In Isaac Asimov’s short story “Little Lost Robot,” a five-second burst of gamma ray radiation is used to “kill” a malfunctioning robot that might otherwise have hurt the heroine, roboticist Dr. Susan Calvin.
Paul Zindel’s 1964 play “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds” deals with a shy teen doing a project for her science fair in the midst of a dysfunctional family with an abusive single mother. Paul Newman and his wife Joanne Woodward created the 1972 film.
John Henry Newman left the Anglican Church for the Roman Catholic Church; eventually he was made a Cardinal.
Ruth Roman, best know these days as Guy’s love interest and potential murder victim in Hitchcock’s Strangers on the Train was aboard the Andrea Doria when it collided with the Stockholm and sunk. Roman was rescued from the ship, but temporary separated from her son, who was in a different lifeboat that was recovered by a different ship.
The Book of Ruth is one of the shorter books of the Bible. Ruth was David’s great-grandmother.
Lyle Lovett’s fourth album was 1992’s Joshua Judges Ruth, both a listing of three consecutive Old Testament books and a suggestion about a crumbling relationship.
The original lyrics to Lyle Lovett’s “Penguins” began:
“I don’t go for fancy cars
For diamond rings
Or movie stars”
After meeting Julia Roberts, he stopped singing the third line in concert, humming it instead.
Diahann Carroll’s 1968-71 show *Julia *is credited with being at least one of the first TV series with a black woman in a starring role as something other than a housemaid or other subservient position. She played a widowed nurse working for a doctor played by Lloyd Nolan, who was also one of the co-founders of the Confederate Air Force aircraft preservation organization.
Lloyd Bentsen, Democrat of Texas, was Michael Dukakis’s running mate in 1988, and served as Bill Clinton’s first Secretary of the Treasury.
Lloyd Robertson, O.C., recently retired as the longest-running national news anchor in television history, having been a national news anchor for 41 years until he retired in the fall of 2011. He anchored the national evening news first for CBC, and then for CTV.
The Declaration of Independence and Constitution were removed from the National Archives in Washington, D.C. and stored at Fort Knox during World War II, for fear of a German air attack that might damage or destroy them.
Robert Silverberg got the idea that editor John Campbell of Astounding SF – the most important SF editor of his time – was rejecting his stories because Campbell was antisemitic. He created the pseudonym “Calvin M. Knox” (After theologians John Calvin and Alexander Knox; the “M,” however, stood for Moses) and submitted under that name. Campbell did accept the story, but also accepted a Robert Silverberg bylined story at about the same time. When Silverberg mentioned it to Campbell, Campbell said, “Did you happen to notice I’ve been publishing stories by a certain Isaac Asimov?”
Scottish reformer/Presbyterian minister/theocratic zealot John Knox raised many eyebrows when he married his second wife, Margaret Stewart, a Scottish noblewoman and distant cousin of Knox’s archenemy Mary, Queen of Scots. The exact dates of Knox and Margaret’s births are unknown, but at the time of the wedding he was at very least 50, possibly older, and and Margaret was at most 17, possibly younger. They had 3 daughters; still young when Knox died she remarried to one of Knox’s disciples and had many more children.
The plump Henry Knox, formerly a Boston bookseller, became George Washington’s chief of artillery during the American Revolution and eventually the first U.S. Secretary of War.
Bobby Plump’s last-second field goal, after stalling the ball for over four minutes, won the championship game of the 1954 Indiana high school tournament against Muncie Central for Milan High School, enrollment 161. The game was the inspiration for the 1986 Gene Hackman film Hoosiers, in which tiny Hickory HS accomplishes the feat, in a scene filmed at Butler University’s Hinkle Fieldhouse, where the 1954 finals had been held. Milan’s other opponents in the tournament were Cross Plains, Versailles, Osgood, Rushville, Aurora, Montezuma, Indianapolis Crispus Attucks, and Terre Haute Gerstmeyer Tech.
The emperor Montezuma II (or Moctezuma, among many other spellings) had dozens of children (by one account he had 50 wives who were either pregnant or nursing who lived with him in captivity), but his daughter Isabel is the most interesting of the ones about whom much is known. She was married and widowed 5 times before she was a teenager, raped by/bore a child to Hernan Cortes (she tried to kill both Cortes and the child), and married for at least the sixth time when she was about 21 to a Spanish husband with whom she had several children and converted to Catholicism. Unlike most of her siblings she was legally treated as royalty and awarded an enormous plantation as her legacy from her father (ironically a much larger inheritance and more respect than she’d have likely received had he not been killed) and lived her life as an extremely wealthy Spanish woman for most of her life; some of her descendants became (and are today) titled Spanish nobility.
There were, somewhat controversially, references to starships named both Cortez and Malinche (the conquistador leader’s Indian translator and lover) in various Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episodes.
The musical Nine is based upon Frederico Fellini’s movie 8 1/2. The explanation for the change was that when you added music to the story, it’s one half more.
Nine Blasted Notes is both a piping tune by Michael Grey, and the name of the album it’s on.
ack - missed the edit window - the title is a reference to the limited range of the Great Highland Bagpipes - nine notes on the chanter.