Earl Butz was the 18th US Secretary of Agriculture, serving under Presidents Nixon and Ford. His policies favored big, corporate-style farms, promoting the planting of corn ‘fencerow to fencerow’ with generous subsidies to corn farmers. Butz was forced to resign in 1976 following the revelation that he told a racist joke while aboard a commercial flight following the Republican National Convention.
The English nobility rank of “Earl” is the rough equivalent of “Count” in other countries; the wife of an earl is even called a Countess.
“Earl” derives from an Old English term. The reason why he is not called a count is obscure, but it may have to do with people pronouncing it as though it had no “o.”
Percy Schmeiser was sued by Monsanto when he planted some of Monsanto’s Roundup-resistant rapeseed that contaminated his fields. Monsanto wanted him to pay the licensing fees for using their product and sign their standard contract preventing replanting the seed. Schmeiser refused saying as it was not his choice tat his field was contaminated and that farmers have a right to replant any seeds on his property. The Canadian Supreme Court rules 5-4 that Schmeiser’s property rights to use seeds on his property did not extend to using Monsanto’s patented genes in replanting despite how it got there.
ETA: ninjaed
The Supreme Court of Canada, like the Supreme Court of the United States, has its own courthouse.
The French court at Versailles in the eras of Louis XIV, XV and XVI was notoriously foul-smelling. The palace itself was built on swampland, and the toilet facilities were deficient to the point that nobles relieved themselves in hallways and galleries.
Marie Antoinette commented that the Austrian court at Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna, where she had grown up, was not as luxurious (given the frugality of her mother Empress Maria Theresa), but was notably cleaner.
The phrase “Let them eat cake” is often attributed to Marie Antoinette (1755-1793), but there is no evidence that she ever uttered it, and it is now generally regarded as a journalistic cliché.
Based on a 2019 analysis of internet searches, bakeryandsnacks.com determined that chocolate is the world’s most popular cake. Red velvet was second, followed by carrot, banana, and pineapple-upside-down.
Red velvet cake originally was red-tinged because of the acid in natural (not Dutch-processed) cocoa. Today bakers use food coloring to make it really red instead of the classic reddish-brown.
There are roughly 16.2 million citizens with Dutch nationality, that include both parents born in the Netherlands, in the Netherlands. Throughout the world, the country with the next highest is the United States, with 3.6 million.
Citizens of the Netherlands are the tallest human population on the planet. Dutch men average just over 6 feet in height, and Dutch women average 5 feet, 6 inches in height.
The Zuider Zee was a shallow bay of the North Sea located in the northwest of the Netherlands. In 1932, a dam was created that sealed off the bay from the sea and thus eventually created a freshwater lake now known as IJssel Lake. As part of the project, some 580 square miles was reclaimed as land.
The trade between the Netherlands and England during the Middle Ages is recorded in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. One of the characters in the poem, a merchant, is concerned about piracy on the North Sea between the mouth of the River Orwell in England and the port of Middelburgh in Holland, and wants the route to be guarded. Currently, a ferry runs along this route, from Harwich to the Hook of Holland, taking 4 hours to travel 125 miles.
Getting back to average heights, according to wiki, the people in the Dinarides are quite tall. They are —
6’ 1" for men, and
5’ 7½" for women.
That compares favorably to Americans who are —
5’ 9" for men, and
5’ 3½" for women.
That also bests the people of The Netherlands who are —
6’ ½" for men, and
5’ 7" for women.
For Sweden it is —
5’ 11½" for men, and
5’ 5½" for women.
For Bosnia and Herzegovina it is —
6’ ½" for men, and
5’ 7½" for women.
For Germany it is —
5’ 10½" for men, and
5’ 5½" for women.
At the other end of the spectrum…
According to Insider, the shortest people on earth reside on the Southeast Asian island of Timor. The average man stands 5’ 2.9", while the average woman’s height is 4’ 11.5".
For the Philippines, where I was born, the heights are —
5’ 4½" for men, and
5’ 0" for women.
(I am male, and I am 6’ 0”. I’m also part Russian.)
The Philippines has the only national flag which is, by law, to be flown upside-down in wartime.
One of the biggest national flags in the world was a Romanian flag that measured roughly 350 yards x 225 yards — that’s 853,478 square feet, or almost 20 acres. It weighed 5 tons, used 44 miles of thread, and took 200 people several hours to unroll it on a large field.
Eight national flags have designs that include a depiction of the flag itself: the flags of Afghanistan, Bolivia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Haiti and Venezuela.
Vexillology is the scientific study of flags of all kinds, and related emblems.
In 1992, South Dakota changed their state flag from having the motto “The Sunshine State” to “The Mt. Rushmore State” on it.