Franklin D. Roosevelt is the only President of the United States to have served with three Vice Presidents: John Nance Garner (1933-41), Henry A. Wallace (1941-45), and Harry S. Truman (1945). Truman held the office for only 82 days before FDR died.
Cool trivia, Elvis!
In play:
The United States Vice-President was originally the person who finished second in the electoral college vote count. However, this method was changed by the 12th amendment to the Constitution in 1804. It was changed largely due to the presidential election of 1800, when 36 ballots were needed to break the tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr.
In base 10 notation, the number “12” and its first four whole multiples display the pattern where the unit digit is the double of the tens digit:
1 x 12 = 12
2 x 12 = 24
3 x 12 = 36
4 x 12 = 48
The pattern breaks at the fifth multiple:
5 x 12 = 60
George Bernard Shaw wryly referred to Shakespeare’s highly patriotic play King Henry the Fifth as “the National Anthem in five acts.”
“O, Canada” is Canada’s national anthem, while “God Save the Queen” is the royal anthem.
When the Queen’s representative enters a hall, the Vice-Regal Salute is often played, beginning with the first six bars from the royal anthem and ending with the conclusion of the national anthem.
The presumed oldest national anthem belongs to the Netherlands and is called the “Wilhelmus van Nassouwe”. It was written between 1568 and 1572 during the Dutch Revolt and its current melody variant was composed shortly before 1626. It is the national anthem with the oldest music, of all national anthems. The Wilhelmus van Nassouwe was also the anthem of the Netherlands Antilles from 1954 to 1964.
A corporate executive who is a former Dutch special-forces soldier is a major character in Norwegian author Jo Nesbo’s crime thriller Headhunters, turned into a movie in 2011. It is the highest-grossing Norwegian movie ever made.
And it’s a crazy good movie!
Fans of James Joyce claim that he was fluent in many languages, with numbers ranging from 13 to 17. However, he himself stated “I speak four or five languages fluently enough”, and he acquired reading knowledge, vocabulary and phrases from many others.
As a student, Joyce was a fervent admirer of the plays of Henrik Ibsen and although translations of Ibsen’s works were available, Joyce took on the task of learning Norwegian (Dano-Norwegian at that time) to read in the original. In March 1901, he wrote to Ibsen in Dano-Norwegian to congratulate him on his 73rd birthday.
Henrik Ibsen is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare. His most famous work, A Doll’s House, is one of the world’s most performed plays. The play, considered an early feminist masterpiece, was based on the life of Laura Kieler, who was a fellow Norwegian author.
Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators is a comedic mystery television series, produced by BBC Birmingham, airing on the BBC in England, and on PBS in the United States. The series features Frank Hathaway (played by Mark Benton), a former police detective who now works as as a private investigator, and his client-turned-partner, Luella Shakespeare (played by Jo Joyner). The pair investigate crimes in Stratford-on-Avon, and many of the epsiodes contain references to the theater and William Shakespeare’s plays.
Anne Hathaway’s Cottage is one of the most popular attractions in the Stratford-upon-Avon area. Rather than a small cottage, it is a twelve-roomed farmhouse, where Anne Hathaway, the wife of William Shakespeare, lived as a child in the 1550s and 60s.
Stugan (“The Cottage” in Swedish) was developed on a PDP-10 mainframe computer in the 1970s and 1980s by Viggo Kann, Kimmo Eriksson and Olle Johansson, three children who had played the game Adventure and wanted to create a similar game in Swedish. The Cottage began as a collection of smaller games the three had previously developed on their own, with the player moving through an amusement arcade to choose what to play; as they found it more fun to move through the arcade than to play the games, they ended up expanding the area to explore and removing most of the smaller games. Several thousand copies of the IBM PC release were sold; despite this, the developers did not receive much money from it outside of pre-paid royalties. The game had a cult-like status among Oden users at the time, and was commercially important to the computer center in Stockholm.
American actor Viggo Mortensen is also a composer, writer and photographer. He wrote the tune to which his character King Elessar, formerly known as Aragorn or Strider, sang his coronation oath in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. The words were JRR Tolkien’s.
Viggo Mortensen, an upstate New York native whose father was Danish, worked as a translator for Scandinavian languages at the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics.
Viggo Mortensen grew up in Watertown NY, near Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence River, and The Thousand Islands, an archipelago of almost 2,000 islands.
Viggo Mortensen grew up about 175 miles from my hometown address — gMap here.
Mort Drucker is best known as a contributor for over five decades to Mad magazine, where he specialized in satires on the leading feature films and television series. In a 1985 Tonight Show appearance, when Johnny Carson asked Michael J. Fox, “When did you really know you’d made it in show business?”, Fox replied, “When Mort Drucker drew my head.”
Johnny Carson and Vice President Spiro Agnew were both present at the Kennedy Space Center when Apollo 11, the first manned mission to land on the Moon, lifted off on July 16, 1969.
In 1973, both U.S. President Richard Nixon and U.S. Vice-President Spiro Agnew found themselves under criminal investigations, for completely unrelated matters.
Nixon, of course, was under investigation for the Watergate break-in, and subsequent cover-up. Agnew, meanwhile, was under investigation for receiving kickbacks, both during the time when he was a public official in Maryland, and while Vice-President.
Agnew reached a plea bargain with prosecutors in October, 1973, pleading no contest to one count of tax evasion, while also simultaneously submitting his resignation from the Vice-Presidency.
The only other Vice President to resign was John C. Calhoun in December 1832, in the last months of his term, in order to take a Senate seat from his native South Carolina. He had also had enough of President Andrew Jackson by then.
Rachel Maddow released a podcast about Spiro Agnew called Bag Man. She interviews a number of people who were involved in the case, including some of the original Baltimore prosecutors.