The monarch butterfly, which is colored orange and black, is believed to have been named in honor of King William III of England, who also held the title of “Prince of Orange.”
Neither Charles nor William were regents.
With the recent death of Queen Elizabeth II, the world’s current oldest living monarch is King Salman Bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia. He was born on December 31, 1935, and recently celebrated his 87th birthday. He was proclaimed King on January 23, 2015.
He might have meant “regnant”, although by strict definition (“regnant” = “one who is reigning”) that would still be the late Queen Lizzie. Truthfully, I think the word knoodler was struggling for is “ascendant”.
-“BB”-
The last British king to also hold the title of Emperor of India was George VI, grandfather of Charles III. India gained its independence before Elizabeth II took the throne, so she was never an Empress.
The Empress Hôtel in Victoria BC was one of the Canadian Pacific Railway hotels which the cPR built across Canada. It was s party in an important Canadian constitutional law case, ultimately decided by the law lords of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London.
The Canadian National Railway founded a bunch of towns on its original route. The town names were originally in alphabetical order along the route.
Thanks, Bill. “Ascendant” works much better. Why I went with “regent” is regrettable.
(Still in play)
Portage La Prairie, Manitoba, marks the beginning of the CNR Alphabet Railway. A noted attraction is the world’s largest Coca Cola can, constructed from an old water tower and can be seen from the Trans-Canada Highway bypass.
The Trans-Siberian Railway, which runs from Moscow to Vladivostok, features the world’s longest direct rail route. The railway, which opened in 1904, now runs for 5,772 miles, and the entire route can be ridden without changing trains. The journey takes six days.
The U.S. Surface Transportation Board classifies railroads which operate in the U.S. into three classes, based on their revenue levels.
In 1900, there were 132 “Class I” (large) railroads in the U.S., but there are now only seven Class I freight railroads: BNSF, Union Pacific, CSX, Norfolk Southern, Canadian National, Canadian Pacific, and Kansas City Southern, though the list is likely to soon shrink by one, with Canadian Pacific in the process of purchasing Kansas City Southern.
As the “Class I” designation only applies to freight railroads, and only those which operate in the U.S., it doesn’t include the passenger lines Amtrak and Via Rail Canada, nor the Mexican railway Ferromex.
The Confederacy was so hard-pressed to maintain its railroad network during the Civil War that it did not lay a single mile of new track in four years. The railroad network in the north, by contrast, dramatically expanded, including more than 2,000 miles of track laid by the US Military Railroad.
Ayn Rand was inspired by trains to use it as a focal point in Atlas Shrugged. She claimed to have taken rides in the locomotives of the New York Central while researching the book, and to have driven the 20th Century Limited, boasting that while she was at the controls of that extraordinary train, “nobody touched a lever except me.”
Ayn Rand considered seeing her name used as a clue in the NYT crossword was a sign that she had really arrived.
Wordle is a web-based word game, originally developed by Welsh software engineer Josh Wardle in 2021, though its mechanics are similar to other games, such as the pen-and-paper word game Jotto, and the TV game show Lingo.
Wardle initially developed it as a game to play with his partner, but released it publicly in October of 2021. The game rapidly grew in popularity, and Wardle sold it to the New York Times on January 31st, 2022, for a sum “in the low seven figures.”
The New York Times’ purchase of Wordle last year has largely left it untouched and, thankfully, outside the paywall many of its other games are locked behind. Some changes were made to the game’s accessibility settings, and some words deemed too archaic, obscure or offensive were removed. Tracy Bennett, who joined the Times in 2020 as an associate puzzle editor, has been named Wordle’s dedicated editor —the first person to hold this job.
The New York Times (known initially as the New-York Daily Times), was founded on September 18, 1851. The first edition of the newspaper sold for a penny. That first issue also contained the positions of the paper:
We shall be Conservative, in all cases where we think Conservatism essential to the public good;—and we shall be Radical in everything which may seem to us to require radical treatment and radical reform.
The Pentagon Papers is a top-secret Pentagon study of the US government’s decision-making in relation to the Vietnam War. It was leaked by Daniel Ellsberg to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers. The Pentagon Papers were first brought to the attention of the public on the front page of The New York Times in 1971.
The world’s largest office building, the Pentagon has more bathrooms than it actually needs, given its typical daily workforce (about 26,000, on average). Completed in 1943 during World War II, separate bathrooms were provided for white and black employees, in keeping with Virginia’s segregation laws at the time.
Wow. SMH…