David Tennant and Patrick Stewart star in a 2009 BBC production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which will have its U.S. television premiere on Wednesday night on PBS. Tennant plays the melancholy Dane and Stewart plays both the Ghost and the usurper, King Claudius.
[del]Rick Moranis, who played Bob McKenzie as well as leads and key roles in Little Shop of Horrors, Parenthood and the Honey I Shrunk the Kids series, mostly retired from acting several years ago but released a parody country album entitled The Agoraphobic Cowboy in 2005.[/del]
Kenneth Branagh’s [Hamlet featured performances from Charlton Heston as the lead actor and John Gielgud as Priam in the song he recites.
John Adams and George H.W. Bush are the only two men in U.S. history to have both served as President and fathered a President.
Calvin Coolidge, who assumed the presidency upon the death of Warren G. Harding, was sworn into office by his father, a notary public.
The comic strip Smokey Stover was well known for the nonsense catchphrase “notary sojac,” which appeared in nearly all the strips.
Smokey Bear, the mascot of the U.S. Forest Service’s anti-forest fire campaign, is currently voiced by actor Sam Elliott.
“Mama” Cass Elliott died in the same flat that Keith Moon would die in approx. 4 years later. She was only 32.
Just 66 years passed from the Wright Brothers’ 1903 first flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C. to the landing of Apollo 11 in the Sea of Tranquility on the Moon.
The Wright brothers (George and Harry) are one of two brother combinations in the Baseball Hall of Fame. The other is Paul and Lloyd Waner.
King George V was the British monarch at the time of World War I. He looked almost identical to his cousin, Tsar Nicholas of Russia, who was deposed and then executed by the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir I. Lenin.
Lenin, originally named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, was radicalized by the hanging of his brother Aleksandr for participating in an assassination attempt against Tsar Aleksandr III. He adopted Lenin as a revolutionary name.
The American Revolutionary War raged from 1775-1783, although most fighting ceased with the American/French victory over Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781.
The USS Yorktown was the only US Navy aircraft carrier sunk at the Battle of Midway (Enterprise and Hornet survived). The four Japanese carriers lost there were the Hiryu, Soryu, Kaga, and Akagi. The other US fleet carriers lost in WW2 were Lexington, Hornet, Princeton, Ranger, and Wasp.
Asuka Langley Soryu, who is of mixed German and Japanese descent, is the pilot of Evangelion Unit 2 in the hit anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Angela Merkel has been the German chancellor since 2005. Born in West Germany in 1954, she was largely raised in East Germany, and is the first woman to be the German head of government.
The first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany was Konrad Adenauer, previously the pre- and post-war mayor of Cologne. The aircraft he used as his personal transport, a triple-tailed Lockheed Constellation operated by the reconstituted Lufthansa, is currently under restoration by that airline at the Auburn-Lewiston, Maine airport.
Prior to the construction of the Washington Monument, the Cologne Cathedral was the tallest man-made structure in the world.
The Washington Monument contains dedicatory stones from many fraternal and charitable organizations. The Vatican donated a stone in the early days of the Monument’s construction, but it was stolen from the worksite (presumably by anti-Catholic “Know-Nothings”) and never found.
The “Know Nothings” were officially the American Party, founded in 1843. The term came from the fact that if a member of the party was asked about the semi-secret organization of the party, they were supposed to reply “I know nothing”.
“American Idiot” was the seventh studio album by the American punk rock band Green Day. It was released on September 21, 2004 to wide acclaim, and won numerous awards including a Grammy for Best Rock Album.