British actor Daniel Radcliffe, star of the Harry Potter movies, admitted a few years ago to having a drinking problem and said he now could not remember filming some scenes due to being severely intoxicated at the time. He has reportedly been clean and sober since August 2010.
There are eight films in the Harry Potter movie series. Six of them rank in the 50 highest-grossing films of all time, with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, the highest-grossing film in the series and one of 31 films to gross over $1 billion, ranking at number eight.
Harry is an English nickname for “Henry”.
“Henry” is tied with “Edward” as the most popular name for kings of England/Great Britain/the U.K., with eight apiece.
However, it is unlikely that any of us Dopers will ever live to see a King Edward, and only a chance of a King Henry if there is a Ralph-like catastrophe.
“Nickname” — now there’s a word we use regularly. But where does it come from? Borrowing from Wiki, … The compound word ekename, literally meaning “additional name”, was attested as early as 1303. This word was derived from the Old English phrase eaca “an increase”, related to eacian “to increase”. By the 15th century, the misdivision of the syllables of the phrase “an ekename” led to its rephrasing as “a nekename”. Though the spelling has changed, the pronunciation and meaning of the word have remained relatively stable ever since.
Jamaican reggae artist Eek-A-Mouse was born Ripton Joseph Hylton. One of the first “singjays”, he adopted his stage name in 1979, taking the name of a racehorse he always bet on; it was a nickname his friends had used for some time.
Upset was notable as the only racehorse to have ever defeated Man o’ War. Man o’ War, who won 20 of his 21 starts, lost to Upset in the Sanford Memorial at Saratoga Race Course on August 13, 1919.
While it is widely believed that the term “upset”, referring to a surprising loss, originated with this horse, that is not the case. The use of the word in horse racing dates to at least 1877, and the meaning “to overturn” or “overthrow” is probably even older.
Although Benedict Arnold played a key role in the American victory at the 1777 Battle of Saratoga, N.Y., he is not mentioned by name on any of the battlefield monuments due to his later betrayal of the patriot cause.
Tom Arnold played Arnold Shep “Arnie” Thomas ion the original Roseanne show.Introduced as a relative stranger to both Roseanne and Jackie, although this was later retconned, and he was subsequently written as having gone to high school with them…
The most frequently anthologized poem of Victorian author Matthew Arnold is “Dover Beach”, and its last stanza is the most often quoted:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Many allusions to this poem appear in literature and popular culture, as in poems (for example, by William Butler Yeats) or in novels (Fahrenheit 451, Catch-22) or in film; Kevin Kline’s character, Cal Gold, in the film The Anniversary Party recites part of “Dover Beach” as a toast. The Bangles have a song “Dover Beach”, from the album All Over the Place, with lyrics by Susanna Hoffs and Vicki Peterson.
The poem has also shown its influence in the US Supreme Court: Justice William Rehnquist, in his concurring opinion in Northern Pipeline Co. v. Marathon Pipe Line Co. (1982), quoted the poem’s final lines, calling judicial decisions regarding Congress’s power to create legislative courts “landmarks on a judicial ‘darkling plain’ where ignorant armies have clashed by night.”
In 1989, The Bangles reached number one in the US with Eternal Flame. It was their second number one song (after their 1986 hit, Walk Like an Egyptian), and The Bangles became the third all-female group to score multiple number-ones in the United States, after the Supremes (twelve) and the Shirelles (two).
“Baubles, Bangles & Beads” is a popular song from the 1953 musical Kismet, credited to Robert Wright and George Forrest. Like all the music in that show, the melody was based on works by Alexander Borodin, in this case the second theme of the second movement of his String Quartet in D. The best-remembered Borodin melody from “Kismet” may be “Stranger in Paradise”, taken from the Polovtsian Dances in the opera Prince Igor.
Strangers in the Night was recorded and released in 1966 by Frank Sinatra. The single reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, the Easy Listening chart, and the UK Singles Chart. It was the title song for Sinatra’s 1966 album Strangers in the Night, which became his most commercially successful album.
Sinatra’s recording won him the Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance and the Grammy Award for Record of the Year at the Grammy Awards of 1967.
The Stranger (1977) is Billy Joel’s breakout album. It remains his best-selling non-compilation album to date,
“One Tin Soldier,” a 1960s counterculture era anti-war song written by Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter, was a hit in the U.S. for Coven, after the version was used in the film Billy Jack.
The Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young song “Ohio”, about the Kent State shootings, starts “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming / We’re finally on our own”. The National Guard troops were actually controlled by Governor James Rhodes.
Ohio Governor Jim Rhodes lost the nomination for the U.S. Senate in the Republican primary just days after the Kent State shootings.
Although he came one pick short of being the 1971 NFL Draft’s “Mr. Irrelevant”, the next-to-last pick in the 17th (!) round was Kent State Golden Flashes fullback Don Nottingham, “The Human Bowling Ball”, who went on to a pretty good career with the Baltimore Colts and Miami Dolphins. One of his teammates at Kent State was Nick Saban, son of peripatetic head coach Lou Saban.
In British slang, the verb “to nick” can mean to steal something; if a person gets nicked, it means s/he is arrested by the police.
Another British slang term is ‘bog roll’, which means a roll of toilet paper.
Brian got arrested by the Romans in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian in language that any contemporary British police officer would recognize: Monty Python (Life of Brian)- You're nicked! - YouTube