In Grouch Marx’s signature song Lydia the Tattooed Lady, among the items, persons, and scenes tattooed on Lydia’s body are the Battle of Waterloo (on her back), The Wreck of the Hesperus (beside it), the red, white and blue (above them); the cities of Kankakee and “Paree”, Washington Crossing the Delaware, President Andrew Jackson, Niagara, Alcatraz, Buffalo Bill, Picasso, Captain Spaulding exploring the Amazon, Lady Godiva (with her pajamas on), Grover Whalen, the Trylon, Treasure Island, Nijinsky, Social Security Number and a fleet of ships (on her hips).
During the 30s and 40s, Grover Whalen was New York City’s “official greeter,” appearing at many public PR events, but he was especially known for publicizing the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair.
Treasure Island in San Francisco is a man-made island built for the 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair. Built in 1936 & 1937, Treasure Island housed this World’s Fair that also celebrated the newly-built San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge which opened in 1936, and the Golden Gate Bridge which opened in 1937. Treasure Island served as a US Naval base until 1997. This Naval base served as the home for the USMC Field Artillery unit, HQ Btry, 1st BN 14th Marine Regiment, until the unit relocated in the early 1990s to the nearby island of Alameda. HQ 1/14 has since been decommissioned and the USMC unit there has been reorganized and repurposed into the 4th Force Recon unit.
Canada is the World’s only country whose airport codes all begin with a uniform prefix… The letter Y is the first digit of all Canadian airport codes.
That is not correct. There are several counter examples: Airports in Canada | List of Canada Airports | Canada Airport Codes
There are twelve airport codes that are tripled letters, e.g. YYY for the Mont-Joli Airport in Canada. Most of these triple-letter airports are smallish airports, e.g. Jardines Del Rey, Cayo Coco, Cuba (CCC), East Texas Regional (GGG). A counter-example is Shanghai Hongqiao International (SSS), one of the busiest airports in China.
In 2014 Shanghai Pudong International Airport was the 19th busiest airport in the world, far busier than Hongqiao. Pudong is the main international airport serving Shanghai, while Hongqiao is Shanghai’s main domestic airport and has limited international flights.
In the original Star Trek episode “Wolf in the Fold,” historical records in the USS Enterprise’s computer indicated that, in 1932, seven women were knifed to death in Shanghai by the Redjac entity, an alien which had also been Jack the Ripper.
After 126 years, the identity of Jack the Ripper may have been discovered just a few months ago! It was Aaron Kosminski, a Polish immigrant who was one of the suspects and who was committed to an insane asylum a few years after the killings. The evdence against Kosminski is mtDNA match between one of his relatives and the bloodied shawl of victim Catherine Eddowes.
In the time of the Whitechapel murders, the late 1880s and early 1890s, the Metropolitan Police estimates that there were 1,200 prostitutes “of very low class” and about 62 brothels in Whitechapel, a very small district in east London.
The Whitechapel Bell Foundry is the oldest manufacturing company in Britain, having been established in 1570 during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.
The most famous bell cast at the foundry is undoubtedly the Great Bell of Westminster (‘Big Ben’). It was cast on 10 April 1858, and weighs 13,760 kg.
Big Ben is the largest bell ever cast at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. The Whitechapel Bell Foundry also cast Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell in 1752.
During the Triduum Sacrum, the three days preceding Easter Sunday, the use of bells is forbidden in the liturgy. In their place a wooden clapper, known as a crotalum or crepitaculum is used.
The Witch of Agnesi curve, first described by Pierre de Fermat, vaguely resembles a bell-shaped curve. But treating that (appropriately scaled) curve as a pdf (called the “Cauchy” distributiuon) leads to “paradoxical” properties; for example the Law of Large Numbers fails for such variates. Such variates can be readily created by simply taking the ratio of two independent standard normal variates.
Maria Agnesi (1718-1799) is best known as an Italian mathematician; however she spent the last forty years of her life studying patristic theology.
The Canadian composer Elma Miller has written a work called “The Witch of Agnesi” for B flat clarinet, bass clarinet, horn, 2 percussion, viola and double bass. The work was first performed in late October 1989 in Toronto. The inspiration for the piece was the curve of Maria Agnesi. In the program notes Miller writes that “The witch of Agnesi refers to a well known mathematical curve, roughly in the shape of a mantelpiece clock. Melodic lines of this shape appear throughout the piece in both large and small scale representations.”
Miller is the most common Amish surname. The other four most common are Stoltzfus, Yoder, Beiler and Schwartz.
Yoder’s Restaurant in the tiny downtown of Hicksville, Ohio makes a great home-made apple pie.
The Ohio River discharges, on average, 650 trillion tablespoons of water into the Mississippi every fortnight. This is more than thrice the flow of the Missouri, and exceeds other famous rivers including the Nile, the Danube, and Niagara Falls. The Amazon River, however, discharges at 26 times the rate of the Ohio.
The world’s oldest bristlecone pine tree is about 125,000 fortnights old. Its exact identity and lokcation is not publicly revealed, out of a very realistic expectation that some human being would be unable to resist the temptation to kill it in the next few fortnights, if he could find it.