The largest library in the world in terms of shelf space and holding the largest number of books is the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
From 1939 to 1944, the Librarian of Congress was Archibald MacLeish, who wrote such poems as You, Andrew Marvell.
Nitpick: Sanders was born in Henryville, Indiana.
Andrew Marvel’s poem “To His Coy Mistress” uses the word “quaint” as a pun on “cunt.”
Robert Bork fired Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, at Richard Nixon’s request, after Attorney General Elliott Richardson had refused to do so. This firing is sometimes called “The Saturday Night Massacre.”
John Travolta’s mother Helen and sister Ann both appeared in minor roles in Saturday Night Fever (1977). Travolta’s sister is the pizzeria waitress who serves him the pizza slices, and his mother is the woman he sells the can of paint to early in the film.
Another of John Travolta’s sisters, Ellen, appeared in Grease as a waitress in the malt shop.
Ellen Travolta played Scott Baio’s mother on three different series: Happy Days, Joanie Loves Chachi, and Charles in Charge.
James Doohan, who played engineer Montgomery Scott om “Star Trek,” lost several fingers while fighting on D-Day with the Canadian Army.
Robert Montgomery starred in The Lady in the Lake but was shown on screen for less than two minutes total. The film – a Phillip Marlowe mystery – was shot (by Montgomery, who directed) entirely from the point of view of Marlowe, so his face was only shown when he looked into a reflective surface.
Nitpick: Just his right middle finger (visible in several ST episodes, despite his efforts to conceal it).
The Lady of the Lake appears in several Arthurian legends, and in various tales gives Arthur his sword Excalibur, enchants Merlin, or raises Lancelot after the death of his father. Various writers and copyists conflated her with, or gave her the name, Nimue, Viviane, Viviana, Vivienne, Elaine, Niniane, Nivian, Nyneve, Nimueh and other variations.
The name Excalibur comes from the Welsh Caledfwlch (yeah, I know, someone really ought to heliport them some vowels) which roughly means “Battle breach”, as in the sword that creates them. It could also be a callback to Caladbolg, a famous sword of Celtic myth, which itself probably was a shout out to the Gae Bolg, Cuchulainn’s spear.
Excalibur was one of three Sikorsky VS-44 flying boats operated in the 1940’s by American Export Airlines, the air division of shipping’s American Export Lines. Along with Exeter and Excambian, they were named after three the company’s “Four Aces” ships. AEA operated from NYC to Foyne, Ireland, where a local chef named Joseph Sheridan invented Irish Coffee to refresh the newly-arrived transatlantic passengers from both AEA and Pan Am. Only *Excambian *survives from the AEA fleet, and is on display at the New England Air Museum at Briadley International Airport in Hartford.
The starship USS Excalibur is badly damaged, and its entire crew slain, by the malfunctioning M5 in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode “The Ultimate Computer.”
The first digital computer is widely thought to have been ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Calculator), based on 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighting 50 tons. It was built during World War II at the University of Pennsylvania.
When the digitized characters of the pioneering partly-computer-generated 1982 movie Tron wander through “an old part of the grid,” they see a vacuum tube walking by.
In Graham Greene’s “Our Man in Havana”, a vacuum cleaner salesman is recruited to work for the MI5 or maybe 6.
MI5, or Her Majesty’s Security Service, is roughly the equivalent of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. It is responsible for domestic security and counterterrorism. Agents of “Five,” as it’s known among the Whitehall elite, are featured in the British TV series Spooks, renamed MI5 for U.S. broadcast. MI5 was very successful in combating German espionage in both world wars, but had several embarrassing failures when it went up against Soviet and Eastern Bloc spies during the Cold War.
Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby was a highly decorated agent for the British MI6 who was later discovered to be a double agent responsible for passing a great deal of information to the Soviets.
Kim is the most common family name in Korea - 21.6% of all Koreans have it. Half of all Koreans are named either Kim, Pak (Park), Lee, or Choi. The 2000 South Korean census listed 348 separate Kim lineages.
[del]Harold Russell, who won an Oscar for playing a sailor who had lost both hands during World War II, won two Oscars for his performance – the Best Supporting Actor award, plus a special honorary Oscar for inspiring his fellow veterans (the Academy’s Board of Governors had assumed that Russell, who had actually lost his hands when an explosive device blew up while he was making a training film, had little chance of winning a regular Oscar).[/del]
Chan Ho Park, a relief pitcher currently a member of the New York Yankees, was the first native of South Korea to appear in a Major League Baseball game when he took the mound for the Los Angeles Dodgers on April 8, 1994.