The earliest known reference to "La-la-land"is found in the Los Angeles Times in January 1925 ran:
Miniature motor cars developed by French engineers amaze American government. Commerce Department motor head home again; describes one-man taxis in ‘La-La Land’. Presumably, the author had in mind the phrase ‘ooh-la-la’, which was in vogue as a recent import from France into the USA in 1925, when that early form of ‘La-la land’ was coined.
J.K. Simmons played a grumpy restaurant manager in the Oscar-winning musical romance La La Land. He had previously played a music teacher (Whiplash), CIA official (Burn After Reading), racist prisoner (Oz), pathologist (Law and Order), LAPD senior officer (The Closer) and newspaper editor (Spider-Man), among other roles.
Nicholas Flood Davin was the founding editor and publisher of the Regina Leader, a local newspaper in Regina, North-West Territories.
An Irishman with the gift of the gab, he posed as a Roman Catholic priest and talked his way into the jail cell where Louis Riel, the Métis leader of the North-West Rebellion, was being held the day before his execution. Davin published his interview with Riel the day of his execution, causing some faces as red as the tunics of the North-West Mounted Police who had been mounting guard.
Davin was later one of the first MPs for the North-West Territories.
After his electoral defeat, and facing financial troubles, he committed suicide by gunshot in a hotel room in Winnipeg.
The Regina Company of New Jersey has made vacuum cleaners for about 100 years, most notably the ElectrikBroom. It started as a German music box manufacturer that lost its market to gramophones and had to radically change business strategies. The Regina Company was eventually acquired by Philips Electronics in 1995. Oreck bought the company in 1997, and in 2000, it was sold to the Royal Corporation, which has sold the vacuums under the Home Depot brand ever since.
Canadian pianist Frank Mills recorded an original composition of his, Music Box Dancer, in 1974. Four years later, when Mills had re-signed with Polydor Records, the label released a new song of his as a single, and used Music Box Dancer as the b-side song.
After the single was mistakenly sent to a pop station in Ottawa (where the program director liked the B-side, and added it to their playlist), Music Box Dancer became an unexpected hit in Canada and beyond – the song reached #3 on the Billboard U.S. chart.
I like that story, kenobi — good trivia!
American banker Darius Ogden Mills (1825-1910) was, at one time, the richest man in California. Born in New York state and working as a young banker, in late 1848 he traveled to California and joined the gold rush. In Sacramento he founded his own bank, the “Gold Bank of D. O. Mills & Co.” Mills never invested in gold mining or silver mining directly, as he considered mining to be too speculative. Instead he started ancillary businesses that supported the mining industry, such as banks and railroads. In 1864 the Bank of California was founded by William Chapman “Billy” Ralston and other investors including Mills. The Bank of California was the first commercial bank in the Western United States and considered instrumental in developing the American Old West. In 1996 it would merge with Union Bank.
Darius Ogden Mills is the namesake for:[ul]
[li]the Mills Building and Tower 22-story office building of San Francisco, at 220 Bush Street and 220 Montgomery Street[/li][li]Mills High School in Millbrae CA[/li][li]13,457’ high Mount Mills, a mountain south of Mono Pass in the Sierra Nevada[/li][li]the city of Millbrae CA, founded by Darius Ogden Mills[/li][li]Mills Field, an airport on the San Francisco Peninsula that is now SFO International [/li][/ul]
‘Frank Mills’ was one of 32 (!) songs performed during the rock musical Hair, all of which were also featured on the album of the same name. Two of the songs from the musical reached #1 on the charts in 1969: ‘Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In’, and ‘Good Morning, Starshine.’
The title song from Hair was a major hit for the Cowsills in 1969 and their most successful single. Their version spent two weeks at number one on the Cash Box Top 100 and reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100. “Hair” was kept out of the number one spot by another song form the Hair cast album: Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In by The 5th Dimension. It did reach number one on the RPM Canadian Singles Chart.
In 2018, Canadian artist Drake had four singles hit #1 in Canada; “Nice for What,” “God’s Plan,” “Nonstop” and “In My Feelings.”
Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered in 1987, almost twenty years after the original Star Trek went off the air. Featuring an all-new cast led by British Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart (although several stars of the original show made cameo appearances), it was at the time the highest-rated syndicated series in the world.
In Gregory Doran’s 2008 production of Hamlet with the Royal Shakespeare Company, David Tennant plays the title role, while Patrick Stewart plays both the usurper Claudius and the Ghost of Hamlet’s father, implying that the two are identical twins. However, in the text Hamlet notes differences between the two several times, including a speech where he calls Claudius “a mildewed ear / Blasting his wholesome brother”.
The Kansas City Royals baseball team was founded in 1969, and the name Royal is in part an homage to a livestock show and rodeo called the American Royal. They’ve won the World Series twice, in 1985 against the St. Louis Cardinals and nicknamed the “I-70 Series”, and 2015 against the New York Mets. They’ve lost the World Series twice, in 1980 against the Philadelphia Phillies and in 2014 to the San Francisco Giants.
The movie The American President and the TV show The West Wing shared a writer (Aaron Sorkin), a star (Martin Sheen, playing the White House chief of staff in the first and the President in the second) and a premise (a liberal President with no military experience facing a more conservative Congress has to cut deals to get his policies passed into law).
Singer and actress Kristin Chenoweth has never married, though she has had relationships with several high-profile men, including producer Aaron Sorkin, and actors Seth Green, Lane Garrison, and Marc Kudisch.
Sorkin based the character of Harriet Hayes, who was one of the main characters on his television series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, on Chenoweth.
Kristin Chenoweith auditioned for the minor role of Patty in the 1999 Broadway revival od “You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown.” However, faced with a tiny blond actor who could really belt out a tune, the producers wrote out the role of Patty, frizzed up Kristin’s hair and expanded the role of Sally Brown into a major character, including a new song “My New Philosophy.”
IKristin Chenoweth won a Tony Award for the role.
Charlie Brown made his official ‘debut’ in the first Peanuts comic strip on October 2, 1950. He is the only character to have been a part of the strip from the beginning to the end of its 50-year run.
The strip’s creator, Charles Schulz, said that Charlie Brown “must be the one who suffers because he is a caricature of the average person. Most of us are much more acquainted with losing than winning.”
The Apollo 10 lunar module was named Snoopy, and the command and service module Charlie Brown, with Peanuts creator Charles Schulz’s permission. Schulz also drew some mission-related artwork for NASA. The third stage of Apollo 10’s Saturn V booster rocket remains in heliocentric orbit today.
The S-IVB third stage for Apollo 12 is believed to have been discovered as an asteroid in 2002 and given the designation J002E3. The ones from Apollos 13-17 crashed into the moon, while the one from Apollo 11 is in heliocentric orbit.
In the original (1978) Battlestar Galactica television series, one of the lead characters was Viper pilot Apollo, played by Richard Hatch. In the 2004 reboot of Battlestar Galactica, a similar character, pilot Lee “Apollo” Adama, was played by Jamie Bamber.
Richard Hatch also had a recurring role in the reboot, playing Tom Zarek, an extremist and terrorist who eventually becomes Vice-President of the surviving colonists.