Between 1971 and 1991 Guy Lafleur played for the Montreal Canadiens, New York Rangers and Quebec Nordiques in an NHL career spanning 17 seasons and five Stanley Cup championships.
Michael Stanley Dukakis, later governor of Massachusetts and the Democratic nominee for President in 1988, served in the U.S. Army in South Korea after the armistice.
John Volpe served as Governor of Massachusetts from 1961 to '63, and again from 1965-69. He then resigned to serve as Richard Nixon’s first Secretary of Transportation.
In the late 18th century, there was an increase in crime in the UK, in part due to an increase population in London. The gaols became filled, and old decomissioned ships (called “hulks”) were pressed into service as executions were slowly phased out for non-capital crimes. In order to punish criminals, the legal system added transportation as a punishment, where they would be shipped into exile, at first to the US and then, after the American Revolution, to Australia.
Many of those transported to Australia had actually been sentenced to death for various offenses but then had their sentences commuted to transportation as a means of demonstrating the beneficence of the British king, Australian historian Robert Hughes noted in his award-winning 1987 book The Fatal Shore.
Robert the Bruce was the King of Scots during the Scottish Wars of Independence from England.
Reminiscent of the Monty Python sketch where all the Aussie men are named Bruce, a Bruce is Aussie slang for a man. Just like Sheila is slang for a female.
Tommy Roe has a series of hits in the 1960s, starting with “Sheila,” which hit number 1 in 1962. His style is often characterized as “bubble gum,” though he predated that genre by almost a decade.
The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 is still considered the closest the world has come to all-out nuclear war. John F. Kennedy of the United States and Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union were the two key leaders involved.
The director of the video for the 1985 Elton John song “Nikita,” Ken Russell, later said he did not realise Nikita was a man’s name in the Russian language (eg Nikita Khrushchev), and Elton John accepted the proposed script written by him, which was a male-female love interpretation of the song. Indeed, the depicted East German border guard in the video was a beautiful blonde woman with short hair. Scenes showed the two together in various happy situations. In interviews John acknowledged he knew Nikita was a male name in Russian.
Lord John Russell was an important English reform politician and eventually Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Clement Attlee, the Labour Party leader, served as Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during World War II, when Winston Churchill, a Conservative, held the top post in a government of national unity. Attlee succeeded Churchill, with the war nearly won, after the general election of 1945.
St. Clement I was an early Pope and author of one of the earliest surviving Christian documents after the New Testament documents.
Hal Clement created the world of Mesklin, with Earth normal gravity at the equator and super heavy gravity at the poles, in his novel Mission of Gravity. Clement did all the calculations by pen and paper and slide rule to set up an oblate world that spun so fast that it did have different gravity at different latitudes. Later computer analysis showed he overestimated the gravity at the poles, but no one holds this against him.
Of all the planets in the Solar System, Earth has the largest moon, relative to its size, of any.
The theme song to the Drew Carey show, set in Cleveland Ohio ( 
), was “Moon over Parma”.
The Duke of Parma was to command the invading army conveyed and guarded by the Spanish Armada in its (ultimately disastrous) attack upon England in late 1588.
Parma Violets are a British candy.
Czech ski jumper Jiři Parma won a bronze medal in the team large hill in the 1992 Winter Olympics. His biggest successes were at the FIS Nordic World Ski Championships, where he earned four medals: one gold, one silver, and two bronzw.
In Olympic tradition, the gold, silver, and bronze medals represent the three stages of man in Greek mythology; the golden age when men lived among the gods, the silver age when youth lasted a hundred years, and the bronze age, the era of heroes.