In the movie Catch-22, the part of Major Major Major Major was played by Bob Newhart.
Bob Newhart has said that of all his standup routines, his favorite is “Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue”. The idea for the sketch was suggested by Bill Daily, who later played Howard Borden on The Bob Newhart Show.
Billy Daily, Larry Hagman, and Barbara Eden appeared together on I Dream of Jeannie and were celebrity autograph booth attendees at the annual Labor Day weekend sci-fi/fantasy/general other convention DragonCon in Atlanta earlier this month.
On the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Measure of a Man,” in which Data was facing involuntary disassembly so that Starfleet could study him more closely, Worf gave Data a copy of K’ratak’s The Dream of the Fire, praising it as the greatest Klingon novel.
Data was played by Brent Spiner whose musical recordings include the cast recording of the Broadway revival of 1776 (in which he played John Adams) and the 1991 collection of 1940s standards Ol’ Yellow Eyes is Back.
The original cast of 1776 had Howard da Silva playing the role of Benjamin Franklin. However, the “original cast” album from the show has his understudy, Rex Everhart, singing the part. The music was written by Sherman Edwards, whose main claim to fame as a songwriter before this was the song “See You in September,” a #3 hit for the Happenings.
The 1960 Broadway musical The Fantasticks, by Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones, based on the ancient story of Pyramus and Thisbe with its numerous later versions, remarkably became the world’s longest-running musical on the basis of the hit song “Try to Remember (the Kind of September)”. Jerry Orbach played El Gallo in the original off-Broadway cast.
[Not an entry]I did not know that. Was there something in the water around then? I mean, two major Broadway shows (West Side Story) based loosely on Pyramus and Thisbe at roughly the same time? I know there are a fairly limited number of plots in the world, but that just seems like too much.[/Not an entry]
Playing off ElvisL1ves’s post:
Welsh superstar Tom Jones (aka Sir Thomas Woodward) has been married to his wife Melinda for 53 years in spite of numerous affairs, an illegitimate son, and instances of domestic violence (all of which involved her beating him over his affairs).
All 7 Ringling Brothers were members of the Masons.
Tom Jones is often confused with Engelbert Humperdinck (real name Arnold Dorsey), also a Welsh pop singer popular in the 70’s and with a very similar voice. Dorsey took his stage name from the real German composer of the light opera Hänsel und Gretel, which premiered in 1893 in Weimar with Richard Strauss conducting. The work might have contained “Entrance of the Gladiators”, better known as the Ringling Brothers clown music, if it had not been composed by the contemporaneous Julius Fučík instead.
Humperdinck and wife Patricia raised four children (Bradley, Scott, Jason and Louise). In 1980, Sunday School teacher Kathy Jetter won a paternity ruling that Engelbert was the father of her daughter Jennifer, who had been born in 1980, and Humperdinck continued making paternity payments for her from there although he declined to meet her. Diane Vincent also claimed that Engelbert was the father of her daughter Angelique, and whilst he never admitted the child to be his, he was forced to make a one-off settlement payment for her upbringing.
I thought West Side Story was based on Romeo and Juliet.
Bill Bradley, former NBA basketball star, was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat from New Jersey. He played a key role in passage of the 1986 tax reform bill. He ran for President in 2000, but lost badly to Vice President Al Gore in the primaries.
(Romeo and Juliet was based on Pyramus and Thisbe, though. And there are only 7 basic storiesanyway.)
Dave DeBusschere, the other forward along with Bradley on the 1973 NBA champion New York Knicks, had previously been a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox. Other Knicks starters included Willis Reed, Walt “Clyde” Frazier, and Earl “The Pearl” Monroe.
James Monroe served in the Continental Army under Gen. Washington’s command during the American Revolution. He is the officer pictured holding the American flag in the famous 1851 Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze painting, “Washington Crossing the Delaware.”
Every Christmas morning, a team of volunteers re-enacts the event by rowing across the Delaware River from Washington Crossing Historic Park, Pennsylvania to Washington Crossing State Park, New Jersey. The real boats were operated by men from the port of Marblehead, MA, led by one of their number, Gen. John Glover, whose home until recently housed a pretty good restaurant.
The actual event permitted the rebels to defeat the Hessian winter encampment in Trenton, and kill its commander, Col. Johan Rall, who was notorious for having a drummer march him everywhere he went, even to the latrine.
Another classic painting is George Washington Fighting a Bengal Tiger on a Sinking Boat During a Hurricane
Delaware was originally a Swedish colony, New Sweden, with its capital of Fort Christina now present-day Wilmington and founded by Peter Minuit, better known for purchasing Manhattan Island for the Dutch.
Delaware was named for Thomas West, 3rd Baron de la Warr, and became the namesake of the Lenape Indians, a language group that stretched from what’s now northern New York to Virginia and included the Mohicans; most modern Lenape/Delaware lands are in Oklahoma and Kansas.
David Boren was a longtime “Blue Dog” conservative Democratic U.S. Senator from Oklahoma. After he left the Senate, he became president of the University of Oklahoma. There have been recurring but never proven rumors that he is gay.
The University of Oklahoma’s “Sooner Schooner” mascot, a covered wagon pulled by two horses named Boomer and Sooner, was charged with an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty during the 1985 Orange Bowl. After an Oklahoma field goal attempt sailed through the uprights, the Schooner was driven onto the field in celebration.
However, an Oklahoma player who had entered for the kick had not reported his temporary jersey number to the officials, and a call of illegal procedure was made. Meanwhile, the Schooner was stuck in a muddy patch of the field, and the crew’s inability to exit in a timely manner led to the additional penalty. After the yardage had been marched off, the subsequent field-goal attempt was blocked, and the Sooners went on to lose the game.