FOR YOUR EYES ONLY
Who has appeared in the most James Bond films? Sean Connery? Guess again. Roger Moore? No, not him either. Turns out there’s someone who’s been in more Bond films than Connery and Moore combined.
HOME FROM SCHOOL
In the summer of 1964, a 22-year-old law student named Michael G. Wilson visited his stepfather, film producer Albert R. Broccoli, on location at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Broccoli was there filming scenes for Goldfinger, the upcoming James Bond film. He needed an assistant, so Wilson signed on for three weeks. His responsibilities consisted mostly of running errands and doing odd jobs, but when a particular scene—Bond villain Auric Goldfinger’s raid of the United States Bullion Depository—called for lots of extras, Wilson suited up as a soldier and appeared in the scene.
After graduating from law school and practicing law for several years, Wilson joined Broccoli’s production company. In 1976 he assisted his stepfather in filming The Spy Who Loved Me. He must have enjoyed appearing as an extra in Goldfinger, because he made an appearance in this movie too, this time as a member of the audience watching an evening light show in Egypt, near the Sphinx. (He’s the man with glasses and a beard sitting behind Agent Triple X, played by Barbara Bach.)
CATCH HIM IF YOU CAN
Wilson has been involved in the production of all but one of the Bond movies made since then (1983’s Never Say Never Again, which wasn’t produced by Broccoli), and he’s made cameos in every film he worked on. In some films he appears in more than one scene; in others his “appearance” is limited to his voice being heard over a loudspeaker or from another room. To date, he has been coproducer or executive producer for 14 different Bond films, five of which he has also cowritten, which makes him one of the most important people on the set. But part of the fun of his cameos is that he doesn’t pick the parts he plays—the crew members pick them. For many 007 aficionados, trying to spot Wilson’s scene in each new Bond film is as much fun as trying to spot director Alfred Hitchcock or M. Night Shyamalan’s cameos in their films. Here are the appearances he’s made…so far:
Moonraker (1979). He’s a tourist strolling past the Venini Glass factory with a young boy in Venice, Italy. Later, he’s standing on a bridge in the background as Bond hands a vial of poison gas to M, the head of the British counterintelligence agency MI6. Near the end of the film, Wilson plays a technician at the U.S. Air Force base tracking Bond villain Hugo Drax’s space station. (He’s the guy who hands a piece of paper to a general and says, “It doesn’t look good at all. It’s over 200 meters in diameter.”)
Actually…the compulsive urge to correct someone else’s grammar is called “Grammatical Pedantry Syndrome.”
For Your Eyes Only (1981). The priest at a wedding on the Greek island of Corfu.
Octopussy (1983). Early in the film, he’s the man with the camera on the tour boat when Bond is pulled out of the water. Later on, he’s the man seated at the far left during the meeting of the Soviet security council.
A View to a Kill (1985). He’s heard, but not seen, from behind a door as Bond and a female character, geologist Stacey Sutton, walk down a hallway to the file room in San Francisco City Hall.
The Living Daylights (1987). He’s a member of the audience enjoying an opera performance in Vienna. Wilson is sitting two seats to the left of Saunders, Bond’s ally in MI6.
License to Kill (1989). Again Wilson is heard but not seen. This time he’s the voice of a DEA agent as a private jet lands on a runway. Wilson’s dialogue begins with him saying, “He’s landing at Craig Key. Advise Key West Drug Enforcement.”
GoldenEye (1995). A member of the Russian defense committee that listens to the report from General Ourumov. Wilson is the man with the mustache seated in the foreground on the far left side of the screen.
Tomorrow Never Dies (1997). He plays media executive Tom Wallace. In the scene where Bond villain Elliot Carver threatens to blackmail the president of the United States with a compromising video, Wallace is shown on a large video screen telling Carver, “Consider him slimed.”
The World Is Not Enough (1999). He’s a man wearing a tuxedo, standing in the background at the casino in Azerbaijan.
Die Another Day (2002). First, a man in a white shirt and straw hat leaning against a car when Bond is in Cuba, and later, U.S. Air Force General Chandler.
Casino Royale (2006). He’s the corrupt chief of police who is arrested in an outdoor restaurant in Montenegro and taken away.
Quantum of Solace (2008). He plays a man sitting in a chair reading a newspaper as Bond collects a briefcase from the front desk clerk at the hotel in Haiti.
Skyfall (2012). He’s the guy in the doorway behind the coffins of the slain British agents when M pays her respects.
Spectre (2015). Wilson is seen shaking hands with C in the background, as M, walking down a hallway, approaches them. And who’s the younger man standing next to him? It’s the film’s associate producer, Wilson’s son, Gregg Wilson.
About 6 million years ago, otters were the size of wolves.
YOU’RE FIRED!
You show up at work expecting it to be like any other day, and then about a half hour after lunch you’re called into the boss’s office and—BOOM!—your life has completely changed.
“If you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.”
—Vince Lombardi
“Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit.”
—George Carlin
“My career is inexplicable to me. So far I’ve just been not getting fired despite being myself.”
—Nick Offerman
“Getting fired is nature’s way of telling you that you had the wrong job in the first place.”
—Hal Lancaster
“Sometimes I wish I could get fired.”
—Matt Stone, who has been making South Park since 1997
“I mean, there’s no arguing. There is no anything. There is no beating around the bush. ‘You’re fired’ is a very strong term.”
—Donald Trump
“From getting cut from the high school basketball team, to getting fired from jobs, getting credit cards rejected and cut up. Rejection has only been a distraction, not a roadblock. ‘Every no gets me closer to a yes’ is the saying I use.”
—Mark Cuban
“You can get fired from a job, but you can’t get fired from your gift. So find your gift and you will always work.”
—Anonymous
“My agent said, ‘You aren’t good enough for movies.’ I said, ‘You’re fired.’ ”
—Sally Field
“No one wants to get fired, so everyone’s scared to take a chance.”
—Billy Eichner
“If you don’t win, you’re going to be fired. If you do win, you’ve only put off the day you’re going to be fired.”
—Leo Durocher
“I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
—Steve Jobs
“Getting fired can produce a particularly bountiful payday for a CEO. Indeed, he can ‘earn’ more in that single day, while cleaning out his desk, than an American worker earns in a lifetime of cleaning toilets. Forget the old maxim about nothing succeeding like success: Today, in the executive suite, the all-too-prevalent rule is that nothing succeeds like failure.”
—Warren Buffett
“Be willing to get fired for a good idea.”
—Spike Jonze
The hard way to make gold: Find two neutron stars and smash them into each other.
RESCUE ANNIE
This is the story of how one mysterious woman who drowned in Paris became the most kissed face of all time.
SLEEPING BEAUTY
In the late 1800s, the unidentified body of a young woman was pulled from the Seine River at the Quai du Louvre in Paris. It was the custom at the time to place unknown corpses on display on marble slabs in the window of the morgue behind Notre Dame in the hope that someone would recognize them. No one was able to identify the young woman, but the Paris morgue’s pathologist was so taken by her beautiful, tranquil expression—a serene smile that looked almost happy in death—that he commissioned a plaster death mask of her face.
Word of the mysterious woman’s beauty spread, and soon casts of the beautiful white mask hung in art studios and salons across Paris. As entrancing as her beauty was, the mystery of her identity and how she died was even more intriguing. Some suspected she committed suicide because of a broken heart. Others guessed murder, though her lifeless body was blemish-free. She soon became known as l’inconnue de la Seine—“the unknown woman of the Seine.” French author Albert Camus called her “the drowned Mona Lisa” because of the hint of a smile on her lips.
AMUSED
The image of this French Ophelia spread across Europe and America, where novelist Vladimir Nabokov and painter Man Ray were two of many artists inspired by her beauty and mysterious story. She was a muse to German author Rainier Maria Rilke, whose poem “Washing the Corpse” described laying out the body of an unknown woman. Englishman Richard Le Gallienne wrote the novella The Worshiper of the Image, about a poet who was obsessed with wanting the mask to open its eyes. But when it does, a moth emerges from her mouth with the face of death between its wings. This story was the inspiration for the now-iconic image used on posters for the 1991 movie The Silence of the Lambs.
“Annie, are you okay? Are you okay, Annie?”
CALL ME ANNIE
In 1950 Norwegian toymaker Asmund Laerdal gave the mysterious lady a name: Anne. Laerdal had attended a conference where Dr. Peter Safar, the inventor of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), was speaking about the importance of training people in this new system that combined mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and chest compression. Safar asked Laerdal to design a life-size mannequin for use in CPR training. Laerdal, whose own son had needed to be resuscitated after nearly drowning at the age of two, was happy to take the job. The toymaker chose to make the human-size doll a woman because he thought men would feel awkward practicing mouth-to-mouth on a male doll. Laerdal had heard stories of the drowned Mona Lisa and chose her image to be the face of the plastic doll he called Resusci Anne, or “Rescue Anne.”
We googled it: 2.3 million Google searches take place every minute.
THE KISS OF LIFE
Since 1960, more than 400 million people have learned to breathe life into Rescue Anne’s lifeless body asking, “Annie, are you okay? Are you okay, Annie?” as they practice CPR and shake the body, checking to see if the victim is reviving. And Anne’s legacy continued even after that. In 1984, nearly 100 years after the mysterious girl was pulled from the Seine River, Michael Jackson took a CPR course and was inspired to incorporate the phrase, “Annie, are you okay?” into the lyrics of his song “Smooth Criminal,” which appeared on Jackson’s 1987 album Bad and hit #7 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1988.
2 RANDOM LISTS
5 Celebrities with Patents
Prince: “Portable electronic keyboard”
Marlon Brando: “Drumhead tensioning device”
Jamie Lee Curtis: “Disposable infant garment”
Zeppo Marx: “Cardiac pulse rate monitor”
Michael Jackson: “Anti-gravity illusion”
Top 5 Most Valuable Christmas Records
1959: Johnny Horton, They Shined Up Rudolph’s Nose (picture sleeve), $400
1971: The Beatles, The Beatles’ Christmas Album, $500
1971: John Lennon, Happy Christmas (promotional copy), $750
1957: Elvis Presley, Blue Christmas (white label promotional copy), $3,000
1957: Elvis Presley, Elvis’ Christmas Album (red vinyl), $15,000
Ancient Roman catapults were often constructed using ropes made from human hair.
NAME THAT SOUP
Ever wonder who put the “strone” in “minestrone”? The “owder” in “chowder”? The “ho” in “pho”? (Careful, there, soup boy! This is a family soup book!) Then sit thee down at the Table of Label—and read all about the name origins of several well-known soups.
MINESTRONE
Minestrone originated in simple vegetable and bean-based soups and stews made by the people who inhabited the area around Rome more than 2,000 years ago. Those early soups evolved as new ingredients became available—notably tomatoes, which were introduced into Europe from South America during the Age of Exploration—eventually becoming the thick vegetable, bean, and pasta (and sometimes rice) soup we know today. The name “minestrone” derives from minestra, the Italian word for “soup.” The -one ending makes it mean something along the lines of “big soup.” The word entered the English language in the 1870s. (Note: minestra is “soup,” but it literally means “that which is served,” from the Italian verb minestrare, meaning “to serve,” which in turn comes from the Latin minister, meaning “servant.” Which explains why “minestrone” has the same etymological origins as the word “minister.”)
BORSCHT
Borscht is the name used for a wide variety of sour soups of eastern European/Slavic origin. There are many varieties, including red and white borschts, some of them served hot, but the best known is the red, beet-based, served-cold borscht whose origins are Ukrainian. The English word “borscht” dates to the 1880s, and comes from the Yiddish name for the soup. That, in turn, is derived from borshch, the Russian name for the common hogweed plant (also known as “cow parsnip”). The pickled flowers, stems, and leaves of the common hogweed were once the basis of this soup, which was how it got its sour taste.
PHO
Pho, pronounced “fuh,” is a brothy Vietnamese soup made with rice noodles, herbs, and usually with thin slices of beef or chicken. It is hugely popular in Vietnam, and is sold by street vendors and in restaurants nationwide. Most common time to eat pho: breakfast, although it is also eaten for lunch or dinner. And it’s a relatively young dish, believed to have originated in the early 20th century, in the country’s north, not far from Hanoi. There are two main theories as to the origin of the name of this soup—and neither are Vietnamese. The first is that “pho” was derived from the French word feu, meaning “fire,” or more accurately from pot de feu, literally “pot on the fire,” the name of a thick French beef stew. Vietnam was a French colony at the time pho was developed, and because the French are credited with making beef popular in the country, this is the version most etymologists support. The second theory is that “pho” was derived from the Cantonese word phan, meaning “noodles.” Either way, it came to English as the name of this tasty soup in 1931.
First CGI movie sequence: a two-minute scene in Westworld (1973).
BISQUE
Bisque is a smooth and creamy crustacean-based soup of French origin. (It is most famously made from lobster, but can also be made from crab, crayfish, or shrimp.) The name “bisque” was probably derived from the name of the region where the soup was first made: the area around the Bay of Biscay, in southwestern France and northern Spain. Some historians believe the word came from bis cuites, meaning “twice cooked,” referring to the fact that the crustaceans involved are first cooked separately, then again with the other ingredients—butter, flour, carrots, celery, onion, wine, and brandy. If this is true, then bisque has the same origin as biscuit, which is known to have been named for its original two-part cooking method. Still another possible origin of the term: “bisque” was derived from bisco, a word in the French Provençal language meaning “small, beveled pieces,” referring to the crustacean pieces in the soup. Wherever this name came from, it first arrived in English in around the 1640s. (Bonus fact: The original French use of “bisque” referred to soup made from the meat of game birds. It only got the crabby meaning in the
17th century.)
YOU’RE MY INSPIRATION
•Buddy Holly’s 1957 hit “That’ll Be the Day” was the first song ever played on American Bandstand, and later became the first song recorded by the Quarrymen (who later changed their name to the Beatles). The idea came to Holly while he was watching a Western called The Searchers, and a character tells John Wayne, “I hope you die,” to which the Duke replies in his distinctive delivery: “That’ll be the day.”
•In 2013 actor Alyssa Milano was approached to host a documentary about Disney’s 1998 animated film The Little Mermaid. At first Milano (Who’s the Boss?, Charmed) wasn’t sure why they’d chosen her, but she said yes. Then she found out why, and it suddenly made sense: “It came out that the drawing and likeness of the Little Mermaid [Ariel] was based on pictures of me from when I was younger, which is so cool!”
During World War II food rationing in England, cardiovascular disease rates dropped…
CAT-IDATES FOR
PUBLIC OFFICE
Everyone seems to agree that the world of politics is going to the dogs. One irrefutable sign: the number of cats who have been candidates for public office in recent years.
Cat-idate: Tuxedo Stan, a black-and-white cat whose markings made him look like he was wearing a tuxedo
Running For: Mayor of Halifax, the capital of Nova Scotia
Campaign Notes: Stan, a feral kitten, was adopted by a veterinarian named Hugh Chisholm and his wife Kathy in 2010. Halifax has a large population of feral cats, thanks in part to the fact that local laws require the spaying or neutering of dogs…but not cats. In 2012 the Chisholms decided to call attention to the problem by entering Stan as a candidate for mayor on the Tuxedo Party ticket. All proceeds generated from the sale of campaign merchandise (lawn signs, T-shirts, campaign buttons, etc.) went to help low-income families spay or neuter their cats.
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