Christopher Haden-Guest, 5th Baron Haden-Guest is a British-American screenwriter, musician, director and comedian who holds dual British and American citizenship. Guest is most known in Hollywood for having written and starred in his series of comedy films shot in mock-documentary style. Many scenes and character backgrounds in Guest's films are written and directed, although actors have no rehearsal time and the ensemble improvise scenes while filming them; the series of films began with This Is Spinal Tap and continued with Waiting for Guffman, Best In Show, A Mighty Wind, For Your Consideration, Mascots. Guest holds a hereditary British peerage as the 5th Baron Haden-Guest, has publicly expressed a desire to see the House of Lords reformed as a democratically elected chamber. Though he was active in the Lords, his career there was cut short by the House of Lords Act 1999, which removed the right of most hereditary peers to a seat in the parliament; when using his title, he is styled as Lord Haden-Guest.
Guest is married to author Jamie Lee Curtis. Guest was born in New York City, the son of Peter Haden-Guest, a British United Nations diplomat who became the 4th Baron Haden-Guest, his second wife, Jean Pauline Hindes, an American former vice president of casting at CBS. Guest's paternal grandfather, Baron Haden-Guest, was a Labour Party politician, a convert to Judaism. Guest's paternal grandmother, a descendant of the Dutch Jewish Goldsmid family, was the daughter of Colonel Albert Goldsmid, a British officer who founded the Jewish Lads' and Girls' Brigade and the Maccabaeans. Guest's maternal grandparents were Jewish emigrants from Russia. Both of Guest's parents had become atheists, Guest had no religious upbringing. Nearly a decade before he was born, his uncle, David Guest, a lecturer and Communist Party member, was killed in the Spanish Civil War, fighting in the International Brigades. Guest spent parts of his childhood in his father's native United Kingdom, he attended The High School of Music & Art, studying classical music at the Stockbridge School in Interlaken, Massachusetts.
He took up the mandolin, became interested in country music, played guitar with Arlo Guthrie, a fellow student at Stockbridge School. Guest began performing with bluegrass bands until he took up rock and roll. Guest studied acting at New York University's Graduate Acting Program at the Tisch School of the Arts, graduating in 1971. Guest began his career in theatre during the early 1970s with one of his earliest professional performances being the role of Norman in Michael Weller's Moonchildren for the play's American premiere at the Arena Stage in Washington D. C. in November 1971. Guest continued with the production when it moved to Broadway in 1972; the following year he began making contributions to The National Lampoon Radio Hour for a variety of National Lampoon audio recordings. He both performed comic characters and wrote and performed numerous musical parodies, he was featured alongside Chevy Chase and John Belushi in the Off-Broadway revue National Lampoon's Lemmings. Two of his earliest film roles were small parts as uniformed police officers in the 1972 film The Hot Rock and 1974's Death Wish.
Guest played a small role in the 1977 All In the Family episode "Mike and Gloria Meet", where in a flashback sequence Mike and Gloria recall their first blind date, set up by Michael's college buddy Jim, who dated Gloria's girlfriend Debbie. Guest's biggest role of the first two decades of his career is that of Nigel Tufnel in the 1984 Rob Reiner film This Is Spinal Tap. Guest made his first appearance as Tufnel on the 1978 sketch comedy program The TV Show. Along with Martin Short, Billy Crystal and Harry Shearer, Guest was hired as a one-year only cast member for the 1984–85 season on NBC's Saturday Night Live. Recurring characters on SNL played by Guest include Frankie, of Frankie, he experimented behind the camera with pre-filmed sketches, notably directing a documentary-style short starring Shearer and Short as synchronized swimmers. In another short film from SNL, Guest and Crystal appear as retired Negro league baseball players, "The Rooster and the King", he appeared as Count Rugen in The Princess Bride.
He had a cameo role as the first customer, a pedestrian, in the 1986 musical remake of The Little Shop of Horrors, that featured Steve Martin. As a co-writer and director, Guest made the Hollywood satire The Big Picture. Upon his father succeeding to the family peerage in 1987, he was known as The Hon. Christopher Haden-Guest; this was his official style and name until he inherited the barony in 1996. The experience of making Spinal Tap directly informed the second phase of his career. Starting in 1996, Guest began writing and acting in his own series of improvised films. Many of them came to be definitive examples of what came to be known as "mockumentaries"—not a term Guest appreciates in describing his unusual approach to exploring the passions that make the characters in his films so interesting, he maintains that hi
Sir Alexander Morris Carr-Saunders, was an English biologist, sociologist and academic administrator. He was Director of the London School of Economics from 1937 to 1957. Carr-Saunders was born on 14 January 1886 in Reigate, England, he was educated at an all-boys public school in Eton, Berkshire. He studied biology at Magdalen College, specialising in zoology, he graduated from the University of Oxford with a first class honours Bachelor of Arts degree in 1908. Carr-Saunders remained a year at the University of Oxford as a demonstrator in comparative anatomy, he left in 1910 to join the University College London where he studied biometrics under Karl Pearson. Deciding against natural science, he instead read for the Bar of the Inner Temple. Concerned about all kinds of social ills and problems, he saw a solution in Eugenics for the engineering of society into a better condition, he lived at Toynbee Hall. When World War I broke in 1914, he attempted to obtain a commission in the London Scottish Regiment, but was instead commissioned into the Royal Army Service Corps.
He spent the first year of the war in France on the Western Front. He was posted to a ration depot at Suez, due to the high standard of his French, he was promoted to temporary lieutenant on 12 December 1914, to temporary captain on 27 January 1918. After the Armistice he returned to the Zoology department of Oxford University, taking an interest in ecological issues population and overpopulation, he participated in one of the firsts Oxford Expeditions to Spitsbergen in the Arctic in 1921 as main scientists, together with Julian Huxley. During the expedition he distilled his early ideas on population dynamics and summarized them in a book called The Population Problem; the book used a neo-Malthusian argument plus Galton's eugenics as the theoretical framework for a quantitative analysis of population dynamics. The population problem arose -according to Carr-Saunders analysis- from the fact of having high reproductive rates among primitive people with low mental and physical qualities. Over-population of these lower races endangered the standard of living of races bearing higher qualities.
Unlike Malthus, he thought that industrial productivity and not food was the main limiting factor in human populations. The success of his magnum opus The Population Problem resulted in his appointment to the Charles Booth Chair of Social Science at the University of Liverpool in 1923. In 1937, he was appointed to succeed Sir William Beveridge as Director of the London School of Economics, held that post until his retirement in 1955, he served on the Royal Commission on Population, in 1944–1949. He served as President of the Geographical Association during 1947. Carr-Saunders was one of the mentors of the animal ecologist Charles Elton influencing Elton's approach toward animal ecology as a "sociology and economy of animals" For his military service during World War I, Carr-Saunders was awarded three medals. In the 1946 New Year Honours, Carr-Saunders was appointed a Knight Bachelor in recognition of his role as Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science, therefore granted the title sir.
On 12 March 1946, he was knighted by King George VI during a ceremony at Buckingham Palace. In 1946, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, awarded the first Galton medal by the Eugenics Society. In the 1957 New Year Honours, he was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire "for services as Director of the London School of Economics"
A pistol sword is a sword with a pistol or revolver attached alongside the blade. It differs from a rifle with a bayonet in that the weapon is designed for use as a sword, the firearm component is considered a secondary weapon designed to be an addition to the blade, rather than the sword being a secondary addition to the pistol. In addition, the two components of these weapons cannot be separated, unlike most bayonet-fixed rifles; some flintlock pistols of the 17th and 18th centuries were constructed as gun-swords, with the barrel of the pistol attached to the side of the blade of a shortsword or dagger. A shell guard protected the firing mechanism; these were used by German hunters to kill wounded wild boar. Examples of these weapons can be found in the armoury of Wawel Castle. Similar weapons were made in India, including the Katar, a thrusting dagger, modern variants of which may feature a single-shot pistol built into one side. In 1838, the United States Navy developed the.54 caliber, single-shot smoothbore Elgin pistol, equipped with an 11.5-inch Bowie knife blade and was intended for use by boarding parties.
The Navy intended them for the Wilkes-South Seas expedition. In 1840 a naval landing party used the pistol to good effect when Fijian warriors attacked the sailors on the island of Malolo. A few Elgin pistols proved unpopular; the Navy replaced them with the M1860 Cutlass, which remained in service until the 1940s. Some found their way into civilian hands and some ended up in the Old West. Pinfire cartridge gun-swords were produced in Belgium during the mid-19th century, although in limited quantity; these custom-made weapons were sometimes used by European officers and featured a loading gate behind the basket hilt. In 1866 T Rauh of Solingen filed a United States patent on the design of a 9mm caliber pistol sword with a 32in blade. During World War I, the British manufactured a limited number of Webley revolvers with folding blades, similar in design to the Pritchard pistol bayonet; these were used by officers in the trenches for close quarters fighting as the confined space made it difficult to use a sword.
However, few were produced due to the scarcity of raw materials. A rare variant of the World War II Japanese Nambu automatic pistol was a pistol sword, it is possible that this non-regulation weapon was purchased by an officer as only one example is known to exist. Another notable example of a pistol sword was the Swedish 1865 Cutlass Pistol, it was a breech-loading 2 shot weapon with a 14in by 2in blade weighing 2.5 lb. A few ended up on the other side of the Atlantic and one became part of Buffalo Bill's gun collection. In the late Victorian era, some French swordsticks had built-in pinfire pepperbox revolvers to increase their lethality; however this idea was far from new. Pistol swords were not used and became uncommon quickly, due to their expense and because instead of getting two weapons in one, one got a heavy pistol and a heavy, off-balance sword, as shown by the poor performance of the Elgin pistol. Modern versions appear on the market, however, as novelties or collectors' items, including the Sierra Madre knife pistol.
Edged weapons with built-in pistols were common in Eastern Europe. The flintlock axe pistol was a trademark Polish cavalry weapon from the 16th until the 18th century. Similar guns were made in Hungary and a multi-barreled version was invented in Germany. Axe pistols, invented in 1703 by Admiral Erich Sioblad, were issued to the Swedish navy from the early 18th century until 1840; some linstocks of the Renaissance and late medieval period had a matchlock pistol concealed in the blade. Henry VIII's bodyguards were equipped with iron round shields fitted with a pistol; the English combined pistols with maces. A notable example is Henry VIII's Walking Staff, a 3 barreled morning star; the king would carry it while walking through the city at night to check up on the constables. Henry's mace pistol is now on display in the Tower of London's Tudor Room. In the late 19th century, members of Parisian street gangs carried Apache revolvers, a combination of knife and knuckleduster. Knife pistols with folding blades were popular in England during the mid Victorian era.
These were made by Unwin and Rodgers, used black powder and were available in various small calibers. Like the modern Swiss Army knife they contained a variety of tools, from blades to corkscrews, were used by sailors. A modern version that fires.22 caliber rimfire cartridges, known as the Defender, is still in production. Belgian gunsmiths made revolvers with Bowie knife blades, some of which were used by French officers during the Crimean War and Franco-Prussian War. In modern times KA-BAR and LASERLYTE have teamed up to produce a Pistol Bayonet for today's tactical market. French Tactical Security Instructor and Martial Arts expert Jeff Thenier designed a pistol shaped tactical folding knife called the P001 by STI KNIVES designed to replace the handgun when it is not available; the P001 uses pistol bayonet techniques for a unique form of knife combat. The Mariners' Museum Video describing mechanical operation and history of an Elgin Cutlass Pistol