Ralph Fiennes and Keira Knightley played the fifth Duke and scandalous Duchess of Devonshire, Georgiana Cavendish, in the 2008 film The Duchess. Knightley vetoed a marketing campaign which would have artificially shown her with actual breasts instead of her natural mosquito bites.
Cavendish bananas are the most popular cultivar for food, comprising 80-90 percent of all bananas sold. The Cavendish variety is especially susceptable to the fungal infection, Panama wilt.
Though yellow fever was inextricably linked as the main danger to workers in the building of the Panama Canal, malaria killed and incapacitated far more workers.
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Panama Canal is one of the seven wonders of the modern world. Others are the “Chunnel”, the CN Tower, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Itaipu Dam, and the Delta Works/Zuiderzee Works.
The CN Tower in Toronto has some very thick glass panels in the floor of the observation deck so that you can stand on them and look straight down to the ground. It is not recommended for those who suffer from vertigo.
In one of Ngaio Marsh’s murder mysteries, “Death and the Dancing Footman”, one of the eventual murder victims paints pictures using “very thick paint.”
Ngaio Marsh would have caused controversy had she still been around when the SDMB Death Pool threads got started. Although her “official” birth date is April 23, 1895, her father didn’t get around to registering her birth until 1900.
The earliest known death to be recorded on movie film occurred in Thomas Edison’s 1903 short Electrocuting an Elephant. A circus animal named Topsy, who had gone rogue, was dispatched in a public spectacle at Coney Island as part of Edison’s campaign to show the unreasonable danger of the alternating-current technology that George Westinghouse was manufacturing. The footage, which survives, occasionally is excerpted for artsy indie films.
In Max Headroom (at least in the US version), Matt Frewer played Max as well as the human upon which Max was based, Edison Carter.
Matt Frewer also played Moloch, a retired, washed-up and dying old supervillain in the movie version of the graphic novel Watchmen.
Moloch was a god worshipped by the Phoenecians and Canaanites. Part of his worship is believed to have involved child sacrifice.
In Watchmen, Dr. Manhattan is used as a crimefighter by the U.S. Government and raids one of Moloch’s vice dens, but finds that so easily destroying Moloch’s mooks is not especially satisfying.
The Manhattan Project was so named because the borough was central to the development of the atomic bomb. A huge city gave the organizers of the project access to almost everything they needed in one location.
In an episode of The Simpsons where Bart becomes Fat Tony’s bartender, his Manhattan cocktails beome well regarded by the gangsters of Springfield.
Charles the Fat was an early king of East and West Francia as well as Western Emperor.
The TV movie Welcome Home, Johnny Bristol had the title character trying to return home after being a POW in Vietnam to his home town of Charles, Vermont. But the town has vanished, and no records of it ever existed. Bristol (played by Martin Landau) has to track down the source of the mystery and government plot that even has planted false records of his own life and tries to portray him as a crazy returning Vietnam veteran. At the end, the mystery is revealed – though not to Johnny Bristol, who gives up on the search.
Stephen King makes reference in his vampire novel 'Salem’s Lot to the inexplicably, eerily abandoned (and fictitious) town of Momson, Vermont. An early draft of the novel was actually set in Momson and not in Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine, as it eventually was.
Maine was a battleground between the Normans and the Angevins in the 11th century.
Maine is one of two states now represented by two women in the U.S. Senate. The other is California.
Maine is the only state that shares its border with only one other state.
And I’d like to point out that Saturday will be the second anniversary of this thread.