Of the many memorable scenes in Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin, the leading candidate may be the baby carriage rolling down the long Odessa Steps, the ceremonial entrance into the city from its harbor, as the citizens trying to escape the Cossack troops and support the mutiny head toward the ship. At the top of the stairs is the Duke de Richelieu Monument, depicting Odessa’s first Mayor.
During the filming of Rocky,inventor/operator Garrett Brown’s new Steadicam was used to accomplish smooth photography while running alongside Rocky during the film’s Philadelphia street jogging/training sequences and the iconic scene of Rocky running up the Art Museum’s flight of stairs, now colloquially known as the Rocky Steps.
With the 2018 release of Creed II, the Rocky series now claims a total of 8 movies. The original film was released in 1976; subsequent films were released in 1979, 1982, 1985, 1990, 2006, 2015, and 2018. The total budget for all 8 movies is estimated at 204 million dollars; thus far, the total box-office haul is 1.712 billion dollars.
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera has played to over 140 million people in 35 countries in 166 cities around the world with an estimated gross of $6 billion That box office revenue is higher than any film or stage play in history, including Gone with the Wind, Titanic, ET, Star Wars and Avatar.
American actor Michael Ensign played both the sniffy hotel manager in *Ghostbusters *and the doomed billionaire Benjamin Guggenheim in Titanic.
The Hugo Boss Prize is awarded every other year to an artist (or group of artists) working in any medium, anywhere in the world. Since its establishment in 1996, it has distinguished itself from other art awards (e.g. the Turner Prize) because it has no restrictions on nationality or age. The prize is administered by the **Guggenheim **Museum and sponsored by the Hugo Boss clothing company, which since 1995 has been sponsoring various exhibitions and activities at the museum. It carries with it a cash award of US$100,000 and a tetrahedral trophy.
In geometry, the Platonic solids are a set of five regular, convex polyhedrons. Each of the five is composed of congruent, regular polygonal faces, with the same number of faces meeting at each vertex.
They are known as the Platonic solids because the Greek philosopher Plato wrote about them, and believed them to be connected to the classical elements.
The five Platonic solids are the tetrahedron, the cube, the octahedron, the dodecahedron, and the icosahedron. Players of Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games recognize these as (respectively) the shapes of a four-sided die, a six-sided die, an eight-sided die, a twelve-sided die, and a twenty-sided die.
Classical elements typically refer to the concepts in ancient Greece of earth, water, air, fire, and aether, which were proposed to explain the nature and complexity of all matter in terms of simpler substances. Ancient cultures in Babylonia, Japan, Tibet, and India had similar lists.
The Michelson–Morley experiment was performed between April and July 1887 by Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley at what is now Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and published in November of the same year. It compared the speed of light in perpendicular directions, in an attempt to detect the relative motion of matter through the stationary luminiferous aether (“aether wind”). The result was negative, in that Michelson and Morley found no significant difference between the speed of light in the direction of movement through the presumed aether, and the speed at right angles. This result is generally considered to be the first strong evidence against the then-prevalent aether theory, and initiated a line of research that eventually led to special relativity, which rules out a stationary aether.
The Ether Dome is a surgical operating amphitheater in the Bulfinch Building at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. It served as the hospital’s operating room from its opening in 1821 until 1867. It was the site of the first public demonstration of the use of inhaled ether as a surgical anesthetic on October 16, 1846.
The Astrodome in Houston, Texas, was the world’s first multi-purpose domed sports stadium. The Astrodome opened in 1965, and originally had a natural grass playing surface. The grass soon died due to lack of sunlight, and in 1966, the stadium became the first sports stadium with an artificial grass surface, which was named AstroTurf.
The Houston Astros, who entered the National League as the Colt .45s in 1962, changed their name to the Astros in 1965. They won the National League pennant in 2005 before losing in the World Series to the Chicago White Sox. In 2013, the Astros moved from the National League to the American League. When they won the American League pennant in 2017, they became the first franchise in Major League baseball history to win a pennant in each league. They also won their first World Series in 2017, defeating the Dodgers 4 games to 3.
Astro, voiced by Don Messick in the TV series The Jetsons, was the family dog of the Jetson family. Messick would usually give Astro a speech pattern involving replacing the first letter of any word with an R, such as “I love you, George” becoming “I ruv roo, Reorge”. Astro is similar to Scooby-Doo in the cartoon Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!; who was also voiced by Messick.
And Quiet Flows the Don is a major four volume Russian novel about the effect of WWI and the Soviet Revolution on the Don Cossacks, who take their name from the Don River which flows to the Black Sea.
The author, Mikhail Sholokov, won the Nobel Prize for literature, but consistently faced allegations of plagiarism. (Russian literature is never free from drama.)
Three separate studies have all concluded that Sholokhov himself wrote And Quiet Flows the Don. The writer had close ties to the Soviet establishment, and once accompanied Premier Nikita Khrushchev on a trip to Europe and the United States. He was twice awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor, and later became vice president of the Union of Soviet Writers.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez was probably the only winner of the Nobel Prize for literature to be given a black eye by a future winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Mario Vargas Llosa. There was much speculation on Vargas Llosa’s motivations being related to political differences between the two writers (Garcia Marquez had strong Socialist sympathies while Vargas Llosa was a right-winger) or personal, connected to a possible relationship between Garcia Marquez and Patricia, Vargas Llosa’s second wife.
In 2014, when Garcia Marquez died, Vargas Llosa said, when asked by a journalist about the incident, “There’s a pact between Garcia Marquez and myself" (not to talk about it). “He respected it until his death, and I will do the same. Let’s leave it to our biographers, if we deserve them, to investigate that issue.”
Former NFL running backs OJ Simpson and Marcus Allen went to college at USC, the University of Southern California. And Marcus Allen definitely had an affair with Simpson’s wife, Nicole Brown Simpson.
The given name Nicole is of Greek origin and means “victory of the people”. It has evolved into a French feminine derivative of the masculine given name Nicolas.
St. Nicholas of Myra, in what is now Turkey, is one of the most popular minor saints recognized by both the Eastern and Western churches. In many countries, children receive gifts on December 6, St. Nicholas Day. His reputation for generosity and kindness led to legends of miracles that he performed for the poor and unhappy. Reportedly, he restored to life three children who had been chopped up by a butcher and put in a tub of brine.
Gore Vidal’s 1968 novel Myra Breckinridge deals with, among other topics, feminism, transsexuality, American expressions of machismo and patriarchy, and deviant sexual practices, as filtered through an aggressively camp sensibility. It was also the first instance of a novel in which the main character undergoes a clinical sex-change (the protagonist was originally Myron, and reverts to that identity. Vidal first contemplated writing Myra Breckinridge as a sketch for the risqué revue* Oh! Calcutta!* but quickly decided to develop the story into a novel