Gregory Peck won the 1962 Academy Award with his fifth nomination, playing Atticus Finch in al To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus Finch was named the greatest film hero of the past 100 years by the American Film Institute.
Tim Federle wrote the novelty cocktail books Tequila Mockingbird: Cocktails with a Literary Twist, Hickory Daiquiri Dock: Cocktails with a Nursery Rhyme Twist, and Gone with the Gin: Cocktails with a Hollywood Twist, as well as the novel Better Nate Than Ever.
John Cleese played, among other roles, a Scots-accented wizard named Tim in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Film lore has it that Cleese’s character actually had a much longer, more complicated name in the script, but that when Cleese blanked on the name in closeup, saying, “There are those who call me… Tim?”, the rest of the cast liked it so much they kept it.
That character is best known as Tim the Enchanter. In EverQuest, an Enchanter is a caster class that has few hit points per level and can wear only the lightest forms of armor, Enchanters are crowd control experts and are the most proficient class at Charming, Stunning, and Mesmerizing enemies. They have the ability to Memory Blur an opponent (causing them to forget they had been attacked) or Pacify an opponent (making them oblivious to antagonists in the area, but which has a small chance of backfiring), both of which may be extremely useful in avoiding unwanted skirmishes.
BARF, the San Francisco Bay Area Riders Forum, is a motorcyclist community. A user named Enchanter is one of the mods there.
Francisco I. Madero is considered one of the more heroic Mexican presidents. Madero was assassinated in a 1913 right-wing coup, engineered by US Ambassador Henry Wilson and his successor, Victoriano Huerta.
The Hindustan Ambassador was an automobile manufactured in India. It was in production from 1958 to 2014 with few improvements and changes over its production lifetime. It was based on the Morris Oxford series III model, first made by Morris Motors Limited in the United Kingdom from 1956 to 1959.
The starship USS Enterprise, NCC-1701-C, which preceded Jean-Luc Picard’s Galaxy-class USS Enterprise, NCC-1701-D, was of the Ambassador class. It appeared in only a single Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, “Yesterday’s Enterprise.”
Vasyl Vasylovych Durdynets, who celebrated his 80th birthday yesterday, served for 29 days as prime minister of Ukraine in 1997.
In 1957-58, the Boston Bruins “Uke Line” became the first in NHL history to have all three participants reach the 20 goal mark. Vic Stasiuk, Bronco Horvath, and Johnny “Chief” Bucyk got the nickname from their shared Ukrainian-Canadian ancestry.
The Boston Bruins of the National Hockey League (NHL have been in existence since 1924, and they are the league’s third-oldest team overall and the oldest in the United States. And native New Englanders pronounce the team name with one syllable: BROONS.
The National Security Agency is based in Ft. Meade, Md., named after the victor of Gettysburg, Maj. Gen. George Gordon Meade. Meade was born in Cadiz, Spain to expatriate American parents.
Gordon Waller of “Peter and Gordon” fame originated the role of Pharaoh in the original 1971 West End production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and appeared on the first cast LP of the show. -
The cast of the sci-fi movie Contact included Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, William Fichtner, David Morse, Jena Malone, Larry King, Geraldo Rivera, Jay Leno, Dan Gifford, Bernard Shaw, Neil Armstrong, President Clinton, Adolf Hitler, Martin Luther King jr, Douglas MacArthur, President Nixon, and President FDR. Peter Jackson worked on the visual effects. Contact was released in 1997. Anthony Lane, a film critic for the New Yorker, once began reviewing Contact and noted it “v. gloomy,” “odd noir look for sci-fi,” “creepy shadows in outdoor scene,” and such, before realizing he had forgotten to take off his sunglasses.
Carl sagan, who wrote the novel “Contact” that later became the movie of the same name, once sued the Apple Corporation. In 1994, Apple chose the internal codename “Carl Sagan” for its PowerMac 7100. Though it was meant as an homage to Carl, they also used the codenames “Piltdown Man” and “Cold Fusion” for the Power Mac 6100 and 8100, respectively. When Carl found out that he was being put alongside scientific hoaxes, he sued Apple. Though Apple won the suit, the codename was changed to BHA (Butt Head Astronomer) … which prompted yet another lawsuit! Apple won again, but their lawyers demanded the engineers change the codename one more time, which they did. The PowerMac 7100 was known by its final codename LAW, which stood for “Lawyers Are Wimps.”
The lander portion of the Mars Pathfinder probe, which landed on the red planet in 1997, was later named Carl Sagan Memorial Station.
The Google Lunar X Prize, for the first private firm to get a spacecraft to the Moon and travel 500 meters there (and it may happen within the year) includes a $1 million bonus for reaching Tranquility Base. The landing site of Apollo 11’s Lunar Module was referred to only as Eagle (the LM’s official nickname) in simulations, Neil Armstrong having confided his choice of name only to CapCom Charlie Duke so that he would not be surprised at the radio call announcing the landing. It is listed on lunar maps as Statio Tranquillitatis, conforming to the standard use of Latin names for lunar place names.
On September 9, 2002, Aldrin was lured to a Beverly Hills hotel on the pretext of being interviewed for a Japanese children’s television show on the subject of space. When he arrived, Apollo conspiracy proponent Bart Sibrel accosted him with a film crew and demanded he swear on a Bible that the Moon landings were not faked, insisting that Aldrin and others had lied about walking on the Moon. After a brief confrontation, in which Sibrel called him “a coward and a liar”, Aldrin punched Sibrel in the jaw, which was caught on camera by Sibrel’s film crew. The police determined that Aldrin was provoked and no charges were filed. Aldrin dedicates a chapter to this incident in his autobiography Magnificent Desolation.
At the Melbourne (FL) Air Show earlier this year, Buzz Aldrin got a flight with the USAF Thunderbirds over Cape Canaveral. When he got out of the F-16, he did not address the crowd, but did open his flight suit to reveal a T-shirt reading “GET YOUR ASSES TO MARS”.
Buzz Aldrin’s mother was named Marian Moon. Unfortunately, she committed suicide in 1967, the year before Aldrin walked on the moon.