Neighboring Bohemia and Bavaria are named after the Boii society, who were a Gallic tribe of the later Iron Age that occupied northern Italy, Hungary and its western neighbors, and Transalpine Gaul.
Bohemia had a seacoast during the 16th century! In 1490, political chaos led Hungary (which already owned part of the Croatian seacoast) to invite Vladislaus King of Bohemia to rule Hungary as well. Although this all soon became part of the Habsburg domains, the united Kingdom of Bohemia and Hungary remained a distinct polity – deliberately so, in part due to religious differences – and did retain a seacoast.
The author of Winter’s Tale mentions “the sea-coast of Bohemia;” this is often cited as evidence the playwright was unfamiliar with European geography. In fact, it’s as likely he was very familiar, and making an elided or sophisticated reference to the still-united Bohemian-Hungarian polity, which had indeed bordered on the Adriatic Sea for at least a century when Winter’s Tale was written.
According to a 2007 New York Times Poll approximately 82% of college professors who teach Shakespeare consider there to be no good reason to doubt that Shakespeare is the principal author of the canon attributed to him.
Henry Wriothesley is assumed to be the patron of William Shakespeare, and is said to have given him the huge sum of £1000 on one occasion, yet no documents written by any of the Wriothesley family survive attesting to this patronage.
Scharffen Berger makes a dark chocolate bar that is 82% cacao.
In 1948, smoking was already recognized as a health issue. More doctors (82%) were said to recommended Camels than any other cigarette. (Adjusted slightly for ninja effect)
After the the United States [del]gobbled up most of Mexico[/del] annexed the current South West, the United States Army set up the eventually unsuccessful and disbanded US Camel Corps for operations in that arid territory.
The first stories about Texas’s Pecos Bill were published in 1917 by Edward O’Reilly for The Century Magazine, and collected and reprinted in 1923 in the book Saga of Pecos Bill. Reilly said they were part of an oral tradition of tales told by cowboys during the westward expansion and settlement of the southwest including Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. But American folklorist Richard M. Dorson found that O’Reilly invented the stories as “fakelore”,[
In 1988 Robin Williams recorded a children’s audiobook version of Tall Tale: The Unbelievable Adventures of Pecos Bill. It is said that Pecos Bill died from laughter. In the story The Death of Pecos Bill, Pecos Bill is in a bar when a so-called city boy walks in with gator-skin shoes and a gator-skin suit, and otherwise trying to present himself in the manner of an outlaw cowboy. Pecos Bill found it amusing and laughed himself to death outside.
The origin of the name Pecos is disputed. It could be from the Spanish word for a single head of cattle, or the verb ‘to sin’. Pecas,the feminine equivalent, means Freckles. But Pecos does not mean Pecans. Nogales, Arizona, means pecans.
The shattered wreck of the USS Arizona, resting beneath the waters of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii since December 7, 1941, still leaks oil. U.S. Navy divers place the urns of cremated survivors of the attack on the battleship’s deck from time to time.
Henry Wadworth Longfellow’s poem “The Wreck of the Hesperus” was probably based on the actual wreck of the Favorite, a ship from Wiscasset, Maine, on the reef of Norman’s Woe off the coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts. All hands were lost, one of whom was a woman, who reportedly floated to shore dead but still tied to the mast. The Hesperus was illustrated on the back of Lydia, the Tattooed Lady.
My grand uncle, Patrocinio Pablo OS1c, was a USS Arizona survivor on 07 December 1941:
ElvisL1ves ninja’d me but my play still works - ship, wreck, lives lost.
I still remember my grand uncle describing how he made his way topside from below decks, then jumped off the deck into the flaming waters, swam underwater and had to clear the burning oil on the surface to come up for air, then continued underwater in that manner and made his way to Ford Island.
He showed me his congratulatory letter for surviving the Arizona and Pearl Harbor disaster that was signed by the President. Can’t recall if it was Truman or FDR, however.
On 26 November 1703, a severe storm hit England, costing 8000 lives; thirteen ships of the Royal Navy were lost including the entire Channel Squadron; the lead roofing was blown off Westminster Abbey; etc. This was the deadliest single-day natural disaster in the history of Britain. Britain had not yet converted to the Gregorian calendar, for which the date was instead 7 December 1703.
Royal Navy Admiral of the Fleet Sir Cloudesley Shovell perished off the Scilly Isles in 1707 when his ship, HMS Association, hit rocks and sank along with HMS Eagle, HMS Romney and HMS Firebrand, costing England four capital ships and 2000 men. The disaster was attributed to the navigators’ inability to determine their longitude, prompting the Navy to sponsor a contest which led to John Harrison’s invention of the chronometer.
The China Clipper, a seaplane, was the first commercial airliner to fly across the Pacific, in 1938. The reason it was not done earlier was because there were no landing strips on the refueling isles in the Pacific that could accommodate large land-based aircraft. The China Clipper flew to Manila, in the Philippines, not China.
The China Clipper route from San Francisco to Manila began in Alameda and required 60 hours of flying time via Pearl Harbor, Midway Atoll, Wake Island, and Guam at a cruising speed of 130 miles per hour.
Amelia Earhart’s navigator, Fred Noonan, was a navigator on China Clippers during their initial airmail flights in 1935.
At lest one Doper once, to make extra money, threw a phone book on the front steps of the house where Amelia Earhart grew up, in Atchison. Also voiced spots for an ad agency in Topeka and had a burrito in Santa Fe.
Amelia Island, Florida, is named after Princess Amelia of Great Britain (Amelia Sophia Eleanor; 30 May 1711 – 31 October 1786) who was the second daughter of King George II of Great Britain.