Because of an alliance forged by Scotland and France against England during the Middle Ages, natives of France born before 1906 had dual citizenship in France and Scotland.
The Battle of Culloden in 1746 was the last military engagement fought in Britain. The Hanoverian victory, by a mostly-English force, ended the attempts by the Jacobites to return the House of Stuart to the throne in the person of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Both sides included large numbers of both lowland and highland Scots.
Stuart Sutcliffe was a Scottish-born artist and musician; best known as the original bassist for the Beatles. Sutcliffe left the band to pursue his career as an artist, having previously attended the Liverpool College of Art. Sutcliffe and John Lennon are credited with inventing the name as they both liked Buddy Holly’s band, the Crickets.
Lunchlady Doris, in talking to Lisa on a recent episode of The Simpsons, implied that she had broken her promise to Paul McCartney not to sleep with John Lennon.
The Lennon Sisters have sung for seven different US presidents in a row – Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan.
The Pleidades, or Seven Sisters, were companions of Artemis in Greek mythology. The constellation is named after them.
In Japan the constellation is called Subaru, which means “unite”. In Persian the constellation is named Nahid.
The angel Israfel was created at the beginning of time, has four wings, reaches from the earth to the pillars of Heaven in height, from the seventh heaven to the throne of God in width, is a master of music and sings praises to Allah in a thousand different languages, the breath of which is used to inject life into hosts of angels.
In Edgar Allan Poe’s beautiful poem Israfel, the Pleiads listen to Israfel’s song (though this parenthetical remark is, arguably, just a convenience due to ‘heaven’ rhyming with ‘seven’).
Edgar Allan Poe met Charles Dickens during the Englishman’s 1842 tour of America. On March 6, 1842, Poe and Dickens arranged to meet while he was in Philadelphia. Dickens had been greatly impressed by Poe’s ability to guess the ending of his 1841 serialized novel “Barnaby Rudge”. In the “Saturday Evening Post” edition of May 1841, Poe had reviewed the work, which was being published serially in a magazine a chapter at a time. At the meeting, Dickens agreed to consider writing for the magazine that Poe edited, “Graham’s”, and to try to find an English publisher for Poe’s “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque”. Nothing of substance came from either promise. Curiously, Dickens owned a pet raven named Grip, and he had introduced the loquacious raven into “Barnaby Rudge” as a character. In his May 1841 review, Poe commented on the use of the talking raven, saying the bird should have loomed larger in the plot. Literary experts surmise that the talking raven of “Barnaby Rudge” inspired Poe’s most famous poem, “The Raven”, published in 1845. After Grip died in 1841, Dickens had the bird mounted. It now resides at the Free Library on Logan Circle in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
In Susan Witing Albert’s mystery series The Darling Dahlias, set in the fictional town of Dahlia, Alabama in the 1930’s, Mr. Charlie Dickens is the editor of the progressive Darling Dispatch newspaper.
My Darling Clementine (1946) was the favorite movie of Colonel Henry Potter on MASH*.
In 2012 Neil Young and Crazy Horse recorded an almost six minutes long, hard rock version of “Clementine” on their album Americana.
The seedless tangerine called the clementine is actually a variety of mandarin orange. It is thought be the result of accidental hybridization, with the first fruits discovered by Father Clément Rodier in the garden of his orphanage in Misserghin, Algeria.
The historic roots of Algerian literature goes back to the Numidian era, when Apuleius wrote The Golden Ass, the only Latin novel to survive in its entirety.
The word “arse” was considered so shocking that polite people started using “ass” as a euphemism. Over time, as is often the case or euphemism, the word “ass” took on the shocking value that “arse” once had. The process came full circle, as “arse” is now sometimes used as a euphemism for “ass.”
I’m missing the connection.
In play:
Although the usual rule of good breeding is that a man should open the door for a woman and allow her to go through first, some believe that it is more polite for a man to go through a revolving door first, so that he is doing more of the work of helping her enter the building. Opinions vary, of course.
John Lennon, Lennon Sisters.
The first revolving door was installed in 1899 at Rector’s Restaurant in Times Square, New York City. Theophilus Van Kannel was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for this invention.
The zipper was invented in 1913 by the Swedish engineer Gideon Sundback. Today, about 80% of the world’s zippers are manufactured in the dusty little town of Qiaotou, China, where they manufacture 124,000 miles of zippers each year. That’s enough to wrap five times around the equator, or to reach halfway to the moon. Each and every year.
The Squirrel Nut Zippers, a swing-influenced band from Chapel Hill, NC had their one breakthrough hit with “Hell” (“Here in the afterlife / You could be headed for the serious strife …”. They took their name from a caramel candy, which in turn took the name “Nut Zipper” from a type of moonshine.
In Thomas Wolfe’s novel Look Homeward, Angel, the city of Chapel Hill is thinly disguised as Pulpit Hill. North Carolina becomes the state of Catawba, which is the name of an actual college in the Tar Heel State’s city of Salisbury.