In Greek mythology Elektra was the daughter of King Agamemnon and Queen Clytemnestra. They weren’t the happiest of families. Agamemnon ordered the sacrifice of another daughter, Iphigenia, in order to obtain good winds for the voyage to Troy to recapture Helen, the wife of his brother Menelaus. Clytemnestra never forgave her husband for this, and slaughtered him on his return from Troy ten years later, with the help of her lover Aegisthus. Elektra then urged her brother Orestes to take vengeance on their mother and her lover, which he did, gloriously and in technicolour.
It all makes for great reading in the plays of the Classical Greek tragedians.
The Buick Electra was not named for the mythological character, but famed Texas sculptor Electra Waggoner Biggs. Her brother-in-law was Harlow H. Curtis, the president of Buick when it was an autonomous part of General Motors.
The city of Electra, Texas, was named after her grandmother.
Music poducer James William Guercio – producer of the rock group Chicago, among others, tried his hand at film direction with Electrs Glide in Blue, starring Robert Blake.
Aviatgion pioneer T C Ryan had nothing to do with the building of Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Lous, a Ryan M-2… The plane was custom built by Ryan airlines in San Diego, but a year after Mr. Ryan sold the airline and moved on to other aeronautical challenges.
During WWII Charles Lindbergh worked with pilots in P-38 squadrons of the US Army Air Corps to extend the operational range of the twin-forked devil by determining the fuel mixture could run leaner and increasing manifold pressure. As a result the range of the P-38 was extended approximately 30% or up to 400 additional miles.
The P-38 Lightning was made by Lockheed, one of the few aircraft makers to have celebrated their centennial. Lockheed was formed by the Lougheed brothers in 1912, who respelled their corporate name so it would not be mispronounced. The name still exists in the merged corporate identity as Lockheed-Martin.
Although kept a civilian by decision of President Roosevelt, who refused to let a prominent Nazi supporter rejoin the Army, Lindbergh became a customer representative for United Aircraft specializing in showing frontline fighter pilots, in non-UA Lightnings as well as Corsairs, how to stretch their range (by using *low *power and speed, contrary to instinct). Against orders, he flew as many as 50 combat missions in Corsairs, with one officially-uncredited kill.
Another famous civilian US pilot in the Pacific was WW1 ace Eddie Rickenbacker, a State Department employee who inspected conditions at US island bases. Rickenbacker spent 24 days adrift on a lifeboat, with no food or water, along with the rest of the crew of a B-17 which became lost in a storm and ditched, while on their way for Rickenbacker to give MacArthur a private chewing out for insubordinate public comments.
Austria, a German-speaking country, is the only country in pre-1990 Europe in which everyone speaks the one language of a single neighboring country, and has no national language of is own. (Aside from a few micro-states.)
Aurora Australis, written by members of the British Imperial Antarctic Expedition or the Nimrod Expedition (1908–09) led by Ernest Shackleton, was the first book ever written, printed, illustrated and bound in the Antarctic. It was edited by Shackleton, illustrated with lithographs and etchings by George Marston, printed by Ernest Joyce and Frank Wild, and bound by Bernard Day. The production of Aurora Australis was one of the cultural activities Shackleton encouraged while the expedition team over-wintered at Cape Royds on Ross Island in the McMurdo Sound.
There is a special section of seating reserved in the courtroom of the Supreme Court of the United States for those admitted to its bar. Many American lawyers are admitted to the Court’s bar for the prestige (although all that is required is five years’ admission in good standing to one’s own state bar, and the nomination of a current member of the SCOTUS bar), but only a comparative handful ever actually argue a case before the Court.
Wilson ‘Iron Bar’ Tuckey held the WA federal electorate of O’Connor for 30 years between 1980 and 2010. With an area of 908,954 km[sup]2[/sup], it is the third largest electorate in Australia.