Salt Lake City has a monument to seagulls. In the Miracle of the Gulls, a group of gulls appeared and ate the katydids that were eating the Mormon’s crops.
The Great Salt Lake is the largest rookery for CaliforniaGulls in North America. The second largest is Mono Lake.
The shore of Mono Lake was the site of one of Clint Eastwood’s first films as director as well as star, High Plains Drifter. The town, consisting of complete buildings rather than facades, included 14 houses and a two-story hotel, and was erected in 18 days. The town graveyard included tombstones with the names of Sergio Leone and Don Siegel, directors whom Eastwood admires. John Wayne hated the film for depicting his favorite genre, Westerns, as including stories where even the hero is a villain.
The Crocodile Hotel in the Kakadu national park in the Northern Territory is built in the shape of a crocodile.
Christmas, Florida, an outpost on the road from Orlando to Cape Canaveral, features Swampy, the World’s Largest Gator (actually a decorated building) at Jungle Adventures Nature Animal Park. The town was named for the date of the beginning of construction of Fort Christmas, a post intended to serve the US Army in the Second Seminole War.
Fort Denison is a former penal site and defensive facility occupying a small island located north-east of the Royal Botanic Gardens and about one kilometre east of the Opera House in Sydney Harbour.
In October 1900, during the Boer War, an enterprising prank was carried out at Fort Denison by several crew members of the White Star Line ship SS Medic. They gained access to the Fort, fired one of the cannons and raised a makeshift Boer flag to fool the local populace into thinking that a Boer raiding party was attacking Sydney. One of the party was Charles Lightoller, who later became famous as the most senior officer to survive the sinking of the *RMS Titanic *in 1912.
The US Army has medics, while the US Navy has corpsmen. USMC combat units have Navy corpsmen attached, and we greatly value and protect our corpsmen!
The International System of Units (generally abbreviated as **SI **from its French name Le Système International d’Unités) is the modern form of the metric system and the most widely used system of measurement in the world.
The SI defines seven base units:
- metre (m) for length;
- kilogram (kg) for mass;
- second (s) for time;
- ampere (A) for electric current;
- kelvin (K) for temperature;
- candela (cd) for luminous intensity; and
- mole (mol) for the amount of substance.
Of these base units, only three are defined independently of any other base units: the second of time, kelvin and kilogram.
The meter was originally intended to be one ten-millionth of the distance from the Earth’s equator to the North Pole at sea level.
78.7% of the length of the Equator is across water and 21.3% is over land.
Starting at the Prime Meridian and going east the Equator passes through the following countries: São Tomé and Principe; Gabon; Republic of the Congo; Democratic Republic of the Congo; Uganda; Kenya; Somalia; Indonesia; Ecuador; Colombia and Brazil.
The equator is the only latitude line that is also a great circle, and a great circle of a sphere is the intersection of the sphere and a plane through its center. On the earth, every line of longitude is a great circle. There are an infinite number of great circles on a sphere.
In 1792, an expedition traveled across France to determine the length the meter, using a longitude line from Dunkirk to Barcelona. Two surveyors, Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre and Pierre Méchain, started out from Paris on that meridian. The expedition lasted from 1792 to 1799, through various unrest.
Afterwards, Méchain discovered some discrepancies in his measurements, but deliberately neglected to report them. He spent the rest of his life trying to reconcile them, pushing himself so much that his mental health suffered.
The actual difference (caused by mathematical factors that were unknown at the time of the survey), was less than the width of a hair.
Jean-Baptiste Lully was an Italian-born French composer, instrumentalist, and dancer who spent most of his life working in the court of Louis XIV of France. He is considered the chief master of the French baroque style. He is renowned for his ballet music and his choral works (‘grands motets’) written for the liturgical services in the royal chapel.
Simon Vouet was the leader of the French artists of the Baroque style in Rome. He was later court painter to Louis XIII.
Louis XIII was the King in the Dumas novel, The Three Musketeers.
From the accession of Louis XIII in 1610 until the deposition of Louis XVI in 1792 - a period of 182 years - there were only four Kings of France.
There are four Kings in a standard deck of cards.
John D. Rockefeller was a founder, chairman and a major shareholder of Standard Oil. With the dissolution of the Standard Oil trust into 33 smaller companies in 1911, he became the richest man in the world.
Rockefeller is reputed to have never read the decision of the Supreme Court which mandated the break-up of Standard Oil under anti-trust law.
Vice President Nelson Rockefeller died in office while having sex with his secretary.