Joseph Haydn’s “Farewell Symphony” was written as a subtle hint to his patron, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, that perhaps he might like to allow the musicians to return home from a long stay at his summer home. During the final adagio, each musician stopped playing, snuffed out the candle on his music stand, and left in turn, so that at the end, there were just two muted violins left (played by Haydn himself and the concertmaster, Alois Luigi Tomasini). Esterházy seems to have understood the message: the court returned to Eisenstadt the day following the performance.
Today is the day following the second shut-out by the Saskatchewan Riders in two years. Last year, they shut-out the Winnipeg Blue Bombers on the Labour Day Classic, 52-0. Yesterday, they shut out the Hamilton Ti-Cats, 37-0.
There is a marvelous children’s book based on Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, with illustrations by Quentin Blake, most famous for illustrating the works of Roald Dahl.
ETA: To handle being ninja’d, ALW later did CATS, based on the poems by T.S. Eliot.
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Nobody’s in a rut here, are they?
Roald Dahl’s and Patricia Neal’s daughter Ophelia Dahl is the president and executive director of Partners In Health (PIH), a Boston, Massachusetts-based non-profit health care organization dedicated to providing a “preferential option for the poor.” The group’s initial and primary focus has been on public health in Haiti. She has been featured in several documentaries and books illustrating the use to which she has put her inheritance and convinced other donors to join her.
Patricia Neal was the female lead in the 1949 King Vidor-directed film The Fountainhead, with Gary Cooper playing Roark. Ayn Rand wrote the screenplay based on her book but was, by all accounts, not fond of the film.
King Vidor’s first sound film was *Hallelujah!, *a groundbreaking film featuring an African-American cast, and in which he established the new language for sound films.
King George III was deeply involved in British parliamentary politics, and would shower his favorites with royal patronage and campaign cash. He also contributed to the campaigns of challengers to Members of Parliament whom he disliked.
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Professor George Edward Challenger is a fictional character in a series of fantasy and science fiction stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, most notably the novel The Lost World.
Nostradamus believers site Century 1.81 as a prediction of the Challenger exploaion
D’humain troupeau neuf seront mis à part,
De jugement & conseil separés:
Leur sort sera divisé en départ,
Kappa, Thita, Lambda mors bannis égarés.
From the human flock nine will be sent away,
Separated from judgment and counsel:
Their fate will be sealed on departure
Kappa, Thita, Lambda the banished dead err.
Thiokol made the defective O-ring that is blamed for the disaster. The name has a ‘k’, ‘th’ and an ‘l’. Never mind that there were seven who died, not nine. The rest is vague enough to retrofit many different scenarios.
The name Thiokol is derived from the Greek words for sulfur (theio) and glue (kolla).
Sulfur is the most common curative or accelerator in the process of vulcanizing rubber, in which crosslinks are formed between the polymer chains in the base material to increase its hardness and durability. Tire magnate Charles Goodyear is credited with inventing the process, even though it was virtually accidental and he never fully understood it.
"Tai nasha no karosha, " is “Live long and prosper” in Vulcan, at least according to this site.
Noted Star Trek Vulcans Sarek and Spock, father and son, had a fraught relationship over the years, as Sarek did not wish his son to enter Starfleet and practically shunned him when Spock nevertheless joined. Much later, they had a falling-out over Federation policy during the Cardassian War.
In the game of Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock, as popularized on an episode of “The Big Bang Theory”:
Scissors cut paper
Paper covers rock
Rock crushes lizard
Lizard poisons Spock
Spock smashes (or melts) scissors
Scissors decapitate lizard
Lizard eats paper
Paper disproves Spock
Spock vaporizes rock
Rock breaks scissors
Dr. Benjamin Spock, best known for his baby and child care books, had two sons, Michael and John. Michael was formerly the director of the Boston Children’s Museum. Spock’s grandson Peter, who suffered from schizophrenia, commited suicide at age 22 by jumping from the roof of the Museum.
Besides establishing the Boston Museum of Science, Bradford Washburn, of Cambridge Brahmin origins, was a pioneering mountaineer who was credited with the first ascents of at least 13 peaks in Alaska, and was a major innovator in aerial photography and cartography.
Marcellus Washburn helped con man Harold Hill in The Music Man.
Julio-Claudian genealogy is extremely inbred and confusing. For example, Augustus’s daughter, Julia, first married her first cousin, Marcellus Claudius, son of her aunt Octavia with her (Octavia’s) first husband. Next she married the much older general Agrippa, whose previous wife had been Marcellus’s sister. Thirdly she married her stepbrother Tiberius, previously married to Vipsania, the daughter of her second husband Agrippa. All of her children who lived to adulthood married cousins.