How do you always manage to be in the top 5 or 10? You must have amazing reflexes!
I like that you always help open our thread with The Star Spangled Banner.
Sergei Rachmaninov was put off by Josef Hoffmann's bombastic piano arrangement, where you can hear the bombs bursting in midair. America meant a safe haven for Sergei to ply his trade in music without worrying about what the commissars thought of his work. He had barely escaped the Bolsheviks with his skin.
When he was dying of cancer in 1943 at age 70, he became an American citizen in the last weeks of his life, which was his way of giving the finger to Stalin.
His real name is Krassenstein.