The hit musical The Book of Mormon was written by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who also co-wrote the music with Robert Lopez, best known for scoring Avenue Q and Frozen.
Lisa Fischer has brought fresh life to the Rolling Stones.
Accounts vary, but the Apple Lisa personal computer, released in 1983, was either named after Apple chief Steve Jobs’s daughter or was an acronym variously said in-house to stand for “Local Integrated System Architecture,” “Lisa: Invented Stupid Acronym” or “Let’s Invent Some Acronym.”
Armas “Mike” Markkula, employee #3 at Apple Computing, became its second CEO from 1981-1983. Earlier, by 1974, Markkula had made his millions on stock options he acquired as a marketing manager for Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel and retired at the young age of 32. He was lured out of retirement by Steve Jobs, who convinced him of the market for the Apple II and personal computers in general.
The Fairchild C-119 was an American military transport aircraft designed to carry cargo, personnel, litter patients, and mechanized equipment, and to drop cargo and troops by parachute. Due to it’s uncommon twin-boom design, it was commonly known as the “Flying Boxcar.”
In 1485, Leonardo da Vinci designed a parachute. Finally, 515 years later, this parachute was finally built, following da Vinci’s detailed design exactly, Adrian Nicholas dropped from a height of 3 kilometers, suspended from da Vinci’s parachute. It worked!
That link is copyright-blocked in the US. These 2 links show it:
Very cool!
In play:
The word parachute literally means an aeronautic device “against a fall”.
The first recorded public parachute jump was by Louis-Sébastien Lenormand off of the tower of the observatory in Montpellier, in southern France, on 26 December 1783.
Lenormand is also credited with coining the term parachute, from the Latin prefix para meaning “against”, an imperative form of parare = to avoid, avert, defend, resist, guard, shield or shroud, from paro = to parry, and the French word chute for “fall”.
The Caterpillar Club is an informal association of people who have successfully used a parachute to bail out of a disabled aircraft. After authentication by the parachute maker, applicants receive a membership certificate and a distinctive lapel pin. The name refers to silkworms, which produced the usual material for parachutes before the invention of Nylon.
Nitpick: that video shows a 2008 demonstration of the da Vinci parachute. The famous Adrian Nicholas who first descended with a de Vinci parachute in 2000 died in 2005. 
But I’m happy to see that some videos I can watch are blocked in the U.S. 
Usually it’s the vice versa.
In play: During World War II, trans-Pacific trade was at a standstill so silk was unavailable, and production of the newly-invented nylon was all needed for parachutes, so American women were reduced to applying gravy juice to their legs to mimic the apperarance of nylon stocking seams!
Silk is a brand of dairy-substitute products (including soy milk, soy yogurt, almond milk, almond yogurt, and others). In July of 2016 it was announced that the French company Danone would purchase WhiteWave Foods, the manufacturers of Silk products, for $10.4 billion.
When Raquel Welch was 76 years old (as she was in July 2016), she was still hotter than 99.9% of 20-year olds! :eek:
When Raquel Welch was growing up she wanted to be a dancer, but her dance teacher discouraged her and told her that she — and get this — that she did not have the right figure(!).
On the Mary Tyler Moore show, Mary was once updating canned obituaries at home one evening. She and Rhoda had some wine and started doing up fake obituaries.
The one they did for Raquel Welch indicated that she had died in a boating accident, “but not from drowning”, a suggestion that Ms Welch’s … anatomy … had acted as a natural life preserver.
Twentieth-Century Fox thought ‘Raquel’ was hard to pronounce or remember and wanted Ms. Welch to change her name to Debbie. The bombshell refused.
The curvaceous American actress Raquel Welch was even mentioned in a 1970 Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketch: Monty Python Sketch: "Wishes" - YouTube
Curvaceous, indeed. According to a few websites, 37-24-36, and 37C are the measurements of Raquel Welch. That’s probably not counting later age drooping and sagging.
Hubba hubba.
In The Shawshank Redemption (1994), the three posters hanging on the wall of prisoner Andy Dufresne’s wall were, in turn, Rita Hayworth (I think this was the poster), Marilyn Monroe (I think this was the poster), and Raquel Welch (I think this was the poster).
What a coincidence. I just re-read Stephen King’s Rita Hayward and the Shawshank Redemption. And I noticed an error in it:
In the beginning, Red writes that he has been in the prison for 40-odd years, having been sentenced for murder when he was twenty. However, when he gets paroled, it’s after 38 years and he’s 58.
Anyway, casting Morgan Freeman as the middle-aged red-haired Irishman Red was not an error. It made the movie.
Andy and Red meet again in Zihuatenejo, Mexico, now a tourist town not far from Acapulco and its famous cliff divers. The area is now the third most-visited area in Mexico, after Cancún and Puerto Vallarta, and the most popular for sports fishermen, even more so than Cabo San Lucas.
The Body, the “fall from innocence” novella in Stephen King’s Different Seasons, was made into the movie Stand by Me, directed by Rob Reiner, and starring Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O’Connell. Both Stand By Me and especially The Shawshank Redemption, are absolutely brilliant, highly recommended movies.
John “Ace” Merrill appeared as an antagonist is both “The Body” (played by Kieffer Sutherland in the movie version) and in “Needful Things”. In the books, Ace spent four years in Shawshank and spent all of his free life in Castle Rock. His number one henchman was Richard “Eyeball” Chambers.