The Lord Speaker of the British House of Lords is elected by the members of the House of Lords and is expected to be politically impartial. Until 2005, the presiding officer in the House of Lords was the Lord Chancellor.
The Lord Chancellor is an appointed position, and nominally outranks the Prime Minister. The Lord Chancellor is outranked only by the Lord High Steward, who is appointed only for the day of coronations.
Lee Martin “Dewey” Bunnell has explained that the song he wrote for America “A Horse with No Name” was “a metaphor for a vehicle to get away from life’s confusion into a quiet, peaceful place”
However, the song was banned for “horse” being a nickname for heroin, and some have questioned what Burnell was smoking when he wrote the lyrics.
You are very welcome, Sir!
In play: The lyrics of America’s song Sister Golden Hair, from 1975 and written by Gerry Beckley, one of the band’s founding members, were largely inspired by the works of Jackson Browne. As Beckley said, “[Jackson Browne] has a knack, an ability to put words to music, that is much more like the L.A. approach to just genuine observation as opposed to simplifying it down to its bare essentials… I find Jackson can depress me a little bit, but only through his honesty; and it was that style of his which led to a song of mine, ‘Sister Golden Hair’, which is probably the more L.A. of my lyrics… [It] was one of the first times I used ‘ain’t’ in a song, but I wasn’t making an effort to. I was just putting myself in that frame of mind and I got those kind of lyrics out of it.”
Commentary: my college years were in So Cal, at UC Santa Barbara. I went through a “phase” of dating blonde girls for a while, and this song always reminded me of one of my girlfriends. I hope she is doing well, Lisa L of Goleta CA, and I hope life has treated you well. Thank you for the good memories and times that we shared.
Goldilocks from Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes.
Taste is a short story by Roald Dahl first published in 1945. The short story includes a wine tasting event that describes several details of how a wine is tasted and in what regions some different wines are grown.
Comment: I read this many years ago and found it entertaining. The entire short story PDF file is here: Access Denied
Author Roald Dahl served in the RAF as a fighter pilot in the early part of World War II. Though he suffered a head injury in a crash landing early in his piloting career, he was responsible for shooting down several German aircraft, and was credited as a fighter ace, before recurring headaches forced the end of his aviation career. Dahl then spent the rest of WWII as a military attache.
Cool trivia!
In WWII, Roald Dahl flew the obsolete Gloster Gladiators, the last biplane fighter aircraft used by the RAF. That’s the plane he was flying when he got hurt. In his first published work, he wrote about the crash. When he got healthy again, his squadron’s planes were replaced with the Hawker Hurricane, the plane he was flying when he qualified as a fighter ace.
In 1965, actress Patricia Neal suffered three burst cerebral aneurysms while pregnant with her fifth child. Roald Dahl, her husband, took control of her rehabilitation over the next months; Neal had to re-learn to talk and walk, but she managed to return to her acting career. This period of their lives was dramatized in the film The Patricia Neal Story (1981), in which the couple were played by Glenda Jackson and Dirk Bogarde. Not included in the film was the fact that for many years Dahl had been sleeping with one of Patricia Neal’s best friends, Felicity Ann d’Abreu. When Neal found out about the 11-year affair in 1983, she divorced Dahl.
Patricia Neal made her film debut with Ronald Reagan in 1949. Reagan had made his debut in the late 1930s.
Ronald Reagan co-starred in what is regarded as the worst Shirley Temple move, That Hagen Girl.
Shirley Temple Black was unsuccessful in her first and only run for public office, when she was defeated in the 1967 primary for a special congressional election in California’s 11th district. She later served as a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly, the US ambassador to Ghana, the first female Chief of Protocol of the United States, and the US ambassador to Czechoslovakia.
Shirley Temple was not fond of the non-alcoholic “mocktail” named for her and supposedly created for her, saying in a 1986 interview:
“The saccharine sweet, icky drink? Yes, well… those were created in the probably middle 1930s by the Brown Derby Restaurant in Hollywood and I had nothing to do with it. But, all over the world, I am served that. People think it’s funny. I hate them. Too sweet!”
The artificial sweetener saccharin was discovered in 1879, by Constantin Fahlberg, a chemist working with coal tar at Johns Hopkins University. It was one of the first widely-available artificial sweeteners, and was popular in diet foods and beverages up until the 1970s, when studies among rats suggested a link between consumption of high levels of saccharin and bladder cancer.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration considered banning saccharin due to these studies, but instead opted for a warning label. The label remained on saccharin products until 2001, when additional research called the cancer link into question, but, by that point, newer sweeteners, with less of a negative aftertaste, such as aspartame and sucralose, had been developed, and had come to dominate the market.
A brain tumor was first successfully removed by surgery in the year 1879.
“If I Only Had a Brain” (also “If I Only Had a Heart” and “If I Only Had the Nerve”) is a song by Harold Arlen (music) and Yip Harburg (lyrics). The song is sung in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz by the character Scarecrow, played by Ray Bolger, when he meets Dorothy, played by Judy Garland. The characters pine about what each wants from the Wizard. It was also sung in Jeremy Sams and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 2011 musical adaptation with an additional reprise called “If We Only Had a Plan” when the characters discuss on how to rescue Dorothy in Act II.
Originally written by Arlen and Harburg as “I’m Hanging On To You” for the 1937 Broadway musical Hooray for What!, the song was ultimately dropped from that show, and when the pair was later hired to do the songs for Oz, Harburg simply wrote new lyrics to the tune.
NM!
Last night’s World Series Game 6 in Houston was won by the Washington Nationals over the Houston Astros by a score of 7-2. So far in this Series, the road team (the visiting team) has won every game. The home team has never won.
Tonight’s Game 7 features starting pitchers Max Scherzer of the Washington Nationals and Zack Greinke of the Houston Astros. This will be the first Game 7 matchup in World Series history between former Cy Young Award winners. Max Scherzer has won the Cy Young Award three times, in 2013 when he was with the Detroit Tigers, and 2016 and 2017 with the Washington Nationals. Zack Greinke won the Cy Young Award in 2009 when he was with the Kansas City Royals.
The 1939 World Series was won by the New York Yankees, 4-0 over the Cincinnati Reds.
The 2011 World Series was won by the St. Louis Cardinals, 4-3 over the Texas Rangers.
The 1937 World Series was won by the New York Yankees, 4-1 over the New York Giants.
Justin Verlander is still winless in World Series games. He holds an 0-6 record overall in the World Series. With the Detroit Tigers he lost two World Series games in 2006 against the St. Louis Cardinals and in 2012 he lost one World Series game in 2012 against the San Francisco Giants. With the Houston Astros he lost one World Series game in 2017 against the Los Angeles Dodgers and this year he lost two World Series games against the Washington Nationals.
Houston Astros pitcher Justin Verlander is married to model Kate Upton, who has been the cover model for Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Issue three times.
Verlander and Upton began dating in 2014; they married in Tuscany, Italy in November, 2017, two days after Verlander and the Astros won the World Series.
Johnny Depp married makeup artist Lori Anne Allison on December 20, 1983; they divorced in 1985. He was later engaged to actresses Jennifer Grey and Sherilyn Fenn in the late 1980s before proposing in 1990 to his Edward Scissorhands co-star Winona Ryder, for whom he tattooed “WINONA FOREVER” on his right arm. From 1994 until 1998, he was in a relationship with English supermodel Kate Moss.
I guess FOREVER ain’t as long as it used to be.
Her Majesty the Queen might raise an eyebrow, were she to read that.
In play:
In the IDW graphic novel based on Harlan Ellison’s original script for the award-winning Star Trek: The Original Series episode “City on the Edge of Forever,” Trooper, a World War I veteran who did not appear in the episode, looks an awful lot like Ellison himself.