Electric Ladyland was the only professionally-produced studio album by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Its best-known track other than “Voodoo Chile” was Jimi’s rework of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower”. Olympic Studios overruled his desire for cover art of a color photo by Linda Eastman of the group sitting with children on a sculpture from Alice in Wonderland in Central Park.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), author of Alice in Wonderland, has for over a century been considered by his biographies to have been fixated on children, especially young girls, and his photography of nude girls to have been evidence of possible sexual deviation. Since 1999, however, a number of biographers, (notably Karoline Leach in her In the Shadow of the Dreamchild), have determined that this was a long-promulgated error: that the Victorian Child-Cult perceived of nude children as a show of innocence, and that Dodgson’s family destroyed many of his correspondences with older women in order to keep his reputation unblemished.
Charles Lindbergh’s record-setting flight over the Atlantic Ocean failed to make the cover of Time magazine in 1927. Later that year, seeking to fill in a slow news week and make up for missing the story earlier, the editors of Time created their “Man of the Year” honorific, devoting an entire issue to how influential the flight was and making Lindy himself the first person ever to receive that title.
When Lindbergh’s Nazi sympathies, anti-interventionism, and support of terror bombing in Spain became public, Bertolt Brecht renamed his modernist theatre piece Der Lindberghflug to Der Ozeanflug, and changed the lead singer’s opening line from “My name is Charles Lindbergh” to “My name is of no account”.
The Hudson Bay Company was granted its Charter in 1670, by Charles II to the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson’s Bay. The first Governor was Charles’ cousin, Rupert of the Rhine. The HBC claimed Rupert’s Land for two centuries, before surrendering it back to the Crown. Queen Victoria, who was Charles II’s first cousin sixth removed, then assigned Rupert’s Land to Canada.
Rupert Everett has portrayed Kings or future kings of England on three occasions in film – Charles I in To Kill a King (2003); Charles II in Stage Beauty (2004); and George, Prince of Wales, the Prince Regent (later George IV) in The Madness of King George (1994). Everett is related by blood to all three of the kings he has portrayed, directly descended from Charles I and Charles II and indirectly or more distantly to George IV.
Gen. George Washington, commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, once approved a secret plan to kidnap the then-Prince of Wales, the future King George IV, while the Prince was visiting British-occupied New York City in the latter years of the American Revolution, but nothing came of it.
Prince Edward Island is named after George IV’s brother, Edward, Duke of Kent, father of Queen Victoria. It was originally called Isle St-Jean when it was part of New France.
Victoria proposed to Albert five days after their second meeting. As Queen, Victoria could not receive a proposal from a man. They had nine children, forty grandchildren and thirty-seven great grandchildren. She wrote in her diary "He has the most pleasing and delightful exterior and appearance you can possibly see.”
Pogo following the adventures of a bunch of anthropomorphic animals is Okeefeneoke Swamp. The title character was an opossum, whose best friends were the uninhibited Albert the alligator and the pessimistic Porky Pine.
Pogo wasn’t the original star of the strip. Albert was paired with a little black boy named Bumbazine, who was written out once it was clear Albert was the real draw.
Barney Google has only rarely appeared in the long-running comic strip “Barney Google and Snuffy Smith”, originally just “Barney Google”, since the hillbilly Snuffy became the main character in 1934, along with his wife Loweezy, their baby Tater, their nephew Jughaid, and their neighbors Elviney and Lukey.
Barney Google’s horse was named Spark Plug. Charles Schulz (later creator of the Peanuts comic strip) liked the strip so much, his uncle started calling him “Sparky”, which lasted as a nickname his whole life.
Nineteenth-century French cycling champion Albert Champion eventually moved to the US where he founded the Champion Spark Plug Co., and, after selling it along with his name rights, the AC Spark Plug Co. The first company was originally located in Boston’s Cyclorama building, originally built to display an in-the-round painting of the Battle of Gettysburg (the painting is now near the battlefield in a similar building), and which is now a community arts center.
While most people think of Boston as a huge metropolis, the actual City of Boston (called “Boston proper” by the natives) only has about 800,000 inhabitants. The city proper and its suburbs form a larger metropolitan area called Greater Boston, home to 4.5 million people and the tenth-largest metropolitan area in the country
There have been seven warships named USS Boston to serve in the U.S. Navy over the years, the most recent of which was a Los Angeles-class nuclear-powered fast attack submarine decommissioned in 1999.
LCDR Solveig Krey is the only known female submariner commander. She is skipper of one of Norway’s fine submarines.
The leader of a curling rink is called the “skip”, shortened from “skipper”. The other three members of a rink are called the lead, the second and the third.
Lyndon Johnson, Democrat of Texas, was one of the most powerful and effective Senate Majority Leaders of the twentieth century.
The LBJ Presidential Library & Museum is located in Austin, TX on the UT campus. It opened on 22 May 1971 (its dedication date). This page shows a picture of LBJ and Lady Bird Johnson in front of the then newly-built facility.