In the film Iron Man 2, the U.S. government attempted to legally force Tony Stark to hand over his Iron Man suits. Ultimately, his best friend, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel James “Rhodey” Rhodes, made off with the Mark II suit after a fight at Stark’s birthday party. The Mark II was the same suit that Stark made his first sustained flight with after escaping custody in Afghanistan.
Martin Mull played Colonel Mustard in the movie version of the board game Clue. This movie had three different endings with three different culprits, depending on what theater one chose to see it in.
Before establishing himself as an actor, Martin Mull released several albums on humorous songs, including Martin Mull Live in Your Living Room, Normal, and Days of Wine and Neurosis. His best-known song was “Dueling Tubas,” and he als released the Christmas single “Santa Doesn’t Cop Out On Dope.”
In the year 2000, John Goodman and Bette Midler won the People Choice Awards for Best Actor and Actress in a New Comedy Series. Their shows, Normal, Ohio, and ***Bette, ***were flops that had already gone off the air before the awards were presented.
John Goodman and Bruce Willis were roommates before they each became famous. In an hilarious Roseanne outtake, she gets in bed expecting to come on to John-as-Dan, only to find Bruce in the bed.
Before they became established movie stars, when they were young and living in New York City, friends Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman briefly shared an apartment as roommates.
The 1979 TV show Cliffhangers! was an attempt to imitate the Saturday morning adventure matinees of the 30s and 40s, with three stories: “Stop Susan Williams,” a pastiche of the Perils of Pauline genre; “The Curse of Dracula,” and “The Secret Empire,” a remake of the Gene Autrey serial, The Phantom Empire.
Among his many other roles, Christopher Lee has played a murderous British aristocrat, the vampire Count Dracula, and the wizard Saruman the White.
Christopher Lee also played Count Dooku in Star Wars: Episodes II and III, and villain Scaramanga in the James Bond film The Man With the Golden Gun, ensuring that nerds everywhere would be buying him drinks the rest of his life.
(I’m allowed to say that, since I’m both a Star Wars and a Bond fan).
James Bond, 007, was named after a British ornithologist who specialized in the birds of the Caribbean. Ian Fleming knew him and liked the strong sound of his name.
After discovering a seemingly endless number of islands in the northeast Caribbean in 1493, Christopher Columbus named them after St. Ursula and the 11,000 virgins – the Virgin Islands.
Among the smash hits written by the songwriting team of Tom Kelly and Billy Steinberg are Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors,” Heart’s “Alone” and Whitney Houston’s’ “So Emotional.”
Virgin Galactic is building Spaceport America in New Mexico.
The Galactic Year, also known as a Cosmic Year, is the length of time required for the Solar System to orbit once around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. Estimates of the length of one orbit range from 225 to 250 million terrestrial years. Since the birth of the Milky Way, the Solar System has completed about 60 such orbits.
By contrast, in the film Men in Black, a “galactic standard week” was one hour-- the length of time the Arquilians gave MiB to recover the galaxy from the bug.
Galactic distances are so large that they are measured in light years, the distance light (traveling at 186,000 miles per second), travels in one year. This means a light year is 5.87849981 X 10^12 miles long.
According to my calculations, one light year is equal to (check my math):
[ul]
[li]1 billion round trips between New York and San Francisco, or [/li][li]235 million times around the earth’s equator[/li][/ul]
In Star Trek IV, we learn that Mr. Sulu was born in San Francisco.
Hikaru Sulu was named by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry for the Sulu Sea, in the southwestern portion of the Philippines.
Lt. Hikaru Sulu, helmsman of the USS Enterprise, tells Capt. James T. Kirk in ST:TOS “Day of the Dove” that his friend, navigator Ens. Pavel Chekov, is an only child.
Eugene Patton, an NBC stage hand, became famous for his appearances on ***The Gong Show ***as “Gene Gene the Dancing Machine.”