This is a history where FDR died fifteen months early and his then-vice-president Henry Wallace succeeded him. This gave Wallace a head start on the power-brokers who had him replaced with Truman in real life and he won the 1944 election. Wallace was relatively trusting of the USSR and in this timeline he allowed Germany to be re-united as a neutral per Stalin's preference. NATO never came to be as Wallace was also pretty peace-oriented (and an alliance was even further out of the question after the isolationist wing of the Republicans won the presidency in 1948).

Left up against the Soviets without the US to back them, the UK broke the bank to develop intercontinental missiles as well as nuclear bombs, using the smaller-scale prototype rocket to do a suborbital manned space launch. This served as propaganda to get France and the Benelux nations interested in sharing the technology in return for paying for some of it.

This was the dark flip-side of that space program: a land-based test of a fission bomb, a second test of a thermonuclear weapon and then a third using the missile to deliver another H-bomb from Malaysia to Peros Banhos in the Chagos Archipelago.

The song is from the So I Married an Axe MURDERer soundtrack.

A double connection: Nouvelle Vague use Bossa nova rhythms on most of their tracks (though this one is more country). And Martin Gore of Depeche Mode does the backup vocals on this cover of a song that he wrote.

Courtney Love was briefly the vocalist for Faith No More, before they became famous.

A Shelley Homosapien naturally leads to a Funky Homosapien.

The drummer on the previous song, Stuart Elliot, would go on to be one of Bush's preferred drummers and played on this track. Besides this one he drummed on "Running Up That Hill", "Wuthering Heights" and most of her other singles too.

He also played on a number of other well-known 80s songs: Paul McCartney's "No More Lonely Nights", Alan Parsons Project's "Eye in the Sky", and...uh...Kenny Rogers' "Morning Desire". I guess you can't win them all.

In the 1970s and 80s the inhabitants of Chelsea in London were called Sloane Rangers -- a UK equivalent of "preppy".

"The fervor over San Francisco’s glorious new baseball park was cresting. It didn’t matter that the first game was delayed several weeks by a tough winter. When Opening Day at Ewing Field came on May 16, 1914, thousands of fans traversed up to Lone Mountain and poured into their new baseball home."

This flint axe was found in 1912 in West Tofts, a now-abandoned village in the UK between Cambridge and Norwich, It was made by a Homo heidelbergensis or possibly a Neanderthal, somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 years ago.

This kind of tool is fairly common throughout western Europe and Africa, but this specimen is unique for having a Cretaceous-era fossil of a spiny oyster in the centre that suggests the axe's maker wanted the shell on it as an adornment.

It's kept in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and you can see more details on their web site.

Kung Fu Fighting to Kung Fu. Not a major hit on release but made some waves after it was used in the end credits and bloopers of Jackie Chan's US breakthrough Rumble In the Bronx. The fighting noises at the start are a sample of Sammo Hung.

Both songs are produced by Brian Burton AKA Danger Mouse.