The Toyota Land Cruiser was first sold in 1951 and has continued to be sold through today. It is Toyota’s longest running series of models and the 2nd longest SUV in production behind the Chevrolet Suburban (1935).
Walt Disney’s 13th animated feature film, “Alice in Wonderland”, was released in July 1951. Disney had been trying to create the film adaptation of the classic Lewis Carroll novel since the 1930s. When the film was finally released, it grossed $2.4 million (after a production budget of $3 million) and received negative reviews from film critics. “Alice in Wonderland” became a cult favorite and was re-released in the 1970s to a more favorable critical response.
Alice Springs, in the center of Australia, first came to prominence in WW2, as a staging base for the defense of Darwin, which was heavily bombed by Japan. Over 1,000 km from any town near irs size, Alice Springs has a declining population, at 25,000
In 2019, the population of Australia exceeded 25 million people for the first time. Over 85% of the population live in urban areas. The population density in Australia is 9 people per square mile, which is among the lowest in the world.
Vatican City has the smallest population of any independent country, with an official population of only 453 people. With a land area of only 0.19 square miles, the Vatican has a population density of 2,394 people per square mile, making it the 7th most densely-populated country in the world.
His Holiness the Pope, who leads the tiny city-state of Vatican City in addition to his role as supreme pontiff of the global Roman Catholic Church, is the only head of state in the world elected by an all-male electorate (the College of Cardinals).
Esther Ballestrino was almost certainly the first woman to be the official work supervisor of a future pope. She was born in Paraguay, where she obtained a doctorate in biochemistry. Moving to Argentina to escape the repressive political climate in her home country, she headed a section of the Hickethier-Bachmann Laboratory in Buenos Aires, where one of her subordinates was Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who would later become Pope Francis.
Ballestrino had three adult children who “disappeared”, abducted and tortured by the military dictatorship. She was one of the early members of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, protesting the “disappearances” until she herself was abducted and killed by the military in 1977.
Clarifying, although Ballestrino fled from Paraguay for political reasons, it was the Argentine government who kidnapped and murdered her and her sons.
The name of the country now known as Argentina dates back to at least 1536, as the name can be found on a Venetian map which dates from that time. The name is Italian for “made of silver” or “silver-colored”; the region was among those which was associated with the legend of the Sierra de la Plata, or “silver mountains,” a mythical mountain made of silver which was said to have been located in the inland of South America.
With an area of 3.3 million square miles, Brazil is easily the largest country in South America. Brazil occupies over 48% of the land mass of the continent. Argentina, about one-third the size of Brazil, occupies about 16% of the land mass. The remaining ten countries share the other 36%.
Of the 12 other countries in South America, Brazil shares a border with ten of them – all except Ecuador and Chile. Some Brazilian border towns have no inspection at the borders, everyone can pass freely, but papers are needed to leave the town going further into Brazil – if there is any way to go further.
Brazil is currently one of the countries hardest-hit by the COVID-19 epidemic, and many are blaming the national government’s poor response: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/06/15/brazil-faces-coronavirus-disaster-almost-everyone-saw-coming/
“19” was an anti-war song by British musician Paul Hardcastle, released in 1985. The song made extensive use of samples from a 1982 ABC documentary, Vietnam Requiem, about the Vietnam War, and the post-traumatic stress disorder which veterans of that war faced. The song’s title comes from a line of narration by Peter Thomas in the documentary: “In World War II, the average age of the combat soldier was twenty-six. In Vietnam, he was nineteen.”
The world’s first documentary film is believed to be Nanook of the North, a silent film which was released in 1922. Created by Robert Flaherty, it depicted the lives of the indigenous Inuit people of Canada’s northern Quebec region.
The history of Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day in Quebec has origins in the Catholic church calendar, where June 24 is the day commemorating St. John the Baptist. Then, in the spring of 1834, a French-Canadian businessman, Ludger Duvernay, attended a St. Patrick’s Day celebration in Montreal and thought that French Canadians should organize a similar day to honor their own heritage. So he formed the Saint Jean Baptiste Society, and the holiday was first observed on June 24 of that year. It is now a Canadian national holiday celebrated in Quebec, known as la Saint-Jean or la Fête nationale du Québec (“the National holiday of Quebec” in English). Many Canadian Francophone communities outside of Quebec also celebrate Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day.
St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana, is one of the original parishes that predate the formation of Louisiana, located on the Mississippi River. Like all of them below Baton Rouge, the river bisects the parish, rather than forming a boundary. It was easier for the priests to get across the river, than through the adjacent swamplands.
The Mississippi River acts as the natural border between a number of states. In at least two instances, when the river’s course changed, it left a portion of a particular state on the “wrong” side of the river (links are to Google Maps):
- In 1876, a portion of the river’s course along the Arkansas/Tennessee border shifted east, near what is now the town of Fulton, Tennessee. This shift left a small portion of Tipton County, Tennessee on the west side of the river.
- In 1881, a flood along the portion of the river bordering on Missouri and Illinois cut a new channel for the river, and left the town of Kaskaskia, Illinois on the west side of the river.
In both cases, the state boundaries were not redrawn after the river changed course, leaving the two enclaves separated from the rest of their states by the Mississippi.
The Mississippi River flows through or touches 10 states: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The river is 2,320 miles long and drains 41% of the continental United States.
Fevre Dream is a critically-acclaimed 1982 novel by George R.R. Martin, later better known for his Game of Thrones books. It is about steamboats and vampires along the Mississippi River before the Civil War. It has been described as “the kind of book Bram Stoker and Mark Twain might have written together.”
At 1,979 miles long the Yukon River’s main stem is the third longest main stem river in the US behind the Missouri River at 2,341 miles and the Mississippi River at 2,202 miles. The Yukon flows from British Columbia, at the approximate lat / long of 59.583333, -133.783333, frm the Llewellyn Glacier at the southern end of Atlin Lake, through the Yukon Territory and Alaska before emptying into the Bering Sea at approximately 62.598611, -164.800000. The main stem is “the primary downstream segment of a river, as contrasted to its tributaries”.
Despite the long length of the Yukon River, there are only four vehicle bridges that cross it:
-
at lat / long 60.576638, -134.680776, the Lewes Bridge in Yukon Territory, on the Alaska Highway north of Marsh Lake; map >> https://is.gd/743Eyy
-
at lat / long 60.713860, -135.045146, the Robert Campbell Bridge in Yukon Territory, near the Alaska Highway in Whitehorse and 20 miles north of the first bridge; map >> Google Maps
-
at lat / long 62.095334, -136.272347, the Yukon River Bridge in Yukon Territory, in Carmacks, on the Klondike Highway and 110 miles north of the second bridge; map >> Google Maps
-
at lat / long 65.876050, -149.721802, the Yukon River Bridge in Alaska, on the Dalton Highway about 135 miles north of Fairbanks and 750 miles north of the third bridge; map >> Google Maps