Washington’s coat of arms included the motto “Exitus acta probat”, translated roughly as “the end justifies the means”, a quote perhaps most associated with Niccolo Machiavelli in The Prince.
American Indian activist Russell Means played the title character in Michael Mann’s “Last of the Mohicans.” In 1988, he sought the Libertarian Party’s Presidential nomination, but lost to Ron Paul.
“The walrus was Paul” line in the song Glass Onion was the Beatles way of having a joke with their fans about the “Paul is dead” rumors.
Many of J. D. Salinger’s short stories featured the members of the fictional Glass family.
Salinger lived in New Hampshire but often crossed over the Connecticut River into Vermont for social occasions. Neighbors did not consider him a recluse among them, but they did help protect his privacy from outsiders. The author died recently, causing many fans to hope that some of his dozens of unpublished stories will finally come to light.
In Dirty Dozen, Wladislow (played by Charles Bronson) explains that he can speak a passable German because his father was a coal miner from Silesia and had to speak German to find work. In real life, Bronson’s father was a coal miner from Lithuania.
More American electricity is now produced by the burning of coal than by any other means.
Kirk Douglas starred as MacMurphy in the Broadway production of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and held the rights to make a movie version. After failing for a decade to get the movie made, he gave the rights to his son Michael, who produced the Oscar winning movie version… and had the unenviable task of telling his Dad, “You’re too old to play MacMurphy. We’re giving the part to Jack Nicholson.”
Nicholson was brought up believing that his grandparents were his parents. Nicholson only discovered this, and the fact that his sister was in fact his mother, when a reporter who’d done some digging told him. He was then almost 40.
Alec Guinness won his only Oscar for his performance as the slightly deranged Colonel Nicholson in “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”
Guinness played eight different roles (and both sexes) in the 1949 dark comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets.
In 1949, the Yankees won the first of 5 consecutive World Series championships, under new manager Casey Stengel.
Stengel won a total of seven World Series as the Yankees’ manager. After retiring from the Yankees, he was brought out of retirement to manage an expansion team, and wound up managing what is generally considered to be the worst team in modern MLB history, the 1962 Mets, which went 40-120.
In the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, President John F. Kennedy declared a naval quarantine around Communist-controlled Cuba and prevented the Soviet Union from reinforcing its previously-clandestine medium-range ballistic missile emplacements there. The Soviets eventually removed all of the missiles in a negotiated settlement. The “Hot Line” between Washington and Moscow was established after the crisis as a permanent and reliable means of contact in crises.
During the Spanish-American War, which freed Cuba of Spanish control, the US sent a battleship to the Spanish colony of Guam. After firing a warning shot at the fort, the Spanish authorities came out to the ship and apologized for not returning the salute, as the fort had no ammunition. When informed that the US was at war with Spain, the fort’s commander immediately surrendered.
Nigerian con men who send out e-mails asking gullible people to provide a bank account where an exiled African ruler can deposit his money are running a variation on a VERY old scam called ***The ***Spanish Prisoner.
Last year a Russian owned oil and natural gas company with interests in Nigeria sparked debate and lots of jokes (including here on SDMB) when they named a Nigerian based gas line a Russian contraction of ‘Nigerian Gas’- NIGAZ, bringing to mind such odd scandals as when a politician’s assistant was fired for using the word ‘niggardly’ or when the Boston Globe’s politically correct editing software changed a headline to read “Transportation Budget Finishes Year in African-American”.
A Russian oil billionaire, Roman Abramovich, owns Chelsea Football Club.
Bill and Hillary Clinton named their daughter after Joni Mitchell’s song “Chelsea Morning,” a tune covered by both Judy Collins and Neil Diamond.
Neil Diamond sang “Coming to America” for the soundtrack of the remake of The Jazz Singer, in which he starred. The song was later extensively used by Democratic presidential candidate Mike Dukakis of Massachusetts in his 1988 campaign, acknowledging his family’s Greek immigrant roots.