Edith Head’s 35 Oscar nominations and 8 awards make her both the most honored costume designer and woman in Academy Award history to date.
She received a master’s degree in French from Stanford University in 1920. Her first job was as a teacher of French, Spanish and Art at the Bishop School for Girls at La Jolla, California. She got into films by answering a wanted ad as a sketch artist for Paramount. From 1938 to 1966 she held the top job as Head of Design at Paramount, contributing to over 1,000 motion pictures (supervising costumes for 47 films in 1940 alone).
The project she was most proud of was in the late 1970s when she designed a woman’s uniform for the United States Coast Guard, in response to growing number of women in the service. She received the Meritorious Public Service Award for her efforts.
The Scripps Institution of Oceanography, one of the nation’s oldest oceanographic institutes, was founded in 1903 by William Emerson Ritter, with financial support from Ella Scripps and her brother E. W. Scripps, both part of the Scripps newspaper family. In 1905 they purchased a 170-acre site in La Jolla where the Institution still stands today.
Alvin (DSV-2) is a manned deep-ocean research submersible owned by the United States Navy and operated by the Woods Hole **Oceanographic **Institution (WHOI) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Alvin discovered and documented the existence of black smokers around the Galapagos Islands and explored the wreckage of RMS Titanic.
The deep-sea submersible Alvin was lost from the deck of the U.S. Navy tender ship Lulu in October 1968 when two steel restraining cables snapped. The three crewmembers aboard managed to escape from the open hatch. Alvin sank in almost 5,000 feet of water in the Atlantic Ocean and was not recovered, after several failed attempts, until August 1969. After thorough cleaning and repairs, she was placed back in service.
The gangster Alvin “Creepy” Karpis was known for being a leader of the Barker–Karpis gang in the 1930s. Although not as well known as their contemporaries the Dillinger Gang, or the Barrow Gang, the Barker-Karpis Gang was perhaps more ruthless, not only committing bank robberies, but also extending the activities into kidnapping.
In 1933, on the same weekend as the Kansas City Massacre of 17 June 1933, they kidnapped William Hamm, a millionaire Minnesota brewer. His ransom netted them $100,000.
Karpis spent the longest time as a federal prisoner in Alcatraz Prison, serving twenty-six years.
The director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, was personally in charge of the agents who arrested Alvin Karpis in May, 1936. He was there due to an appearance before Congress in April where a Senator had criticized him for never personally arresting someone.
It was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s nominal subordinate, who called the AG at home on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, to tell him that the President, his brother, had been shot in Dallas. At that time it was not clear if President Kennedy’s wounds were mortal, but the AG told friends later that Hoover’s tone had been cold and not at all sympathetic.
The Kansas City massacre of 17 June 1933 led to the FBI significantly upgrading their equipment. In newspaper coverage, Hoover played on American sympathy to drive more funding towards the FBI.
Today, bullet marks from the incident can be seen on the facade of Kansas City’s Union Station.
Robert Swan Mueller III was the sixth Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 2001 to 2013. A Republican, he was appointed by President George W. Bush and his original ten-year term was given a two-year extension by President Barack Obama with broad bipartisan support in Congress, making him the longest-serving FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover. He is currently a Special Counsel, investigating allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, and other possible wrongdoing by the Donald J. Trump campaign and White House.
The phrase “Swan of Avon” is a nickname for William Shakespeare. It was invented by fellow writer Ben Jonson in a poem he wrote in the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays, published 7 years after Shakespeare’s death. The phrase refers to the swans on the River Avon at Stratford, where Shakespeare was born, and also to the ancient Greek belief that the souls of poets pass into swans.
It is not known whether Shakespeare and Jonson were friends; they did know each other, as Shakespeare’s theatrical company produced a number of Jonson’s plays, at least two of which Shakespeare certainly acted in.
MDMA (Molly) user Keith Thurston was recently stranded on the Lake Eola Fountain in downtown Orlando, after having stolen one of the park’s swan-decorated pedal boats, explaining to the police that “the swans don’t judge him”.
An adult male swan is called a cob while an adult female is a pen. Young swans are known as swanlings or as cygnets. A group of swans in flight is called a bevy or a wedge.
Michael Dukakis, former Governor of Massachusetts and the Democratic Party’s 1988 nominee for President, is known for picking up trash on The T light-rail line in Boston and properly disposing of it when he sees it.
One of the most recognizable constellations seen from Massachusetts is Cygnus the swan. Cygnus features the prominent Northern Cross, and also the prominent Summer Triangle.
The brightest stars in Cygnus are Deneb, Sadr, Gienah, Delta Cygni and Albireo, and these stars form the Northern Cross. The Northern Cross is larger than the Southern Cross. Deneb, the head of the Northern Cross, is also part of the Summer Triangle.
The first flight from the continental United States to Australia was flown in 1928 by Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, Charles Ulm, Harry Lyon and James Warner in a Fokker F.VIIb/3m trimotor monoplane named Southern Cross. The Sydney airport is named for Kingsford Smith.
The Fokker D.VII was considered such a formidable airplane during the latter stages of WWI that the Allies specifically required Germany to surrender all surviving D.VII’s as part of the Armistice.
In Britain and the Commonwealth countries, both Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday are commemorated formally, but are not public holidays. In recent years Armistice Day has become increasingly recognised, and many people now attend the 11:00 a.m. ceremony at the Cenotaph in London – an event organised by Royal British Legion, a British charity dedicated to perpetuating the memory of those who served in the First World War and veterans of all subsequent wars involving British and Commonwealth troops.
The Cygnus is the large, mysterious, long-thought-lost starship on which most of the action takes place in the 1979 Disney sf drama The Black Hole, starring Maximilian Schell, Robert Forster, Yvette Mimieux, Anthony Perkins and Ernest Borgnine. It was the first Disney movie to receive a PG rating.
ETA: The “troops” of the Cygnus are laser-bearing security robots.