The King James Bible was largely written by a committee of Church of England leaders, lawyers and clerics; the King himself played no role in its preparation, but ultimately gave it his approval. It was published in his reign, and thus still bears his name.
The Thai alphabet was supposedly created by King Ramkhamhaeng (r. ?1279 to 1298). Only the most fanatical Thais (and there are many) actually believe he personally created it, but whoever was actually responsible, it came out during his reign. (It’s really an adaptation of an older Khmer script, which in turn was based on southern-Indian scripts. Hope I don’t get deported for saying that.)
From 1970 to '75, Cambodia was known as the Khmer Republic. The leader was Lon Nol, who deposed head of state Norodom Sihanouk. The Republic was replaced by the Communist regime of Democratic Kampuchea.
Prime Minister Lon Nol of Cambodia and Prime Minister U Nu of Burma are in the small club of palindromic heads of state.
(Prime ministers are heads of government, not heads of state).
Winston Churchill was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland during the worst days of World War II. When Britain stood virtually alone against the might of Nazi Germany, he told the House of Commons that he had nothing to offer but “blood, toil, tears and sweat.” He formed a close friendship and personal alliance with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his successor, Harry S. Truman.
After founding member Al Kooper left Blood Sweat and Tears, the group wanted to continue and was looking for a new singer. They asked Laura Nyro, who turned them down for a solo career. David Clayton-Thomas was hired and the group had many hits, including some songs written by Nyro.
Side note: I recall an American political cartoonist at the time saying: “The only thing we know about Lon Nol is that Lon Nol spelled backwards is Lon Nol.” 
The famous phrase “Blood, toil, tears and sweat” was first uttered on July, 2 1849 by Giuseppe Garibaldi when rallying his revolutionary forces in Rome. Theodore Roosevelt also uttered the phrase in an address to the Naval War College on June 2, 1897, following his appointment as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Then Churchill popularized it onMay 13, 1940.
The House on Garibaldi Street is a book which details the capture of Adolf Eichmann, who has been called “the architect of the Holocaust”. The house in question is in Buenos Aires, where Eichmann was living after fleeing to Argentina and obtaining (under a false identity) employment with Mercedes-Benz.
In Rice & Webber’s Evita there’s a big number called Buenos Airesthat celebrates Eva’s arrival in the city as a teenager. Strangely a large part of the song is to the melody of Brazil (actual title Aqualero de Brasil).
The tune “Brazil” is a recurring musical theme in the Terry Gilliam-directed dark, surreal sf satire Brazil, starring Jonathan Pryce, Kim Greist, Ian Holm and Ian Richardson, which was released in 1985 after Gilliam struggled mightily with the studio. Robert De Niro, in the role of a lifetime, makes a cameo appearance as Harry Tuttle, an insurgent plumber.
Brazil star Katherine Helmond was considered a “plain Jane” growing up in Texas and her family thought she was insane when she became an actress (especially after graduating uberconservative Bob Jones U.). She almost quit several times before getting the role of insane housewife Bananas in the premiere production of John Guare’s House of Blue Leaves. She received rave notices, knew she had finally “made it” at the age of 42, and barely worked for the next several years.
She later found major TV stardom in the series SOAP and then again in WHO’S THE BOSS.
Both Carl Reiner (in The Comic) and Ingmar Bergman (in (Let’s Not Talk About) All These Women*) set funeral scenes where the background music was, “Yes, We Have No Bananas.”
*The US Title was the last three words; the literal translation is all seven.
Yes, we have no bananas,
Bananas in Scranton, P A
is one of the endings Harry Chapin would perform to end his oddball song “30,000 Pounds of Bananas”, commemorating a fatal 1965 crash of a truck carrying that load downhill to the local grocery stores. Chapin was told of the crash by a Greyhound bus seatmate several months later.
And he said ‘Christ!’
It was funny how he had named the only man who could save him now
Scranton, Pa. is the home of the Dunder Mifflin regional sales office which is the setting of the TV comedy The Office.
When Clement Clark Moore’s poem A Visit from Saint Nick (aka, "The Night Before Christmas) was first published in 1823, the names of the last two reindeer were given as Dunder and Blixem. The names evolved Dunder>Donder>Donner and Blixem>Blixen>Blitzen until the lineup was finally set in the 1949 song Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer."
Johnny Marks, who wrote the music for Rudolph has the same last name as Guy Marks, who had a minor hit single with “Loving You Has Made Me Bananas,” which could have been played a few moves back.
Rudolph Hess, at one point Hitler’s right-hand man in the Nazi Party, flew to Great Britain on a controversial and still puzzling personal peace mission in May 1941. He was captured, tried, convicted in the Nuremberg Trials, and eventually imprisoned at Spandau Prison in Germany until his death in 1987, under joint guard of U.S., British, French and Soviet military police.
A British musical group known as The Makers claims to have changed its name after journalist and “friend of the band” Robert Elms saw a phrase on the order of “Rudolf Hess, all by himself, dancing the Spandau Ballet” scrawled on a restroom wall in Berlin. (The bolded bit is the name under which the band gained its greatest fame.)
Albert Speer, the last inmate to be released alive from Spandau (he was released a day after Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach on October 1, 1966) became one of the bestselling memoirists of all time with his books Inside the Third Reich and Spandau Diaries. It was not revealed until many years after his death (when his publisher revealed it) that he donated the majority of his royalties to Jewish and Holocaust charities; not even the charities themselves knew where the money came from as it was donated through other agencies- Speer fearing if it was known it would be called a publicity stunt.
When Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner visited Albert Einstein in Peconic NY in order to convince him to write a letter to FDR urging him to develop the atomic bomb, they interrupted a visit from my grandfather, David Rothman, who befriended Einstein that summer.