A famous saying from WWI came from a company commander of the 5th Marines. When advised to withdraw by a French officer on the defensive lines, that USMC C.O. replied,
“Retreat? Hell, we just got here!”
That USMC C.O. was Captain Lloyd W. Williams.
The double “ll” in Welsh words such as “Lloyd”'is approximately the same sound as the “thl” in “athlete”.
The Welsh word for valley is CWM, pronounced “coom”. On Mount Everest, the Western Cwm is just above the Khumbu icefall, at the foot of the Lhotse face. The Western Cwm was named by George Mallory in 1921.
Sir George Everest, the Surveyor-General of India, objected to having the mountain named after him.
And George Everest pronounced his surname Eve-rest.
There are about 15 recognized routes for climbing Mount Everest, but only two main ones. One starts in Nepal and runs up the southeast ridge of the mountain, and the other starts in Tibet and runs up the north ridge. Each of these routes has its own base camp for people to start out from, called the South Base Camp and the North Base Camp, respectively. Since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were the first verified summiters in 1953, over 3,000 climbers have summited Everest.
The only populated place in the USA named Everest is a town in Kansas with a population of 264. It is also claimed (probably wrongly) by locals that Everest is the only town in Kansas with a unique name. The former community of Everest, North Dakota, no longer exists. it is a ghost town with no surviving buildings.
Harry Jennings and his disabled friend Herbert Everest, both mechanical engineers, invented the first lightweight, steel, collapsible wheelchair in 1933. Everest had broken his back in a mining accident.
The two saw the business potential of the invention and went on to become the first mass-manufacturers of wheelchairs: Everest and Jennings. Their “x-brace” design is still in common use, albeit with updated materials and other improvements.
Jennings (NSW) and Wallangarra (QLD) are towns straddling the state border in the New England region. The border cuts across the railway station, which was formerly a change of gauge point.
As a junior U.S. senator in the late 1950s, Sen. John F. Kennedy gave a series of well-regarded speeches on the economic ills of New England, and how to address them.
Senator John Faulkner (Australian Labor Party) is the current “Father of the Australian Senate” i.e. the senator with the longest continuous membership. He was first elected on 4 April 1989.
The 1989 San Francisco Giants were swept in the World Series by the Oakland A’s that was known as ‘The Bay Bridge Series’ but then later became known as ‘The Earthquake Series.’ The MVP of the series was Dave Stewart.
(Commentary: I’ve met Stewart, once, on a flight from STL to SFO. A classy guy.)
Australia’s most powerful recorded onshore earthquake occurred on 29 April 1941, centred on Meeberrie, WA. It measured 7.2. Due to the sparse population the damage was minor, and was limited to cracked walls and burst rainwater tanks at Meeberrie Homestead. There were no injuries.
Andy Griffith is the sheriff at Meeberrie, a town whose name derives from American non-indigenous languages, and is spelled Mayberry on that continent.
Mayberry was set in North Carolina and is said to be based on Andy Griffith’s hometown of Mount Airy, North Carolina.
Then-married couple Melanie Griffiths and Antonio Banderas both made their Broadway debuts in 2003–she as Roxie Hart in Chicago, and he as Guido Contini in Nine.
Antonio Banderas played Tom Hanks’s gay lover in Philadelphia, a role which some thought might hurt his career, although it does not seem to have.
When Tom Hanks was told to audition for Splash, he admits his first thought was “A movie about a mermaid directed by Opie Cunningham?”
Tom Hanks is directly related to Abraham Lincoln’s mother Nancy Hanks, and has admitted to recycling the same essay he wrote on their family connection several times throughout his school years.
Austria recycles or composts about three times as much waste material as what goes into landfills, which leads all European nations in recycling effort.
Austria has the highest proportion of women smokers in the EU.