James Taylor provided a guest voice to The Simpsons episode “Deep Space Homer” where he played some of his songs to Homer, Buzz Aldrin, and Race Bannon when they were in space. He also appeared later on in the series when the family put together a jigsaw puzzle. His face was the missing final piece.
In 1976, Jack Warden starred in the TV show, Jigsaw John. The character was based upon LA detective John P. St. John, who went by that nickname. Though the TV show explained the name as being due to St. John’s ability to piece together clues like a jigsaw puzzle, the real detective got the name by piecing together the body parts of a dismemberment victim in order to solve the crime.
Jack Warden appears as a football coach in Warren Beatty’s 1978 supernatural romance Heaven Can Wait.
Heaven Can Wait was a remake of the 1941 film Here Comes Mr. Jordan, starring Robert Montgomery as boxer Joe Pendleton, who was in the pink at the time of his demise.
Real-life spouses Jim Jordan and Marian Driscoll starred as the title characters in the radio series Fibber McGee and Molly, which featured the running gag of Fibber opening his closet and cacophony ensuing.
Fibber McGee’s is the name of a pub in Regina, Saskatchewan.
Willie McGee won the 1990 National League batting championship despite ending the season in the American League. When traded from St. Louis to Oakland at the end of August, he had accumulated enough plate appearances to qualify, and no one was able to match his .335 mark at the time.
Pope Sylvester I died on December 31, 335 A.D.
Elizabeth I succeeded her half-sister Mary I on the English throne, and in turn was succeeded by her distant cousin, James I.
At her 1953 coronation in Westminster Abbey, Queen Elizabeth II wore a long white train embroidered with symbols of the various British Commonwealth realms.
Westminster College is the home of the National Churchill Museum and Library, which features a church designed by Christopher Wren and rebuilt on the campus. The memorial honors the famous “Iron Curtain speech” Churchill delivered at the school located in Fulton, Missouri.
Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was accompanied on the occasion of his “Iron Curtain speech” by President Harry S. Truman. Truman was a native of Missouri who had, before moving into the White House, been a farmer, Army artillery officer during World War I, haberdasher, county judge (an executive and not judicial post), U.S. senator, and, briefly, Vice President of the United States.
There have been two Presidents who used “S.” as their middle initial without a name: Harry S. Truman and Ulysses S. Grant.
Cream’s “Tales of Brave Ulysses,” from the Disraeli Gears album, is often credited as being one of the first uses of a wah-wah pedal in rock music.
Joyce fans worldwide celebrate 16 June as Bloomsday, to commemorate Ulysses.
HMS Ulysses was the first novel by author Alistair MacLean, published in 1955 and set aboard a British Royal Navy light cruiser during World War II.
Life on the Mississippi (1883) by Mark Twain is considered be the first novel submitted to a publisher as a typewritten manuscript. He did not type it himself though, but rather dictated it to a typist.
(In a 1904 letter, Twain wrote that The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was the first novel written using a typewriter. Though this infomation has been repeated in numerous articles, scholars have since all but proven that Twain’s memory was faulty. Pertinent timeline here.)
Truman Capote played Lionel Twain in the movie Murder by Death. Most critics agreed it was a good thing that he was killed off early.
Myrna Loy, who played Nora Charles in the *Thin Man *movies, was offered the role of Dora Charleston in the parody Murder by Death. She turned down the part, stating “it would be ridiculous to have Myrna Loy playing Myrna Loy.”
Alec Guiness had the script for Star Wars and was, his castmates remember, reading it in his off hours between takes on the set of Murder by Death, in which he played the butler.