Joel Grey narrated the US version of the cartoon Paddington Bear.
Jasprt fforde’s recent novel, Shades of Grey, is a fantasy in a world where social status is determined by your color perception. The book predates a best selling novel with a similar title by a couple of years.
These Old Shades was Georgette Heyer’s second novel. Originally intended as a sequel to her first novel, The Black Moth, she decided to make it a stand-alone novel. However, the characters are easily linked to the characters in The Black Moth, as “shades” of their former selves.
Georgia Engel, who played Ted Baxter’s ditzy girlfriend Georgette on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, graduated from my alma mater, the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and had a sister who was Miss Hawaii 1967.
The Efficient Baxter was one of the Earl of Emsworth’s many secretaries. He first appears in the first Blandings story, Something Fresh. The Earl of Emsworth does not like him, finding him to be too efficient for the leisurely Earl. The Earl’s sister, Constance, is strongly pro-Baxter, leaving the hapless Earl little choice in his secretary.
Baxter next appears Leave it to Psmith!, where at one point he is locked out of the Castle at midnight in lemon-yellow pajamas. To try to alert someone to let him back in, he begins throwing flowerpots at an open window, which happens to be Emsworth’s bedroom. This awakes the Earl, who goes to the window and is hit by an incoming flower-pot. The episode finally gives him the excuse to dismiss Baxter.
Baxter next appears in a travelling caravan parked on the grounds of Blandings, in Summer Lightning, scheming to get his job back as secretary, with the help of Lady Constance. He fails, but pops up from time to time in other books, still pining for Blandings. However, he is permanently barred from Paradise, and never is re-admitted, a point of pathos almost equivalent to the death of Saruman.
US PP5847 PAbstract was issed for a variegated lemon-line tree names Lemonine, described as “A citrus tree producing lemon-lime combination fruits and ample foliage wherein both foliage and fruits are variegated, such variegation of both arising from the type of bud variation known as white-over-green periclinal chimera.”
In Canada, chimeras of human and animals are banned by the Assisted Human Reproduction Act. The Supreme Court struck down much of the Act a few years ago as intruding on provincial jurisdiction, but upheld the ban on chimeras under the federal criminal law jurisdiction.
Chief Justice John Marshall encouraged his colleagues on the U.S. Supreme Court to live in the same boarding house in Washington, D.C. to deepen their sense of collegiality when the court was in session.
Recitations of excerpts from the Goodridge v. Department of Health decision, ruling in favor of same-sex marriage in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, written by Chief Justice Margaret Marshall of the Supreme Judicial Court (a South African native who had demonstrated against apartheid in her younger years) have become popular at both same-sex and mixed-sex weddings.
Massachusetts, Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania are the four U.S. states that style themselves “commonwealths.”
Maine was originally part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and only became a separate state in 1820 as part of the Missouri Compromise.
On Sucker Day in Nixa, Missouri, school closes officially and the little town swells to a throng of 15,000 hungry folks, all craving a taste of the much maligned but delicious bottom dweller fish loathed by almost everyone else.
Hatchling flounder have their eyes on opposite sides of the head, but one migrates over as the fish transitions from larval to juvenile stage, and an eventual life of lying on the bottom looking for predators above. Flounder ambush their prey, feeding at soft muddy areas of the sea bottom, near bridge piles, docks and coral reefs. They have been found at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, the deepest known ocean canyon, but only once, for 20 minutes.
Coral reefs in the Caribbean are producing less than half of the calcium carbonate (which they need to survive) that they did in pre-industrial times.
Reporter Walter Duranty of the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of news events in the Soviet Union, coverage that is now known to have been little more than laughably dishonest pro-Communist propaganda.
Anatoly Dobrynin served as ambassador of the Soviet Union to the U.S. from 1962 to 1986, during the administrations of six U.S. Presidents (from Kennedy to Reagan) and five Soviet leaders (from Khrushchev, who appointed him, to Gorbachev).
The people on Wikipedia’s list of US Ambassadors to Russia / USSR include former US Presidents John Quincy Adams and James Buchanan, and also a Cassius M. Clay who was a cousin of Henry Clay and who had a reputation as a fighter but who apparently was no relation to Muhammad Ali.
The elderly John Adams was in failing health but lived to see his son John Quincy Adams elected President of the United States; by all accounts, it lifted his spirits so much that his health improved and he ended up living more than another year.
The Marquis de Lafayette gave John Quincy Adams a pet alligator. The alligator lived in the White House for several months.
Humorist Don Marquis wrote numerous comical essays using only lower-case letters on his typewriter. His gimmick was that the essays were written by a cockroach named archy who was too small too press the shift key.