In Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a gun-toting General “Bat” Guano stops Group Captain Mandrake from reaching a pay phone with some memorable dialogue:
The mandrake root often grows into a shape similar to a human body, with four limbs and a trunk, which led to John Donne including it the impossible thing in the opening stanza of his Song (“Go and Catch a Falling Star”): “Get with child a mandrake root.”
One of the most frequently quoted lines from John Donne is “No man is an island”. The line is often thought to come from a poem, but while it is poetic, it comes from his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, a 1624 prose work of meditations and prayers. The entire sentence is “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”
In the 2004 Pixar superhero adventure The Incredibles, the evil supervillain’s lair is concealed on Nomanisan Island - very likely the only John Donne punne in all of cinematic history.
Nomans Land (also mapped “No Man’s Land,” “No Mans Land,” or “No Man’s island”) is an uninhabited island 612 acres (2.48 km2) in size, located in the town of Chilmark, Dukes County, Massachusetts. It is situated about 3 miles (4.8 km) off the southwest corner of the island of Martha’s Vineyard.
The island was used by the United States Navy as a practice bombing range from 1943 to 1996. In 1998, the Navy transferred the island to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service for use as an unstaffed wildlife refuge. Due to safety risks from unexploded ordnance and its value as a wildlife habitat, the island is closed to all public use.
The island was probably named “Nomans Land” after a Martha’s Vineyard Wampanoag sachem, Tequenoman, who had jurisdiction over the island when the English came in the early 17th century: named from “TequeNoman’s Land” (figurative phrase).
Phillip R. Craig was an American mystery writer best known for his Martha’s Vineyard mysteries.
Jeffrey Archer, a British writer best known for his novels and short stories, also published three volumes of prison diaries after being convicted and sentenced in early 2001 to a four-year sentence for perjury and perverting the course of justice in an earlier libel trial.
Rapper Albert Johnson, better known by his stage name Prodigy, in addition to writing an autobiography, served time for gun possession and wrote a really good cookbook Commissary Kitchen: My Infamous Prison Cookbook.
The late chef Anthony Bourdain first came to widespread public notice with the 2000 publication of his memoir Kitchen Confidential, describing the extent of the, well, degeneracy he loved in the restaurant kitchens he had run. Damn good read, btw. I will never again order fish on Monday, and I would never order steak well-done anyway.
The practice of ‘fasting’ (not eating the meat of warm-blooded animals) has been a part of Catholicism since the first century. But when Henry VIII broke away from the Catholic Church to marry Anne Boleyn, this practice fell out of favor in England. However, the English fishing industry suffered, so when Edward VI, the son of Henry VIII, assumed the throne, ‘fast days’ were reinstated by law.
In Moby Dick, Herman Melville expounded at length on the difference between a “fast fish” and a “loose fish”. A whale which was harpooned and tied to the ship (“fast”) was the exclusive property of the ship, while a loose (wounded but unkilled) whale that did not have its ship’s marker (“waif”) attached to it was available to any crew that could make it fast. Ishmael thought that was pretty much the basic rule of life, as he took his time in explaining.
Herman Melville went to sea as a sailor several times in his youth, including service on whalers, merchant ships and a stint in the U.S. Navy aboard the frigate USS *United States *(which he later wrote about in his 1850 novel White-Jacket).
SS United States, which has been rotting at Pier 82 in Philadelphia for over 20 years, won the Blue Riband, for the fastest transatlantic crossing by a passenger liner, in both directions on her maiden voyage between Ambrose Light off New York and Bishop Rock off Cornwall, a record previously held by RMS Queen Mary. She served with United States Lines 1952-1969.
SS United States was designed for possible use as a troopship if necessary. HMY Britannia, the former Royal Yacht, was designed for possible use as a hospital ship in an emergency. Neither ship ever served in their alternative roles.
The US Navy’s first hospital ship was USS Red Rover (Let Maury come over!), a captured steamboat serving the Mississippi Squadron until the end of the American Civil War. Her medical complement included nurses from the Catholic order Sisters of the Holy Cross, the first female nurses to serve on board a Navy ship.
According to Wikipedia, The United States Navy currently operates two hospital ships, the USNS Mercy and the USNS Comfort. Each ship contains 12 operating rooms, a 1,000-bed hospital facility, digital radiological services, a medical laboratory, a pharmacy, an optometry lab, an intensive care ward, dental services, a CT scanner, a morgue, and two oxygen-producing plants.
CVS/pharmacy used to be a subsidiary of Melville Corporation, where its full name was initially Consumer Value Stores. Melville later changed its name to CVS Corporation in after selling off many of its nonpharmacy stores.
CEO Tom Ryan has said he now considers “CVS” to stand for “Convenience, Value, and Service.”
Chorionic villus sampling (CVS) is a prenatal test in which a tiny tissue sample is taken from the villi of the chorion, which forms the fetal part of the placenta. It is a diagnostic test for identifying chromosome abnormalities and other inherited disorders in a fetus.
Spoofing the Seventies fad of eating the placenta after a woman had given birth, Saturday Night Live early in its run had a fake ad for Placenta Helper.
Original SNL writer Rosie Shuster was the daughter of Canadian comedian Frank Shuster, the coursin of Superman co-creator Joe Shuster, and the first wife of SNL creator , Lorne Michaels, who she met when they were both 15.