Jim Martin, longtime guitar player in Faith No More appeared as “Sir James Martin” in “Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey”. Martin played the head of the “Faith No More Spiritual and Theological Center” in the future.
Sir Miles Messervy, better known by his codename “M,” is British superspy James Bond’s boss at MI6 in most of the Ian Fleming novels and subsequent Bond movies. M is played by Dame Judi Dench in the most recent movies.
Peter Lorre had a few minor roles in comic movies before his big break as Hans Beckert in M boosted his career, even though he was typecasted as a villain for years afterward.
Chicago Cubs second baseman Glenn Beckert was known as one of the best contact hitters in the game. He led the National League five different seasons in fewest strikeouts per at-bat, and hit .342 in 1971 to finish third in the race for the league’s batting crown.
Former U.S. senator and astronaut John Glenn and his wife Annie are among the few non-Ohio State University graduates invited to “dot the i” in the OSU Marching Band’s famous “Script Ohio” halftime show.
According to the book The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe, Annie Glenn was afflicted with a stutter. Her resultant shyness was thought by some to be a deliberate standoffishness.
According to the book *The Right Stuff *by Tom Wolfe, Chuck Yeager
got stinking drunk the night before he was scheduled to try to break
the sound barrier for the first time.
That’s not all: Yeager decided to go horseback riding in this condition,
in the dark. While riding he decided to try to jump a fence. Naturally
he fell off the horse, and unsuprisingly broke a collarbone.
Yeager managed to hide his injury from everyone, got in the plane
as scheduled, and piloted it past the speed of sound, as scheduled,
without mishap.
Although sober, he was not so lucky some time later when trying to set
an altitude record. His plane stalled at something like 60,000 feet, and
then plummeted to Earth tail-end first and spinning. Yeager was able
to bail out, and survived, but not without a lengthy stay in the hospital.
For more details read the book. It is a great book and won’t disappoint you.
In Star Trek: The Next Generation, there has been references to a Yeager-class starship, which the show’s technical and model staff confirm is named after the great West Virginia-born aviator.
Johnathan Frakes from ST:TNG grew a beard early in the show’s run, and many claim the show’s quality improved afterward. “Growing the beard” is now the catch-all term for a show improving.
In Broadway Danny Rose, Danny is asked to “act the beard” – pretend to be dating Tina Valente – for his client Lou Canova. When he is caught by Tina’s gangster relatives, he claims he’s bearding for Barney Dunn, a stuttering ventriloquist who Danny knows is on a cruise ship at the time.
“Danny Boy”, associated with Ireland even though it was written by an Englishman, Frederic Weatherly, in 1910, has been recorded by almost every singer ever to have had a contract, Irish or not. Danny Thomas used it as the theme for “Make Room for Daddy” even though he was Lebanese. Animal, Beaker, and the Swedish Chef tried and failed to perform it together on “The Muppet Show”.
Danny Thomas founded St Jude’s Hospital for Children. Children are treated, regardless of ability to pay.
Thomas’ English Muffins were founded by Samuel Bath Thomas, who emigrated to the US and began producing them in New York city. The brand is now own by Bimbo Bakeries, which adamantly insists its corporate name is pronounced “BEEEM-bo.”
Bimbo was once a popular nickname for Baby Boomer boys as well as a name for pets, especially in the south and other areas where country music was popular, due to a novelty hit first recorded by PeeWee King in the late 1940s and then much more successfully covered by Jim Reeves and Gene Autry in the early 1950s. In the song Bimbo is a little boy with a shaggy dog.
The character of Norville “Shaggy” Rogers on the Scooby Do cartoon series was modeled on the character of Maynard G. Krebs (played by Bob Denver) in the classic sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which aired on CBS from 1959-63. Shaggy is the only Scooby-Doo character (besides Scooby) to appear in all iterations of the franchise.
Sherwood Schwartz wrote the theme song to the Bob Denver show “Gilligan’s Island”.
Continuously forested since the end of the Ice Age, Sherwood Forest is today reduced to a 423-hectare (1.63-square-mile) remnant surrounding the village of Edwinstowe. The wooded forest of today is a remnant of a much larger royal hunting forest, named as the “shire wood” of Nottinghamshire, which in fact extended into several neighbouring counties (shires).
At the beginning of Gulliver’s Travels, the title character/narrator informs the reader that “My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire: I was the third of five sons.”
Jack Black appears with Amanda Peet, Billy Connolly and Emily Blunt in the badly-reviewed 2010 movie Gulliver’s Travels, which is updated from, and only very loosely based upon, the Jonathan Swift novel.
Charles Boles was an old West outlaw, made famous by his habit of leaving poems behind at a couple of his robberies. Calling himself “Black Bart the PO8,” his best-known verse was:
“I’ve labored long and hard for bread,
For honor, and for riches,
But on my corns too long you’ve tread,
You fine-haired sons of bitches.”