A terrorist attack against the Channel Tunnel (commonly referred to as “the Chunnel”) was the subject of a short story by British author Jeffrey Archer.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 remain the largest single worst attack in world history, with reportedly 2.993 dead and 8,900 injured.
The Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004 was the largest disaster in Swedish history in terms of loss of life, with 543 vacationing Swedes in Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia among other countries drowned.
His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, who has reigned since 1973, is of the royal House of Bernadotte.
The ruling House of Bernadotte was founded by Jean Baptiste Jules Bernadotte, at one time a Marshal of France under Napoleon. He adopted the name Charles XIV John as King of Sweden and Charles III John as King of Norway when he was elected to succeed Charles XIII, whose death ended the House of Holstein-Gottorp (aka House of Goldenburg).
French Canadian explorer and diplomat Pierre le Moyne, better known by his title of Sieur d’Iberville, is generally regarded as the founder of Louisiana, the territory in the American southeast that stretched from the panhandle of Florida to west of the Mississippi River and had its capital at New Orleans. His younger brother Jean Baptiste le Moyne, known by his title of Sieur de Bienville, founded Mobile and was governor of the Louisiana territory for many years. Neither brother married and their substantial estates passed to their 10 additional brothers and their heirs back in Canada.
Thomas Hardy’s masterpiece Tess of the d’Urbervilles received mixed reviews when it first appeared in 1892, in part because it challenged the sexual mores of late Victorian England.
Pawnbrokers (often Jewish) in Victorian England often also offered a 'clock repair" service as a sideline. They were ‘clock-boilers’. This involved taking the clockwork from the case and merely boiling it for a period, suspended in a pot of water.
On most occasions this was entirely effective in ‘repairing’ the clock because all that was stopping its operation was hair, dust, etc in the works, and the boiling removed this.
The Victorian state parliament building in Melbourne is one of the grandest of the Australian state parliaments, as its construction was fuelled by the gold rush revenues of the 1850s.
Melbourne, Florida was founded in 1867 by former slaves.
The USS *Melbourne *was one of the ships offered to Cmdr. William T. Riker of the USS Enterprise, NCC-1701-D, for his possible command; it was ultimately destroyed in the Borg attack at Wolf 359.
The movie Wolf had Jack Nicholson as an editor of a publishing house who was bitten by a werewolf. Columbia Pictures produced and since they didn’t have their own publishing house, they approached science fiction and fantasy publisher Tor Books to supply the books for Nicholson’s office. These included several volumes of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, as well as other Tor titles.
Aesop’s fable The Boy who cried Wolf dates from Classical times. However as it was recorded only in Greek it did not gain currency until it appeared in Latin translations of the fables in Europe in the 15th century.
“God helps those who help themselves.”
Many believe this saying is in the bible, perhaps in the book of Proverbs, but it is not in the bible. The earliest recording of this saying is actually from Aesop’s fable “Hercules and the Waggoner.” A man’s wagon got stuck in a muddy road, and he prayed for Hercules to help. Hercules appeared and said, “Get up and put your shoulder to the wheel.”
The moral given was “The gods help them that help themselves.”
The Inca society did not use the wheel.
Early revolvers date from the 1500s in Europe. Early patents date from the 1700s in England, and in 1836 Samuel Colt of Hartford, CT patented his revolver, sometimes called a wheel gun. According to Colt, he came up with the idea for the revolver while at sea, inspired by the capstan, which had a ratchet and pawl mechanism on it, a version of which was used in his guns to rotate the cylinder.
The title of Mission of Burma’s song “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver” is taken from a mistranslated quotation commonly attributed to Hermann Göring – “When I hear the word ‘culture’, that’s when I reach for my revolver” – the actual quote is “Wenn ich Kultur höre … entsichere ich meinen Browning!” This translates as: “Whenever I hear [the word] ‘culture’… I remove the safety from my Browning!” In fact, it is a line uttered by the character Thiemann in Act 1, Scene 1 of the play Schlageter, written by Hanns Johst.
Early in World War II, Hermann Göring, head of the German Luftwaffe or air force, bragged that British bombers would never get through his defenses to bomb any German city. “If they do, you can call me Meyer!” he said, using a common Jewish name, a poor jest considering systematic and murderous Nazi anti-Semitism. As it happened, many British (and later, American) bombers got through.
Well it didn’t take long for that to happen, Herr Meyer: Berlin was bombed by the RAF Bomber Command between 1940 and 1945, and by the USAAF Eighth Air Force between 1943 and 1945.
The Pergamon Museum in Berlin has in its collection the famous Ishtar Gate from Babylon.