Frank Lloyd Wright created a scandal when he abandoned his wife and children for his mistress. Later, his mistress was murdered by a deranged worker on his Taliesin estate.
Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall was the first US cabinet member ever to be convicted of a felony, for his involvement in the Teapot Dome Scandal of 1922. He served two years in prison.
The current Secretary of the Interior is Ken Salazar, formerly a U.S. senator from Colorado. He was appointed by fellow former senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois.
In Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983), the movie that is playing on the TV when Chi Chi (played by Angel Salazar) is chainsawed to death in a motel bathroom is Earthquake (1974).
Boris Karloff played a crime boss who was murdered while bowling in Howard Hawks’s Scarface. He bowled a strike, actually, and the scorer wrote an X – a motif for death throughout the film.
Special Agent Fox Mulder faces, in the (IMHO ludicrous) series finale of The X-Files, the death penalty at the hands of a Federal Bureau of Investigation administrative review board.
Karen Mulder was one of the top supermodels of the 1990’s but has been in the news more recently for various scandals: she accused His Serene Highness Albert II, Prince of Monaco, of attempted rape; overdosed herself into a coma; and was arrested in 2009 for threatening her plastic surgeon.
Karen Carpenter, a successful pop singer who was also known for her work as a drummer, died in 1983 atr the age of 32 from heart failure brought about by anorexia nervosa.
“Pro Ana” is a term used by people who defend being anorexic as a “lifestyle choice.” There are websites offering tips on how to be anorexic.
Criminal cases in California are captioned *The People versus [defendant’s name]. *Such cases in Ohio are captioned State of Ohio vs., and in the Federal system, United States vs.
Zenna Henderson wrote a series of SF stories about "The People,’ a group of humanoid aliens with paranormal powers who had to emigrate to Earth when their planet was destroyed and live secretly among us.
Florence “Carol Brady” Henderson was the first woman to guest host The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, in 1962.
Florence Nightingale developed the unique “rose diagrams” to present data on hospital mortality in the Crimean War, a contribution for which she became the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society. One advantage of the rose diagram is that, since a wedge’s area varies as the square of its radius, relative sizes are depicted more compactly.
The Grateful Dead’s album American Beauty features this variety of rose on its cover. Bred in France in 1875, it was the most popular rose in the US around the turn of the century and is the official flower of the District of Columbia.
American Idiot, Green Day’s concept album about Jesus of Suburbia, won rave reviews, a Grammy for Best Album, spawned a hit Broadway musical that won two Tonys and a tour, and is scheduled to be turned into a movie.
The terms “moronic,” “idiotic,” “imbecilic,” “stupid” and “feeble-minded” were once used clinically to describe the degree of a patient’s intelligence or mental disability.
Carlos II ‘El Hechizado’, King of Spain, was certainly an imbecile, unable to speak until age 4 nor walk until age 8. This is due mainly to inbreeding, six of his eight great-grandparents being Habsburgs. Juana ‘La Loca’, Queen of Castile and Aragon, appears in his pedigree about a dozen times; she was a beautiful intelligent woman, though perhaps schizophrenic.
Queen Elizabeth II is the first British monarch to have ever sent an email.
In 2003, l’Académie française, “The Immortals”, chose the Quebecois word courriel (a contraction of courrier électronique) as the official French word for e-mail, to halt the intrusion of the English (and, worse, American-originating) word that was infiltrating la belle langue. Another factor was the confusion that could result from the fact that émail is a French word meaning “enamel.”
As Adam Nicolson explains in his book God’s Secretaries, the King James Bible was actually the third (or fourth, depending on how you count 'em) English translation of the Bible.