New York politician Grover Whalen was named for Grover Cleveland. He was best known as “Mr. New York”, after being appointed by Fiorello La Guardia as Chairman of the Mayor’s Committee on Receptions to Distinguished Guests. He became a public celebrity easily recognized by his exquisitely groomed moustache and carnation boutonniere. In this capacity, in which he served until the early 1950s, he officially welcomed everyone from Charles Lindbergh to Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd to Douglas MacArthur to New York and became master of the ticker tape parade.
In 1935, he became president of the New York World Fair Corporation and put a familiar face on the 1939 New York World’s Fair. He was on the cover of Time magazine on May 1, 1939. He is mentioned in the Harold Arlen/Yip Harburg song “Lydia the Tattooed Lady”, the Cole Porter song “Let’s Fly Away”, the Bobby Short song “Sweet Bye and Bye”, as well as in the 1933 film The Prizefighter and the Lady, starring Myrna Loy and Max Baer. Grover Whalen is also mentioned in Once in a Lifetime, a play written by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman in 1930. He is also mentioned in E.B. White’s essay “The World of Tomorrow.” Whalen titled his 1955 autobiography Mr. New York.
The Duke University Lemur Center was established in 1966 and is the world’s largest sanctuary for rare and endangered prosimian primates. Sprawled across 85 acres in Duke Forest, it houses 15 species of lemurs, lorises from India and Southeast Asia, and bushbabies from Africa.
British historic royal dukedoms which are now not held by anyone include Albany, Albemarle, Avondale, Clarence, Connaught, Cumberland, Hereford, Kendal, Ross, St. Andrews, Strathearn, Sussex, Teviotdale and, perhaps most famously, Windsor. The Duke of Windsor was the former King Edward VIII, who reigned for most of “the year of three kings,” 1936.
According to the U.S. Cattlemen’s Beef Board, the most popular breed of beef cattle in the US is the Black Angus, followed by the Charolais. The Hereford breed, which was instrumental in displacing the Longhorn as a major source of beef, now ranks third in the country.
Among many other roles, British actor Gary Oldman has played a spy (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), a terrorist (Air Force One), a crooked DEA agent (Leon: The Professional), a vampire (Bram Stoker’s Dracula), an assassin (JFK), a prime minister (Darkest Hour) and a wizard on the run (Sirius Black, in four Harry Potter movies).
Gary Oldman has played starring roles in costume dramas including Ludwig van Beethoven in Immortal Beloved and Rosencrantz in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. He also played Bob Cratchit and Marley’s Ghost in A Christmas Carol.
The Immortal Beloved (German “Unsterbliche Geliebte”) is the mysterious addressee of a love letter which composer Ludwig van Beethoven wrote on 6–7 July 1812 in Teplitz. Her identity is unknown, but the two candidates favored by most contemporary scholars are Antonie Brentano and Josephine Brunsvik. Beethoven never married or had known children, however.
Martin O’Malley, former mayor of Baltimore and governor of Maryland, and one of three major candidates for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in 2016, recently announced that he will not run again in 2020. He encouraged Beto O’Rourke, defeated in November in his bid for the U.S. Senate, to run for President instead.
Count Joseph Cornelius O’Rourke (Russian: Иосиф Корнилович Орурк (О’Рурк), or Ioseph Kornilovich O’Rourke) (1772–1849) was a Russian nobleman of Irish ancestry. He was a military leader who fought in the Napoleonic Wars and achieved the rank of lieutenant general; he is noted in present-day Serbia, where he led a combined Russian and Serb army to defeat the Turks at Varvarin in 1810.
Journalist and political satirist P.J. O’Rourke spent some of his early career as a writer (and editor-in-chief) for National Lampoon, and was co-author of the book National Lampoon’s 1964 High School Yearbook, which was one of the inspirations for the film National Lampoon’s Animal House.
Later, O’Rourke moved on to stints with a number of publications, including Rolling Stone, Playboy, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, The Weekly Standard, and The Daily Beast. He has also regularly appeared on NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, and has written several bestselling books, including Parliament of Whores.
PJ Masks is an animated children’s television series. The series is based on the Les Pyjamasques book series by Romuald Racioppo. The series debuted on the Disney Junior cable channel in the United States on September 18, 2015. In June 2016, a second season, consisting of another 52 11-minute segments began airing on January 15, 2018.
The series is about Connor, Amaya, and Greg, three 6-year-olds who attend first grade. When night falls, they become the superhero team, the PJ Masks in order to fight villains such as Romeo, Luna Girl, and Night Ninja to keep them from ruining people’s day.
Journalist and political satirist P.J. O’Rourke is generally considered a conservative. Per Wiki, in 2009, he described the Presidency of Barack Obama as “the Carter Administration in better sweaters.” However, in 2016, he endorsed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. O’Rourke stated that his endorsement included her “lies and empty promises,” adding, “She’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.”
O’Rourke was a proponent of Gonzo journalism; one of his earliest and best-regarded pieces was “How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink”, a National Lampoon article in March 1979.
Hunter S. Thompson was considered the founder of “gonzo journalism,” in which the journalist has no pretense of objectivity, and often becomes a part of the story itself.
Thompson often used the pseudonym / alter-ego Raoul Duke in his writings. Cartoonist Garry Trudeau based the “Uncle Duke” character in Doonesbury on Thompson, much to Thompson’s displeasure (though he apparently mellowed on the topic late in his life).
Before his Chakotay days, Robert Beltran played the title role in Eating Raoul, about a scheme to rob and kill swingers and sell their bodies to a dog food company.
Robert Beltran, who played the facially-tattooed Native American Cmdr. Chakotay throughout the entire run of Star Trek: Voyager, was reported to have been unhappy in the role, feeling he had little to do and disliking the technobabble the scripts called upon him and others to spout.
Kate Mulgrew was not the only actress to be cast as Captain Janeway. For the first two days of filming on the pilot episode, Genevieve Bujold, a Montreal native (like Shatner) who was best known for her film roles, played Captain Nicole Janeway, before (allegedly) quitting due to TV’s demanding work schedule.
Montreal, with a population of 1.7 million, is the second-largest city in Canada, behind Toronto. Montreal was founded on an island in the St. Lawrence River, and was named after Mount Royal, a 3-peaked hill which is now in the heart of the city. Montreal is located about 120 miles east of Ottawa, the capital of Canada, and about 40 miles north of the Québec/Vermont border.
