Director Steven Spielberg, who is Jewish, took some heat for giving both his Jewish and his Arab/Palestinian characters the chance to explain their motives in his 2005 historical thriller Munich, which follows an Israeli hit squad as it hunts down those responsible for the lethal attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympiad.
Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich has been associated (as alma mater and/or employer) with 34 Nobel Prize recipients, including Wilhelm Roentgen (Physics, 1901); Max Planck (Physics, 1918); Thomas Mann (Literature, 1929); and
Werner Heisenberg (Physics, 1932).
In most versions of Ken Ludwig’s play Lend Me a Tenor, the actors reenact the entire play during the curtain call – in about two minutes.
Statistically speaking, about 10% of men are true tenors, and about 10% are true basses. The rest are baritones of one stripe or another.
Daddy Sang Bass (Mama Sang Tenor) was a 1968 gospel song written by rockabilly great Carl Perkins and recorded by Johnny Cash. Cash’s version went to #1 on the country charts.
Richard M. Nixon, Republican of California, was narrowly elected President over Hubert Humphrey, Democrat of Minnesota, in November 1968. He had lost eight years earlier by an even narrower margin to John F. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts.
Robert Coover’s novel, The Public Burning, was an alternate world story about the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. It took a long time to get a publisher because of fear of a lawsuit by the protagonist in the book, Richard Nixon. In the book, however, Nixon is portrayed as a generally sympathetic figure.
U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice William O. Douglas later told a friend that he felt like committing suicide when Richard M. Nixon told him that Douglas’s speech to Nixon’s college class inspired the young man to enter public service.
Not only did William O. Douglas set the record for longest tenure on the Supreme Court (36 years, 209 days), he and successor John Paul Stevens hold the mark for most combined time by two successive justices in one seat (71 years).
Albino Luciani, who was elected Pope John Paul I in 1978, died after only 33 days into his reign. His reign as Pope was the shortest in more than 350 years and one of the shortest in the history of the Roman Catholic church. His predecessor, Paul VI, and successor, John Paul II, were among the longest reigning Popes.
Aha! Souds like a deal with the devil was made.
The 18th-century English poet Alexander Pope is the third most-frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson.
The PBS series Anyone for Tennyson ran in the mid 70s and featured a group of actors of the First Poetry Quartet reciting poetry, usually about a particular theme, with occasional guest stars. It was also filmed in locations that had a connection with the theme.
Among the guest stars to appear on Anyone for Tennyson were Will Geer, Henry Fonda, George Plimpton, Vincent Price, William Shatner, and even an actual Poet Laureate – Sir John Betjeman.
Henry Fonda played the President of the United States in the 1964 movie Fail-Safe; a very young Larry Hagman played his Russian interpreter. Richard Dreyfuss played the top role in a 2000 TV movie, with Noah Wylie as the interpreter.
The world’s largest employer of interpreters is currently the European Commission, which employs hundreds of staff and freelance interpreters working into the official languages of the European Union.
The European Union’s flag is a field of blue with a circle of 12 yellow stars (although there are now 27 sovereign members).
The flag of the U.K. is rightfully known as the Union flag, but more often referred to incorrectly as the Union Jack. Technically, by flag code and tradition, it’s only the Union jack when it’s on a ship. Similarly the flag usually associated with the Confederacy, which was never the official flag of the Confederacy, was most commonly used as a Confederate naval jack during the war and only by a handful of units on land (though a square version was fairly common as a regimental flag).
The Senyera, national Flag of Catalonia (and earlier, Aragon, etc.) is one of the oldest European flags still in use, but often overlooked in trivia questions since Catalonia is not an independent country. The origin of this flag is obscure and may date from the 11th century, but is also sometimes connected to the flag raised on the tower of Alī-Bufāt by the Moors of Valencia as a sign of surrender on September 28, 1238.
New York State Traffic Statue § 1238 reads, and I copied and pasted: Passengers on bicycles under one year of age prohibited passengers and operators under fourteen years of age to wear protective headgear.
Could anyone translate that into English for me?
Simon de Montfort was one of the leaders of the Albigensian Crusade, a heinous persecution which may have dramatically affected the course of religion in Europe. Simon’s son Simon married the daughter of England’s King John in 1238, eventually becoming de facto ruler of England.
Revised punctuation shown in red.