BTW, my last post was written for a different thread and was posted here accidentally. Does it actually match something?
Bye Bye Birdie was the Broadway debut for composer Charles Strouse, whose best known song is probably “Tomorrow” from Annie.
Bye Bye Birdie was a satire based on Elvis Presely’s real-life induction into the Army and the hype surrounding his “last kiss” with a fan. The name “Conrad Birdie” was a twist on Conway Twitty, an actual rock and roll singer who would go on to much greater fame in country music.
Born Harold Lloyd Jenkins (named by his uncle after his favorite silent-film star), there are diferent stories about how he acquired Conway Twitty as his stage name vary. As one account would have it, Jenkins felt that his real name wasn’t marketable, and he changed his show business name in 1957. Looking at a road map, he spotted Conway, Arkansas and Twitty, Texas. Thus, he went with the professional name of Conway Twitty.
Alternatively, Jenkins met a Richmond, Virginia, man named W Conway Twitty Jr. through Jenkins’ manager in a New York City restaurant. The manager served in the US Army with the real Conway Twitty. Later, the manager suggested to Jenkins that he take the name as his stage name because it had a ring to it. W Conway Twitty subsequently recorded the song, “What’s in a Name but Trouble” in the mid-1960s, lamenting the loss of his name to Jenkins.
There were also rumors he had lovers in Conway, Arkansas, as well as Twitty, Texas, and his stage name was a constant reminder of their love.
At the height of his fame and fortune Conway Twitty owned and maintained a mansion at “Twitty City”, a country music themed amusement park in Hendersonville, TN (a suburb of Nashville). The park closed after Twitty’s death as did Opryland, both blamed as casualties of the far more popular Dollywood; Twitty City was sold to TBN, the televangelist network owned by Jan Crouch (aka the lady with the giant purple hair) and her husband Paul (of gay sex scandal fame).
British mathematician John Horton Conway invented the famous “Game of Life”, a cellular automaton, in 1970. Suitable for the computer processors of the time, it provides a graphic representation of a primitive colony in which each cell of a grid is occupied by either a living member or a vacant one, and the living member’s prospects of reproducing or dying depend on its total number of living neighbors. It is “played” simply by defining an initial configuration and then passively watching each generation evolve. Surprisingly numerous subconfigurations are either stable or repeating. It was an attempt to create a simple version of John von Neumann’s speculation about self-replicating mechanisms.
British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke credited von Neumann’s hypothetical self-replicating machines with partially inspiring the Monolith’s surprising capabilities in Clarke’s book 2010: Odyssey Two, later adapted into a film starring Roy Scheider, John Lithgow, Bob Balaban and Helen Mirren.
From 1936 to '64, Barney Balaban (uncle of Bob) was president of Paramount Pictures.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Democrat of New York, defeated Republican nominee Alf Landon of Kansas in 1936, winning reelection by the biggest margin in U.S. history up to that time. Landon carried the Electoral College votes of only two states, Maine and Vermont.
As many Dopers probably already know, the popular election for US President is actually an election for each state’s members of the Electoral College. The electors almost always vote for their party’s candidates; the election of 1800 was a dramatic case of electors not voting the party line.
Despite the fact her husband, the president, had an estate a few miles away, Eleanor Roosevelt lived in her own cottage, Val-Kil, starting in 1924. Part of this was because Hyde Park was really her mother-in-law’s house, and Eleanor needed a place of her own. Val-Kill is the only National Historical Site devoted to a First Lady.
Theodore Roosevelt was known to periodically ask his daughter, Alice, “Why can’t you be more like ‘cousin Eleanor’?” While Alice was known for a sharp tongue and a self-absorbed personality, Eleanor was more “socially acceptable”, and had been nicknamed “Granny” as a child because her outlook and actions betrayed a maturity beyond her years.
Theodore Roosevelt once said of his headstrong daughter, “I can control Alice, or I can be President. I cannot possibly do both.” When a would-be assassin said he planned to kill T.R. and then marry Alice, the President laughed, “Now we know that he’s crazy!”
Alice Roosevelt’s husband, Senator Nicholas Longworth, was also well respected for his quick wit and sharp tongue. He also had a reputation as a womanizer. One famous anecdote about him is that he was sitting in a men’s club when one of his political enemies came up behind him, patted his bald head, and announced to the person he was with “Longworth’s head feels just like my wife’s ass.” Longworth without a missing a beat rubbed his own head and said “I’ll be damned, it does feel like your wife’s ass, doesn’t it?”
Another famous insult match was between rivals Benjamin Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli. Gladstone once told Disraeli: “I predict, Sir, that you will die either by hanging or of some vile disease.” Disraeli replied, “That all depends, sir, upon whether I embrace your principles or your mistress.”
When Disraeli was dying Queen Victoria visited his house, presented the seal and asked to see him, an enormous honor even for a dying prime minister, yet he refused to see her. The official reason was that he was not well enough to receive, though legend says he told those present “she just wants me to take a message to Albert” (which in fact was very likely as the queen was still morbidly obsessed with Albert twenty years after his death).
That was actually John Wilkes and the Earl of Sandwich.
Queen Victoria did not get along well with Prime Minister William Gladstone, who she disliked for his liberal and populist tendencies, as well as his manner with her. “He always addresses me as if I were a public meeting,” she once complained to a courtier.
The only river to leave Lake Victoria is the White Nile, which joins the Blue Nile at Khartoum, Sudan to form the main stream of the Nile. It was “discovered” and named by John Speke, whose claim to have determined it to be the source of the White Nile was disputed by his colleague Richard Burton. David Livingstone’s attempt to prove it failed, but Henry Stanley succeeded.
Charlton Heston played Gen. George “Chinese” Gordon in the 1966 epic film Khartoum, which deals with the Mahdi’s siege of the Sudanese city in 1885.
Though the British government sent a relief column to rescue British nationals in Khartoum during the Mahdi uprising, the only British national in the city at the time was Gordon, who seemed set on making himself a martyr. The relief column was severely criticized when it waited three days before moving on Khartoum: Gordon was killed two days before the column arrived.
The British government is technically referred to today (as it was in Queen Victoria’s time) as Her Majesty’s Government, as all official acts are done in her name. Queen Elizabeth II is head of state; the Prime Minister, currently David Cameron, a Conservative, is head of government.