Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, is the second wife of Charles, Prince of Wales. She uses the title Duchess of Cornwall, her husband’s secondary designation. As was made clear at the time of the announcement of the marriage in 2005, she is Princess of Wales but does not use the title. This is possibly out of respect for Diana, Princess of Wales.
Born Camilla Rosemary Shand, she grew up in Plumpton, East Sussex, near Brighton and Hove, East Sussex and Crawley, West Sussex, and also in South Kensington. Edward James Boys (1916-2002), historian of the Crimean War was born in Plumpton. The comedian Benny Hill (1924–1992), lived in South Kensington.
The Crimean War was fought from 1853 through 1856. It began largely because of Russia’s increasing pressure in the Middle East, and ended with Russia surrendering via the Treaty of Paris.
One of the more famous battles in the war was the Charge of the Light Brigade. This war also is known for the work of Florence Nightingale.
The Charge of the Light Brigade took place on 25 October 1854 in the Crimean War during the Battle of Balaclava, in Crimea, near Yalta on the north shore of the Black Sea. Communication errors led to a misunderstood order where 600 men tragically rode into an ambush.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem The Charge of the Light Brigade was written about a month afterwards and includes the stanza,
- Not though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.*
Alfred Tennyson became a member of the peerage in 1884 after Queen Victoria created him Baron Tennyson, of Aldworth in the County of Sussex and of Freshwater in the Isle of Wight. Although he did occupy a seat in in the House of Lords, it is technically incorrect to refer to him as ‘Lord’ Tennyson; proper usage would be to refer to the author as Alfred, Baron Tennyson (with the comma separating the Christian name from the title).
The title is hereditary, and the current Baron Tennyson is David Harold Alexander Tennyson, 6th Baron Tennyson. He is the great-grandson of Lionel Tennyson, the second son of the original Baron, and assumed the title after the line of succession following the first son (Hallam Tennyson) failed upon the death of Mark Aubrey Tennyson, 5th Baron Tennyson, in 2006.
-“BB”-
Freshwater dolphins, sometimes called river dolphins, are found living in rivers and lakes in South America, as well as in east and southeast Asia. The World Wildlife Fund lists all of the several species of freshwater dolphins as vulnerable or endangered. The Yangtze river dolphin was listed as extinct as of 2006.
Barron William Trump, the youngest son of America’s president, is 14 years old. He was born in 2006 and is the youngest of the President’s children. President Trump has five children from three marriages, ranging from 42-year old Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric Trump with Ivana Trump; Tiffany Trump with Marla Maples; and on down to 14-year old Barron Trump with First Lady Melania Trump.
“The last trump”, referring to the trumpet sounding the end of the world, is a concept debated by believers in The Rapture. They question whether there are several trumpets or one. A line from 1 Corinthians 15:52, “the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible” may also refers to the seventh trumpet in Revelation 10:7 sounded by an angel; there is also a line in 1 Thessalonians 4, where the Lord descends with “the trump of God”.
The Chrysler Cordoba was a “personal luxury coupe” model, sold by Chryrsler in the 1975 through 1983 model years. The car was very popular in its first few years of production, but is now mostly remembered for its TV ads, which featured actor Ricardo Montalban describing the car’s interior of “rich Corinthian leather” (a meaningless term, which was coined by Chrysler’s ad agency of the time, Bozell).
Walter Chrysler was born in Wamego, Kansas and grew up in nearby Ellis. He began his career as a railroad machinist and mechanic before turning his attention to the fledgling automobile manufacturing business. He founded Chrysler Corporation in 1925 after working for Buick Motor Company and Willys-Overland Motor Company.
In the early 1800s Ellis Island in New York Harbor was where convicted pirates, criminals, and mutinous sailors were hung. It was called Gibbet Island, for the gibbet, or wooden post, where their bodies were displayed. By 1847 the Army tried using the island to process immigrants, and by 1890 plans were in place to create a federal immigration station.
The Lenni Lenape peoples called Ellis Island Kioshk, which means gull island. While Ellis Island is usually thought of as an immigration site, many of the names recorded there are of non-immigrants. Many migrants who arrived into the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries intended to return to their villages in the Old World. Known as “birds of passage,” many of these eastern and southern European migrants were peasants who had lost their property as a result of the commercialization of agriculture. They came to America to earn enough money to allow them to return home and purchase a piece of land.
From 1907 to 1911, of every hundred Italians who arrived in the United States, 73 returned to the Old Country. For Southern and Eastern Europe as a whole, approximately 44 of every 100 who arrived returned back home.
Also, many thousands of names recorded at Ellis Island were travelers en route from Europe to Asia and taking trains overland from New York to San Francisco, or students.
(I’m a first generation immigrant myself but I have 3 great-grandparents recorded at Ellis Island, all just passing through)
The “Overland Route“ was what people called the first transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869, a 2,000 mile route from Council Bluffs IA to San Francisco CA. Today, the Overland Route remains a common name for the line from California to Chicago, now owned entirely by the Union Pacific.
There are several theories as to the meaning of the name ‘Chicago’. The most accepted origin is a word from the dialect of the Algonquin language called “shikaakwa,” meaning “striped skunk” or “smelly onion”.
Johnny Depp based his performance as Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean films on two inspirations: Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, and the cartoon skunk Pepé Le Pew, from Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes shorts.
The MiG-21 Fishbed, a Russian supersonic jet fighter and interceptor, first flew in 1956. It is comparable to the US’s Lockheed F-104 Starfighter and Northrop F-5 Freedom Fighter, and to the French Dassault Mirage III. In warfare, 3 of them were shot down by US Navy fighters, and 38 of them by US Air Force fighters, all by the AIM-7 Sparrow air-to-air missile. According to the US FAA, there were 44 privately owned MiG-21s in the US in 2012.
The term “MiG” is derived from the Mikoyan and Gurevich Design Bureau, founded in 1939 by Soviet aircraft designers Artem Mikoyan and Mikhail Gurevich. After several mergers and restructurings, it is now called the Russian Aircraft Corporation MiG.
MIG welding is an arc welding process in which a continuous solid wire electrode is fed through a welding gun and into the weld pool, joining the two base materials together. A shielding gas is also sent through the welding gun and protects the weld pool from contamination. MIG stands for metal inert gas
Russian inventor Nikolay Benardos is generally considered to be the ‘father of welding’. In 1881, he introduced carbon arc welding, which was the first practical arc welding method.
The coat of arms of the Russian Federation is based on that of the Russian tsars and includes their double-headed eagle and three crowns, even though the country is putatively a republic and the last Tsar was murdered more than a century ago.