Each of the Cinque Ports was to provide 57 ships for 15 days’ service to the king annually, each port fulfilling a proportion of the whole duty. In return the towns received the following privileges:
“Exemption from tax and tallage, right of soc and sac, tol and team, blodwit (the right to punish shedders of blood) and fledwit (the right to punish those who were seized in an attempt to escape from justice), pillory and tumbril, infangentheof and outfangentheof, mundbryce (the breaking into or violation of a man’s mund or property in order to erect banks or dikes as a defence against the sea), waifs and strays, flotsam and jetsam and ligan”
Flotsam and Jetsam is a heavy metal band from Phoenix, AZ. Most of the songs on their first two albums were written by bassist Jason Newsted, who left the band to join Metallica following the untimely death of Cliff Burton. Newsted’s final performance with Flotsam & Jetsam was on Halloween night, 1986.
Aviatrix Amelia Earhart is believed to have crashed on Howland Island, one of the** Phoenix **Archipelago, which is now under the sovereign jurisdiction of the Republic of Kiribati.
Josephine Cochrane of Shelbyville, Illinois is credited with inventing the first practical dishwashing machine. The purpose wasn’t to save herself labor, since she was independently wealthy, only to find a way to wash dishes after one of her frequent parties without the servants chipping so many. Her company is now part of Whirlpool.
King George III appointed English Prime Minister Pitt the Younger as Warden of the Cinque Ports, as a sinecure while Pitt was Prime Minister. Pitt retained the Wardenship when he was out of office from 1801 to 1804. He spent much of his time in the Lord Warden’s residence, and took his summer vacations there.
Hester Grenville, Countess of Chatham, 1st Baroness Chatham in her own right, was the mother of Pitt the Younger. She had the distinction of being the wife, mother, sister and aunt of four British PMs.
Miami Dolphins Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Marino was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on 15 Sep 1961. He attended high school at Pittsburgh (PA) Central Catholic. He attended college at Pitt (University of Pittsburgh). His #13 Pittsburgh Panthers jersey has been retired. In the AFC Conference Championship game leading to Super Bowl XIX, his Miami Dolphins defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers, 45-28. He retired prior to the 2000 NFL season after declining an offer to play for the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Marino never won the Super Bowl during his otherwise stellar career. In Super Bowl XIX at Stanford Stadium, his Dolphins lost 38-16 to the Joe Montana-led San Francisco 49ers.
San Marino is a very small independent enclave within Italy. It has an area of only 61 km[sup]2[/sup]. It considers itself the oldest surviving sovereign state and the oldest constitutional republic.
Balochistan province in Pakistan is where Koh Kambaran is located. Koh Kambaran was the site of Pakistan’s nuclear test explosion in May 1998. Pakistan is the 7th and newest confirmed member of the nuclear club. Pakistan reported the yield of this explosion to be 40-45 kilotons of TNT. Independent measuring however reports the actual yield to be a maximum of 2-10kt for the largest explosion.
The yield of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs at the end of WWII were 15kt and 20kt, respectively.
Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear bomb ever exploded, yielded 50 megatons of TNT.
Pakistan’s test explosion is celebrated annually on 28 May as their National Day of Greatness.
The initials KT stand for Knight of the Thistle. The Order of the Thistle was founded in 1687 and is the second-most senior in precedence after the Garter.
Its emblem is the thistle, the national flower of Scotland, and its motto is Nemo me impune lacessit, which means ‘nobody provokes me with impunity’.
The Scottish Thistle species is an introduced menace to US agriculture, and in some states, it is a punishable offense to knowingly permit the plant to grow without taking steps to eradicate it, subject to the Noxious Weed Act.
Scottish Widows Fund and Life Assurance Society was established as ‘a general fund for securing provisions to widows, sisters and other female relatives’ of fundholders so that they would not be plunged into poverty on the death of the fundholder during and after the Napoleonic Wars. Now a part of Lloyd’s, Scottish Widows began television advertising only in 1986, with Roger Moore’s daughter Deborah as its first widow’s-weeds-wearing model.
The Cherry Sisters was a vaudeville act whose main claim to fame was their utter lack of talent; audiences would show up to throw rotten vegetables to them (they took to performing behind a wire mesh screen to protect themselves). When a newspaper wrote a scathing review of their act, they sued for libel, losing the case, which was a landmark in defining the rights of a newspaper to criticize an act.
Despite everything, the eventually managed to play Broadway when a producer decided that if people weren’t showing up for the best talent, he’d show them the worst. The act stayed together for over ten years, until the death of one of the sisters.
In his Hugo- and Nebula-winning 1979 novelette Sandkings, author George R.R. Martin refers to a “temple/brothel of the Secret Sisterhood” on Asgard, a human-settled world far from Earth.
Hiram Bingham, who discovered the ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru although the locals certainly knew about it, thought it was a temple for the Virgins of the Sun, who devoted their lives to the Inca Sun God.