Bretwalda was the Old English title that meant High King, given to whichever of the kings of the separate kingdoms that composed England was the most powerful and had hegemony over his contemporaries. (How many that was varied at any time from 4 to more than a dozen but the period is known as the heptarchy because officially there were usually 7 kingdoms and kings.) Mercia was usually the kingdom whose king was bretwalda, but ultimately it became the kings of Wessex when most of the other royal houses were either killed or chased from their kingdoms by Vikings. Alfred of Wessex is generally considered the first king of all England.
After Stephen King was struck by Bryan Smith’s van in that terrible accident, the surgeons removed over six pounds of metal from his body.
When Stephen King was a toddler, his father left the family (which included Stephen’s mother and adopted brother David) under the premise of “going to buy a pack of cigarettes”.
King Edward VII of Great Britain had a number of lovers, including the actress Lillie Langtry, Winston Churchill’s mother Jennie (Lady Randolph Churchill), and Alice Keppel. Queen Alexandra permitted Mrs. Keppel to see the King on his deathbed.
Chloe Sevigny is the only Best actress nominee to have performed full fellatio onscreen, on her former lover Vincent Gallo in The Brown Bunny (2003).
Vincent Mancini (played by Andy Garcia) was the illegitimate nephew of Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part 3, the son of Santino “Sonny” Corleone and his mistress, Lucy Mancini, who Sonny is seen having sex with at his sister’s wedding in the first movie. The novel The Godfather has a surprisingly detailed subplot about Lucy’s vagina but never mentions her having a child.
Voice actor John Morris, now 27, portrayed Andy, the little boy who owns Buzz and Woody, in all three Toy Story movies - including the last, where he’s headed off to college and finally ready to put aside childish things.
Woody from Toy Story was named for former football player turned character actor Woody Strode, best known perhaps as the African gladiator in Spartacus or for his many appearances in westerns. Strode had recently died when the script for Toy Story was being finalized and the producers liked the name.
Woody Strode was cast in *Spartacus *only after decathlete Rafer Johnson regretfully turned down the role that his friend Kirk Douglas had offered him in his role as the film’s executive producer, as it would have made Johnson ineligible for the Olympics. Johnson won the decathlon gold medal that year in the Rome games, narrowly beating his UCLA teammate, C.K. Yang of Taiwan.
Rafer Johnson was one of a group who wrestled Sirhan Sirhan to the floor after Sirhan shot Robert Kennedy, who had just won California’s Demoratic primary in 1968. Others in the group included pro football player Roosevelt Grier, writer George Plimpton and two hotel waiters.
In 1973, Roosevelt Grier wrote a book called Rosey Grier’s Needlepoint for Men.
The Secretary of the Navy announced in 1996 that the new Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Roosevelt would be named after both FDR and his wife Eleanor, the first time that a single U.S. Navy warship has honored a married couple.
Arleigh Burke was an admiral who rose to become Chief of Naval Operations during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. He is buried at the United States Naval Academy Cemetery, where his gravestone bears the one-word epitaph Sailor.
Roughly half of all Arleigh Burke class destroyers have been built at the General Dynamics Bath Iron Works shipyard in Bath, Maine. At its peak production in WW2, BIW built a destroyer (mostly *Fletcher *class then) every 17 days. Other ships in the class are made by Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Mississippi, whose location in Trent Lott’s hometown can have had nothing to do with its success in winning military contracts.
“Up the close and down the stair,
But and ben with Burke and Hare.
Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief,
Knox, the boy who buys the beef.” – an 18th century skipping rhyme in Edinburgh, Scotland, referring to the Burke and Hare murders. The two men murdered people and sold their corpses to anatomist Dr. Robert Knox for dissection.
Attorney Andrew Vachss’s series about Burke, a one-named vigilante who deals with peophiles, has been published/translated in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Latin America, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, and the USA.
Queen Elizabeth II is the head of state of Australia, Canada, England (the United Kingdom, naturally), Northern Ireland and New Zealand, among others. The Kings of Norway and Spain are both in the British line of succession; the Emperor of Japan is not.
While crown prince, the future King Olav V of Norway won a gold medal in sailing at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam.
During his 1919-20 racing career, the horse Man o’ War won all but one of his races, losing only to a horse named Upset.
The Portugese Man o War jellyfish reproduces both sexually - the sperm of one mature colonial hydroid fertilizes the egg of another reproducing a larva. Then this larva reproduces itself asexually by growing genetically identical colonial offspring within and onto itself.