10 days ago Johnny Depp turned 50.
The Warren Beatty film Reds, about an American journalist covering the Russian Revolution in 1917, was based on John Reed’s memoir Ten Days that Shook the World*.
Warren Beatty was a notorious ladies’ man back in the day. Woody Allen once joked that, if he were ever reincarnated, he would want to come back as Warren Beatty’s fingertips.
“Fingertips” was the first #1 hit for 13 year old multi-instrumentalist Steveland Morris, who performed as Little Stevie Wonder.
Morris the Cat is the spokescat for 9Lives cat food.
The novelty song “Cat Food” was the last King Crimson track to feature Greg Lake on lead vocals.
King George III considered abdication in 1781 after Lord Cornwallis’s defeat at Yorktown during the American Revolution, and drafted a letter to that effect, but did not go through with it after all.
A few years later, Cornwallis was made a Knight Companion of The Most Noble Order of the Garter, and Governor-General and commander in chief in India, where he enacted a series of deep reforms in the British government there as well as consolidating rule over the subcontinent.
Sam Houston was governor of two different U.S. states: Tennessee and Texas.
Recently, a Texan citizen developed and posted the first blueprints for a 3D printed gun, the Liberator.
Simon Bolivar, El Libertador, was the key figure in liberating Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru from Spanish rule.
Any Texan could tell you that the Lone Star State’s flag is flown with the white stripe on top, i.e. “the bandage over the wound” of the red stripe below.
D’oh! How about:
Simon, played by Mike Myers, was an annoying little British kid with an exaggerated accent, always found in his bath in a series of Saturday Night Live sketches.
William Howard Taft was the 27th president of the United States. He was also the fattest, and legend has it that he once got stuck in a tub, commissioning a new one once he was pried out. It could fit 3 grown men.
When Taft was president, he started the tradition of a White House Christmas tree, with a large fir in the Blue Room.
William Howard Taft was a Federal judge before he held several appointive posts in the Federal government, and when he died he was Chief Justice of the United States. He is the only former President to serve as Chief Justice.
Woodrow Wilson, Taft’s successor, is the only president to have a PhD.
George W. Bush was the only President with an MBA.
Really? And still. Just.
Anyway, George W. Bush initiated the War of Afghanistan, which is now the longest war in US history.
In his poem “The Young British Soldier”, Rudyard Kipling advised young recruits:
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Neil Gaiman’s novel The Graveyard Book is loosely based on Kipling’s The Jungle Book.