John Pulman

Herbert John Pulman (12 December 1923 – 25 December 1998) was an English professional snooker player who dominated the game throughout the 1960s.

Pulman won the 1946 English Amateur title and turned professional shortly after. In 1947 he had his first appearance at the World Championship losing 14-21 to Albert Brown in round 1 of the qualification. The next season he won the qualifying section of the World Snooker Championship. In the 1948 Sunday Empire News Tournament he won the qualifying event and finished second in the main event behind Joe Davis. Pulman won a total of £400; £150 for the qualifying and £250 for finishing second. He first reached the final of the World Matchplay in 1955, losing to Fred Davis. Davis beat him again in the 1956 final, but Davis did not enter in 1957 and Pulman won the title, after which the event was discontinued. In 1964 the World Championship was resumed on a challenge basis. Pulman won the championship and successfully defended it in all further title challenges, the last being in 1968 when he beat the Australian Eddie Charlton. In 1969 the World Championship became a knockout tournament (which is generally regarded as the birth of the modern snooker era) and Pulman failed to successfully defend his title. He reached the final in 1970 but lost to Ray Reardon. Pulman reached the semi finals of the World Championship when it was first held at The Crucible in Sheffield in 1977, narrowly losing to the eventual winner John Spencer by 18 frames to 16.

Jay Leno

James Douglas Muir "Jay" Leno (/ˈlɛnoʊ/; born April 28, 1950) is an American comedian, actor, writer, producer, voice actor, and television host. He was the host of NBC's The Tonight Show with Jay Leno from 1992 to 2009. Beginning in September 2009, Leno started a primetime talk show, titled The Jay Leno Show, which aired weeknights at 10:00 p.m. ET, also on NBC.

After The Jay Leno Show was canceled in January 2010 amid a host controversy, Leno returned to host The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on March 1, 2010. He hosted his last episode of The Tonight Show on February 6, 2014. That year, he was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame.

Early life

Leno was born in New Rochelle, New York. His homemaker mother, Catherine (née Muir; 1911–1993), was born in Greenock, Scotland, and came to the United States at age 11. His father, Angelo (1910–1994), was an insurance salesman who was born in New York, to immigrants from Flumeri, Italy. Leno grew up in Andover, Massachusetts, and obtained a bachelor's degree in speech therapy from Emerson College, where he started a comedy club in 1973. His older brother, Patrick (May 12, 1940 – October 6, 2002), was a Vietnam War veteran who worked as an attorney.

I, Claudius

I, Claudius (1934) is a novel by English writer Robert Graves, written in the form of an autobiography of the Roman Emperor Claudius. Accordingly, it includes history of the Julio-Claudian Dynasty and Roman Empire, from Julius Caesar's assassination in 44 BC to Caligula's assassination in 41 AD.

The 'autobiography' of Claudius continues (from Claudius' accession after Caligula's death, to his own death in 54) in Claudius the God (1935). The sequel also includes a section written as a biography of Herod Agrippa, contemporary of Claudius and future King of the Jews. The two books were adapted by the BBC into an award-winning television serial, I, Claudius.

In 1998 the Modern Library ranked I, Claudius fourteenth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 2005, the novel was chosen by Time as one of the one hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to present.

The novels

Content

Claudius was the fourth Emperor of Rome (r. 41–54 AD). Historically, Claudius' family kept him out of public life until his sudden coronation at the age of forty nine. This was due to his being perceived as being a dolt due to his stammering, limp and other nervous tics. This made others see him as mentally deficient and also therefore not a threat to his ambitious relatives. Even as his symptoms begin to wane in his teenage years, he runs into trouble for his work as a budding historian. His work on a history of the civil wars was too truthful and too critical of the reigning emperor Augustus, and his mother and grandmother quickly put a stop to it. This episode reinforced their initial suspicions that Claudius was not fit for public office. This is how he was defined by scholars for most of history, and Graves uses these peculiarities to develop a sympathetic character whose survival in a murderous dynasty depends upon his family's incorrect assumption that he is a harmless idiot.

Jay Leno's Garage

Jay Leno's Garage is an American web and television series about motor vehicles, primarily cars and motorbikes starring Jay Leno, the former host of The Tonight Show. Formerly a web series for NBC.com, Jay Leno's Garage morphed into a special that aired on CNBC in August 2014 and the show became a weekly prime time series on the channel in 2015.

Leno does car and motorcycle reviews on classic cars, super cars like the McLaren P1, restored cars, vintage and sports cars. Jay Leno's Big Dog Garage is located in Burbank, California, near Bob Hope Airport. In 2011 the show won a Primetime Emmy Award for "Outstanding Special Class — Short-Format Nonfiction Program".

Episodes

CNBC season 1 (2015)

Broadcast

Internationally, the series premiered in Australia on Discovery Turbo on February 1, 2016.

References

External links

Joe Davis

Joseph "Joe" Davis, OBE (15 April 1901 – 10 July 1978) was an English professional snooker and English billiards player. He was the dominant figure in snooker from the 1920s. He won the first 15 World Championships from 1927 to 1946. After his 1946 victory he no longer played in the World Championship but continued to play in other tournaments and exhibition matches and remained the most well-known player until the late 1950s. He was also World Billiards Champion 4 times between 1928 and 1932.

Biography

Joe Davis became a professional billiards player at the age of 18, having won the Chesterfield Championship at age 13. In 1926 he reached his first World Professional Billiards Championship final but was unsuccessful against defending champion Tom Newman. He reached the final again the following year and was runner-up again to the same opponent. It was to be a case of third time lucky for Davis when he defeated Newman in 1928 to become the world champion at English billiards for the first time. He would defend his title for the next three years – against Newman again in 1929 and 1930 and New Zealander Clark McConachy in 1932. He contested the final two more times in 1933 and 1934 losing on both occasions to Australian Walter Lindrum.