“In Midst of Life,” the last story James Tiptree, Jr. wrote, told of a man who shoots himself in the head and goes to live in a heavenly afterlife. Tiptree committed suicide a few months later the same way as the protagonist.
(Aside: I found this the creepiest story I ever read – an actual suicide note as fiction).
Sigmund Freud’s death would today be called an assisted suicide; in constant pain from the cancer that had already cost him his jaw, a friend and colleague helped him lethally overdose on morphine.
One of the nicknames for Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was “The Jaw that Walks like a Man.” (Mr Mulroney was well-endowed in the mandibular department.)
Jaws writer Peter Benchley is the grandson of The Algonquin Round Table wit Robert Benchley.
Algonquin is a dialect of Ojibwe, which is a member of the Algonquian family.
There have been three warships in the U.S. Navy named the USS Algonquin. The first was a Civil War gunboat that failed her engine trials and was never commissioned; she was sold, without ever having seen service, in 1869.
The first definitive use of what became known as “gunboat diplomacy” occurred in 1850, when Lord Palmerston dispatched a squadron of the Royal Navy to blockade the Greek port of Piraeus in retaliation for the harming of a British subject, David Pacifico, in Athens, and the subsequent failure of the government of King Otto to compensate the Gibraltar-born (and therefore British) Pacifico.
Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, the first women’s medical college, opened on October 12, 1850.
There were actually several schools that allowed women to train as doctors in the U.S. before there was a program that allowed them to train as nurses. The first nursing school that allowed women was at t he New England Hospital for Women, and its first graduate was Linda Richards in 1874, who soon became the head of the program and of several other nursing schools in the U.S. and abroad. (Though many women were called ‘nurses’ during the Civil War, few had more than on-the-job training and they had few duties that required any kind of medical training but were more what we would now call orderlies.)
Florence Nightingale was nicknamed “The Lady with the Lamp” which she carried with her as she made her rounds in the military hospital she worked in.
American novelist William Styron once wrote a nonfiction essay about his time as a young U.S. Marines officer, confined in a military hospital for treatment for venereal disease.
In World War II, William “Cannon” Conrad flew a P-39 under the Golden Gate Bridge twice.
The Pierre Laporte bridge crosses the St Lawrence River at Quebec City. It is named after the Deputy Premier of Quebec who was kidnapped and assassinated by the FLQ during the 1970 October Crisis.
Garry Trudeau’s comic strip Doonesbury debuts on October 26, 1970, in approximately two dozen newspapers in the United States.
The original characters of Doonesbury were created when Trudeau was an undergraduate at Yale; Mike Doonesbury takes his name in reference to Trudeau’s roommate Charles Pillsbury (a great grandson of the man who founded the company that bears his last name) and B.D. was named after Yale quarterback Brian Dowling.
Brian Dennehy was a US Marine, but contrary to press releases never saw any combat or was wounded.
Bea Arthur was a US Marine, reaching the rank of Staff Sergeant as a typist and truck driver in World War II, under her original name of Bernice Frankel, although for some reason she denied it later in life. While stationed at Cherry Point, NC, she was dinged for a misconduct for contracting a venereal disease.
During the 1984 Canadian election, Brian Mulroney tried to hit the common touch by saying that his opponent, Prime Minister Turner, spent his youth dancing with Princess Margaret, while Mulroney as a young man was driving a truck in Baie Comeau.
It is argued that Princess Margaret’s most enduring legacy is an accidental one. Perhaps unwittingly, Margaret paved the way for public acceptance of royal divorce. Her life, if not her actions, made the decisions and choices of her sister’s children, three of whom divorced, easier than they otherwise would have been.
Not just press releases. From Wiki:
Rather than immediately chase his dreams of stage and screen, Dennehy enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1959, actively serving until 1963. Although he said in numerous interviews that he had spent five years fighting in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, even telling harrowing tales of being hit by shrapnel, it was revealed in the 1998 book Stolen Valor by B.G. Burkett that Dennehy had never served overseas at all during his time in the military. Later that year, Dennehy admitted to the tabloid The Globe “I lied about serving in Vietnam and I’m sorry. That was very wrong of me. There is no real excuse for that. I was a peace-time Marine, and I got out in 1963 without ever serving in Vietnam. I started the story that I had been in 'Nam, and I got stuck with it. Then I didn’t know how to set the record straight.” Nonetheless, in 2007 Dennehy once again told a reporter that he had served in Vietnam, this time Joanne Kaufman of the Wall Street Journal.
In play:
A pantomime Princess Margaret was a recurring gag in several Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketches. The princess herself never appeared on the show.