The MIT Science Fiction Society is proud to have a library which they claim contains 90 percent of all SF ever written.
The Big Bang Theory has a running gag that Howard Wolowitz does not have a Ph.D. His response is always “I have a Maser’s in Engineering from MIT.”
Simon Helberg, who plays Howard, also played Cosmé McMoon in the Meryl Streep film Florence Foster Jenkins (2016), which earned him a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture. Hugh Grant played the untalented but unaware socialite’s husband.
On June 27, 1995, actor Hugh Grant was arrested in Los Angeles, California, in a police vice operation near Sunset Boulevard for receiving oral sex in a public place from Hollywood prostitute Divine Brown. He pleaded no contest and was fined $1,180, placed on two years’ summary probation, and was ordered to complete an AIDS education program by Robert J. Sandoval.
The arrest occurred about two weeks before the release of his first major studio film, Nine Months, which he was scheduled to promote on several American television shows. The Tonight Show with Jay Leno had him booked for the same week. In the much-watched interview, Grant did not make excuses for the incident after Leno asked him, “What the hell were you thinking?” Grant answered, “I think you know in life what’s a good thing to do and what’s a bad thing, and I did a bad thing. And there you have it.”
Cary Grant, whose career in movies spanned from 1932 till 1966, was considered one of Hollywood’s classic leading men. He starred in several movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and twice was nominated for Best Actor. However, he never won an Oscar.
Grant, who was born Archibald Alec Leach on January 18, 1904, in England, became a citizen of the United States in 1942. He died in 1986.
A classic, but unverified, anecdote begins with a journalist who is working on a story about Cary Grant with a tight deadline. He needs to gather some background information, so he sends a telegram to the publicist of Cary Grant asking about the age of the star:
HOW OLD CARY GRANT?
But Cary Grant intercepts the message and decides to send his own reply:
OLD CARY GRANT FINE. HOW YOU?Carrie Nation, best known for her anti-alcohol antics, was also concerned about tight clothing for women. In fact, she refused to wear a corset and urged women not to wear them because of their harmful effects on vital organs.
Actress Sissy Spacek attended Quitman High School in Texas and was homecoming queen. She got to play another homecoming queen in the movie “Carrie”. in 1976.
The oldest organ donor in the US is Carlton Blackburn of North Texas, who donated his liver when he died at the age of 92. Worldwide, the oldest known organ donor was a 107-year-old Scottish woman, whose corneas were donated after her death in 2016.
Jolly Blackburn is a writer and comic artist, who developed “Knights of the Dinner Table,” a comic strip about a group of role-playing gamers, in the mid 1990s.
The strip soon evolved into a monthly comic book (which continues to be published), and “HackMaster,” the fictional Dungeons & Dragons-style game which the characters in the comic play, was eventually published as an actual game system.
The word “knight” comes from the old English word “Cniht,” which more or less meant “a young male vassal.” The concept of being a man-at-arms came much later. At the time, it would have been pronounced the way it looks; it did not evolve to rhyming with “white” until, at the earliest, the 17th century, after spelling had started to become a bit more fixed.
A knight’s tour is a sequence of moves of a knight on a chessboard such that the knight visits every square only once. Creating a program to find a knight’s tour is a common problem given to computer science students.
Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker’s review of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s memoir Unmasked stated “If you want to know how he wrote the music for Cats and Chess…”
The music for Chess was written by ABBA’s Benny Anderson and Bjorn Ulvaeus. Andrew had nothing to do with the show (though the lyrics were written by Tim Rice).
The review was corrected and the mistake noted in the on-line review
Chess Records was an American record company, founded in 1950 in Chicago and specializing in blues and rhythm and blues. Over time it expanded into soul music, gospel music, early rock and roll, and occasional jazz and comedy recordings, released on the Chess label and on its subsidiary labels Checker, Argo/Cadet and Cadet Concept. It was founded by two Jewish immigrant brothers from Poland, Leonard and Phil Chess, born Lejzor and Fiszel Czyż.
n 2008, Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” was named the biggest chart hit of all time by Billboard magazine. Billboard looked at all singles that made the charts between 1958 and 2008
Chubby Checker was born in 1941; his birth name was Ernest Evans. As a young singer, he was given the nickname ‘Chubby’ because of his physique. When he was in high school, he performed a private session for American Bandstand host Dick Clark. After he completed a Fats Domino impression, Clark’s wife asked him was his name was. He answered with ‘My friends call me Chubby.’ Clark’s wife replied ‘As in checker?’ And the stage name was born.
Chubby Checker’s name was also inspired by the name of one of rock and roll’s leading pioneers Fats Domino, which real name was Antoine Domino Jr.
Domino is the name of the Bond Girl in Thunderball, played by Claudine Auger, and in the remake Never Say Never Again, played by Kim Basinger.
Van Morrison wrote and sang the song “Domino” as his personal musical tribute to Fats Domino.
Historian and naval officer Samuel Eliot Morrison wrote the official history of the United States Navy during World War II, which ended up running to 15 volumes. Morrison, who retired as a rear admiral in the Navy Reserve, won two Pulitzer Prizes and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among other awards, for his many books and writings, and was also honored by having a frigate named after him: USS Samuel Eliot Morison (FFG-13) - Wikipedia