A comedy routine, “Here Come de Judge”, used repeatedly on the iU]Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In* TV show, inspired the creation of a 1969 Pontiac GTO version called “The Judge.”
The year 1969 saw 4 men walk on the moon. The year 1970 saw zero.
Zero Mostel played Teyve in the Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof”, Pseudolus on stage and also in the movie of " A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum", and Max Bialystok in the original movie version of “The Producers”.
In 1970, Barry Dennem played Pontius Pilate on the album of Jesus Christ Superstar, and he played the same role in the 1971 Broadway production. In the same year, he played Mendel in Norman Jewison’s film of Fiddler on the Roof, and suggested to Jewison that he direct a film version of Superstar. Jewison did so, and Dennen played Pilate again
According to the historian Eusebius of Caesarea, Pontius Pilate killed himself on orders from Emperor Caligula in ~39 CE. A legend says that his body was rejected by several rivers and lakes and ended up in a small tarn on Mount Pilatus, overlooking Lucerne. Every Good Friday, the body is said to reemerge from the waters and wash its hands.
In the London production of Jesus Christ Superstar that I saw circa 1974, Pontius Pilate whipped Jesus with his microphone cord.
The vocalists on the original album of Jesus Christ Superstar were offered a flat payment of $2500 or a contract for 1/2 of 1% of the record’s profits for life. Murray Head, who sang Judas, was the only one who took the profit option. And became a millionaire from it.
On February 1, 1884, the first fascicle of the Oxford English Dictionary, a 352-page volume that covered words from A to Ant, was published. Six years previously, Oxford University Press agreed with publisher James Murray to proceed with the project, for which the first formal plan had originated in 1864. It took another 50 years to complete the entire dictionary.
The first applied use of what we now call a microphone was in early telephones, in reference to the component of the device that transduced sound into an electric signal. In that original application however that component was called a transmitter. When that same technology was adapted for use in radio, confusion ensued, because by that time in radio the whole transmitting machinery was already referred to as the transmitter. So radio adopted the term microphone to refer only to that component of the transmitter that transducers sound into an electric signal.
Double Ninja. Shoulda had a second cup of coffee.
Les Harvey, co-founder of the Scottish Band Stone the Crows* in late 1969, was on stage with the group at Swansea Top Rank in 1972, on a rainy day with puddles on the stage when he was electrocuted after touching a microphone that was not earth-grounded.
*A line used in Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s “Pharaoh’s Song” "Pharaoh thought “Well, stone the crows. This Joseph is a clever kid. Who’d have thought that 14 cows could mean the things he said they did?”
American Pharoah is an American Thoroughbred racehorse who won the American Triple Crown and the Breeders’ Cup Classic in 2015. In winning all four races, he became the first horse to win the “Grand Slam” of American horse racing.
The Egyptian word “Pharoah” meant “great house”. Like using the term “The White House” to refer to the President of the United States, “Great House” came to be used to refer to the ruler of ancient Egypt.
Faro, or Pharaoh, was a popular gambling game in Regency England and later in the United States.
Faro is the southernmost city in Portugal and capital of the Algarve district. In 1596, the city was sacked by English privateers led by Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. Fires damaged the city and English troops seized the library of the Bishop of Faro, which eventually became part of the collection of the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Among the looted books was the first printed book in Portugal: a Torah printed by Samuel Gacon at his workshop in Faro.
The Torah is the first five books of the Bible ans is also called the Pentateuch. The English (and Hebrew) names for the books are Genesis (Bereshit), Exodus (Shemot), Leviticus (Vayikra), Numbers (Bəmidbar), and Deuteronomy (Devarim).
A passage in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake has the following references to the first five books of the Bible:
This was often quoted to comic effect by Irish folk group The Clancy Brothers in their live performances.
NM, spelled name wrong.
The James A. Finnegan Foundation was founded in 1960. It was established to honor the memory of James A. Finnegan, Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth (1955–58), who died in office. The foundation works to provide practical training in government and politics for outstanding undergraduate students by offering a number of ten-week paid internships in executive agencies located in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania each summer.
In 1960, brothers Tom and James Monaghan purchased a pizza store named DomiNick’s. It became Domino’s Pizza.
Within eight months of opening their pizza business, James Monaghan, a postal worker, traded his half of the business to his brother in exchange for the VW Beetle they used for deliveries. It has to be one of the worst trades in the history of businesses deals.