A Navy petty officer just recently gave birth aboard a deployed aircraft carrier. She claims she didn’t know she was pregnant. Son of a gun!
The Navy sailor gave birth aboard the Nimitz-class supercarrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, which was commissioned in 1977 during the Carter Administration, and can be seen in this vertiginous photograph: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/CVN-69-SPIE-training.jpg
In September 1996, Amy Carter, daughter of former President Jimmy Carter, married computer consultant James Gregory Wentzel, whom she had met while attending Tulane University. Carter chose not to be given away, stating that she “belonged to no one”. Carter kept her own family name and the couple moved to the Atlanta area, where they continue to live and focus on raising their son, Hugo James Wentzel (born July 29, 1999). In Atlanta, Hugo attended Paideia, Since the late 1990s, Carter has maintained a low profile, neither participating in public protests nor granting interviews. She is a member of the board of counselors of the Carter Center that advocates human rights and diplomacy as established by her father. Carter illustrated her father’s children’s book The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer (1996).
Nigeria-born Hugo Weaving was already a major Australian film star, before being cast in “Matrix” and “Lord of the Rings”. Like all Australian stars, he resisted being typecast, making his first international splash in “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert”
Hugo Weaving played multiple roles in the sf epic Cloud Atlas, as did fellow castmembers Halle Berry, Tom Hanks, Hugh Grant, Doona Bae, Keith David and others.
Cloud Atlas (2012) consists of several plot lines across six different eras:
Pacific Islands, 1849
Cambridge/Edinburgh, 1936
San Francisco, 1973
London, 2012
Neo Seoul, 2144
Big Island of Hawaii, 106 winters after the Fall (2321)
Film critic Roger Ebert praised the film, including, “I was never, ever bored by Cloud Atlas.”
On September 27, 2016. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera will celebrate 30 years on London’s West End. That’s 30 years!!!
Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel Le Fantôme de l’Opéra was adapted numerous times for film and stage; prior to the Andrew Lloyd Webber version, the most successful was the 1925 film starring Lon Chaney.
*Fantome *was a 679-ton staysail schooner owned by Windjammer Barefoot Cruises in Miami, Florida. Completed in 1927 by the Duke of Westminster, she was purchased by Windjammer in 1969, and became flagship of the fleet. During her twenty-nine years of service in this regard, *Fantome *offered cruises in the Caribbean and the Bay of Honduras. She was lost in October 1998, during Hurricane Mitch.
The inner part of the Bay (or Gulf) of Honduras is lined by the Belize Barrier Reef which forms the southern part of the 900 km long Meso-American Barrier Reef System, the second-largest coral reef system in the world.
In philosophy, the term “world” has several possible meanings. In some contexts, it refers to everything that makes up reality or the physical universe. In others, it can mean have a specific ontological sense (see world disclosure). While clarifying the concept of world has arguably always been among the basic tasks of Western philosophy, this theme appears to have been raised explicitly only at the start of the twentieth century and has been the subject of continuous debate. The question of what the world is has by no means been settled.
The song “What a Wonderful World” was initially offered to Tony Bennett, who turned it down. Then, it was offered to Louis Armstrong. George Weiss recounts in the book Off the Record: Songwriters on Songwriting by Graham Nash that he wrote the song (in 1967) specifically for Armstrong. Weiss was inspired by Armstrong’s ability to bring people of different races together. The song was not initially a hit in the United States, where it sold fewer than 1,000 copies because ABC Records head Larry Newton did not like the song and therefore did not promote it, but was a major success in the United Kingdom, reaching number one on the UK Singles Chart.
The first incarnation of what is now Disney’s It’s a Small World debuted at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. It opened on 22 April 1964. Some 50 years later, in April 2014, Time magazine said that It’s a Small World is likely the most played song ever in history. It has been played, as of then, some 50 million times.
Louis Armstrong’s version of “What a Wonderful World” may be heard - used ironically both times - in the movies Good Morning, Vietnam and 12 Monkeys.
Louis Armstrong pronounced his name “Lewis”. In Hello, Dolly! Armstrong sings the title song and he begins his part with these lyrics,
*Hello, Dolly!
This is Lewis, Dolly
*
In 1964, Armstrong’s recording of the song, “Hello, Dolly!”, rose to number one on the Billboard pop chart, making Armstrong, at age 62, the oldest person ever to accomplish that feat. In the process, Armstrong dislodged The Beatles “Can’t Buy Me Love” from the number-one position they had occupied for 14 consecutive weeks with three different songs.
In 1952, Armstrong County South Dakota ceased to exist. With a population of only 23, and most of its best land flooded by the Oahe Dam reservoir, the county was annexed to Dewey County.
Neil Alden Armstrong was an American astronaut and the first person to walk on the Moon. He was also an aerospace engineer, naval aviator, test pilot, and university professor. The Armstrong Air and Space Museum is located in his hometown of Wapakoneta, Ohio, United States.
When he was learning to fly in the US Navy, Neil Armstrong had to practice carrier landings. His very first jet carrier landing was on the USS Essex (CV-9) in 1951, the same year that Essex was recommissioned after she served in WWII.
A Navy veteran, Neil Armstrong, first man to walk on the Moon, was buried at sea from the deck of the guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea in 2012.