With his imposing size, Michael Clarke Duncan worked as a bouncer, and as a personal bodyguard (guarding celebrities such as Will Smith, Jamie Foxx, and The Notorious B.I.G.). Before his breakout role in The Green Mile, Duncan’s appearances in films and TV shows were, in fact, often small roles as bouncers or bodyguards.
See Annie’s post above, post # 44458, about Bruce Willis helping Michael Clarke Duncan. It’s a good one.
In play — Tom Hanks played Paul Edgecomb in The Green Mile (1999). He said, “Usually, death row was called “the last mile”; we called ours “the Green Mile” — the floor was the color of faded limes.”
Tom Hanks, like a lot of Hollywood stars, got his start in a horror movie, “He knows You’re Alone”. Other actors who had early roles in horror movies are Johnny Depp, Kevin Bacon, and John Travolta. (not Carrie, one even earlier than that)
According to Christopher Brinkley’s history American Moonshot, three years before he was elected President, then-Sen. John F. Kennedy appeared with NASA rocket scientist Dr. Wernher von Braun on a TV show honoring West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.
October Sky (1999) is based on the true story of Homer H. Hickam, Jr., a coal miner’s son who was inspired by the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 to take up rocketry against his father’s wishes and eventually became a NASA engineer. In the movie, Homer Hickam accidentally meets his hero, Wernher von Braun, but does not recognize him. In real life they never met, although von Braun was near him once.
In 1958, the U.S. goverment the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). NASA absorbed the earlier National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), and was made responsible for civilian space exploration, in addition to aeronautics and aerospace research.
While the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA; later renamed the Defense Advanced Projects Agency, or DARPA) was also formed in 1958, and intiially given the responsible for leading miliary applications of spaceflight, ARPA’s space efforts were soon moved to NASA and the military services, and ARPA focused its efforts on other defense projects, and high-level technology R&D.
The first movie about space travel was Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon), released in 1902. The French film follows a group of astronomers who travel to the Moon in a cannon-propelled capsule, explore the Moon’s surface, escape from an underground group of Selenites (lunar inhabitants), and return to Earth with a captive Selenite.
The Man in the Moon watched the capsule as it approached, and it hit him in the eye.
DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, was created by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on February 7, 1958, just 4 months after the space launch of Sputnik 1. Its first director, Roy Johnson, left a $160,000 management job at General Electric for the $18,000 job at (then) ARPA.
Lyndon Baines Johnson had a private apartment at his presidential library and museum on the University of Texas campus in Austin. Occasionally he would greet tourists from behind the desk of the museum’s Oval Office replica.
Lyndon Baines Johnson assumed the office of the President on November 22, 1963, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Johnson ran for re-election in 1964 and won in a landslide over Republican Barry Goldwater. Johnson was eligible to run for re-election again in 1968, but chose not to do so. He was succeeded as President by Richard Nixon. Nixon also won the 1972 election and was sworn in for his second term on January 20, 1973. Johnson died two days later.
In a span of a month over the end of 1972 and beginning of 1973, two former U.S. presidents passed away.
On December 26th, 1972, Harry S Truman died in Kansas City, Missouri, at age 88. Truman had been hospitalized in early December due to pneumonia, which led to multiple organ failure.
Four weeks later, on January 22nd, 1973, Lyndon Johnson suffered a heart attack while at his ranch in Texas. He was airlifted to Brooke Army Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead, at age 64.
With the deaths of Truman and Johnson, there were no living former U.S. presidents until Richard Nixon resigned from office in 1974.
Brooke Shields’s paternal grandmother was Italian Princess Donna Marina Torlonia di Civitella-Cesi. She is descended from several Italian princely families (most notably the Doria-Pamphili-Landi)
Dot Warner’s full name on Animaniacs is Princess Angelina Contessa Louisa Francesca Banana Fanna Bo Besca the Third. Dot’s voice actor Tress MacNeille came up with the name.
NM
The 10 Democrat Presidential candidates who have qualified for the third debate stage as of this posting are:
Former Vice President Joe Biden
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont
Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts
Sen. Kamala Harris of California
Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey
Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota
South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg
Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas
Andrew Yang, entrepreneur
Former HUD Secretary Julián Castro
Candidates have until Aug. 28 to meet the polling and donor cutoffs.
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Julian Lloyd Webber’s last name is “Lloyd Webber.” This is a tradition British upper class families, using a double or even trippled last name. and is referred to as have a surname that is barrelled.
Elton John’s song “All the Girls Love Alice,” from his 1973 album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, is about a bored teenaged girl from an upper-class English family, who becomes a lesbian prostitute.
The lyrics “Alice was the spawn of a public school // With a double-barrel name in the back of her brain” underscore her class background – “public schools” in England are typically attended by the children of the upper class, and “double-barrel name” refers to a double last name (such as “Lloyd Webber”), which is common in English upper-class families.
Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 song “White Rabbit” is often referred to “Go Ask Alice,” which was used as the title of a 1971 book about “Alice,” a teenager drug user. While the book was originally said to be a “true” diary by Anonymous, questions about the book’s authenticity and true authorship began to rise in the late 1970’s. It is now generally viewed as a work of fiction written by Beatrice Sparks, a therapist and author who went on to write numerous other books purporting to be real diaries of troubled teenagers. Some sources have also named Linda Glovach as a co-author of the book.
Jefferson Airplane, formed in 1965, was one of the first bands of the psychedelic San Francisco era, and was the first band of that sub-genre to achieve commercial success. Their single ‘Somebody to Love’ peaked at #5 on the Billboard Top 40, and a later single ‘White Rabbit’ climbed as high as #8. However, none of their subsequent singles reached the Top 40 chart.
The band dissolved in 1972, with some members joining the group Hot Tuna, and some members re-forming the band as Jefferson Starship.
“We Built this City” by Jefferson Starship is often cited as one of the worst rock songs ever.