When translated from French, the official style of Haiti’s King Henri I was “By the grace of God and the constitutional law of the state, King of Haiti, Sovereign of Tortuga, Gonâve and other adjacent Islands, Destroyer of Tyranny, Regenerator and Benefactor of the Haitian Nation, Creator of her Moral, Political and Martial Institutions, First Crowned Monarch of the New World, Defender of the Faith, founder of the Royal and Military Order of Saint-Henry”.
In the comic strip “Henry,” the main character never spoke a word.
“I’m Henry the Eighth I Am” was a British music hall song made into a 1965 hit by Herman’s Hermits. As singer Peter Noone explained it, Henry married a seven-times widowed woman whose previous husbands had all been named Henry.
In one episode of “The Patty Duke Show,” Cathy Lane sang “I’m Henry the VIII, I Am” at a rockin’ teen party!
Henry I’s only son and heir died I’m a shipwreck. We have it on good authority that Henry never smiled again!
Charlie Chaplin wrote the melody to the song Smile, a hit for Nat King Cole and others.
King Edward VII was the first British monarch to use a rubber stamp for his signature, as he found the task of signing the commissions of all British and Imperial military and naval officers onerous.
Edward VII appeared in a 1910 advertisement for Angelus Player Pianos. He almost certainly neither consented or received reimbursement for that ad, but, like Paris Hilton and other celebutantes of today, when he was a constantly broke Prince of Wales he did accept credit, merchandise, and-or money to openly patronize or mention his fondness for various businesses (hotels, restaurants, tobacconists, jewelers, tailors, etc.).
King Edward VII, son of Queen Victoria, is mentioned in the award-winning Australian court-martial drama Breaker Morant; British troops give him three cheers when they douse their tent lights at the end of the day.
In what is perhaps Breaker Morant’s most famous line, “The only rule out in the Veldt is Rule .303,” .303 is a reference to the caliber of the standard-issue British rifle of the day.
“Rule 34” is an internet meme variously described as “if it exists, there’s pornography of it” and “if it can be imagined, there’s pornography of it.”
Jersey number 34 was worn in the NFL by Walter Payton, Joe Perry, Herschel Walker, Thurman Thomas, Ricky Williams, and Bo Jackson.
William Herschel, discoverer of the planet Uranus, was not only Astronomer Royal of Great Britain but an accomplished musician and composer as well. He wrote at least 24 symphonies during his lifetime.
In Greek mythology Uranus (the Sky) was the son and husband of Gaia (the Earth). Their children included the twelve Titans, the three Cyclopes, and depending on the teller various other monsters and vengeance demons and other beings.
The New York Titans were a founding franchise of the American Football League. They were owned by sportscaster Harry Wismer and were consistently short of funds, since Wismer did not have the money that other AFL owners did. Stories were that the players would leave the field in the middle of practice on the day they got their paychecks, in order to rush to the bank and cash them before the account was overdrawn. Wismer was forced to sell the franchise to a syndicate headed by media executive Sonny Weblin, who renamed the team the “New York Jets,” and started spending heavily to get talent, including the unheard of sum of $400,000 to sign Alabama quarterback Joe Namath.
Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan was an 1898 novella written by Morgan Robertson. The story features the ocean liner Titan, which sinks in the North Atlantic after striking an iceberg. The Titan and its sinking were very similar to RMS Titanic, which sank fourteen years later.
The legend of the Edmund Fitzgerald remains the most mysterious and controversial of all shipwreck tales heard around the Great Lakes. Her story is surpassed in books, film and media only by that of the Titanic. Canadian folksinger Gordon Lightfoot inspired popular interest in this vessel with his 1976 ballad, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
The Chippewa mentioned in Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” are actually the Ojibiwa tribe of Native Americans. In their language, the name means “People of the Red Leaf.”* They were originally indigenous to what is now eastern Canada and the northeastern United States, but were pushed westward by the European population.
*Or so I was told when I worked for the Minnesota Historical Society; a number of other etymologies are possible.
Sailor/stuntman Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly is credited with creating the 1920’s fad for pole-sitting, when his 1924 session lasted over 13 hours. He later stretched the record to 49 days, beating out some upstart competitors (the record eventually went to over 439 days). Pole-sitting is related to the ancient ascetic discipline of Stylitism, or column-sitting. St Simeon Stylites the Elder (c. 388-459) of Antioch (now Turkey) was a column-sitter who sat on a column for 37 years.
“Machine Gun Kelly” was the nom-de-crime of George Barnes, a petty thief and bootlegger and (once) kidnapper whose image as a ferocious machine gun spraying supercriminal was 90% manufactured by his publicity loving wife, Kathryn. His biggest claim to fame is originating the term “G-men” for FBI agents, though some experts dispute that as well.