On the American Comedy Awards, Bea Arthur did a comedic routine with a seal
In 2005, Peter Cook was ranked #1 in the Comedian’s Comedian , a poll of 300 comedians, comedy writers, directors and producers throughout the English-speaking world.
Dmitri Kabalevsky’s orchestral suite “The Comedians”, taken from the incidental music he wrote for a children’s play about the German printer/inventor Johannes Gutenberg and a group of travelling buffoons, is often performed and recorded jointly with fellow Soviet composer Aram Khachaturian’s “Masquerade Suite”.
The The Phantom of the Opera’s Masquerade scene, half of the costumed actors are mannequins, being moved by the real actors.
The song “Showroom Dummies”, telling the story of mannequins come to life and going out on the town, by German technopop pioneers Kraftwerk, was rearranged with a Latin rhythm and orchestration by Señor Coconut (Uwe Schmidt) for his album Baile Aleman. Besides Electrolatino, Señor Coconut is also considered the father of Electrogospel and Aciton (acid-reggaeton) music.
The Supreme Court of Canada tends to use Latin terms for some of its procedures, such as coram (“panel”) and “factum” (“brief”), partly because they are neither English nor French terms.
Frenching, when referring to car body customization, means recontouring the area around the headlights or taillights to smooth out the visual flow into the rest of the body, in the manner of a dress shirt’s French cuffs - the kind that fold back and need cufflinks. The result is that the lens is slightly recessed into the body, leaving a lip around it.
The sleeves of the waistcoat for common barristers do not have cuffs, in contrast to the heavy cuffs of the sleeves on the QC waistcoat.
Ron Dante is best known as the lead singer for the fictional cartoon band, The Archies, as well as the one-hit wonder (Tracy) group The Cuff Links, and was the co-producer of Barry Manilow’s first nine albums.
In the original *Rocky *movie, Rocky Balboa’s two pet turtles were named Cuff and Link.
The name of Rocky and Bullwinkle’s hometown was Frostbite Falls, Minnesota.
Rocky & Bullwinkle’s creator, Jay Ward, collected African masks. His collection is now part of the Michelson Museum of Art in Marshall, Texas.
Jay Silverheels, who played Tonto on the old Lone Ranger TV series, was an avid horse-racer when not acting. When asked if he ever thought about running Silver or Scout (who portrayed the steeds of the Lone Ranger and Tonto, respectively) in a race, Silverheels laughed: “Heck, I can beat Scout.”
Actor Iron Eyes Cody, who played numerous bit parts in Hollywood as a stock Indian, was best known as the “crying Indian” in the “Keep America Beautiful” Public Service Announcement (PSA) in the early 1970s. The environmental commercial showed Cody dressed as a Native American, shedding a tear after trash is thrown from the window of a car and it lands at his feet. The announcer, William Conrad, says: “People start pollution; people can stop it.”
But his real name was Espera Oscar de Corti, the son of Sicilian immigrants.
Armand “Armie” Hammer, who played the lead in the recent box-office bomb The Lone Ranger, is the paternal great-grandson of oil tycoon and philanthropist Armand Hammer.
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Today is the 67th birthday of former President William Jefferson Clinton, Democrat of Arkansas.
Although admittedly sorely tempted, Armand Hammer never bought control of Church & Dwight, the manufacturer of Arm & Hammer baking soda. He did own a lot of its stock and sat on its board for a while, though.
Hammer was actually named after the “Arm and Hammer” symbol of the Socialist Labor Party of America (SLP), in which his father, a committed socialist, had a leadership role at one time. The Arm & Hammer brand was in use some 31 years before Hammer was born, and is said to represent the god Vulcan, the ironworker.
Vulcan was the Roman version of Hephaestus, the husband of Aphrodite, goddess of love. (She was called Venus in Roman mythology.)
There were early references to “Vulcanians” in early episodes of the late Gene Roddenberry’s* trailblazing sf TV show Star Trek, but it was not long before the show referred to Mr. Spock and others of his race simply as “Vulcans.”
*Today’s his birthday, BTW.
The Birmingham Americans, the champion of the World Football League’s only full season (1974), changed their name to the Birmingham Vulcans for the ill-fated following season, with the league’s best record at the time it folded. One of their players was former 'Bama running back Johnny Musso, whose nickname, the Italian Stallion, was stolen by Sylvester Stallone for Rocky. The team’s name came from the city’s cast-iron statue (the world’s largest) of Vulcan, overlooking the steelmaking city from Red Mountain.
Richard M. Nixon was saluted by a U.S. military combined-services color guard when he left the White House for the last time as President on Aug. 9, 1974.
