Canada has had three Earls as Governor General who had a marked influence on Canadian history: Earl Durham, who wrote Lord Durham’s Report; the Earl of Elgin, who implemented responsible government in Canada, with the side effect that an angry mob burnt the Parliament buildings to the ground; and Earl Grey, who donated the Grey Cup so that every fall, Saskatchewan Roughrider fans can say, “This year!”
Earl Grey tea was named after Charles, the 2nd Earl Grey, who served as Prime Minister of Great Britain and Ireland. The tea gets its distinctive aroma and taste from oil of Bergamot.
Despite him being putatively French, Capt. Jean-Luc Picard’s typical drink request aboard the USS Enterprise is “Tea, Earl Grey, hot.”
The 2nd Earl Grey was the father-in-law of Earl Durham, and the grandfather of the 4th Earl Grey, both of whom served as Governor General of Canada.
The title of Governor General, or its Portuguese equivalent Governador-Geral, may have first been applied to the Governorship of Goa, a colony which was finally wrested away from Portugal in 1961, after 451 years, in a major Indian military operation.
John F. Kennedy was sworn in as President by Chief Justice Earl Warren on Jan. 20, 1961. Warren had been appointed by Kennedy’s predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who privately told friends that he considered the appointment a mistake, as Warren was more liberal than Ike.
Lyman Poore Duff was one of Canada’s most respected Chief Justices, but almost didn’t get appointed because of a drinking problem. As a puisne justice on the Supreme Court, he was passed over for the Chief Justiceship once because of the drinking issue (although he got appointed to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as a consolation prize), but he eventually got appointed when his two spinster sisters assured the Prime Minister that they would keep Duff sober. They succeeded in doing so, and Duff CJ earned such a stellar reputation that Parliament extended his term on the Court past the normal retirement age.
Queen Elizabeth II first laid eyes on her future Prime Minister, David Cameron, when she saw him appear in a school play with her youngest son, Prince Edward, at age 9.
In The Stunt Man, Peter O’Toole plays Eli Cross, and megalomaniac film director who just might be willing to kill his stunt men in order to the the effect he wants. Cameron, a man with a past, joins the company as a stunt man in order to hide from the police. His name becomes an important plot point, and sets the final scene in motion.
Viggo Mortenson and Jackie Chan are among actors famous for performing their own stunts.
Viggo Mortensen, who played Aragorn, chipped a front tooth during the filming of the battle of Helm’s Deep in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers when an extra accidentally hit him. Although he was willing to keep filming, director Peter Jackson insisted he pay an immediate visit to a dentist.
Viggo Mortensen, a native of the Adirondacks region in New York, used his knowledge of Scandinavian languages, learned from his Danish and Norwegian parents, to get a job as a translator at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, NY.
In 1946 Edwin McLaughin and Charles Millard began making Adirondack brand baseball bats using the wood of Northern white ash trees. In 1969 the company introduced the “bat-mobile” – an Airstream trailer equipped to hand-turn bats at various Major League spring training camps. In 1975 Adirondack was merged with Rawlings Sporting Goodsy.
H. L. Mencken is the perpetrator of “The Great Bathtub Hoax,” a spurious history of the bathtub that grew out of an article he wrote in 1917 entitled, “A Neglected Anniversary.” Though his history was completely made up, it was taken up by historians the the public and continued to be repeated for decades, with cites are recently as 2008. Among his claims was that cities tried to ban bathtubs, and did tax them excessively; that doctors condemned it as a threat to health; and the Millard Fillmore was the first president to have a bathtub installed in the White House.
Donoghue v Stevenson, [1932] A.C. 562 (H.L.) is a famous tort decision of the British House of Lords sitting in its judicial capacity, dealing with a snail (or possibly a slug) found in a bottle of ginger beer. The plaintiff’s action claimed for damages for gastroenteritis and severe nervous shock after finding the remnants of the slug (or possibly a snail) after she had drunk most of the contents of the ginger beer bottle. The case is one of the most notable decisions of the British House of Lords and is the foundation of the modern law of negligence. Lord Atkin’s decision is notable for the clarity of his language in establishing the “neighbour” principle in negligence law, including a surreptitious reference to the parable of the Good Samaritan. The House of Lords did not actually rule on the merits of the case, since the form it reached them was a motion to strike out as disclosing no cause of action. After the Lords ruled that the pleadings disclosed a cause of action known to the law, the parties settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. It was never determined if in fact the ginger-beer bottle contained a snail (or slug).
[del]New England is noted for its profusion of “Bathtub Jesus” lawn displays, in which an old cast-iron tub is upended with one end buried, and used for a display case for a statue of Jesus. A popular variant is the Bathtub Madonna, or “Mary on the Half Shell”. Another custom in the region is to bury a statue of St. Joseph upside down to help sell a house quickly.[/del]
It is a misconception that some tequilas contain a “worm” in the bottle. Only certain mezcals, usually from the state of Oaxaca, are ever sold con gusano, and that only began as a marketing gimmick in the 1940s. The worm is actually the larval form of the moth Hypopta agavis, which lives on the agave plant. Finding one in the plant during processing indicates an infestation and, correspondingly, a lower quality product.
“Time in a Bottle”, by Jim Croce, reached No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart posthumously, three months after Croce died in a plane crash.
John F. Kennedy (who had a brother, sister, son and widow’s stepson [Alexander Onassis] who all died in air crashes) is alleged to have had secret dealings with Sam ‘the Cigar’ Giancana.
Sam Giancana’s daughter Antoinette wrote a bestselling memoir, Mafia Princess, that was made into a TV movie in which Tony Curtis (born Bernard Schwartz) played her father. (Both memoir and movie received terrible reviews.)
St Bernard of Clairvaux was a French abbott and an influential Doctor of the Church.