In French, the word for a hot air balloon is “montgolfière”, named after the Montgolfière brothers who made the first hot air balloon capable of carrying humans.
Humans breathe 20 times per minute, more than 10 million times per year and about 700 million times in a lifetime.
Breathing Lessons is just one of several Anne Tyler novels about annoying, depressed people in Baltimore who badly need a good smack in the face. Morgan’s Passing, The Amateur Marriage, and The Accidental Tourist are others.
Martin Charnin, who would later win Tony Awards for writing the scores to Annie (“Tomorrow”) & Hairspray "Good Morning Baltimore), won an Emmy in 1971 for Annie, The Women in the Life of a Man, which starred Anne Bancroft
Martin Landau was Gene Roddenberry’s first choice to play Mr. Spock on Star Trek.
Martin is the most common last name in France.
After originally been written in French, the musical Les Miserables has been translated into 21 languages: English, French, German (Austria and Germany), Spanish (four versions: two from Spain, one version each from Argentina and Mexico), Japanese, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk), Polish, Swedish (in Sweden and in Finland), Dutch (Netherlands and Belgium), Danish, Finnish, Brazilian Portuguese, Estonian, Czech, Mauritian Creole, Basque, Catalan and Korean. It was also translated back into French for the 1991 Paris production.
The Cao Dai religion of Vietnam was founded in 1926 and venerates Victor Hugo as one of its saints. Also venerated are Sun Yat-Sen, Trang Trinh, Shakespeare, Joan of Arc, Descartes, Lenin, and Pasteur.
Robin Williams’ portrayal of Adrian Cronauer in Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) has led to confusion as to the beliefs of the real Cronauer. Cronauer has said the film is about 45% accurate, according to a biography on Robin Williams. Cronauer has said the film misrepresented him to make him seem anti-war, when he was, in his own words, “anti-stupidity.” In fact, today Cronauer – who is now a lawyer – remains an active Republican and was a vice-chairman of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. Furthermore, Cronauer has also said that if he’d done half the things Williams did in the film, he would’ve been court-martialed and sent to Fort Leavenworth.
Dr. Hunter Doherty “Patch” Adams severely criticized Robin Williams’s “simplistic portrayal” of him in the movie, even stating that Williams “made $21 million in four months pretending to be me and didn’t give anything to my free clinic.”
John Lithgow has won five Emmy Awards, two Tony Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, an American Comedy Award and two Screen Actors Guild Awards. However, though he has nominated for Oscars for The World According to Garp (co-starring with Robin Williams) and Terms of Endearment, he has not won one.
In Fosse’s semi-autobiographical film All That Jazz, John Lithgow’s character Lucas Sargent is believed to have been based on director/choreography Michael Bennett, whose work included Promises, Promises, Follies and Company.
Maj. Gen. John Reynolds was offered but declined command of the Army of the Potomac, and was killed on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, July 1, 1863, as he led Federal troops against the advancing Confederates.
Really? Wow. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Clara Barton and Abraham Lincoln deserve to be on that list a lot more than Lenin. Hell, I could think of dozens of people who deserve to be on that list more than Lenin…
I can confirm 'tis true. Hey, it is Vietnam after all. There are about 2 million followers, and their HQ is in Tay Ninh, near Ho Chi Minh City. You can see their English-language website here.
In play: Burt Reynolds was the first actor ever asked to guest-host The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson." Prior to Reynolds, only comedians had been invited. One guest was his ex-wife Judy Carne, whom he hadn’t spoken to in over six years after a very bitter divorce.
In Québécois French, a clipped pronunciation of the word for the host in the Mass (“osti”) is one of the more powerful swear words, along with “tabernak” (the tabernacle where the host is kept) and “câlice” (the chalice for the wine and/or the host).
King Henri IV of France, originally a Protestant, estranged himself from the Huguenots but gained the support of the Catholic majority and secured his place on the throne by converting in 1593. He (apocryphally) explained his change of beliefs by saying “Paris is well worth a Mass”. He made it up to the Huguenots by issuing the Edict of Nantes, ordering their toleration within limits.
The invention of the cocktail “Earthquake” or Tremblement de Terre is attributed to artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: a potent mixture containing half absinthe and half cognac (in a wine goblet, 3 parts Absinthe and 3 parts Cognac, sometimes served with ice cubes or shaken in a cocktail shaker filled with ice).
Toulouse Lautrec’s parents were first cousins and it is thought the bone disease that caused his shortness was caused by his family’s history of inbreeding.
The highest inbreeding among US presidents was that of President William Henry Harrison, whose parents were second cousins. By coincidence, President Harrison had the shortest time in office of any president: one month.
The runners up were John Quincy Adams (parents were third cousins) and William Howard Taft (whose parents had several common ancestors amounting to a little more than a fourth-cousin relationship).