguration ball wearing shoes made of human skin.
In L. Frank Baum’s original novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), on which the film is based, Dorothy wears Silver Shoes. However, the color of the shoes was changed to red in order to take full advantage of the new Technicolor film process being used in big-budget Hollywood films of that era. Film screenwriter Noel Langley is credited with the idea
Nobody is certain when horse shoes were first used, as iron was precious and horse shoes were melted down when no longer useful, but nailed-on horse shoes began to be used in Europe between 500-900 AD and cast-bronze horse shoes were common by 1000 AD.
side note: Fear Itself, I read your post #30831 with some skepticism, but damn if you had it nailed (so to speak). Big Nose George - Wikipedia
Horse-mounted police units from Ft. Worth, Texas and Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, assisted Cleveland Police Department mounted officers in providing crowd control at the recent Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio.
In a Sherlock Holmes story, "The Adventure of the Priory School,” the villain outfitted horses with shoes that left cow hoof prints in order to avoid detection. During the days of Prohibition, in the 1920s, moonshiners and bootleggers were found to be using wood blocks carved to leave cow hoof prints to cover their footprints to and from the stills.