Monty Hall is the father of Joanna Gleason, an actress whose credits include the Tony Award-winning role of the Baker’s Wife in Into the Woods and agent Connie Randolph on Bette Midler’s TV series Bette.
Bette Davis was the first person to get 10 Academy Award nominations for acting. She’s been joined in this group by Meryl Streep, Katherine Hepburn, Jack Nicholson, and Lawrence Olivier.
Although the musical Cabaret swept the 1972 Academy Awards ceremony with eight Oscars, it failed to win Best Picture, which went to The Godfather instead. Cabaret therefore has the unfortunate distinction of having the most Oscar awards of any film without winning Best Picture.
The NBA’s Oscar Robertson is still considered by many to have been the best
basketball player of all time. He averaged a Triple Double per game aggregate
during his first five seasons and per game for the 1961-62 season. The sturdy
6-5 220lb Roberstson also averaged over 30ppg his first eight seasons, and was
known as an excellent defensive player.
Coincidental Namesake Oscar Schmidt of Brazil is thought to have scored more
points in competition: 49,702 than any other player in history (NBA record-holder
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar scored “only” 40,712 in college and the pros). Some say
Schmidt was the best basketball player never to have played in the NBA, even
though he was an admittedly poor defensive player. Schmidt’s comment on his
deficiencies was “Some people are piano movers, some are piano players.”
At 6-8 225lb he should have hauled in a few rebounds, but I have not been able
to locate his career stats.
In Groundhog Day, TV weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray) explains his remarkably quick development of piano skills to his amazed teacher by saying, “Well, my dad was a piano mover…”
The recent Travel Channel show “Deathwish Movers” is a reality series about Deathwish Piano Movers, a small Boston-area firm known locally for its all-black, skull-logo’d trucks.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Boston Common monument to the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, a black Civil War regiment, is seen over the final credits of the movie Glory.
Jacques Futrelle created the detective nicknamed “The Thinking Machine” in 1905 in his story “The Problem of Cell 13,” a classic of the genre. In it, Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S., M.D., M.D.S makes a bet that he can escape from any prison cell in a week, and is put into the most secure cell in a new prison in order to prove his point. Futrelle’s career as a writer cut tragically cut short when he traveled to the US on the Titanic.
The White Star Line vessel RMS Titanic was suffering from a coal-bunker fire that was not finally extinguished until the ship sank after hitting an iceberg in April 1912.
The Titantic’s sister ship the HRM Britannic was launched just before the start of the First World War and was laid up at her builders in Belfast for many months before being put to use as a hospital ship in 1915. In that role she struck a mine off the Greek island of Kea, in the Kea Channel on November 21, 1916, and sank with the loss of 30 lives.
HMS Belfast is a retired World War II light cruiser which is now moored on the Thames as a museum ship in London.
(Incidentally, the hospital ship was HMHS and not HRM Britannic: HMHS Britannic - Wikipedia).
Belfast is the capital of Ulster.
The Ulster Fry is their version of a full cooked breakfast that typically consists of some or most of the following: bacon rashers, eggs, sausages (either pork or beef), vegetable roll, white pudding, black pudding or lamb’s kidney, fried tomato, farl (a form of soda bread which is split in half crossways to expose the inner bread and then fried with the exposed side down), boxty or potato bread. Other common components include mushrooms, baked beans or pancakes.
All this is traditionally fried; however, in recent decades, people have taken to grilling the ingredients instead.
Sherlock Holmes wore an Ulster, a type of coat popular in Victorian times.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s father and namesake, a well-known author, wrote a poem which is credited with rallying public support to save the sail frigate USS Constitution: Old Ironsides, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1885
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s most famous postgrad clerk
was undoubtedly Alger Hiss.
The English comic actor Terry-Thomas voiced Sir Hiss, Prince John’s (Peter Ustinov’s) snake henchman (henchcreature?) in Disney’s 1973 Robin Hood.
Robin Hood: Men in Tights was one of Mel Brooks’ genre-spoofing movies. Others included Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, *Silent Movie *and High Anxiety.
“High Anxiety” has been the title of episodes of Kate and Allie, The Golden Girls, Dawson’s Creek, A Different World, 7th Heaven, Full House, and Rescue Heroes.
Kate Mulgrew has perhaps most notably played the wife of Det. Columbo, Katharine Hepburn, a Boston City Councilwoman (on Cheers) and Capt. Kathryn Janeway of the USS Voyager.