“Fireball XL-5” was a 1962 TV series in Supermarionation, produced by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. Members of the genre included:
Four Feather Falls (1960)
Supercar (1961)
Fireball XL5 (1962)
Stingray (1964)
Thunderbirds (1965)
Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967)
Joe 90 (1968)
The Secret Service (1969)
“Team America: World Police” was a spoof of the Andersons’ marionette shows by Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
Harlan Fiske Stone was appointed an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court by President Calvin Coolidge and, although a Republican, named Chief Justice of the United States by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, as he was known to be generally supportive of New Deal legislation. He is the only justice ever to have occupied all nine positions of seniority on the Court over the course of his career.
The TV show Night Court’s creator Reinhold Weege has stated that Judge Harry Stone was originally envisioned as a fan of Mel Tormé, and the fact the actor Harry Anderson not only had the same first name as the character, but was also a Tormé fan was completely coincidental. Tormé appeared on Night Court six times (as himself) and Anderson was among the many people who delivered eulogies at the singer’s funeral in 1999.
Mel Torme’s publicist coined the name “The Velvet Fog” to describe his smooth style but he hated it, and sometimes referred self-deprecatingly to his “Velvet Frog” voice.
Smoky fog is called smog. An estimated 12,000 people died from it in London in December 1952, when a period of cold weather, combined with an anticyclone and windless conditions, collected airborne pollutants – mostly arising from the use of coal – to form a thick layer of smog over the city. Visibility was reduced to as little as 1 meter, and surface transport virtually ceased.
The Beatles lived in the Hotel President in Bloomsbury in the summer of 1963 after making the move from Liverpool to London. They all moved into a flat at 57 Green Street, near Hyde Park, in the Autumn of 1963, the only true home shared by all four Beatles.
USS President, a U.S. Navy sail frigate launched in April 1800, was captured by HMS Pomone and Tenedos in January 1814 and soon entered Royal Navy service as HMS President. She was broken up in March 1818, although her design inspired another HMS President just over a decade later.
There have been five ships in the British Navy named the HMS Trafalgar. The most recent was a submarine, HMS Trafalgar (S107), that was the class ship for a class of submarines that are still in active service. She was decommissioned in 2009.
The naval Battle of Trafalgar took place just off the coast of south-west Spain in the province of Cadiz. Cape Trafalgar stands between Caños de Meca and Conil on the Costa de la Luz. Lying on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean, north west of the Strait of Gibraltar, Cape Trafalgar is windy and the sea is prone to strong currents, and the coast is now popular with extreme sport fans, including surfers and kiteboarders.
Atlantropa, also referred to as Panropa, was a gigantic engineering and colonisation idea devised by the German architect Herman Sörgel in the 1920s and promoted by him until his death in 1952. Its central feature was a hydroelectric dam to be built across the Strait of Gibraltar, which would have provided enormous amounts of hydroelectricity and would have led to the lowering of the surface of the Mediterranean Sea by up to 200 metres (660 ft), opening up large new lands for settlement, for example in the Adriatic Sea. The project proposed four additional major dams as well:
On May 3, 1491, Portuguese missionaries in the Kingdom of Congo baptized King Nkuwu Nzinga with the appellation João I. Most of the Portuguese in the Congo later departed with slaves and ivory, while leaving behind priests and craftsmen. After this exodus, the King no longer professed the Catholic faith. His life ended in 1509.
The use of ivory, through most of history has been for artistic and decorative objects. One of its first practical uses came when the Chinese discovered that it would form an air-tight seal.
Mah jong tiles were traditionally made with bamboo and ivory. There was a mah jong craze in the 1920’s, leading to it appearing in a key chapter of “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” by Christie.
Bamboo is the usual material used in the manufacture of simple non-reeled fishing poles, knlown as “cane poles”. In Florida, no license is required to fish in your county of residence using a cane pole.
Although the theme song to “The Andy Griffith Show” was whistled for broadcast use, it does have lyrics:
*Well, now, take down your fishin’ pole and meet me at The Fishin’ Hole,
We may not get a bite all day, but don’t you rush away.
What a great place to rest your bones and mighty fine for skippin’ stones,
You’ll feel fresh as a lemonade, a-settin’ in the shade.
Whether it’s hot, whether it’s cool, oh what a spot for whistlin’ like a fool.
…*
The Bonanza theme song also had lyrics that included “With a gun and a rope and a hatful of hope we planted our family tree.” That’s chillingly ironic, as every woman who hooked up with Ben, Adam, Hoss and Little Joe ended up dying a very early death.
Gene Roddenberry wrote a set of lyrics to the “Star Trek” theme song that also were never broadcast, just so he could take keep half of the music royalties for himself instead of letting Alexander Courage have them. Roddenberry, a former Pan Am third officer, survived the fire and crash of the Lockheed Constellation Clipper Eclipse in Syria in 1945, in which fourteen passengers died but for the rest of whom he was instrumental in their rescue.
In the weeks preceding the premiere of A Charlie Brown Christmas, producer Lee Mendelson encountered trouble finding a lyricist for Vince Guaraldi’s instrumental opening number, and penned “Christmas Time Is Here” in “about 15 minutes” on the backside of an envelope.
Brad Paisley’s 2002 hit country song “I’m Gonna Miss Her” is about a man faced with a choice of keeping either his exasperated girlfriend or his love of fishing. The video features ESPN host Dan Patrick, TV schlockmeister Jerry Springer and Paisley’s then-girlfriend (now wife) Kimberly Williams: Brad Paisley - I'm Gonna Miss Her - YouTube
ETA: No envelope appears in the video.
The “Snail in a bottle” case which established negligence as a separate tort in English common law and Scots delict law arose when a customer in a tea shop in Paisley discovered a dead snail in a bottle of ginger beer, after she had drunk most of the contents.