Folk singer Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guithrie’s second wife Marjorie Mazia was born Marjorie Greenblatt and her mother, Aliza Greenblatt, was a well-known Yiddish poet. With her, Guthrie wrote numerous Jewish lyrics.
These lyrics were rediscovered by his third wife Nora Guthrie and were set to music by the Jewish Klezmer group The Klezmatics with the release of Happy Joyous Hanukkah on JMG Records in 2007. The Klezmatics also released Wonder Wheel — Lyrics by Woody Guthrie, an album of spiritual lyrics put to music composed by the band. The album, produced by Danny Blume, was awarded a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary World Music Album.
British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, although of Jewish roots, was raised as a member of the Church of England and always considered himself Anglican. He was nevertheless subjected to anti-Semitism his entire life.
The second album released by Cream (Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce) was 1967’s “Disraeli Gears”, an inside joke about a roadie’s mispronunciation of “derailleur gears” on a bicycle. The best-known songs on the album were probably “Sunshine Of Your Love” and “Strange Brew”.
Disraeli and William Gladstone were longtime political rivals who practically took turns being Prime Minister of the United Kingdom throughout the late 1800s. Disraeli got along very well with Queen Victoria, and told a friend, “Everyone likes compliments, and when you are dealing with royalty you must lay it on with a trowel.” The Queen disliked Gladstone both personally and politically, and complained to a friend, “He always addresses me as if I were a public meeting!”
There have been rumors about William Gladstone’s sex life, usually centered on his concern for prostitutes. He was involved with various charities to help “fallen women” and did meet with prostitutes in an attempt to reform them. Others have suggested there was more. When Peter Wright wrote in the 1920s about Gladstone’s consorting with them, indicating he was doing it for the sex, Gladstone’s sons – both old men – wanted to sue for libel. Since you couldn’t libel the dead, the deliberately taunted Wright into a libel suit against them by calling him a liar. In the trial, Wright lost, the jury deciding that the evidence was that Gladstone was a moral man.
Still, the rumors persist. Historians tend to believe that Gladstone was truly trying to reform the prostitutes, and did not sleep with them – but may have done so for sexual titillation.
In SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance, the sequel to their * Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything*, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner explained the persistence of prostitution in major cities by presenting data to show that an encounter between a prostitute and a policeman is approximately three times more likely to result in a free sex act than an arrest.
Roy Jenkins, in his very good bio of Gladstone, concluded that Gladstone really was motivated by religious zeal to “save” the prostitutes. Noting the incidence of inked-in little whip-shapes in Gladstone’s journals, Jenkins suggested that the PM might even have whipped himself after some or all of these nighttime outings as a way to atone for his sins, whatever they may have been.
Victor Hugo’s work Les Miserables was inspired by an incident where he saw a man teasing and then putting snow down the back of a prostitute. She turned around and scratched his face, whereupon she was arrested and brought to trial. Hugo’s friends told him not to testify on behalf of the prostitute, but his consciouse forced him to do what was right. Had it been a case of evil prostitute vs. upstanding citizen attacked with provocation, she would have been jailed. Sine upstanding citizen Hugo testified for the woman, she was freed.
Sir Hugo Baskerville was the violent, drunken and debauched aristocrat whose supposed slaying by a demonic hound, centuries before, inspires the bad guy in the Sherlock Holmes story The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Robert Johnson’s song Hellhound on My Trail includes the line “You can run, you can run, tell my friend Willie Brown”, which inspired the movie Crossroads with the late Joe Seneca and the seemingly eternally youthful Ralph Macchio .
Willie Brown was one of a number of seminal blues musicians from the rail crossroad town of Clarksdale, Mississippi and the surrounding area. Sam Cooke, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Son House, and Ike Turner were just a few. Clarksdale is now the home of the Delta Blues Museum and is the main stop on the Mississippi Blues Trail.
Willie Brown, Democrat of San Francisco, served 15 years as Speaker of the California House of Representatives, and 8 as Mayor of San Francisco. He is now retired from public office but has remained a force in state politics. He suffers from retinitis pigmentosa and has very poor eyesight.
In 2004, future New York Governor David Paterson, who is legally blind, became the first visually impaired person to address the Democratic National Convention. He is the second legally blind governor of any US state, after Bob Riley, who was acting governor of Arkansas for 11 days in January 1975.
The Pattersons are the central family in Canadian Lynn Johnston’s comic strip For Better or For Worse. It is the only syndicated strip other than Gasoline Alley to have had the characters age in real time, and, oddly, the only one to also be restarted with the characters’ ages dialed back.
Cmdr. William T. Riker, who was born and raised in Alaska, is mistaken for a fellow Canadian by a junior officer aboard the USS Enterprise in the 1994 Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Lower Decks.”
Riker’s Island is located in New York City’s East river, between the Bronx and Queens. It is home to the main jail complex of New York City, housing an average of 14,000 inmates each day.
The East River is actually not a river but a tidal strait, connecting New York Bay to Long Island Sound, and was once commonly called the Sound River. The North River is a former name for the Hudson.
Andrew Cuomo, the Governor-elect of New York, is the son of another former Governor, Mario Cuomo. The younger Cuomo has said he’s looking forward to moving back into the Governor’s Mansion, of which he has many happy memories from the last time he lived in it.