Don’t tell Virginia!: http://www.virginia.org/presidents/
In play:
President Barack Obama is the first person elected to the White House directly from the U.S. Senate since John F. Kennedy, another Democrat, in 1960. Obama was born during Kennedy’s Presidency.
The half-dollar bearing President Kennedy’s likeness is now in its 50th year of mintage, and is still being struck. In 2013, 9.6-million of them were made at the mints in Denver and Philadelphia. Over 3-billion have been minted so far, and nobody has any idea where the hell they all are or why new ones are needed.
The original Australian 50 cent piece was issued in 1966. It was a round coin, made of 80% silver and 20% copper. However, as silver prices began to rise its intrinsic value started to outweigh its face value, and it was withdrawn. The current version, introduced in 1969, is cupro-nickel, with a dodecagonal shape.
Dorothy wore silver slippers in Frank Baum’s book “The Wizard of Oz”. They were changed to red for the movie version.
Dorothy L Sayers, the English author, is probably best known as the creator of the amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey. However she herself considered her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy to be her best work.
“The Kansas Komet”, Gale Sayers, has one of the shortest NFL careers of any inductee to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. Sayers played 7 seasons in the NFL, and for 2 of those seasons he was mostly injured.
A cantonment is a police or military quarters. Its name is derived from the French word canton, meaning ‘district’.
Whilst attending Cardiff University, I lived briefly in Canton - a district in the west of the City.
Today Canton is one of the most ethnically diverse of Cardiff’s suburbs, with a significant Pakistani and Indian population. The derivation of the name differs from the French however in coming from St. Canna’s Town, St Canna being an obscure 6th century female Welsh saint. Her father was a nephew of King Arthur according to legend.
The canna plant, or canna lily, is one of the world’s richest sources of starch.
Starch grains from sorghum were found on grind stones in caves in Ngalue, Mozambique dating up to 100,000 years ago. Sorghum bicolor, native to Africa, is an important food crop in Africa, Central America, and South Asia, and is the “fifth-most important cereal crop grown in the world”.
When Mozambique joined the Commonwealth of Nations in 1995 it was the first member not to have had a constitutional link to the British Empire or to another member of the Commonwealth.
A “double tap” is a shooting technique that is part of a move called the Mozambique Drill. The Mozambique Drill, also known as the Failure Drill or Failure to Stop drill, is a close-quarters shooting technique that requires the shooter to fire twice into the torso of a target (known as a double tap to center mass), rapidly assess whether the target has been stopped, and follow up if needed with a more difficult head shot that will instantly incapacitate.
Drill is a cotton fabric that is very durable, and has a strong bias in its weave.
The Mozambique Drill described two posts above was invented (or used early) by Rhodesian Mike Rousseau, who then told his acquaintance, Jeff Cooper, about it. Cooper, a US Marine and shooting instructor, incorporated it into his shooting techniques and training. John Dean “Jeff” Cooper (1920-2006) was one of the 20th century’s foremost international experts on the use and history of small arms.
Cooper graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in political science. He received a regular commission in the United States Marine Corps in September 1941.
The Drill is one of the most endangered species of primate in Africa, living in the rainforest in the Cameroon area. It is closely related to the Mandrill, a large baboon, to which it has lent the etymology of its vernacular name.
Derna is a port city in Libya. The Battle of Derna in late April / early May 1805 saw the US Marines and Army defeat the forces of Ottoman Tripolitania during the First Barbary War in the first recorded land battle that the USA fought overseas.
This led to the first line in the USMC Hymn:
“From the Halls of Montezuma
to the Shores of Tripoli”
There are approximately 300 Barbary macaques living on the Rock of Gibraltar. Legend has it that while the macaque population remains, the British will retain control of Gibraltar.
Gibraltar was ceded to Great Britain in perpetuity in 1704 and has thus been British for 310 years - longer than Spain had existed as a united Kingdom and thus has been British longer than it had been Spanish.
A perpetuity is a government bond that has no maturity date. Its value is simply the sum of the geometric series represented by the present value of the future coupon payments.
In mathematics, the geometric mean is a type of mean or average, which indicates the central tendency or typical value of a set of numbers by using the product of their values (as opposed to the arithmetic mean which uses their sum). The geometric mean is defined as the nth root of the product of n numbers.