Five states have a county that shares the name of the Allegheny River, and they are spelled three different ways.
Allegany County, MD
Allegany County, NY
Alleghany County, NC
Alleghany County, VA
Allegheny County, PA
Furthermore, there is an Allegan County, MI.
The biggest river in the world, measured by the amount of water that flows down it, is the Amazon. On average 120,000 cubic metres (about 20 swimming pools’ worth) of water flows out of its mouth every second.
The Incas built long bridges over the deep Apurimac River canyon. The distance from the source of the Apurimac River to the mouth of the Amazon makes it the longest river in the world.
Mexico’s Barranca del Cobre (Copper Canyon) is larger and portions are deeper than the Grand Canyon in Arizona.
The Fish River Canyon in Namibia is the largest canyon in Africa. It’s about 100 miles long and up to 550 meters deep in part.
A coelecanth, caught by fishermen in the Indian Ocean in 1938, was thought to have been extinct for over 60-million years, and is more closely related to reptiles than to fish. There were no fossil records from the last 400-million years, and it was thought that their ancestors had all evolved into land animals.
The southern bound of the Indian Ocean is, depending on your point of view, either Antarctica or the Southern Ocean.
Lynyrd Skynyrd’s song “Sweet Home Alabama,” with the line “I hope Neil Young will remember / a Southern man don’t need him around anyhow,” was written in response to Neil Young’s song “Southern Man.” However the two were actually big fans of each other. Young said “I’m proud to have my name in a song like theirs,” and sometimes played the song in his own performances.
The Ashley and Cooper Rivers meet at Charleston to form the Atlantic Ocean, depending on your point of view, and the self-importance of the people of Charleston knows no bound.
[ I don’t know what the threshold is for a valid domino connection, so will incorporate connections to both recent posts in the following to thwart any quibbling.]
After giving a concert in Greenberg – at the opposite end of South Carolina from Charleston – on 20 October 1977, Lynyrd Skynyrd’ boarded a Convair CV-300. Several people died in the subsequent crash, including their lead singer Ronnie Van Zant. The very same airplane had been inspected by members of Aerosmith’s flight crew for possible use a few months earlier, but was rejected because it was felt that neither the plane nor the crew were up to standards.
Vultee Arch (image), near Sedona, AZ, can be reached from Sedona by taking a 5-mile jeep trail (Schnebly Hill Road and FR 152 (Vultee Arch Rd)) followed by a 2-mile hiking path. This well-known rock feature is named after Jerry Vultee, who died in a plane crash near the arch in 1938 in the small plane he was piloting. Vultee owned the Airplane Development Corporation which had acquired Lycoming and Stinson Aircraft Company, and later became Vultee Aircraft. In 1943 the Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation, generally known as Convair, was formed by the merger of Consolidated Aircraft and Vultee Aircraft. Consolidated Aircraft built the PBY Catalina and the B-24 Liberator.
Wiley Post was the first person to fly around the world in a fixed-wing aircraft., which took 8 days. He died in a crash in which he was only the second most famous person – Will Rogers was his passenger. Post was born in Van Zandt County, Texas, named for a family unrelated to that of Ronnie Van Zant (two posts back) who also died in a plane crash. But the Van Zandt family did produce Townes Van Zandt, a country music legend. Wiley Post was the fist Texas-born person to be commemorated on a US postage stamp who was never elected President.
Will Rogers and Wiley Post were killed in August, 1935 when the plane piloted by Post crashed on takeoff near Point Barrow, Alaska. At 71° North Latitude, Point Barrow is the northernmost point of all the territory of the United States. The northernmost point on the Canadian mainland, Murchison Promontory, is 40 miles farther north.
Any two humans will be distant cousins of each other, though details are usually unclear. Although the relationship depends on genealogies of doubtful reliability, Edgar Allan Poe (author of “The Raven”) and Charles William Post (originator of “Post Toasties” cereal) are alleged to be 9th cousins of each other (once removed), both showing descent from the Sir William Molyneux of Sefton who distinguished himself at the Battle of Flodden Field in 1513. At Flodden, that English knight seized two Scottish banners with his own hands; the banners remain in the possession of the Molyneux family to this day.
King James IV was killed in the Battle of Flodden Field. He was the last monarch from the British Isles to suffer such a death.
Thomas Howard, who led the victorious Engliush army at Flodden, was grandfather of Anne Boleyn, second wife of King Henry VIII. When she was beheaded on 19 May 1536, it was not with a common axe but, at Henry’s order, by sword, with an expert swordsman brought from France to do the deed.
The center star of Orion’s sword isn’t a star; it’s the Orion Nebula and is the only nebula visible from Earth with the naked eye.
Real astronauts may fly on NASA’s Orion MPCV (Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle) by 2021.
Before he became rich and famous as Mark Twain, Sam Clemens was largely dependant professionally, financially, and emotionally on his older brother Orion Clemens, an ambitious young printer and lawyer who had a promising career in Nevada politics during the Civil War. After Sam became rich and famous the positions flipped and Orion (whose name was pronounced in a way that rhymed with ‘Dorian’ rather than the usual pronunciation) spent most of the rest of his life dependant on Sam for financial support as the great expectations of Orion’s youth evaporated and he underwent decades of business and career failures.
Pip is the young hero of Dickens’ novel, Great Expectations. He is plucked from poverty by an unknown benefactor.
