Brass instruments typically include the Trumpet, Trombone, Cornet, Alto horn, Baritone horn, Flugelhorn, Mellophone, Euphonium, Tuba, and the French horn.
Cmdr. William T. Riker, First Officer of the USS Enterprise, NCC-1701-D, can play the trombone, just as does the actor who played him on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Jonathan Frakes.
In the musical The Music Man, “Professor” Harold Hill uses the song 76 Trombones to help the townspeople of River City, Iowa visualize their children playing in a marching band by recalling a time when he saw several famous bandleaders’ bands in a combined performance. While an average-sized high school marching band might have about 10 musicians playing the trombone, and a large college marching band seldom has more than 30 trombonists, the band that Harold Hill describes to the villagers includes 76 trombones, 110 cornets, “more than a thousand reeds”, double bell euphoniums, and “fifty mounted cannon” (which were popular in bands of the late 19th century).
In 1957, The Music Man became a hit on Broadway. After years of development, a change of producers, almost forty songs (twenty-two were cut), and more than forty drafts, it won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and ran for 1,375 performances. The cast album won the first Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album and spent 245 weeks on the Billboard charts.
“Chicken Fat” (also known as “The Youth Fitness Song”) is a 1962 song written by Broadway composer Meredith Willson (The Music Man, The Unsinkable Molly Brown) and performed by actor/singer Robert Preston. It was commissioned as part of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness. A new version, used in an Apple iPhone commercial, was made by an unidentified singer, but who was reported to be Bernie Knee, a jingle writer and part-time cantor.
Chicken fat is one of two types of animal fat referred to as schmaltz, the other being goose fat.
On January 10, 1929, The Adventures of Tintin, a series of popular comic books created by Belgian artist Hergé, first appeared in a children’s supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle. The earliest stories in *The Adventures of Tintin *have been criticized for displaying racial stereotypes, animal cruelty, colonialist, violent, and even fascist leanings, including ethnocentric caricatured portrayals of non-Europeans.
Captain Haddock, a major character in The Adventures of Tintin, is known for his colorful insults (“bashi-bazouk”, “visigoths”, “miserable molecule of mildew”) and exclamations, such as “Billions of bilious blue blistering barnacles!” and “Ten thousand thundering typhoons!”
In the original French, Captain Haddock uses the expressions:
**Mille sabords, Mille millions (a billion) de sabords, Mille millions de mille sabords, Mille milliards de mille sabords,
*Mille millions de mille milliards (a trillion) de mille sabords, Mille milliards de mille millions de mille sabords,
*Tonnerre de Brest, Tonnerre de tonnerre de Brest, Mille tonnerres, Mille tonnerres de Brest,
*Mille millions de tonnerres de Brest, Mille milliards de tonnerres de Brest, Mille millions de mille tonnerres,
*Mille sabords de tonnerre de Brest, Mille millions de mille sabords de tonnerre de Brest,
*Mille milliards de mille sabords de tonnerre de Brest,
Mille millions de mille milliards de mille sabords de tonnerre de Brest.
The bazooka weapon was named after a musical instrument of the same name. The instrument was made of a piece of junk by comedian Bob Burns in the 1930s, and the hand-held recoilless gun of WWII resembled the contraption. Burns claimed to have invented it when he was ten years old, and named it for an expression that was slang for ‘mouth’.
On May 29, 1911, Sir William Schwenck Gilbert was about to give a swimming lesson to two young women and 17-year-old Ruby Preece in the lake near his home, Grim’s Dyke. Preece lost her footing and called for help. Gilbert, then 75 years old, tried to save her but suffered a heart attack in the middle of the lake and died. He is best known for writing the libretti of fourteen comic operas (“the Savoy operas”) produced in collaboration with composer Sir Arthur Sullivan. The inscription on Gilbert’s memorial on the south wall of the Thames Embankment in London reads, “His Foe was Folly, and his Weapon Wit.” Preece, born Ruby Vivian Preece, survived her close call and became an English artist associated with the Bloomsbury Group and the second wife of painter Stanley Spencer. A year after the Grim’s Dyke tragedy, Preece changed her first name to Patricia.
Bloomsbury has three London Underground stations (Russell Square, King’s Cross/St. Pancras and Euston Square) located in it’s region of London.
On March 1, 1979, Philips publicly demonstrated a prototype of an optical digital audio disc at a press conference in Eindhoven, Netherlands. American inventor James T. Russell has been credited with inventing the first system to record digital information on an optical transparent foil that is lit from behind by a high-power halogen lamp—a compact disk (CD).
CDs hold almost 700MB of data. A Digital Versatile Disc can hold 4.7GB - 9.4GB. A Blu-Ray Disc (BRD) can hold anywhere from 25GB to 128GB of data.
Current CD (Certificate of Deposit) rates, lower than 1%, have led many to predict the death of this type of investment. At their peak, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, CDs could generate a rate of return from 15-18%, and long-term CDs in particular were acclaimed for their unprecedented interest rates.
Death came for U.S. President John F. Kennedy, Christian apologist C.S. Lewis and novelist Aldous Huxley all on the same day, Nov. 22, 1963.
Speaking of death, a human head can remain conscious for about 15 to 20 seconds after it is decapitated. French physician Dr. Gabriel Beaurieux witnessed the beheading of a man named Languille. He wrote that immediately afterward, “the eyelids and lips … worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five or six seconds.” Dr. Beaurieux called out his name and said that Languille’s eyelids “slowly lifted up, without any spasmodic contraction” and that “his pupils focused themselves”
From the very beginning of its use, speculation abounded over whether the heads of the guillotined remained conscious after being cut off. The debate reached new heights in 1793, when an assistant executioner slapped the face of one of his victims’ heads and spectators claimed to see its cheeks flush in anger. Doctors later asked the condemned to try to blink or leave one eye open after their execution to prove they could still move, and others yelled the deceased’s name or exposed their heads to candle flames and ammonia to see if they would react. In 1880, a doctor named Dassy de Lignieres even had blood pumped into the head of a guillotined child murderer to find out if it would come back to life and speak. The ghastly experiments were put to a stop in the 20th century, but studies on rats have since found that brain activity may continue for around four seconds after decapitation.
The word decapitation comes from the Latin, caput, or capitis, meaning head. The terms “capital offence”, “capital crime”, and “capital punishment,” derive from caput and refer to the punishment for serious offences involving the forfeiture of the head; i.e., death by beheading. In some cultures, such as ancient Rome and Greece, decapitation was regarded as the most honorable form of death.
If the headsman’s axe or sword was sharp and his aim was precise, decapitation was quick and was presumed to be a relatively painless form of death. If the instrument was blunt or the executioner clumsy, however, multiple strokes might be required to sever the head resulting in a prolonged and more painful death. The person to be executed was therefore advised to give a gold coin to the headsman to ensure that he did his job with care.
Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, and Mary, Queen of Scots, required three sword strikes at their respective executions.
A money belt of gold sovereigns is an important plot point in “Have His Carcase” by Sayers, where the body of the murdet victim goes missing for several days.