The Netherlands, which means ‘low country’, is aptly named. Over half of its land area is below or less than one meter above sea level.
There are 1,281 bridges in Amsterdam NLD which connect the city’s 165 canals.
The Royal Palace of Amsterdam was originally built as a city hall. It was used by Louis Napoleon, a younger brother of the Emperor, in his four-year but surprisingly popular stint as the French-imposed King of Holland.
Napoleon Bonaparte had four brothers and three sisters. During his reign, three of the four brothers became kings. Joseph, the eldest, was king of Spain; Louis was king of Holland; and Jerome, the youngest, was king of Westphalia.
The fourth brother, Lucien, was appointed prince of Canino by Pope Pius VII.
Volkswagen Westfalia (spelled differently than Westphalia) are campers based on their vans or microbuses, or Kombis. Basically the vans are called the Type 2.
There’s a Wikipedia page for the Westfalias, Volkswagen Westfalia Camper - Wikipedia.
The Westfalia has been sold since the 1950s.
The VW Type 2 has six generations, T1 - T6:
Type 2 T1: 1950-1967
Type 2 T2: 1966-1979
Type 2 T3: 1979-1992, the “Vanagon”
Type 2 T4: 1990-2003
Type 2 T5: 2003-2015
Type 2 T6: 2016-present
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The definitive biography of Huey Long was written by T. Harry Williams, who moved to Louisiana out of a fascination with Long a few years after his assassination in 1936. Williams was botn in Illinois and educated in Wisconsin, where he first taught history at Madisun. He then spent the rest of his life at ISU.
Mr. T and Tina was an obscure TV sitcom from 1976 that only aired for five episodes. It starred Pat Morita as Mr. T, Taro Takahashi, and also Susan Blanchard as Tina. Pat Morita was born in Isleton CA, a tiny town on the Sacramento River.
The Sacramento River is the largest river in California. It provides water to over half of the state’s population and is used heavily for irrigation in Central and Southern California.
Gavin Newsom is the 40th Governor of California. A Democrat, he is the former mayor of San Francisco and the former lieutenant governor of the state.
John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir was a Scottish novelist, historian and politician who served as Governor General of Canada from 1935-1940. A prolific author of over 60 titles, he was best known for his eighth novel, the thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps, published in 1915.
Brian May, guitarist of the rock band Queen, had already begun work on his doctoral dissertation in astrophysics in the early 1970s, when Queen became popular; the demands of being in a hit band forced him to suspend work on his dissertation. He resumed work on it in 2006, and was awarded a PhD from Imperial College in 2008.
One of the songs which May wrote as a member of Queen, “'39,” which appears on their 1975 album A Night at the Opera, was inspired by his scientific knowledge – it depicts space voyagers who embark on a 100-year round trip from Earth at relativistic speeds. When the voyagers return to Earth, they have only aged a year.
Ninja’ed, but still works!
The Thirty-Nine Steps has been made into four movies. The first was an Alfred Hitchcock film, released in 1935. The first color version was released in 1959, followed by a 1978 version. In 2008 the BBC released a television adaptation. The first two movies and the television version were entitled The 39 Steps.
There also have been at least seven radio adaptations, one of which starred Orson Welles.
There are 192 steps in the famous Potempkin Stairs, an access to Odessa from the sea, made famous by the massacre scene in the film “Battleship Potemplin”. The stairway is from 40 to 70 meters wide, and the 100 year old sandstone was worn out from usage, and has been replaced with granite.
It’s one of he few entertainment landmarks I’ve actually seen.
The Russian Navy battleship Potemkin, a key site of the looming Russian Revolution when its crew mutinied in 1905, and made even more famous by the 1925 Sergei Eisenstein-directed silent film, was honored by the United Federation of Planets in the Star Trek universe.
In the Star trek universe it is never explained what NCC stood for. As Memory Alpha put it
The use of “NCC” as a prefix for Starfleet registry numbers, Matt Jefferies said that the registries for American civil aircraft are preceded by “NC,” and Soviet craft used a prefix of “CCCC,” and as such, he more-or-less combined the two. His philosophy was, " If we do anything in space, we (Americans and Russians) have to do it together. "
On the other hand it is well known what the NTE stood for in NTE-3120, the NSEA Protector in *Galaxy Quest. It stood for “Not The Enterprise”.
Note: by using Cyrillic letters, Soviet aircraft prefices would be transliterated as SSSS
The word ‘soviet’ is a Russian word meaning council or assembly. Soviets were originally political organizations or governmental bodies seen in the later days of the Russian Empire. The first soviet is believed to be a worker’s council formed in 1905 in the city of Ivanovo.
Red has historically been a color of revolution, as shown by its use in the flags of the United States, France, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.
The use of the colors red and blue on television news political maps, to denote states voting for Republican or Democratic candidates, dates back to at least 1976, when NBC used a color-coded map to depict results on election night (although, interestingly, in that first documented usage, the GOP was assigned blue, and the Democratic Party was assigned red). This idea was soon adopted by the other networks, though there was inconsistency on which colors were assinged to the parties.
By the 2000 election, the U.S. networks had settled on a consistent use of blue for the Democrats, and red for the Republicans; the terms “red state” and “blue state” have entered general parlance for describing states which generally lean towards one or the other party.
^^^ Good trivia, @kenobi_65.
CBRN is a military abbreviation for Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear defense. In the Marine Corps in the 1980s and 1990s this concept was called NBC, for nuclear, biological, and chemical.
The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) for a time had two separate networks. The ‘Red Network’ offered commercially sponsored entertainment and music programming, while the ‘Blue Network’ featured mostly news and cultural programs.
Later expansions by NBC led to the creations of an ‘Orange Network’, a ‘Gold Network’, and a ‘White Network’.