The Oakland A’s use a white elephant as their symbol, as the Athletics franchise always has, because of John McGraw’s claim to Connie Mack that his purchase of the Philadelphia franchise in the new American League would turn out to be a “white elephant”. Mack embraced the taunt and put white elephant logos on the team’s uniforms.
According to Buddhist tradition, when queen Maya of the Indian kingdom of Sakya was pregnant she dreamt of being handed a lotus petal by a bodhisattva riding a white elephant, a dream interpreted that she would give birth to a bodhisattva herself. After a ten month pregnancy she gave birth to Siddharta Gautama, whose father took extreme (but vain) measures to stop his son from becoming a holy man.
After he finished his run as Dennis in the TV show Dennis the Menace, actor Jay North returned as a series lead in the show Maya, about a couple of teens and their elephant (he had originated the role in a movie by that name a year earlier). The series was one of the few American TV series filmed on location in India.
George Costanza was advised by an Indian expatriate couple to never use the bathroom while he was visiting their homeland for a wedding on Seinfeld, and as far as the audience knew, he did as they suggested.
On the notorious Seinfeld episode The Contest, George Costanza admits his mother caught him masturbating to a copy of Glamour magazine.
Nuala is a faerie in the graphic novel series The Sandman by Neil Gaiman. She has the appearance of a beautiful woman until her glamour is removed, which leaves her with the appearance of a frumpy plain woman. Her glamour is later restored after she renounces it twice.
The New York Evening Graphic was a highly successful newspaper in the 1920sand published by Bernarr McFadden. It was known for its sensational stories (it was referred to as “The New York Pornographic”) and the use of “composographs,” a primitive form of cut-and-paste Photoshop, where they took photos and laid them out to show scenes they could not get an actual photo for. The paper featured Walter Winchell’s columns and was massively successful until 1932, when a combination of lack of advertising and defending against libel lawsuits force it to close.
Walter Koenig is perhaps best known for his roles as Starfleet officer Pavel Chekov in the Star Trek original series and movies, and as the evil PsiCorps operative Bester in Babylon 5. His son recently committed suicide.
Chekhov’s Gun is a principle put forward by Anton Chekhov (but used long before he put it in words), who stated that if a gun is introduced early in a story, it must go off before the end, else it should not be introduced - or, in a general case, no prop, plot point, or bit of information should be introduced, unless it will pay off in the end.
Vanya on 42nd Street (1994) was the film version of Louis Malle directing a group of actors in a rehearsal of Anton Chekov’s Uncle Vanya. They kept doing this over the course of three years in a bid to reach a deeper understanding of Chekov’s work, and as far as I know, they never performed it for real before a live audience. This film version is simply of them rehearsing, minus props or costumes.
Uncle Buck was a 1989 comedy film starring John Candy, Amy Madigan, Jean Louisa Kelly, Gaby Hoffmann, Macaulay Culkin, Jay Underwood and Laurie Metcalf. It was #1 at the box office for a month and gave rise to a short-lived TV series.
Candy bar recipes are not copyrightable or trademarked (the names are). When Hershey wanted to have a toffee bar similar to Heath’s, they created SKOR, even though the two are almost identical. Later Hershey bought Heath’s and now sells both.
Ted Heath was the name of both the top-selling bandleader in the UK in the 40’s through 60’s, and the UK Prime Minister who was succeeded by Margaret Thatcher as leader of the Tories.
For decades it was thought Margarat Mitchell had only ever written one complete novel, Gone with the Wind. (In fact, periodically claims are made that she never wrote it at all due to the lack of any other published work by her). But in the 1990s, a manuscript by Mitchell of a novel entitled Lost Laysen was discovered among a collection of letters Mitchell had given in the early 1920s to a suitor named Henry Love Angel. The manuscript had been written in two notebooks in 1916. In the 1990s, Angel’s son discovered the manuscript and sent it to the Road to Tara Museum, which authenticated the work. A special edition of Lost Laysen – a romance set in the South Pacific – was edited by Debra Freer, augmented with an account of Mitchell and Angel’s romance including a number of her letters to him and published by the Scribner imprint of Simon & Schuster in 1996.
George Mitchell of Maine, a Democrat, has served as a U.S. district court judge, U.S. senator, Senate majority leader, chairman of the Walt Disney Corp., and a diplomat. He is now the Obama Administration’s special envoy to the Middle East.
Margaret Chase Smith of Maine was the first woman to be elected to both the House and Senate, and the first to have her name placed in nomination for the presidency at a party national convention. For denouncing Joe McCarthy, he nicknamed her “Moscow Maggie”.
Joseph McCarthy flew 12 combat missions as a gunner-observer, earning the nickname of “Tail-Gunner Joe” in the course of one of these missions.] He later claimed 32 missions in order to qualify for a Distinguished Flying Cross, which he received in 1952.
In case you need more evidence of what a sad sack of shit he was, McCarthy publicized a letter of commendation he claimed had been signed by his commanding officer and countersigned by Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, then Chief of Naval Operations. However, it was revealed that McCarthy had written this letter himself, in his capacity as intelligence officer. A “war wound” that McCarthy made the subject of varying stories involving airplane crashes or antiaircraft fire was in fact received aboard ship during an initiation ceremony for sailors who cross the equator for the first time.
Sailors who have crossed the equator, and undergone their shipmates’ initiation ceremony featuring King Neptune and his court, are called “shellbacks”. Those who have not are “pollywogs”. Those who cross the equator at the International Date Line are “golden shellbacks”.
“Neptune, the Mystic” is the final movement of Gustav Holst’s musical suite ***The Planets. *** Holst didn’t write any music for Earth, nor for Pluto (which hadn’t been discovered yet, and which is no longer regarded as a planet anyway).
In his sf novel Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein has a portion of Gustav Holst’s theme “Mars, the Bringer of War” from The Planets used as the “national anthem” of Mars in a diplomatic ceremony on Earth.