Prime Minister Melbourne was reputed to have said, “Here’s another bishop dead! I think they do it to annoy me!” (because of the political difficulties caused by having appoint bishops)
Bishops Head is a small community in southern Maryland.
Trollope’s novel Barchester Towers opens with the dying Bishop of Barchester being attended by the two great London doctors, Sir Lamda Mewnew and Sir Omicron Pie.
Archdeacon Grantley was expected to succeed his father as bishop, but there has been a change in government. The former Prime Minister no longer has the power to appoint the new bishop, and sends the note that the bishop has died on to the new Prime Minister (who no doubt wondered if the bishop had died just to annoy him…)
The Barchester Chronicles was largely filmed in and around Peterborough Cathedral. The cathedral was built in the 12th and 13th centuries.
Playing on the correct form of address, His Grace the Archbishop is often ribaldly called “His Arse the Gracebishop”, just to annoy him.
Anthony Trollope’s father lived his life in expectation of inheriting a fortune from a rich childless elderly uncle; his hopes were dashed when after the uncle’s wife died he married a much younger woman and in his old age had children who became his legal heirs. Qualified to do nothing, Trollope’s father descended into debt and drink (and, to connect to the above, sitting on his arse).
Mexican-American actor Anthony Quinn won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor twice: for Viva Zapata! in 1952 and Lust for Life in 1956.
Anthony Quinn’s many surviving children range in age from 73 to 18. His oldest child would be 75 were he still alive, but he drowned as a child in the pond of Quinn’s next door neighbor W.C. Fields.
The Blues Music Award, formerly known as the W. C. Handy award, has been presented annually for the past 35 years in Memphis, Tennessee.
One of Red Greene’s tag lines was: “If the women don’t find you handsome, they should at least find you handy!”
Nathanael Greene was one of George Washington’s most trusted top officers. A businessman before the American Revolution, he zoomed from the rank of private to major general of the Continental Army.
Nathan Bedford Forrest was the only officer in the Civil War – either Union or Confederate – to work himself up from private to general in the course of the war.
In addition to George Custer, two other captains, Elon Farnsworth and Wesley Merritt, were promoted to Brigadier General on recommendation of George Meade in an effort to shake up the Cavalry Corps.
The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps was formed in 1915 in Egypt, prior to the Gallipoli Campaign. It gave rise to the familiar acronym ANZAC.
ANZAC cookies have oats and coconut in them.
ANZAC biscuits (or better still ‘bikkies’) please.
Another Australian favourite is the lamington: cubes of stale sponge cake, dipped in melted chocolate and covered in dry coconut.
My favourite baseball team, the San Francisco Giants, just won the 2014 World Series! This is the eighth world championship for the Giants:
- 1905, 1921, 1922, 1933 and 1954 as the New York Giants, and
- 2010, 2012 and 2014 as the San Francisco Giants.
Giants manager Bruce Bochy has never lost a postseason series. The 2014 San Francisco Giants are the first team since the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates to win a World Series game 7 on the road.
An interstate baseball competition exists in Australia, with teams playing for the Claxton Shield. However it is a fringe sport, with little media coverage or spectator interest.
Claxton is also the name of a small village eight and a half miles south-east of Norwich, in the English county of Norfolk. The 2001 census returned showed it then contained 85 households and a population of just 244.
After the withdrawl of the Roman legions in the 5th century the Angles settled in the region becoming the “north folk” and the “south folk”, hence the county names today of Norfolk and Suffolk, later becoming the kingdom of East Anglia, which later merged into the kingdoms of Mercia, Wessex and, ultimately, England and the United Kingdom of Great Britain.