“Welcome to the Machine” by Pink Floyd ends with the sound of elevator doors opening onto a raucous party.
The Anti-Masons were the first political party in the USA to hold a convention to choose their Presidential nominee.
The 1922 Committee, composed of Conservative Party backbenchers in the British House of Commons, has the power to choose the party’s leader if there is a vacancy between national elections. David Cameron is currently leader of the party and the incumbent Prime Minister.
The movie ***Almost Famous ***is a fictionalized account of director Cameron Crowe’s real-life experiences as a 15 year old reporter, on tour with Led Zeppelin.
The name “Led Zeppelin” was coined by Keith Moon of the Who. The group had temporarily broken up and were trying to start a new one with Moon and John Entwistle. Moon said that their band would go over like a “lead zeppelin” – in other words, a big lead balloon.
Jimmy Page liked the name and changed it to “Led Zeppelin,” so it wouldn’t be mispronounced. Page, of course, never appropriated anyone else’s work ever, ever again. :rolleyes:
Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”, about Viking explorers, was written in 1970 while the band was on tour in Reykjavik, Iceland, a locale which inspired Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. The first on-stage performance, beginning with Plant’s signature howl, took place six days later in Bath, England during the Bath Festival. It is now used as a pregame crowd-stimulator over the PA system at Minnesota Vikings home games.
While a member of the Yardbirds, Jimmy Page appeared in the famous club scene in Antonioni’s thriller Blow Up. They performed “Stroll On,” a revised version of their earlier hit “The Train Kept a Rolling.”
A portrait of President Jimmy Carter appears over Al Pacino character’s shoulder in Scarface, as he describes his yearning for the American Dream… or at least his amoral criminal’s version of it.
Razor Ramon, the character portrayed by Scott Hall during his first, most successful run in the World Wrestling Federation, was based off of Tony Montana, Al Pacino’s character from Scarface. Hall won the WWF Intercontinental Championship four times, and participated in the revolutionary ladder match against Shawn Michaels at WrestleMania X in which two Intercontinental Title belts were hanging above the ring. That particular match, while still considered a classic, is also relatively tame as ladder matches go, by today’s standards.
Montana has the largest migratory elk herd in the US.
Wisconsin has the second largest wild deer herd in the US, after Pennsylvania.
Canada is the second-largest country in the world by area.
Canada’s Act of Union was passed in 1840, but Upper and Lower Canada (southern Ontario and Quebec and Newfoundland, respectively) were officially united as the Province of Canada on February 10th, 1841.
On March 4, 1841, William Henry Harrison succeeded Martin Van Buren as President of the United States. In an extremely ill-advised decision that would never fly in these days, Harrison-- wanting to prove he was still the badass hero of Tippecanoe-- chose not to wear an overcoat or hat during his outdoor inaugural address, which was, at two hours long, the longest inaugural address to date.
Predictably, he contracted pneumonia, and died exactly a month later (though Wikipedia contradicts the textbooks I grew up with, and says that it’s unrelated to the inaugural). John Tyler succeeded him as president, and established the precedent that someone who succeeds to the presidency in this manner is the President, and not merely the Acting President. This precedent was eventually codified in the 25th Amendment more than a hundred years later.
The Hundred Years War, lasting from 1337 until 1453, was a defining time for the history of both England and France. The war started in May 1337 when King Philip VI of France attempted to confiscate the English territories in the duchy of Aquitaine (located in Southwestern France). It ended in July 1453 when the French finally expelled the English from the continent (except for Calais).
The Battle of Gavere was fought near Semmerzake in Belgium on July 23, 1453 between an army under the Philip III, Duke of Burgundy and the rebelling city of Ghent.
The Belgian waffle is a North American type of waffle identified by its larger size, lighter batter and higher grid pattern which forms deep pockets and has larger squares than the standard American waffle.
American Airlines’s largest hub is Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. It has two affiliates, American Eagle and AmericanConnection.
In 1980, Pete Rose won his last World Series ring while playing for the Phillies under manager Dallas Green. Oddly enough, when Dallas Green was a major league pitcher, he yielded the only grand slam Pete Rose ever hit.
“The Wars of the Roses” were given their name by Sir Walter Scott over three hundred years after the war ended, taking the name from an incident in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 (written a century after the war) where the two sides chose red and white roses to stand for their side. Actually, the rose was not the main symbol of either side (the Yorkists used the “Sun in Splendor” – a triple sun), and red roses did not exist in the 15th century.