Since UB40’s reggae-style cover of his song “Red Red Wine” was commercially much more successful than his own recording, Neil Diamond took to performing it that way in his live concerts. For the same reason, Bob Dylan performs “All Along the Watchtower” in Jimi Hendrix’ style, not his original.
On The Big Bang Theory, it was established in The Scavenger Vortex that both Howard Woloqitz and Amy Farrah Fowler are huge Neil Diamond fans. When Howard and Bernadette had a son, he was named Michael Neil, Michael after his maternal grandfather and Neil after “Armstrong, Gamien, and Diamond.”
Neil Armstrong was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Richard Nixon, the Congressional Space Medal of Honor by President Jimmy Carter, and Armstrong and his Apollo 11 fellow astronauts Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin received a Congressional Gold Medal from President Barack Obama.
Michael Collins was Chairman of the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State from January 1922 until his assassination in August 1922.
Children’s author Beverly Cleary won the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award from the American Library Association in 1975 for “substantial and lasting contributions to children’s literature,” was U.S. nominee for the biennial international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1984. in April 2000 she was named Library of Congress Living Legend in the writers and artists category for her contributions to the cultural heritage of the United States, and she received the National Medal of Arts in 2003.
AND born April 12, 1916, she recently celebrated her 102 Birthday!
President Abraham Lincoln died of his bullet wound on April 15, 1865, and the British liner RMS Titanic sank on April 15, 1912 after hitting an iceberg.
In the US, April 15 has been Tax Day, the deadline for filing federal income tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service, since 1955, although brief extensions for holidays and weekends have been common.
The Sixteenth Amendment to the US Constitution allowed Congress to levy an income tax. The amendment was adopted on February 3, 1913.
In 1913, the top tax bracket was 7 percent on all income over $500,000, and the lowest tax bracket was 1 percent.
One of Cecil’s favorite claims by the nihilist faction of US politics is that federal income tax is unconstitutional, because the 16th Amendment was passed while Ohio’s William H. Taft was President, which he legally couldn’t have been, since a parliamentary oversight in Ohio’s 1803 statehood wasn’t corrected until 1953.
No Federal or state court to have considered claims that Ohio was not properly admitted in 1803 as a state of the Union has ever ruled in favor of those making the argument.
The Freemen on the land movement, primarily found in Canada but related to the Sovereign Citizen movementbased in the US, has similarly never had its tactics accepted as valid in any court case. The SovCits claim the highest authority is the county sheriff, and do not accept taxation as legitimate. The Freemen base their views on admiralty law.
Actor Morgan Freeman has tried for years to make a movie adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Rendezvous With Rama, but to date has been unsuccessful in finding an agreeable script and production company willing to make it.
For 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke wrote the screenplay and the novel simultaneously. The novel was clearer that the ending implied that evolution was taking place. Kubrick wanted to make the movie more nonverbal.
Morgan Hill, California, some 20 miles south of San Jose and 70 miles south of San Francisco is, according to Forbes magazine, one of the most expensive places to live in the US. It is named after Missouri businessman Hiram Morgan Hill, who settled there in the late 19th century, when it was called Morgan Hill’s Ranch. Hiram Morgan Hill died at his Elko estate in Nevada in 1913.
BMX chapion Scott Clark hails from Morgan Hill.
In British mythology, Morgan le Fay originally was an ally on Arthur, an enchantress who escorted him on the ship to the Isle of the Blessed to recover from his mortal wounds.
As the mythology developed, she gradually became an adversary of Arthur and his knights. In some versions, she is the mother of Mordred, Arthur’s last adversary.
The Morgan EV3 is Morgan Motor Company’s electric 3 spoked-wheel sports car, expected to go into production at the end of 2018.
Helen Mirren played Morgana (an alternate name for Morgan le Fay) in the 1981 Arthurian epic Excalibur. She and Nicol Williamson, who played Merlin, did not get along well at all, so the obvious hostility between their characters was not entirely “acted.”
In the late 1980s, author Paul Rudnick moved into a New York City apartment which had been the 1920s home of the actor John Barrymore. This inspired Rudnick’s play I Hate Hamlet, about a young TV star who, as he’s about to play Hamlet, is visited by the ghost of Barrymore. The play was produced on Broadway and became notorious when Nicol Williamson, the actor playing Barrymore, struck Evan Handler, his co-star, on the backside during a dueling scene. Handler walked off stage and responded later, stating, “I removed myself from the production because from the first day of rehearsals I have endured the show’s producers condoning Nicol Williamson’s persistent abusiveness to other cast members.”
The 1920 REO Speed Wagon was a light motor truck manufactured by REO Motor Car Company and was an ancestor of the pickup truck.
- REO Speed Wagon is the car, and REO is pronounced as a single word
- REO Speedwagon is the band name, and REO is spelled out individually by letter
Band founder Neal Doughty had studied in transportation history at the University of Illinois in Champaign, and the initials REO are those of its founder Ransom E. Olds.
William Kissam Vanderbilt, born 1849 in New York City and died 1920 in Paris, France, had one son who donated the Vanderbilt Cup to the sport of automobile racing, and another son who donated the Vanderbilt Trophy to the sport of contract bridge.