Rosemary is a woody, perennial herb with fragrant, evergreen, needle-like leaves and white, pink, purple, or blue flowers. It native to the Mediterranean region. The Virgin Mary is said to have spread her blue cloak over a white-blossomed rosemary bush when she was resting, and the flowers turned blue. The shrub then became known as the “Rose of Mary”
The title of Ira Levin’s novel “Rosemary’s Baby” is obviously a reference to “Mary’s Baby.” One gave birth to the son of God; the other, the son of Satan.
Jesus was a Capricorn.
The planet Neptune was discovered by German astronomer Johann Galle, near Deneb Algedi (δ Capricorni) on September 23, 1846, which is appropriate as Capricornus can be seen best from Europe at 4:00am in September (although, by modern constellation boundaries established in the early 20th Century, Neptune lay within the confines of Aquarius at the time of its discovery).
On October 10, 1846, English astronomer William Lassell discovered Triton, the largest moon of Neptune.
The rings of Neptune consist primarily of five principal rings and were first discovered (as “arcs”) in 1984 in Chile by Patrice Bouchet, Reinhold Häfner and Jean Manfroid at the La Silla Observatory. They rings were then imaged by Voyager 2 in 1989.
President Lincoln was fond of addressing his Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles, as “Neptune”. During the four years of the Civil War, Welles expanded the size of the Navy by a factor of ten.
IN 1961, Clarence Earl Gideon was charged with breaking and entering when he stole money from a vending machine. At his trial, he asked the court to appoint an attorney to represent him. The court refused, saying that only applied to capital cases. After sentencing, Gideon filed a writ of habeas corpus, saying he had been convicted unjustly. The writ eventually made it up to the Supreme Court, who rules for Gideon in Gideon v. Wainwright, establishing that all defendants in felony cases can have a court appointed attorney. Gideon was retried, with an attorney this time, and was acquitted.
The earliest known reference to a vending machine is in the work of Hero of Alexandria, a first-century AD Greek engineer and mathematician. His machine accepted a coin and then dispensed holy water. When the coin was deposited, it fell upon a pan attached to a lever. The lever opened a valve which let some water flow out. The pan continued to tilt with the weight of the coin until it fell off, at which point a counterweight snapped the lever up and turned off the valve.
Hero is the friend of Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, betrothed to Claudio, who is the friend of Benedict.
The villain, Don John, makes Claudio believe Hero has been unfaithful to him and Claudio breaks off the engagement, publicly shaming Hero.
It leads to two of Beatrice’s best lines, seeking vengeance for Hero:
When Benedict asks what he can to prove his love for Beatrice, she snaps: “Kill Claudio!”
When Benedict temporises, Beatrice responds : “Oh God, that I were a man; I would kill him and eat his heart in the marketplace!”
Claudio Ranieri is an Italian football manager and former player. He was most recently the manager of English club Leicester City, taking them to their first English Premier League championship in history in 2016, but was fired in February 2017 due to the team’s poor performance.
Richard III was reburied in Leicester Cathedral in 2015 following the discovery and identification of his remains nearby. Both the Right Reverend Tim Stevens, the Bishop of Leicester, and the Most Reverend Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, officiated. The British Royal Family was represented by the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester and the Countess of Wessex. The actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who is a distant relation of the king and later portrayed him in “The Hollow Crow” television series, read a poem by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy.
Among the cast of “The Hollow Crown” (not “The Hollow Crow”) television series are actors Jeremy Irons, Tom Hiddleston, Simon Russell Beale, Clemence Poesy, Ben Whishaw and Michelle Dockery.
Robert Greene, an Elizabethan writer, critiqued a young William Shakespeare, referring to him as an “upstart Crow” who believed that “in his owne conceit is the onely Shake-scene in a country”.
Recent research has found some crow species capable of not only tool use, but also tool construction. Crows are now considered to be among the world’s most intelligent animals with an encephalization quotient equal to that of many non-human primates.
The world’s oldest stone tools have been unearthed from the shores of Lake Turkana in Kenya, and date to 3.3 million years ago. They are 700,000 years older than any tools found before, even pre-dating the earliest humans in the Homo genus.
“Ecce homo” (Latin for “Behold the Man”), is a phrase uttered by Pontius Pilate at the trial of Christ. The scene has been widely depicted in Christian art, with Christ bound and crowned with thorns. An “Ecce Homo” painting in Spain, when restored in 2012 by an elderly amateur, was said to look like a monkey and has been nicknamed “The Monkey Christ” or “Ecce Mono”, “mono” being Spanish for monkey.
Pontius Pilate has been played by, among others, Basil Rathbone in The Last Days of Pompeii, Richard Boone in The Robe, Arthur Kennedy in Barabbas, Telly Savalas in The Greatest Story Ever Told, Rod Steiger in Jesus of Nazareth, Michael Palin in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, David Bowie in The Last Temptation of Christ, and Gary Oldman in Jesus.
Michael Palin has said that one of the sources of tension behind the scenes in the Pythons is that John Cleese and Eric Idle had expensive lifestyles, including foreign travel, while Palin and Terry Jones just wanted to go down to the pub for a pint every now and then.
The US adopted the British “wine gallon”, defined in 1707 as 231 cubic inches exactly (3 × 7 × 11 in) as its basic liquid measure, from which the US wet pint is derived; and the British corn gallon ( 1⁄8 of a standard “Winchester” bushel of corn, or 268.8 cubic inches) as its dry measure, from which the US dry pint is derived.