The first Attorney General, Edmund Randolph, was forced to resign over his having engaged in diplomacy with France contrary to President Washington’s policy over the Jay Treaty. Randolph later served as Aaron Burr’s defense counsel in his treason trial (Burr’s treason, not his own).
The Jay Treaty was negotiated by John Jay, then Chief Justice of the United States. He later resigned to serve as Governor of New York. A criminal-justice college, the only one of its kind, is named after him in New York City.
“Ponsonby Britt” was a pseudonym Jay Ward used for Rocky and his Friends in order to give the impression he wasn’t running the whole show. The name is supposed to be stereotypically English.
Britt Ekland was a Swedish-born actress who long lived in the UK. She was married to Peter Sellers, and appeared perhaps most notably in The Man with the Golden Gun and The Wicker Man.
That’s Britt Ekland speaking flirtatiously in French, at the end of then-boyfriend Rod Stewart’s smash hit, “Tonight’s the Night.”
French troops and warships played a key role in the Yorktown campaign of 1781, which resulted in the surrender of Lord Cornwallis’s army to George Washington and the virtual end of military operations in the American Revolution.
William and Mary ousted James II, England’s last Catholic monarch, in a relatively bloodless coup d’etat known as the Glorious Revolution.
The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia is the second-oldest college in the United States, after Harvard. The Phi Beta Kappa society was founded there in 1776.
On The Bob Newhart Show, Bob Hartley’s orthodontist buddy Jerry Robinson was a William & Mary graduate.
When asked to contribute songs to the soundtrack of “The Graduate,” Paul Simon took “Mrs. Roosevelt,” a 1940s-themed song he’d been working on, and changed it into the Grammy-winning “Mrs. Robinson.”
Mrs. Robinson, nee Mary Therese Winifred Bourke, was the first female president of Ireland, a country of shamrocks, harps, and leprechauns.
American photographer Margaret Bourke-White, generally acknowledged as the first female photojournalist, took the photo that appeared on the cover of the first issue of Life magazine. Photography was originally a hobby for Bourke-White. She had studied to be a herpetologist.
Candice Bergen played photographer Margaret Bourke-WHite in Richard Attenborough’s film “Gandhi.”
Bourke-White did much of her early photographic work in Cleveland, Ohio, including this iconic image of the Terminal Tower: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41IDOz-fX4L.jpg_SX350_BO1,138,138,138_SH30_BO0,100,100,100_PA7,5,5,10_.jpg. The Tower still stands, although not nearly as many trains come there nowadays.
Tower Bridge in London is billed as the most famous bridge in the wall. Beneath it is the Dead Man’s Hole, where bodies of people who drowned were fished out of the Thames.
“…bridge in the wall”?
Tower Bridge appears, still under construction, in the recent Robert Downey Jr./Jude Law action-adventure, Sherlock Holmes.
London Bridge is the most famous landmark in Lake Havasu City, Arizona; the bridge was built across the Thames in 1831 (William IV was king), was dismantled and sold when a larger one was needed to accommodate automobiles in the 1960s, and rebuilt in its present location over a canal in 1971.
Before coming up with the name Spinal Tap, Nigel Tufnel and David St. Hubbins called themselves the Originals, the New Originals, and the Thamesmen.
In A Mighty Wind the group “The Folksmen” began when the duo The 2-Badours became a trio. Their records included Singin’, Walkin’, Ramblin’, and Pickin’, but when they added Gs for their album Saying Something it flopped.
“A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow” was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. It was written for the film A Mighty Wind by husband and wife actors and songwriters Michael McKean and Annette O’Toole.