Steven Spielberg became a household name as the director of Jaws , which was critically and commercially successful, and is considered the first summer blockbuster. Since the movie’s mechanical sharks often malfunctioned, Spielberg decided to mostly suggest the shark’s presence, employing an ominous and minimalistic theme created by composer John Williams to indicate its impending appearances.
John Williams has been nominated for 51 Academy Awards, the most of any living person. Only Walt Disney had more, with 59.
Walt Disney dropped out of school at age 16 to join the Army but was rejected for being underage. Instead, he joined the Red Cross and was sent to France for a year to drive an ambulance. He returned to the U.S. in 1919 and moved to Kansas City to pursue a career as a newspaper artist.
“Kansas City,” a song written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and first recorded by Little Willie Littlefield in 1952, is one of Leiber and Stoller’s most recorded tunes, with more than three hundred cover version, including one by The Beatles.
Cities whose tourist attractions include Disney Parks, Experiences and Products theme parks and resorts are Anaheim (LA), Orlando, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.
British secret agent James Bond is supposedly killed in Hong Kong in the movie You Only Live Twice.
The only not-James-Bond book that Ian Fleming published was Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car, a children’s novel written by Fleming for his son Caspar, with illustrations by John Burningham. It was later turned into a movie and a stage musical
Over the course of his career, Caspar Weinberger served in a variety of political and govermental positions. He is mostly remembered for being Secretary of Defense for most of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and being forced to resign the post due to the Iran-Contra scandal.
Previous to that, Weinberger served in several roles in the Nixon administration, including heading up, at various times, the Federal Trade Commission, the Office of Management and the Budget, and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; before joining the Nixon administration, he held a number of positions in California government.
The German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich is known for landscape paintings with an intense emotional focus on strange and awe-inspiring nature scenes. His 1818 painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog has been called a cultural icon.
The German equivalent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz or BfV. It was established in 1950 and is based in Cologne, not Berlin, although it has offices in the capital city. Its leaders are referred to as presidents, not directors.
Cologne was bombed over 200 times by Allied air forces in World War II, including the RAF’s first “Thousand Bomber Raid.” By war’s end the center of the city was completely destroyed and almost the entire population had left or been killed.
Cologne is the fourth most populous city in Germany after Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich, and the largest city on the Rhine river. A major cultural center, it has more than thirty museums and hundreds of galleries.
The first usage of the word ‘Cologne’ for a scented perfume was in 1709, when an Italian perfume maker started marketing ‘Eau de Cologne’, named for his adopted city of Cologne, Germany. Giovanni Maria Farina, the original mixer of the fragrance, described it as ‘an Italian spring morning, of mountain daffodils and orange blossoms after the rain.’
In contemporary society, the word ‘cologne’ has become a generic term for perfumes usually marketed towards men.
“Chì mi na mòrbheanna” is a Gaelic song written in the mid-19th century. Under the English name of “Mist Covered Mountains” it is a popular pipe tune, and was played at the funerals of JFK and the Queen Mother.
The song was a favourite of JFK, who joked that it was so beautiful that he could not believe it was composed by a Scot, rather than an Irishman.
John F. Kennedy was, in the last year of his life, taking occasional French lessons so that he could speak to Charles de Gaulle in the French president’s native tongue.
The first written records of an outbreak of syphilis in Europe occurred in 1494 or 1495 in Naples, Italy, during a French invasion (Italian War of 1494–98). Since it was claimed to have been spread by French troops, it was initially called the “French disease” by the people of Naples.
Robert Rayford, a 15 year old who died in may, 1969), s age, was a teenager from Missouri who has been described as the earliest case of HIV/AIDS in North America, having been “infected with a virus closely related or identical to human immunodeficiency virus type 1.” Rayford died of pneumonia, but his other symptoms baffled the doctors who treated him. A study published in 1988 found the presence of antibodies against HIV.
Gaetan Dugas, a promiscuous Air Canada flight attendant who often visited San Francisco, was long considered to be “Patient Zero”, or the primary case for AIDS in the United States. Dugas is featured prominently in Randy Shilts’s book And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (1987), which documents the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic in the United States.
Air Canada commenced operations with three aircraft and less than a hundred employees on Sept. 1, 1937, two years to the day before the outbreak of World War II. It now operates more than 180 aircraft and has more than 30,000 employees.
Googling Air Canada led tothis link from September 11, 2001 at 8:50 a.m.