Besides being the King of Spain, Philip II was also the King of Portugal, the King of Naples, the King of Sicily, the Duke of Milan, the lord of the Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands, and, by virtue of his marriage to Queen Mary I, the King of England and Ireland. His empire included territories on every continent then known to Europeans, including his namesake, the Philippines. The expression ‘the empire on which the sun never sets’ was coined during Philip’s reign to reflect the extent of his dominion.
There have been six monarchs in world history named Philip II:
Philip II, Emperor of Rome (238–249)
Philip II of France (1165–1223)
Philip II of Macedon (382–336 BC)
Philip II of Navarre (1293–1322)
Philip II of Portugal (1578–1621)
Philip II of Spain (1527–1598)
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, husband of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, is probably the most famous royal Philip today.
The Philippines, which is named for Philip II of Spain, has a national hero who was a former major league baseball player. Arlington “Arlie” Pond pitched for the great Baltimore Oriole teams in the mid 1890s – their top pitcher on an legendary team packed with Hall of Famers. After his career, he became a doctor, and was an army doctor during the Spanish American War, assigned to the Philippines. He remained in the Philippines until he died in 1930, when he was given a state funeral and flags were flown at half mast.
The national flag of the Philippines is the only one in the world that is supposed to be hung upside-down in wartime.
Manila was the second most devastated Allied capital of World War II. Of Allied capitals in those war years, only Warsaw suffered more. The damage done to Warsaw in World war II was unique in that after the failed uprising of August 1944, Adolf Hitler personally ordered that the entire city be razed to the ground. In contrast, over 80% of Manila was destroyed in a month-long battle from Feb. 3 to March 3, 1945 with United States troops determined to recapture it from the Japanese with urban street battles and American artillery bombardments. In the process, the beautiful city, the “Pearl of the Orient”, was laid waste, and over 100,000 Filipino civilians died in the fighting.
Tomas Claudio Boulvard in Manila was named after the only Filipino victim of the First World War.
Stephen Sondheim briefly considered turning the movie Sunset Boulevard into a musical until meeting Billy Wilder at a cocktail party, who told him that the film would be better adapted as an opera rather than a musical. Hal Prince later approached Sondheim to adapt the film as a musical with Angela Lansbury playing Norma Desmond. Sondheim declined based on Wilder’s previous advice.
John Kander and Fred Ebb were also approached by Hal Prince to write a musical of Sunset Boulevard.
The movie was finally adapted into a stage musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Charles Hampton and Don Black.
Glenn Close, who was one of the first actresses to play Norma Desmond in the stage musical Sunset Boulevard, was, early in her career, the understudy of another actress who, in the middle of a show, was unable to go on. Close told an interviewer with The New York Times years later that she still remembered putting on the actress’s wig, still damp from her sweat, to go on in the second half.
Anthony Hopkins’ big break came when he filled in on-stage as understudyfor Laurence Olivier in the National Theatre’s Dance of Death.
Anthony Hopkins won the 1991 Best Actor award for his portrayal as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. Jodie Foster won the Best Actress award for her portrayal of Clarice Starling in the same movie.
This was one of seven times that the Best Actress and Best Actor awards have come from the same film. The most recent of these was 1997, when Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt both won for their work in As Good As It Gets.
The Royal Hunt of the Sun is a 1969 movie about the Spanish Conquest of the Incan Empire. It starred Robert Shaw as Pizarro and Christopher Plummer as the Incan Emperor, Atahualpa. Although set in mountainous scenery, no Nazis were harmed in the making of the movie.
Playwright Peter Shaffer, who wrote The Royal Hunt of the Sun, is better known for his Tony Award winning plays Equus and Amadeus. His twin brother Anthony Shaffer was best known for his play Sleuth, which he adapted into an Oscar-nominated film, as well as the screenplays for the Hitchcock film Frenzy and the thriller The Wicker Man.
The Wicker Man, featuring the burning of a giant effigy, was not (consciously) the inspiration for the icon of the annual Burning Man arts and counterculture festival. It started on the summer solstice of 1986 on Baker Beach in San Francisco. Larry Harvey, Jerry James, and a few friends met and burned a 9-foot (2.7-meter) wooden man as well as a smaller wooden dog. Harvey has described his inspiration for burning these effigies as a spontaneous act of “radical self-expression”.
The first Burning Man ‘festival’ was attended by about 20 people, some of whom just happened to be on the beach when the fire was lit. In 2017, the ‘man’ was about 105 feet tall and the festival, in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, was attended by almost 70,000 people. Ticket prices for the week-long event ranged from $190.00 to $1200.00.
The battleship USS Nevada was commissioned into the United States Navy in 1916, badly damaged in the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, repaired and served during World War II (including shore bombardment duty during the 1944 D-Day landings in Normandy). Deemed obsolete, she was used as a target for the Operation Crossroads A-bomb testing after the war, and finally sunk for naval gunfire practice in 1948.
In the Delta-style “Cross Road Blues”, Robert Johnson sang about how that was where he sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for his musical talents. Eric Clapton and Cream recorded it as “Crossroads”.
President Lyndon Baines Johnson was once redirected by an officer at an Air Force base who thought he was headed the wrong way across the tarmac. The officer said, “Sir, your helicopter is over here.”
Johnson threw his arm around the officer’s shoulder and said, “Son, they’re all my helicopters.”
The dilapidated, antique Sea-King helicopters operated by the Canadian Armed Forces usually require several hours of service for each hour of flight.
They have been described as an assembly of parts flying in loose formation.
Most military aircraft do.
Seakingis a large, orange, fish-like Pokémon. It has billowing caudal and pectoral fins, all of which are white specked with black. However, its dorsal fin is pure white and rigid. It has round, dark eyes, prominent pink lips, small fangs, and a horn in the center of its forehead. Females have smaller horns than males.
Seaking is a very powerful swimmer that is found in rivers and streams. It can not only swim against a river’s current but it can travel up waterfalls. In the autumn spawning season, it travels upriver, where male Seaking, grown fattier and more vibrant in color, engage in elaborate dances to court females. Seaking uses its powerful horn to bore holes in riverbed boulders in order to shelter its Eggs from water currents. A mated pair takes turns patrolling around their new nest for roughly a month, and defends it with their lives.
“Autumn Leaves” was originally was a 1945 French song, “Les Feuilles mortes” (lThe Dead Leaves), with music by Hungarian-French composer Joseph Kosma - derived from a ballet piece of music (Rendez-vous, written for Roland Petit), itself partly borrowed from Poème d’octobre by Jules Massenet - and lyrics by French poet Jacques Prévert, and introduced in the film Les Portes de la nuit.