Loudon Wainwright III’s song “Uptown” includes the following day time activities
Well, let’s go fly a kite in Central Park
Go and see a Shakespeare play
Have a lot of fun at the planetarium
And museum all the blues away
Well, Rockefeller Center and the UN too
Baby don’t make me wait
I want to elevate up and down with you
In the building of the Empire State
Loudon Wainwright III has recorded 26 studio albums, but is probably best known for the 1972 song “Dead Skunk (in the Middle of the Road)”. Wainwright also played a “singing surgeon” in 3 epsiodes of MASH* in its third season.
Wainwright is perhaps best known for the 1972 novelty song “Dead Skunk (in the Middle of the Road)” and for playing Captain Calvin Spalding (the “singing surgeon”) on the American television show MAS*H. His appearances spanned three episodes in its third season (1974–1975). His daughter Martha composed the song “Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole,” which according to her is about her father.
Miz Ma’m’selle Hepzibah was one of the characters in Walt Kelly’s comic strip Pogo. Hepzibah was a French skunk, and was frequently the object of affection of the strip’s male characters.
In the 1970s, comic artist Dave Cockrum created a group of characters for Marvel Comics – a team of spacefaring adventurers named the Starjammers. One of the characters, a female alien from a race which resembled humanoid skunks, was named Hepzibah, in honor of the character from Kelly’s comic strip.
Kevin Kline played both the big-hearted boss of a small job-placement agency and an ill-tempered conservative President of the United States in the 1993 political comedy Dave, which featured cameos by Tip O’Neill, Alan Simpson, Larry King, Chris Dodd, Jay Leno, Ahnuld and Oliver Stone, among others.
Super Bowl LI (51) is the only Super Bowl to date that went to Overtime. There never will be a Super Bowl ending in a tie. In the beginning of that Super Bowl, the team introductions for both teams, the New England Patriots and Atlanta Falcons, was narrated by actor Ving Rhames, who was a costar in the film Dave (1993).
I enjoyed that movie!
David McCallum and Jill Ireland’s son Valentine “Val” McCallum is a guitar player, playing with Jackson Browne most recently in 2014 and is a member of the faux country band Jackshit.
Robert Heinlein’s novel Stranger in a Strange Land, about a human raised off-planet, begins “Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith.”
Valentine Dyall played the Black Guardian on Doctor Who and Deep Thought on the original series Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Total expenditures in the US for Valentine’s Day in 2019 totaled 20.7 billion dollars.
Eddie Murphy played Philadelphia con man and faux Vietnam vet Billy Ray Valentine in the comedy hit Trading Places. Some scenes were filmed at the World Trade Center, destroyed by terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001.
Edward Regan Murphy, better known as Eddie, was born in Bushwick and grew up in Roosevelt. Both are in New York State, on Long Island (“long-GUY-land”). Among his early influential comedians were Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor.
Comedian Richard Pryor was one of the writers of Mel Brooks’ Western parody, “Blazing Saddles.” Pryor was also Brooks’ first choice to play the lead, Sherriff Bart, but the studio refused, claiming that Pryor’s history of drug arrests made him uninsurable; this led to the casting of Cleavon Little as Bart.
Like Eddie Murphy, Mel Brooks was also born in Brooklyn. Richard Pryor was born in Peoria IL. And Cleavon Little was born in Chickasha OK.
Chickasha OK is only 45 miles NE of both the Fort Sill Quadrangle and also Geronimo’s grave.
gMap – Google Maps
Clevon Little played the title role in Ossie Davis’s 1970 Broadway musical Purlie, for which he won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor in a Musical.
Pearly Kings and Queens, known as pearlies, are an organised charitable tradition of working class culture in London, England. The practice of wearing clothes decorated with mother-of-pearl buttons[1] is first associated with Henry Croft (1861-1930), an orphan street sweeper who collected money for charity. At the time, London costermongers (street traders) were in the habit of wearing trousers decorated at the seams with pearl buttons that had been found by market traders. In the late 1870s, Croft adapted this to create a pearly suit to draw attention to himself and aid his fund-raising activities.
Pearlies were featured in the “Step In Time” number in the original film Mary Poppins. The segment took a week to shoot, then another week when the film was found to be damaged.
Pearls are the only jewels created by a living animal. A natural pearl of value is found in less than 1 in every 10,000 wild oysters. All pearl oysters are born male and transform into females at around three years of age.
Gen. George S. Patton was known for carrying, in addition to a riding crop, a pair of pistols with handles made from mother of pearl, or nacre.
Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton talked late into the night after learning of the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945. Neither knew the new President, Harry S Truman, very well, and they were uneasy. Truman later offered Eisenhower his endorsement if Ike ran as a Democrat for President, offering to stand aside for him, but Eisenhower bided his time and ran as a Republican, and won, in both 1952 and 1956.
Gen. Douglas MacArthur also ran for the 1952 Republican nomination, trying to build on his fame after being relieved of his Korean War command by President Truman, however winning 10 delegates despite lack of active campaigning. His plan was to hope Eisenhower and isolationist Ohio Sen. Robert Taft would deadlock, and that the grateful convention would turn to him as a savior. That didn’t work, of course, and despite MacArthur’s endorsement of Taft, the old soldier began to fade away.