The song Bohemian Rhapsody was a composition on which Freddie Mercury had been working for years (possibly as far back as the late 1960s), before finally being recorded by Queen in August and September of 1975. Recording of the song took the band three weeks, with some portions of the “operatic” middle section of the song requiring as many as 180 overdubs (Brian May has shown the magnetic tape of that section, and the magnetic media is nearly gone from the tape, due to all of the overdubs).
Conversely, the well-known promotional video which the band made for the song was recorded in just four hours, and edited in only five hours.
“Les goddams” is an obsolete ethnic slur historically used by the French to refer to the English, based it is said on their frequent expletives. The name originated during the Hundred Years War between England and France, when English soldiers were notorious among the French for their frequent use of profanity and in particular the interjection “God damn”.
Samuel F.B. Morse, a noted painter as well as the inventor of his famous code, created a portrait of the American Revolutionary War hero the Marquis de Lafayette while the French aristocrat was visiting the U.S. in 1825.
Morse was the name of a Saskatchewan electoral riding for over 80 years, created for the 1912 provincial election and abolished prior to the 1995 election. It was the riding of Premier Ross Thatcher from 1960 to 1971, the year of his defeat in a general election, and his sudden death.
Balnagown Castle in the Highlands of Scotland is the ancestral home of the Chiefs of Clan Ross. In 1978 it was bought by Egyptian-born businessman Mohamed Al-Fayed, owner of Harrods department store.
Warren Beatty and Julie Christie played sweethearts in the Oscar-winning supernatural love story Heaven Can Wait. They had earlier been lovers in real life, and although still on good terms had broken up by the time the 1978 movie was made.
Warren Beatty, Shirley MacLaine’s brother, is at the top of the list of possible subjects of Carly Simon’s song “You’re So Vain”, about a former lover (or perhaps a composite), although she has never publicly stated so.
A domestic warren is an artificial, enclosed establishment of animal husbandry dedicated to the raising of rabbits for meat and fur. Ultimately, the term warren was generalized to include wild burrows.
Earl Warren (1891–1974) served as the 14th Chief Justice of the United States from 1953 till 1969. During his tenure, Warren wrote the majority opinions in landmark cases such as Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, Reynolds v. Sims, and Miranda v. Arizona. Warren also chaired the Warren Commission, a presidential commission that investigated the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The failed attempt between 1788 and 1795 to impeach Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of Bengal in the Parliament of Great Britain, has been described as probably the most famous and longest political trial in Britain. The impeachment dragged on for over 7 years partly due to its not sitting continuously and due to the need of witnesses sailing back and forth from Bengal; for many spectators the trial resembled a social event. Finally, Hastings was found overwhelmingly not guilty of the corruption charges.
Vice-President Butt presided over the impeachment trial of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase. Burr closely followed precedents from the Hastings impeachment trial in the House of Lords, right down to a red velvet table cloth on his desk during the trial.
The advertising slogan “Got Milk?” was initially developed by the Goodby Silverstein & Partners agency, for an ad campaign they created in the early 1990s for the California Milk Processor Board (the slogan was later licensed to other milk-production organizations).
The slogan was first used in the now-famous “Aaron Burr” ad, from 1993, in which a history buff, obsessed with the Alexander Hamilton / Aaron Burr duel, is unable to successfully answer a radio call-in trivia contest with the answer “Aaron Burr,” because his mouth is full of a peanut-butter sandwich, and he’s out of milk to wash it down. The ad was directed by Michael Bay, then recently out of film school.
In 2015, the producers of the musical Hamilton created an homage to this ad, with Leslie Odom Jr. (who originated the Burr role in the musical) playing the history buff.
Hamilton creator and star Miranda received an honorary degree in 2009 from Yeshiva University in Washington Heights, Manhattan, becoming the youngest person to receive an honorary degree from that university. Ed Koch, former mayor of New York City, presented Miranda with the degree.[
He received the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters in 2015 from his alma mater, Wesleyan University, and gave their commencement address. In May 2016, he received an honorary Doctorate of the Arts from the University of Pennsylvania and gave the commencement speech.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has never awarded an honorary degree. MIT’s meritocratic founder, William Barton Rogers, regarded the practice of giving honorary degrees as “literary almsgiving … of spurious merit and noisy popularity.” When Rogers previously worked at the University of Virginia, he was similarly persuasive, and UVa has also practiced that policy ever since.
Barton Fink is a 1991 American period film written, produced, directed and edited by the Coen brothers. Set in 1941, it stars John Turturro in the title role as a young New York City playwright who is hired to write scripts for a film studio in Hollywood. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1991 and won the Palme d’Or, as well as awards for Best Director and Best Actor.
Yeshiva University in New York City lost over $100 million from its endowment as a result of the Madoff investment scam. However, their losses go much, much higher than that; in an attempt to recoup they took more investment risks (including selling safe US bonds and replacing them with hedge funds) which resulted in losses leading them to tap into their principal. They had total losses of $1.3 billion by 2014. The school’s US News and World Report ranking dropped from a high of 45th in 2012 to a low of 94th in 2018. A sexual abuse lawsuit filed by 34 victims (which was dismissed because of the statute of limitations) was another factor in the declining rankings.
Joe Haldeman, the acclaimed American science fiction author (The Forever War, Tool of the Trade, All My Sins Remembered, The Accidental Time Machine and others), teaches creative writing at MIT. He has a favorite writing exercise he gives his students. He writes down typical science fiction tropes on separate slips of paper, all different, two per student and then two extra, and puts them in a hat. Each student draws two, Haldeman takes the two that are left, and each must then, by the end of the semester, write a short story incorporating those two tropes.
Ninja’d! ETA: MIT is technically an institute, not a university.
