A statue of Queen Victoria stands directly in front of Buckingham Palace; automotive traffic must pass around it. During state occasions such as the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, temporary scaffolding turns it into a photographers’ and TV cameras’ vantage point.
The head of South Park Elementary School is Principal Victoria. In the episode “Sexual Harassment Panda,” when she was put on the witness stand during Cartman’s second trial over the school allowing him to be sexually harassed, she hysterically confessed that she murdered a man, cut up his body, and hid his remains.
“Notice to Agent is Agent to Principal; Notice to Principal is Notice to Agent” is a legal tag that is often found on pseudo-legal gibberish documents filed by Sovereign (sic) Citizens.
The British TV show Danger Man starring Patrick McGoohan was renamed Secret Agent when broadcast in the US.
The new London headquarters of the Security Service, MI5, and the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, were purposefully built on separate sites so that a single attack could not destroy both.
M-17 is also called Messier-17, the Omega Nebula, the Swan Nebula, Checkmark Nebula, Lobster Nebula, the Horseshoe Nebula, and good old NGC 6618. It’s in the constellation of Sagittarius.
The Swan Queen in Swan Lake is named Odette. The Black Swan in the same ballet is named Odile.
The recently deceased Karen Black considered Kris Kristofferson the most attractive male star she ever worked with. She especially liked his voice.
Kris Kristofferson made Sports Illustrated’s “Faces in the Crowd” for starting and starring in the rugby program at Pomona College. He later went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and flew helicopters as a captain in the US Army.
Andy Griffith starred as “Lonesome” Rhodes in A Face in the Crowd.
In an often-replayed segment from a 1969 episode of The Tonight Show, “Lonesome George” Gobel followed Bob Hope and Dean Martin, walking onstage with a plastic cup with an unidentified drink. Gobel ribbed Carson about coming on last and having to follow major stars Bob Hope and Dean Martin. He quipped to Carson, “Did you ever get the feeling that the world was a tuxedo and you were a pair of brown shoes?”, to which Carson, Hope, Martin, and the audience came unglued with laughter. After the laughter died down, Carson asked Gobel about his career in World War II as a fighter pilot. Gobel feigned bewilderment at why people laugh when he says that he spent the war in Oklahoma, pointing out that no Japanese plane ever got past Tulsa. Gobel also began to get some unexpected laughs, being unaware that Dean Martin had begun flicking his cigarette ashes into Gobel’s drink. Observing all of this, Carson finally asked rhetorically, “Exactly what time did I lose control of the show?!”
Dean Martin, born Dino Paul Crocetti in Steubenville, Ohio, died on Christmas Day 1995.
When James Brown died on Christmas day, 2006 the Bergen County, New Jersey newspaper The Record, had his obit on page 1, and an ad on page 3 for his New Year’s Eve performance at the Bergen County Performing Arts Center!
The next day they print an apology.
W. C. Fields also died on Christmas Day, in 1946. On the whole, he’d have rather been in Philadelphia.
The Fields Medal, awarded by the International Mathematical Union, is often considered the discipline’s Nobel Prize. It is awarded only triannually, and only to mathematicians under the age of 40. The distinction of “math Nobel” is shared by the Abel Prize, awarded by the King of Norway.
Sweden, Norway, Spain and Holland each have a king; the United Kingdom has a queen; only Japan, in all the world, still has an emperor.
“The King of Spain” was a hit song in Canada in the early 90’s by the indie band, Moxy Früvous. The narrator of the song is a former King of Spain who left the cares of the monarchy behind and now drives the Zamboni in the Maple Leaf Gardens.
A stylized maple-leaf-and-mountains is the symbol of the Vorkosigan District in Lois McMaster Bujold’s novels about the Vorkosigan family.
Lois Flagston of the comic strip Hi and Lois is the sister of Beetle Bailey in the two strips’ official continuity.
The name of the a-cappella quartet The Hi-Lo’s, formed in 1953 and who achieved their greatest fame in the late 1950s and 1960s was reportedly a reference to their extreme vocal and physical ranges. Bob Strasen and Bob Morse were tall, while Gene Puerling and Clark Burroughs were short.