Daniela Bianchi, who played Tatiana Romanova in From Russia with Love, had a stand-in whenever her legs were shown. Despite being a beauty queen (First Runner Up in the 1960 Miss Universe Contest), Terence Young, the film’s director, didn’t think her own legs were shapely enough.
The femme fatale Bond Girl in “GoldenEye” is Xenia Onatopp. Ms Onatopp’s preferred method of murder was crushing her opponent with her thighs.
(What a way to go!)
Her Majesty the Queen is the latest Bond girl, having appeared with Daniel Craig in a segment filmed at Buckingham Palace for the opening of the London 2012 Olympiad.
The 2012 presidential election marks the first time in the 236-year history of the US that no one on either party ticket – Democrat OR Republican – belongs to that once-prototypical American group, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
The first known published definition of the ethno-religious epithet “WASP” was provided by sociologist Andrew Hacker in 1957: “They are ‘WASPs’—in the cocktail party jargon of the sociologists. That is, they are wealthy, they are Anglo-Saxon in origin, and they are Protestants (and disproportionately Episcopalian). To their Waspishness should be added the tendency to be located on the eastern seaboard or around San Francisco, to be prep school and Ivy League educated, and to be possessed of inherited wealth.”
(I always thought the “W” in WASP stood for “white”).
George Washington was an Episcopalian. The last Episcopalian President was George H.W. Bush.
USS Wasp (CV/CVA/CVS-18) was one of 24 Essex-class aircraft carriers built during World War II for the United States Navy. The ship, the ninth USN vessel to bear the name, was originally named Oriskany, but was renamed while under construction in honor of the previous Wasp (CV-7), which was sunk 15 September 1942.
The Lexington-class aircraft carrier, USS Saratoga (CV-3) was just arriving at San Diego Harbor when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. She hurriedly got underway as the nucleus of a third carrier force, and arrived at Pearl Harbor on December 15.
(On a personal note, I had the distinct honor of meeting one of the Saratoga’s sailors more than 65 years later.)
Most but not all U.S. aircraft carriers during World War II were named after Revolutionary War battles or warships, including Saratoga, Lexington, Yorktown, Enterprise, Ranger, Valley Forge, Bunker Hill, Bonhomme Richard, and others.
My father’s uncle, may he R.I.P., was a Pearl Harbor survivor. He was on the USS Arizona when it was sunk. He jumped off the burning deck, into the burning water, and swam under water to Ford Island. When he needed air, as he surfaced he splashed the water to clear the burning oil, then took a breath and went back underwater until he got to the island. I was a little kid when he told me about this experience, and he showed me his letter signed by the president commemorating him as a USS Arizona Pearl Harbor survivor.
My father’s uncle, we kids called him “Lolo Enyong”, lived to a ripe old age. Lolo Enyong was a member of The Greatest Generation.
“Lolo Enyong” was Patrocinio Pablo and he is listed on this page:
http://files.usgwarchives.net/hi/keepers/ph002f.txt
(Side note: I too have only heard the W in “Wasp” referred to as “White.”)
In play (assuming the post above mine was a trivia play: When President Johnson was visiting his ranch in Texas, he’d invite friends down and take them for a joyride in his car. He’d drive down a steep incline toward the lake, pretend to lose control, and then yell, “The brakes don’t work! We’re going in! We’re going under!” The car would splash into the lake, and as everyone else was screaming, Johnson would be doubled over laughing. Turns out, Johnson was the proud owner of an Amphicar, the only amphibious passenger automobile ever mass-produced for civilians.
[side note] but that would be redundant - doesn’t “Anglo-Saxon” imply “white”?[/side note]
on-game: Gerald Ford was the only person to serve as Vice-President and President without being elected to either office.
(Redundant or not, that’s how I’ve always heard it. AcronymFinder.com agrees with “White.”)
(It’s not redundant; it differentiates from, say, a white Germanic protestant)
Back to the game:
In Monkey Business, Groucho tells Thelma Todd, “You look like a girl who’s had a lot of bad breaks I could clean and tighten those brakes, but you’d have to stay in the garage overnight.” The line is seen as morbidly prophetic; Todd was found dead in her garage a few years later.
Gary Hart was a leading presidential candidate in 1988 until a scandal broke out that he was having an extramarital affair with a woman named Donna Rice. Pictures of Rice sitting on Hart’s lap while aboard a yacht circulated. The name of the yacht? Monkey Business.
One of the Top Ten lists on David Letterman’s show in the '80s was titled “Gary Hart Pick-Up Lines.” They included “I’ll have a Slurpee … saaaay, are you a model?” and “Can a Kennedy-esque guy buy you a drink?”
Wiki also uses “white” and not “wealthy” in WASP: White Anglo-Saxon Protestants - Wikipedia
Doris Kearns Goodwin, the noted historian and author of Team of Rivals, was a White House intern and later an aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had earlier served as VP to John F. Kennedy.
If you look a bit further down on that Wiki page, you’ll see the 1957 Hacker quote, followed one paragraph later by a 1964 passage by E. Digby Baltzell which ends with “an increasingly castelike White-Anglo Saxon-Protestant (WASP) upper class”. So the assumption of wealth is still being made, but skin color has become explicit in the unabridged version of the acronym. Even now, many people wouldn’t refer to a “redneck” as a WASP even if all the components of the (more updated version of the) term literally apply to him – there’s still generally an implication of privilege, or at least a decent standard of living.
Goodwin was the first female allowed to enter the Boston Red Sox locker room in a journalistic capacity.
Sports Night, a comedy series written by Aaron Sorkin, had an episode in which one of the reporters, Natalie, was accosted in a locker room by a football player.
Aaron Sorkin also wrote A Few Good Men, and The American President, and he conceived the idea to create West Wing.