Beginning on September 11, 2012 in Benghazi, Libya, attacks by Ansar al-Sharia on the US diplomatic compound and a nearby CIA annex resulted in the deaths of US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and US Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith, and of CIA contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty. In her role as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton took responsibility for the security lapses at these compounds.
During the Middle Ages, the O’Neills were a prominent ruling family; as sovereign Kings of Tír Eógain, they held territories in the north of Ireland, particularly around what is today County Tyrone.
Sir Tyrone Guthrie was the founding artistic director of the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario. Amongst his innovations was the thrust stage, a stage which projects into the audience, creating greater intimacy between the audience and the players.
Folk singer Arlo Guthrie, son of singer Woody Guthrie, had only one top-40 hit in his career, a cover of Steve Goodman’s “City of New Orleans”.
John Goodman won the 1991 Best Actor in a TV Musical or Comedy Golden Globe.
Starting from 425 BCE, Aristophanes, a comic playwright and satirical author of the Ancient Greek Theater, wrote 40 comedies, 11 of which survive. Aristophanes developed his type of comedy from the earlier satyr plays, which were often highly obscene. Of the satyr plays the only surviving examples are by Euripides which are much later examples and not representative of the genre. In ancient Greece, comedy originated in bawdy and ribald songs or recitations apropos of phallic processions and fertility festivals or gatherings.
The Theatre of Dionysus Eleuthereus was a major theatre in Athens, built at the foot of the Athenian Acropolis. The theatre could seat as many as 17,000 people. It is considered to be the first stone theatre ever built, cut into the southern cliff face of the Acropolis.
On December 19, 2013, 10 square metres (110 sq ft) of London’s West End Apollo Theatre’s auditorium’s ornate plasterwork ceiling collapsed around 40 minutes into a performance of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. It brought down a lighting rig and a section of balcony, thereby trapping two people and injuring around 88, people of the 720 that were in the audience, including seven seriously. The collapse was blamed on London’s previous heavy rains.
Area code 720 is an overlay of the 303 area code in Denver, Colorado. Wikipedia claims that many people will distinguish phone numbers with a 3/ for the 303 area code like 3/789-1234 and a 7/ for the 720 area code as in 7/789-1234. I have seen the 3/ but I have never seen the use of the 7/.
Tom Paxton’s song “Whose Garden Was This”, an environmentalist anthem written for the first Earth Day held on April 22, 1970, was later recorded by John Denver and became the title track of Denver’s 1970 album. Denver himself once said “I meant to write this song.”
In the Wimsey detective novels, Lord Peter Wimsey is the younger brother of the 16th Duke of Denver. Although the Duke has a son, Sayers said that she thought that he would die in WWII and Lord Peter would eventually be Duke. However, she never wrote a story to that effect.
On March 17, 1337, The first duchy was established in England when Edward, the Black Prince, became Duke of Cornwall. In 1348 he became the first Knight of the Garter, of whose order he was the founder.
Author Patricia Cornwell has been involved in a continuing, self-financed search for evidence to support her theory that painter Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper. She wrote Portrait of a Killer—Jack the Ripper: Case Closed, which was published in 2002 to much controversy, especially within the British art world and among Ripperologists. Cornwell denied being obsessed with Jack the Ripper in full-page ads in two British newspapers and has said the case was "far from closed. In 2001, Cornwell was criticized for allegedly destroying one of Sickert’s paintings in pursuit of the Ripper’s identity.She believed the well-known painter to be responsible for the string of murders and had purchased over thirty of his paintings and argued that they closely resembled the Ripper crime scenes. Cornwell also claimed a breakthrough: a letter written by someone purporting to be the killer, had the same watermark as some of Sickert’s writing paper.Ripper experts noted, however, that there were hundreds of letters from different authors falsely claiming to be the killer, and the watermark in question was on a brand of stationery that was widely available.
In philately, the watermark is a key feature of a stamp, and often constitutes the difference between a common and a rare stamp. Collectors who encounter two otherwise identical stamps with different watermarks consider each stamp to be a separate identifiable issue. The “classic” stamp watermark is a small crown or other national symbol, appearing either once on each stamp or a continuous pattern. Watermarks were nearly universal on stamps in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but generally fell out of use and are not commonly used on modern U.S. issues, but some countries continue to use them.
Watermarks were first introduced in Fabriano, Italy, in 1282.
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Also in 1282, Hertford College was founded at the University of Oxford, King Denis of Portugal married Elizabeth of Aragon in Trancoso, and the Archbishop of Canterbury ordered all synagogues of London to close and forbade Jewish doctors from practicing on non-Jews.
On April 17, 1397, Geoffrey Chaucer gave the first reading of The Canterbury Tales.
On December 19, 1154, Henry II became King of England in a coronation in Westminster Abbey. Henry’s desire to reform the relationship with the Roman Catholic Church led to conflict with his former friend Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury. This controversy lasted for much of the 1160s and resulted in Becket’s murder in 1170.
Geoffrey Chaucer originally intended The Canterbury Tales to outdo Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron in terms of quantity. The Decameron features 10 characters each telling a story for every day over a 10 day period, for a total of 100 stories. Chaucer’s prologue announces that each of the 30 characters on the pilgrimage will tell 2 stories on the way to Canterbury, and 2 more on the way back, for a total of 120 stories. However, the text as we have it includes 24 tales. There is debate as to whether he intended to write more tales and was prevented by circumstances, or whether he decided that quality was more important than quantity.