Stephen King wrote in Danse Macabre that his first concept for the book that would become The Stand was, what if Patty Hearst and the SLA turned out to be immune to some plague that killed everyone else in the world?
The Andromeda Strain was such a virus.
The Andromeda Strain was written by Michael Crichton, a physician and author who was also a cocreator of the TV show E.R.
The robot Kryten in Red Dwarf is named for the butler character in the J. M. Barrie play, The Admirable Crichton (pronounced “Kry-ten”). The play is a criticism of the British class system, where a group of upper class English are shipwrecked and Crichton becomes the natural leader in the new environment.
The word “robot” entered universal literary consciousness via
the 1920 play R.U.R. by Czech dramatist Carel Kapec.
Its approximate meaning in Czech is “serf(dom)”.
The word “gremlin” was coined by the British Royal Air Force pilots during World War II to describe inexplicable damage to their planes. Writer Roald Dahl is credited with introducing the word to the rest of the world in his first children’s story, “The Gremlins.”
Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, is a commissioned officer of the Royal Air Force, although he was married last week in the uniform of the Irish Guards.
The 1924 Democratic National Convention lasted for 15 days and took 103 ballots before nominating John W. Davis as its candidate. The deadlock was due to many factors, including the requirement that a candidate get 3/4ths of the ballots. The two leading candidates, Al Smith and William Gibbs McAdoo (Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law) refused to give up. McAdoo led until the 87th ballot, when Smith took the lead, but McAdoo refused to release his delegates. At the same time, McAdoo was hurt by an endorsement by the Ku Klux Klan. Davis was a compromise candidate, receiving only 31 votes on the first ballot, but slowly gaining votes as the delegates just wanted to get the convention over with.
John Henry Davis was the greatest US weightlifter of all time.
He won the world heavyweight title eight straight times: 1938
and 1946-52 (incl. Olympics gold 1948 and 1952).
Were it not for the wartime interruption 1939-45 he might
have won it 15 staight times.
Naim Süleymanoğlu, “The Pocket Hercules”, won 3 Olympic weightlifting gold medals for Turkey in the 60kg class, 1988-96. A native of Bulgaria previously named Naum Shalamanov due to the Communist regime’s insistence that those of Turkish descent adopt Bulgarian names, he had won a silver and two golds in the Worlds as a Bulgarian before defecting.
British pianist Reginald Dwight took on the stage name of “Elton John,” naming himself for Soft Machine saxophonist Elton Dean and blues singer Long John Baldry. In the 1970s, he legally changed his name to “Elton Hercules John” after the horse in the British comedy Steptoe and Son. His Honky Chateau album, released just before he changed his name, also had a song called “Hercules.”
Then-Sen. John F. Kennedy once read a fake telegram from his very wealthy dad, former Amb. Joseph Kennedy Sr., at a political dinner: “Don’t buy one more vote than necessary - I’ll be damned if I’m going to buy a landslide!”
In the early 1960’s, the Chicago Cubs experimented with a “College of Coaches” as an alternative to the traditional setup of a manager assisted by several coaches. Following two chaotic “revolving-door” seasons, Bob Kennedy was designated the “head coach” for 1963, and served in that role until June 1965. After Lou Klein replaced Kennedy for the rest of that campaign, Leo Durocher was hired to take over for 1966. He insisted on being a traditional manager, and the College of Coaches system was officially abandoned.
Leo Durocher played for both the “greatest of all time” 1927 Yankees and the “Gas House Gang” 1934 St. Louis Cardinals, and managed the “Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff” 1951 New York Giants.
Jackie Coogan was famous as a child actor in Charlie Chaplin’s movie The Kid and then later as Uncle Fester in The Addams Family. His mother and stepfather stole most of his money, and as a result, the state of California enacted the California Child Actor’s Bill, sometimes known as the Coogan Bill or the Coogan Act. This requires that the child’s employer set aside 15% of the child’s earnings in a trust.
The Addams Family on TV were based upon comic panels by Charles Addams that originally appeared in The New Yorker. Once the show went on the air, the New Yorker refused to publish any more comics featuring the characters.
William Shawn, longtime and legendary editor of The New Yorker, hated elevators and was rumored to carry a small hatchet in his briefcase in the event that he was ever trapped on one. Shawn was played by Bob Balaban in the 2005 movie Capote.
Peter Benchley, best known for writing Jaws, was the grandson of New Yorker newspaper critic Robert Benchley.
Jaws was the 1st summer blockbuster, and the top grossing film of all-time at the time of its release.
The mechanical shark in Steven Spielberg’s summer blockbuster Jaws was nicknamed Bruce, and was notoriously unreliable and difficult to work with.