Word: opera
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...boots/everybody's-a-photographer-or-in-a-band thing." For his new character's name, he thought of 007's Aston-Martin sports car. For the look, he borrowed Michael Caine's eyeglasses from The Ipcress File, Connery's thatchlike chest hair, the costumes from the Who's rock opera Quadrophenia and the grotty dentures he used in an SNL skit about sugar-filled British toothpaste. The supervillain, bald-pated Dr. Evil, was lifted from the Bond film You Only Live Twice, with Myers adding the pinky-sucking tic of his former SNL boss Lorne Michaels...
...most entertaining thing about Pirates is the fact that--pro forma statements about inaccuracies from both camps aside--the corporate soap-opera events it recounts went down largely as Burke presents them: Jobs really did launch Apple in his parents' garage; his team really did steal the Macintosh's revolutionary visual-desktop design from under Xerox's nose; Gates really did talk IBM into licensing an operating system that he didn't yet own to run the first PC; and Jobs really did trust Microsoft with the Mac prototype, never believing Gates would, at least in Jobs' view...
History is often portrayed as a string of arias in a grand opera, all baritone intrigues and tenor heroics. Some of the most tumultuous events, however, have been provoked by serendipity--the assassination of an inconsequential archduke spawned World War I, a kicked-over lantern may have sparked the Great Chicago Fire. One cannot help wondering what role Martin Luther King Jr. would have played in the civil rights movement if the opportunity had not presented itself that first evening of the boycott--if Rosa Parks had chosen a row farther back from the outset, or if she had missed...
...spent his life turning his small body into a large weapon. Born sickly in a San Francisco hospital (his father, a Hong Kong opera singer, was on tour there), he would be burdened with two stigmas that don't become an action hero: an undescended testicle and a female name, Li Jun Fan, which his mother gave him to ward off the evil spirits out to snatch valuable male children. She even pierced one of his ears, because evil spirits always fall for the pierced-ear trick. Lee quickly became obsessed with martial arts and body building and not much...
Enter England's Alfred Deller, who, starting in the mid-1940s, singlehandedly revived countertenor singing. Deller inspired Benjamin Britten to write the first countertenor role in a 20th century opera, Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Other singers began emulating Deller, and as the revival of interest in baroque opera picked up steam in the '70s, countertenors became popular once more...