On January 14, 1972, Queen Margrethe II becomes the first queen regnant of Denmark since 1412. That queen was Margaret I. Although spelled differently, Margrethe is a variation on her grandmother’s name Margaret, thus “the Second”.
99% of Danish Jews (7,200 out of a population of 7,800) survived the Holocaust, thanks to an effective Resistance movement. In comparison, survival rates of Jewish communities in neighboring countries were 70% in France and 60% in Belgium. Only 27% of Dutch Jews were able to escape.
Denmark is the only nation in Western Europe that saved most of its Jewish population from the Nazis. Most escaped to neutral Sweden.
The young adult novel Number the Stars by Lois Lowry depicts a fictional heroine named Annemarie and her Jewish friend Ellen who are living under the Nazi occupation of Denmark. Ellen is forced to live with Annemarie’s family and pose as their late daughter to avoid Nazi detection until they can get her and her real family out of Denmark and to Sweden. It was required reading for me in elementary school, and has never been banned at any school district in the United States, but it was fully banned by the Department of Education at the Tarsus American College in Turkey.
In terms of population, Sweden has about the same number of people as both Norway and Finland combined. Sweden has about 10.6 million people, while Norway and Finland each have about 5.5 million.
With 173,000 square miles, Sweden is larger than either Finland or Norway. Finland has 131,000 square miles, and Norway has 125,000 square miles.
Blue Swede was a 1970s rock band from Stockholm, Sweden, which had its primary success with cover versions of rock and pop songs. They are best known in the U.S. for their 1973 cover of B.J. Thomas’s song “Hooked on a Feeling” – Blue Swede’s version was a #1 hit in the U.S., outperforming the original (which reached #5 on the charts). The band had a second top-ten hit in America, with their cover of the Association’s “Never My Love,” reaching #7 in 1974.
Empty-headed male model Derek Zoolander’s key look in the Ben Stiller comedy Zoolander is “Blue Steel.”
Norwegian Blue parrots normally have beautiful plumage.
ooga chaka ooga chaka ooga ooga ooga chaka
is a line in Blue Swede’s Hooked on a Feeling in 1973, as @kenobi_65 posted upthread. BJ Thomas’s original version in 1969 reached number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Oogtar was the name of Mario’s caveman child friend in the cartoon Super Mario World. He was an original character for the cartoon and did not appear in the video game, nor did any other cavemen.
The “Cavemen” are characters in a recurring series of advertisements for GEICO auto insurance, beginning in 2004. The ads describe using the company’s website as “so easy, even a caveman could do it.” The Cavemen, who are depicted as much more intelligent and refined than the stereotype, are always offended by the GEICO tagline.
The GEICO gecko is the animated mascot of their commercials. Created in 1999, his name is Martin, named after The Martin Agency, the advertising company that created him.
During the Patriation debates in Canada, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau sent Paul Martin Sr, one of the senior politicians in the Liberal government, to London to brief the Queen and the British government.
Martin reported back that the Queen had a very good grasp of the constitutional and political issues faced by the Canadian government, better than any of the British politicians he had spoken to.
London, the capital and largest city in the UK, was in Roman times called “Londinium.” A well-developed planet of that name was also mentioned in *Firefly.”
The mysterious and terrifying Reavers in Joss Whedon’s Firefly were said to have been so monstrous that their preferred method of dealing with their prey was to rape them to death, eat their flesh, and sew their skins into their clothing. And if the victim was very lucky, they would do it in that order.
The repressive interplanetary government in the sf TV series Firefly and its later movie Serenity was the Alliance, the result of a future quasi-merger of the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China.
The united human government in the Mass Effect video game series was called the Human Systems Alliance, which unlike Firefly’s Alliance, was decidedly not evil. But they burst onto the galactic scene in a rather bombastic and irresponsible way by opening every mass relay they could, forcing the turians to slap them down before they could accidentally bring back the rachni, in a month-long police action known to the humans as the First Contact War.
There was a Star Trek: The Next Generation TV episode, and a movie featuring the cast of the show, both named First Contact. They had little in common with each other beside the title.
Canadian actress Genevieve Bujold was the original casting choice for the role of the ship’s captain in the television series Star Trek: Voyager. The character had originally been named Elizabeth Janeway, but Bujold requested the first name be changed to Nicole.
However, Bujold (a film actress) rapidly became unhappy with the intense production schedule for a television series, and was uninterested in participating in interviews with the media; she quit the series after two days of filming, leading to Kate Mulgrew being re-cast in the role, and the character being renamed again as Kathryn.
During the seven-year run of Star Trek: Voyager, Harry Kim remained an ensign the entire time, except for periods in which they look ahead into the future. In the most recent Star Trek Online expansion, however, he is a captain.