HI-C is a brand of fruit-juice flavored beverage, originally introduced in 1948 by its creator, Niles Foster. The original recipe included orange juice concentrate and ascorbic acid (vitamin C); the brand’s name was meant to reflect its high content of vitamin C.
The Hi-C brand was sold to Minute Maid in 1954; it is now owned by Coca-Cola (which bought Minute Maid in 1960).
Minute Maid Park in Houston TX is the home ballpark for the Houston Astros. It opened in 2000 as The Ballpark at Union Station, and then later that same year was renamed to Enron Field. In 2002 it was first renamed to Astros Field, and then to Minute Maid Park.
Minute Maid Park has a retractable roof. Its playing field is natural grass. The Houston Astros played in the National League West Division until 2012. In 2013 they moved to the American League West Division.
Minute Maid Park had a unique feature in center field - a hill known as Tal’s Hill between the warning track and the wall. It was covered with grass and had a light pole in the field of play. The Hill was removed in 2017.
The old Polo Grounds, home ballpark of the New York Giants and later the Mets, was built between existing streets, rather than razing the needed area. That method of construction created some interesting dimensions of the park. The right-field foul pole was only 258 feet from home plate, while the left-field foul pole stood 279 feet from the plate. The wall in straightaway center field, however, was 483 feet from home plate.
Willie Mays made “The Catch” an estimated 440 feet from home in Game 1 of the 1954 World Series.
Wesley Dennis, an artist who illustrated many books for the children’s author Marguerite Henry, was an avid polo player.
Prince Charles first met Camilla Shand at a polo match at Windsor Great Park in 1970. When they were chatting, she said: “My great-grandmother was the mistress of your great-great-grandfather. I feel we have something in common.”
On the TV show The West Wing, White House Counsel Lionel Tribbey threatened to kill people with a cricket bat gifted to him by Elizabeth II of Windsor after two White House staffers made false testimony before Congress.
The Lionel Corporation was a manufacturer of toy trains; it was founded by Joshua Lionel Cohen and Harry C. Grant in New York City in 1900.
The Lionel Corporation sold off its toy train line to General Mills in 1969. Lionel Trains continue to be sold today by Lionel, LLC, which bought the line from General Mills in 1986.
Organic food producers Cascadian Farm and Muir Glen are owned by General Mills.
In the film Kate & Leopold, Hugh Jackman’s character Leopold, who’d time-traveled to the 21st century from the 19th, finds himself flummoxed by a toaster from General Electric.
“Insertion of bread into said toaster produces no toast at all; merely warm bread. Inserting it twice produces charcoal. So obviously, it requires one and a half insertions, something for which the apparatus doesn’t begin to allow!”
There is a pub franchise in western Canada named Leopold’s, named after Queen Victoria’s son, Prince Leopold, whom Jackman played in Kate and Leopold. I am having lunch right now in the original Leopold’s, on Albert Street, named after Leopold’s father, Prince Albert.
“Prince Albert” is a name used to refer to a particular type of male genital piercing. The appellation comes from an almost-undoubtedly apocryphal tale about Albert, the Prince Consort, having developed the piercing; the story appears to trace back to a fanciful pamphlet about body piercings from the 1970s, written by body modification enthusiast Richard Simonton, under the alias Doug Malloy.
Albert Street in Regina intersects with Victoria Avenue.
Wrestler Lisa Marie Varon is a seven-time women’s champion in professional wrestling overall: Twice as Victoria in WWE, and five times as Tara in Impact Wrestling.
Temair is the Old Irish form of the name for a hill that means “a height with a view”. The hill Temair is an ancient ceremonial and burial site in County Meath, Ireland. Tradition identifies the hill as the inauguration place and seat of the High Kings of Ireland. Temair consists of numerous monuments and earthworks dating from the Neolithic to the Iron Age. Temair is known as Tara, or Hill of Tara.
Scarlett O’Hara’s Irish-born father Gerald named his Atlanta-area antebellum plantation Tara, in Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind and the 1939 hit movie.
Irish cream is a liqueur, containing Irish whiskey, cream, and other flavorings (often including chocolate).
It is a relatively recent creation; the first Irish cream brand, Baileys, was introduced to the market in the early 1970s.
Chocolate was originally consumed as a bitter, stimulating hot drink by Aztec nobility.
The term “Aztec” was not used by the people of Mexico prior to conquest. The term was invented and popularised by the German polymath, Alexander von Humboldt.
Aztlan is the ancestral home of the Aztec peoples. Historians have speculated about the possible location of Aztlan and tend to place it either in northwestern Mexico or the Southwestern United States, although whether Aztlan represents a real location or is purely mythological is a matter of debate.
The various descriptions of Aztlán apparently contradict each other. While some legends describe Aztlán as a paradise, the Codex Aubin says that the Aztecs were subject to a tyrannical elite called the Azteca Chicomoztoca. Guided by their priest, the Aztec tribe fled. On the road, their god Huitzilopochtli forbade them to call themselves Azteca, telling them that they should be known as Mexica.