Six degrees

King Bhumibol Adulyadej (above) of Thailand this week celebrates the 60th anniversary of his marriage to Queen Sirikit. The monarch, an accomplished jazz musician and composer, is known for his command of the saxophone. On a 1960 state visit to the country of his birth, the United States, the world's longest-reigning monarch demonstrated his musical prowess when he performed with the 'King of Swing', Benny Goodman ...

Goodman, born to poor Jewish immigrants, is credited with bringing jazz into the mainstream. Contemporary music reviewer Will Friedwald, reflecting upon Goodman's legacy, said, 'In bringing jazz to Carnegie [Hall, Goodman was], in effect, smuggling American contraband into the halls of European high culture, and Goodman and his 15 men pull[ed] it off with the audacity and precision of Ocean's Eleven' ...

Steven Soderbergh's 2001 remake of the 1960 Rat Pack caper about a Las Vegas casino heist grossed US$450 million in box offices worldwide. Despite its commercial success, some prominent critics were non-plussed, with one reviewer condemning the film, because it 'doesn't offer much', in a scathing review in Time magazine ...

Time has courted controversy with its Person of the Year feature, having bestowed the accolade on the likes of Adolf Hitler (1938) and Joseph Stalin (1939). In its defence, the magazine says the criteria for nominations is based on 'for better or for worse, [a person who] has done the most to influence the events of the year'. In 1999, it created a new category, Person of the Century, with the title going to theoretical physicist Albert Einstein ...

Einstein, who may have been autistic, had a less than impressive start to his career. After graduation - having failed an initial university entrance exam - he spent two unsuccessful years looking for a teaching post. The world's favourite boffin eventually found a position testing other people's attempts at scientific innovation, at the Berne, Switzerland-based office of patents ...

Patents have been awarded for all sorts of inventions, including cheese-flavoured cigarettes; a contraption for delivering babies by centrifugal force; and apparatus for resting the forehead while at the urinal. In 2003, a technique for rainmaking won such an accreditation for its royal recipient, probably the world's only monarch to earn a patent, King Bhumibol of Thailand.