Oliver Cromwell’s head (but not the rest of his body) is buried somewhere in the chapel of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, of which he was a graduate.
Henry Fonda, playing a U.S. presidential candidate in the 1964 political drama The Best Man, quoted Cromwell’s request to a portraitist that he be painted “warts and all.”
Next to the infamous Trabant, the second-best-known East German automobile make was the respectable Wartburg, also with a small, two-stroke engine, made in the former BMW plant in Eisenach. The firm could not survive reunification, and most of its former workers went to the new Opel plant in the city.
A noteworthy photo from just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of East Germany showed an entire Trabant which had been discarded in a dumpster.
The final collapse of the Western Roman Empire is traditionally dated to 476 A.C., when Odacer, a German soldier, deposed Emperor Romulus Augustulus and set himself up as the first King of Italy.
The home planet of the Romulans in Star Trek is Romulus. A nearby planet is named “Remus.” There is no explanation as to why aliens name their words after the two founders of Rome.
“Uncle Remus” is one of the lesser-known tracks from Frank Zappa’s 1974 album Apostrophe (’). The album is better known for its first two tracks, “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” and “Nanook Rubs It”, in which Zappa imagines himself living a vignette from the life of an Eskimo named Nanook… Zappa contributed vocals, guitar, bass, and bouzouki.
Warren Burger, Chief Justice of the United States, had to fly back to Washington, D.C. from London to swear in Gerald Ford as President after the resignation of Richard M. Nixon on Aug. 9, 1974.
William Buell Richards was the first Chief Justice of Canada.
In 2003 John Glover Roberts, Jr. became the youngest U.S. Chief Justice since John Marshall took the bench in 1801. He had only been a judge for a few months prior to this appointment, with notable decisions as District Judge including:
[ul][li] Agreeing in Hedgepeth v. Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority that the Transit Authority had the right to handcuff and detain a 12-year old black girl for several hours for the crime of eating a single french fry on Authority property.[/li][li] Accepting Bush’s military tribunals in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. (This was later overturned by SCOTUS, Roberts recusing.)[/li] Dissenting to the protection of an endangered species in Rancho Viejo, LLC v. Norton, arguing that the Commerce Clause of the Constitution did not apply to"a hapless toad" because “for reasons of its own, [it] lives its entire life in California.”[/ul]
Bertie Wooster, when in the depths of despair caused by the machinations of various aunts, British fascists and intellectual girls seeking to marry him, frequently referred to himself as the toad beneath the harrow, a phrase coined by Rudyard Kipling, “the toad beneath the harrow knows / Exactly where each tooth point goes.”
“Jeeves,” later revived as “By Jeeves” was Andrew Lloyd Webber’s most seriously flop. And, since Fry & Laurie also did a TV series based on Wooster’s books, I wold love to cast them in a revival of the ALW show.
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s first successful (although not earliest) collaboration was Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. They called the work a cantata, and it originally consisted solely of singers and instrumental accompaniment, without any attempt at staging.
John Cleese played several roles in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, including Tim the Enchanter, Sir Lancelot, the Black Knight, and a memorably rude French man-at-arms with a self-described “ridiculous accent.”
Forty years ago, John Cleese helped found Video Arts, a company that makes industrial training films and videos. Video Arts is still in business and, though Cleese sold his ownership shares in the 90s, he still appears in the videos.
John F. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and his future political rival Richard M. Nixon, Republican of California, were both interviewed by Jacqueline Bouvier in their first terms as Congressmen.
In one Wooster novel, “Right Ho, Jeeves”, Jeeves maneuvers Bertie into making a 9 mile bike ride in the middle of the night on a rickety old bike without a lamp. By way of grisly encouragement, as he sees Bertie off, Jeeves tells a joke about two men, Nicholls and Jackson, who were riding a tandem bike but came into a collision with a brewer’s van. When rescuers arrive, they find that the two men had been hurled together with such force that the rescuers could not tell which part was Nicholls and which part was Jackson. So they collected the remains all up and buried them together, under the name of Nixon.
Cynthia Nixon, who played Miranda in the HBO series Sex and the City was diagnosed with breast caner in 2006, but chose not to make that information public until 2008.
The City associated with sinful sex in Revelations 17:4-5
is thought not to be Babylon, but Rome. (Or even, say some, the Roman Catholic Church.)
In1983, then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein began to reconstruct Babylon. Many of the bricks used for the project were inscribed “This was built by Saddam Hussein, son of Nebuchadnezzar, to glorify Iraq”.