The invalid Prince Myshkin was the title character of Dostoevsky’s novel ***The Idiot. ***
Vladimir Myshkin replaced Vladislav Tretiak in goal for the USSR after the first period of the “Miracle on Ice” Olympic hockey game against the US in 1980.
The Olympic games were created mostly for the veneration of the two gods Hermes(Mercury) and Apollo as they were the two main gods of athletes. The lighting of the Olympic torch, however was originally to please the ruler of the gods, Zeus.
The drummer for Def Leppard, Rick Allen, lost his entire left arm in an crash of his Corvette in Sheffield, England, the band’s hometown, but returned to play for the band anyway with a customized drum set.
Dean Kamen, best known as the inventor of a portable dialysis machine and the Segway scooter, has invented a robotic arm (codename Luke) for amputees that allows enough dexterity to eat with chopsticks or write legibly (though in large letters).
Elena Kagan, now the Solicitor General of the United States and the government’s top appellate lawyer, is a former dean of Harvard Law School. She has been often mentioned as a possible future Supreme Court justice.
Harvard Law School was the setting for the very-different films “Paper Chase” and “Legally Blonde”.
Paper Chase was the first credited film appearance for John Houseman, whose fame before then had been as Orson Welles’ partner in The Mercury Theater* and as an acting professor whose students included Oscar winners Robin Williams and William Hurt. Houseman won an Oscar and earned a fortune as a character actor and celebrity spokesman, but almost always playing Kingsfield like characters in many projects, though in real life he was said to be the opposite of his on-screen persona (very affable, nice, and funny).
*Houseman and Welles had a falling out and did not speak for more than 30 years until accidentally reunited on a talk show by a producer who booked them both but had no idea of their history together. The two old friends actually ended up dancing on the show.
The best known production of Mercury Theater was “War of the Worlds”, on Halloween 1938, done so realistically that many listeners thought it was real news reportage of a Martian invasion.
Freddie Mercury, lead vocalist of the rock band Queen, died of complications from AIDS on November 24th, 1991, one day after he publicly acknowledged that he had the disease.
Paul Rodgers, who recently toured with Queen, was also in the bands Free, Bad Company, and The Firm.
Katharine of Aragon (who spelled her name Katharine, Katherine, Katharina and Kateryne in various documents) was demoted from the title of Her Majesty the Queen of England, Ireland and France to Princess Dowager of Wales (from being the widow of her husband’s older brother Prince Arthur of Wales) when Henry VIII annulled their marriage. To the end of her life however else she signed her name she always followed it with the Queen as a show of not accepting the annulment. (When she died Henry, Anne Boleyn, and the Princess Elizabeth all appeared at court garbed in yellow, which set off a 474 year old riddle: at the English court yellow was a color of merriment and rejoicing, while in Katharine the Queen’s native Spain it was the color of mourning, thus it is a riddle whether they were mourning her death, celebrating it, or deliberately being ambiguous.)
A later Princess Elizabeth than the one mentioned above became Queen Elizabeth II of the UK when she was visiting the Treetops Hotel in the then-British colony of Kenya.
Barack Obama, Sr., a member of the Luo tribe of Kenya, left his pregnant wife when he came to Hawaii where he impregnated (and later married) teenaged college student Ann Dunham while both were students at the U. of Hawaii. Obama completed his M.S. in Economics at Harvard, by which time he was in a relationship with Ruth Nidesand, a schoolteacher with whom he would have 3 children and eventually marry and who claims he mentally and physically abused her and their children.
For many years, the record for most consecutive shut-out inning in the World Series was held by Babe Ruth, set in 1918 and finally broken by Whitey Ford in 1962.
Retiring U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens was, as a young boy, present at Game 3 of the 1932 World Series in Chicago, in which Babe Ruth had his famous, much-debated “called shot,” and recently said he was quite certain that Ruth did just as the legend has it.
(Sampiro, I’ve always read that Henry VIII was the first English monarch to use the style “Majesty”).
John Stevens, a redheaded teenager from Buffalo, made it to the final six in Season 3 of “American Idol,” despite auditioning with a drunk-Dean-Martin impersonation. He is still the youngest finalist ever, 16 years old.
One of Simon Cowell’s critiques of John Stevens was during a heavy metal week when he told him that “Your voice and this style of singing go together like chocolate ice cream and an onion”. (I always loved that line.)
Alan Arkin starred in the 1980 not-so-funny brainwashing comedy Simon.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest use of the term “brainwashing” was in 1950.