The Guinea is an archaic unit of currency in Great Britain, originally a gold one-pound coin. Owing to fluctuations in the gold market, the coin’s actual value fluctuated above one pound, and was then officially set 21 shillings, or 1.05 pounds. Its practical use is now limited to livestock sale price quotations, with the difference going as the auctioneer’s commission. The term Guinea arises from the West African origin of the gold from which the coins were originally struck.
In the Bonzo Dog Band song, “Ali Baba’s Camel,” a line goes “Out for what we all want: lots of LSD.” While the lyric was deliberately taken as a drug reference, in the original version, from the 1930s, the line was actually referring to money, a slang of the British coinage at the time: £ = pound, s=shilling, and d=pence.
Australia decimalised its currency from pounds, shillings and pence to dollars and cents on 14 February 1966.
The captain of the USS Scorpion agrees to put his nuclear attack submarine under the command of the Royal Australian Navy after World War III in Nevile Shute’s postapocalyptic novel On the Beach.
And the novel ends with the captain and crew taking their submarine out of Melbourne, through Port Phillip Bay and to the open ocean to scuttle it.
Port Phillip Bay was named for Arthur Phillip, the founding Governor of the colony of New South Wales.
The Philippines were named after Felipe II, the heir apparent to the Spanish throne. There is no known record of any culture calling the entire archipelago by a single name before Magellan’s discovery. In 1521, he called some of the islands San Lazaro, about 20 years before the Felipinas name took hold under later Spanish explorers. However, Islam had already taken hold of the islands peoples 200 years before Magellan “discovered” it.
In the 1976 western, The Outlaw Josey Wales, a rift developed between lead actor Clint Eastwood and director Philip Kaufman. The rift was caused by Kaufman’s meticulous attention to detail and many takes, and Eastwood’s wanting to be done quickly. Also contributing to the rift was the attraction the two shared towards actress Sondra Locke and apparent jealousy on Kaufman’s part in regards to their emerging relationship. For their relative ages, Eastwood was born in 1930, Kaufman in 1936, and Locke in 1944.
During filming, Eastwood had Kaufman fired by producer Bob Daley. This outraged the Director’s Guild of America which passed new legislation, named ‘the Clint Eastwood Rule’ where they reserved the right to impose a major fine on a producer for discharging a director and replacing that director with himself.
The chemical symbol for lead is Pb, from the Latin plumbum.
A variation of the Latin word plumbum made it as far west as France (plomb) and Spain (plomo), but for some reason didn’t cross the English channel. The word “lead” today probably comes from a middle English word “leed”.
Due to border anomalies arising from less-than-accurate 19th century surveying, it’s possible to start in South Australia and travel west into Victoria.
The future Queen Victoria had an extremely restrictive upbringing and, well into her teens, was not allowed to go down any flight of stairs without holding the hand of an adult.
The restrictive upbringing of Princess Victoria meant that she also slept in her mother’s room throughout her childhood. One of Victoria’s first acts on acceding to the throne was to order the removal of her bed from the chamber of her mother, the Duchess of Kent, to a room of her own.
Victoria was baptised with names Alexandrina Victoria. For the first years of her life she was called by the diminutive ‘Drina’.
Victoria is the only name that is shared by a city in Canada, the USA and Mexico. They were not all named after the same person – the first for the Queen of England, the other two for the first President of he Republic of Mexico, Guadalupe Victoria.
Our Lady of Guadalupe, in Spanish Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, is a title of the Virgin Mary associated with her apparition to a young boy, Juan Diego, in Mexico on 9 December 1531.
This image of the Virgin is a theme in the work Cantos Sagrados by the Scottish composer James Macmillan.
The Guadalupe River in San Jose, CA is the southernmost major U.S. river with a Chinook salmon run.
The greatest recorded temperature change in 24 hours was recorded on 15 January 1972 in Loma, Montana when Chinook winds caused an increase from -48C to 9C.
On 6 November 1986, a British International Helicopters Chinook crashed on approach to Sumburgh Airport, Shetland Islands resulting in the loss of 45 lives.
The crash resulted in the withdrawal of the Chinook from crew-servicing flights in the North Sea. As more flights were now required of small capacity helicopters to move the equivalent number of personnel the decision could be questioned on absolute safety grounds however the aircraft had completely lost the confidence of the offshore work force, hence the decision.
The Shetland Islands’ motto is in Icelandic: Með lögum skal land byggja, meaning ‘by law shall the land be built up’.
The motto of the US State of Washington is *Al-ki *, which means “By and by” in the Chinook Native language.
Species of salmon include the Chinook, Coho, Sockeye, Atlantic, Chum, Pink, and Masu.