“Mr. Custer” is a march novelty song, sung by Larry Verne, and written by Al DeLory, Fred Darian, and Joseph Van Winkle. It was a number-one song in the United States in 1960, topping the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart for the issue dated October 10, 1960, and remained there for one week. It is a comical song about a soldier’s plea to Custer before the climactic Battle of the Little Bighorn against the Sioux, which he did not want to fight.
In the song “Mr. Sandman” (written in 1954), Liberace’s name is mentioned for his “wavy hair,” and Pagliacci for having a lonely heart—a reference to the opera *Pagliacci *by Ruggero Leoncavallo.
“California Love,” a 1995 hip hop song by 2Pac featuring Dr. Dre and Roger Troutman, includes the line, “Now it’s '95 and they clock me and watch me / Diamonds shining looking like I robbed Liberace…”
Liberace’s catch phrase was “I wish my brother George was here.” Far from being a joke, as some comedians hinted, George Liberace was Władziu Valentino Liberace’s elder brother, business partner, and violin accompanist.
since it looks like Rivka got left out (#33855), I’ll incorporate both heres and Elendil’s…cause that’s the way I roll…
in play: Black Diamond was a buffalo or North American bison, housed at the Central Park Menagerie (Central Park Zoo); according to legend, he was the model for the US buffalo **nickel **coin introduced in 1913. He was born in 1893 of a bull and cow given to the zoo by Barnum and Bailey. He weighed 1550 pounds at his height. In the April 1952 issue of Natural History Magazine, George S. Goodwin, the Associate Curator of Mammals at the Museum of Natural History, wrote “(Black Diamond) was an excellent object for the artistic brush. … Despite his size, he was quite docile. This virtue made him the perfect model.”
eta: had to include the last section to cover Chefguy, so three prior posts referenced.
Canada does not use the term “Associate Justices”. In our system, justices other than the Chief Justice of a court are “puisne” justices (pronounced “puny” in English), from the Norman law-French for “born later” (“puis né”).
A Certain Justice by P.D.James is the tenth novel in her Adam Dalgliesh mystery series. Published in 1997, it centers on the murder of a barrister and was a New York Times bestseller. In London, the Times Literary Supplement described it as “Gripping reading… With virtuoso ingenuity, James weaves a wonderfully intricate whodunit.”
Colin Dexter was famous for his Inspector Morse detective novels. As The Guardian reported:
For Chinese, Chinese telegraph code is used to map Chinese characters to four-digit codes and send these digits out using standard Morse code. Korean Morse code uses the SKATS mapping, originally developed to allow Korean to be typed on western typewriters. SKATS maps hangul characters to arbitrary letters of the Latin script and has no relationship to pronunciation in Korean. For Russian and Bulgarian, Russian Morse code is used to map the Cyrillic characters to four-element codes. Many of the characters are encoded the same way (A, O, E, I, T, M, N, R, K, etc.). Bulgarian alphabet contains 30 characters, which exactly match all possible combinations of 1, 2, 3, and 4 dots and dashes. Russian requires 1 extra character, “Ы” which is encoded with 5 elements.
The Bulgarian folk song “Izlel e Delyu Haydutin” by the Bulgarian folk music singer Valya Balkanska was sent in deep space on the board of the US Space Probe – Voyager I, as part of a collection of our civilization’s finest cultural artifacts – a message to an alien intelligence.
The Voyager Gold Records also include greetings from then-U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim and U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=7890Kurt Waldheim is the only UN Secretary General who is alleged to have been complicit in war crimes.
On December 15, 1961, former Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann was sentenced to death after being found guilty on fifteen criminal charges, including war crimes and crimes against humanity. Eichmann’s trial had been held in the Jerusalem District Court, the 15 charges being that he had committed 15 discrete crimes as defined by Israel’s 1950 Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law. Political theorist Hannah Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany after Hitler’s rise to power, reported on Eichmann’s trial for The New Yorker. Arendt called Eichmann the embodiment of the “banality of evil,” as he appeared to have an ordinary and normal personality, displaying neither guilt nor hatred. His ashes were dumped in the Mediterranean Sea outside of Israeli territorial waters.
Adolf Dassler, the founder of the shoe and sports equipment company Adidas, was known as “Adi”, since the name Adolf was so closely associated with Hitler.
One of Adolf Hitler’s nephews was Patrick, born in Liverpool, the son of Alois Hitler Jr. (Adolf’s half-brother) and Bridget Dowling. Patrick visited the U.S. in 1939, invited for a lecture tour by William Randolph Hearst. When he found himself stranded at the outbreak of World War II, he joined the U.S. Navy after making a special request to F.D.Roosevelt. He eventually changed his last name and settled on Long Island where 3 of his sons still live (one having died in an accident in 1989). None of Patrick’s sons have children; however, contrary to rumors, this was not due to an intentional pact to let the Hitler bloodline die out.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945 while having his portrait painted in the “Little White House” at a resort in Warm Springs, Georgia.
Benjamin Franklin’s mother, Abiah Folger, was born into a Puritan family that was among the first Pilgrims to flee to Massachusetts for religious freedom, when King Charles I of England began persecuting Puritans. They sailed for Boston in 1635. Her father was “the sort of rebel destined to transform colonial America.” As clerk of the court, he was jailed for disobeying the local magistrate in defense of middle-class shopkeepers and artisans in conflict with wealthy landowners. Ben Franklin followed in his grandfather’s footsteps in his battles against the wealthy Penn family that owned the Pennsylvania Colony.
Charles I public profile in his youth remained low in contrast to that of his physically stronger and taller elder brother, Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, whom Charles adored and attempted to emulate. However, in early November 1612, Henry died at the age of 18 of what is suspected to have been typhoid. Charles, who turned 12 two weeks later, then became heir apparent and in 1625, King of England.
In his youth, Prince Charles was advised by his great-uncle Lord Mountbatten: “In a case like yours, the man should sow his wild oats and have as many affairs as he can before settling down, but for a wife he should choose a suitable, attractive, and sweet-charactered girl before she has met anyone else she might fall for … It is disturbing for women to have experiences if they have to remain on a pedestal after marriage.”
Lord Mountbatten, like John F. Kennedy, lost his ship during World War II. His Royal Navy destroyer, HMS Kelly, was sunk by German dive bombers on May 23, 1941 during the Battle of Crete. The incident served as the basis for Noël Coward’s film* In Which We Serve*. Coward was a personal friend of Mountbatten and copied some of his speeches for the film.