Proclamation Day in South Australia celebrates the establishment of government in South Australia as a British colony. The proclamation was made by Captain John Hindmarsh beside The Old Gum Tree in the present-day suburb of Glenelg North on 28 December 1836.
The date 28 December as a public holiday in South Australia was modified to the first otherwise working day after the Christmas Day public holiday (i.e. usually 26 December).
December 28th is also known as Childermas, or the Massacre of the Innocents. The story’s first appearance in any source other than the Gospel of Matthew is in the apocryphal Protoevangelium of James of c.150 AD, which excludes the Flight into Egypt and switches the attention of the story to the infant John the Baptist:
"And when Herod knew that he had been mocked by the Magi, in a rage he sent murderers, saying to them: Slay the children from two years old and under. And Mary, having heard that the children were being killed, was afraid, and took the infant and swaddled Him, and put Him into an ox-stall. And Elizabeth, having heard that they were searching for John, took him and went up into the hill-country, and kept looking where to conceal him. And there was no place of concealment. And Elizabeth, groaning with a loud voice, says: O mountain of God, receive mother and child. And immediately the mountain was cleft, and received her. And a light shone about them, for an angel of the Lord was with them, watching over them."
The first non-Christian reference to the massacre is recorded four centuries later by Macrobius (c. 395-423), who writes in his Saturnalia:
"When he [emperor Augustus] heard that among the boys in Syria under two years old whom Herod, king of the Jews, had ordered killed, his own son was also killed, he said: it is better to be Herod's pig, than his son."Currently the longest regularly scheduled non-stop commercial passenger flights are those operated by Qantas between Sydney and Dallas/Fort Worth. The flight distance is 13,804 km, which is over one-third of the distance around the earth. The scheduled duration is around 16 hours 50 minutes.
Founded in 1920, Qantas is the third-oldest airline in the world, behind KLM and Avianca. Its name comes from its initial acronym, Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services.
On 19 February 1942 the Japanese began their bombing raids on Darwin, the capital of the Northern Territory. Darwin was only lightly defended and the Japanese inflicted heavy losses upon the Allied forces at little cost to themselves.
The bombings caused approximately 250 casualties, as well as major damage to Darwin’s buildings and essential services. Most of the cargo shipping available to support the war effort in Java and the Philippines was also lost.
Over the next eighteen months the Japanese made almost 100 raids on Darwin and other targets in northern Australia.
At a little less than 521,000 square miles, the Northern Territory is a little smaller than Alaska and about twice as big as Texas.
While larger in size than Texas, the Northern Territory’s population of 243,700 is minuscule compared with 26,956,958 for Texas. The population density of Texas (38.7 people/km[sup]2[/sup]) is more than 200 times that of the Northern Territory (0.2 people/km[sup]2[/sup]).
Even Alaska, at 0.5 people/km[sup]2[/sup], is twice as densely populated as the Northern Territory.
The Australian Antarctic Territory is a part of Antarctica. It is the largest territory of Antarctica claimed by any nation. It has an area of approximately 5,896,500 km[sup]2[/sup].
H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” is about explorers from Miskatonic University who find evidence of an ancient alien outpost in 1931 Antarctica. You can even get a sweatshirt!: http://www.cthulhulives.org/store/storeDetailPages/mu-antarctic.html
Housatonic Community College is located in Bridgeport, CT, near the moiuth of the Housatonic River. The Housatonic River flows through western Massachusetts and Connecticut.
The Housatonic River is near the Mianus River, flowing through the Mianus neighborhood in Greenwich, CT, and the namesake of the Mianus River Bridge on I-95. It was the site of a “Jackass” episode in which Johnny Knoxville and team explored all the things one can find in Mianus.
Naugahyde – an artificial leather-like covering for furniture – is so named because it was originally manufactured in Naugatuck, CT.
In the Bea Arthur / Bill Macy / Adrienne Barbeau sitcom “Maude”, a spinoff from “All in the Family”, Maude’s maid, after Florida Evans (Esther Rolle) left for her own show, was Mrs. Naugatuck,played by Hermione Baddeley. They lived in Tuckahoe in Westchester County, NY.
In Greek mythology Hermione was the daughter of King Menelaus of Sparta and his wife Queen Helen (‘Helen of Troy’).
The Bicycling Capital of America, a city that sits on the La Crosse River, is Sparta, Wisconsin.
The Bridge to Nowhere is a concrete road bridge spanning the Mangapurua River in Whanganui National Park, North Island, New Zealand. It has no roads leading to it, but it is a popular tourist attraction, accessible by mountain bike or bushwalking on a variety of different tracks.
It was built across the deep Mangapurua Gorge to provide access to an area where the NZ government was opening up land in 1917 for pioneering farmers, mainly soldiers who had returned from World War I. The intention was to build roads to it later, but the area proved to be so remote and unsuitable for farming that the venture failed and the farms reverted to native bush.
The “Bridge to Nowhere” that was one of the many items to embarrass Sarah Palin in her brief but memorable campaign for Vice President (although all the Alaska Congressional delegation participated) would have connected mainland Alaska to Gravina Island, site of the Ketchikan airport, replacing a ferry service. It would have been longer than the Golden Gate Bridge and higher than the Brooklyn Bridge, all to serve 550 people a day.
Ketchikan is on an island named Revillagigedo Island. The island was named by George Vancouver in 1793.
Vancouver, BC, is not on the island of Vancouver. Generations of Canadian school kids have assumed that this was some sadistic plot to ensure bad marks on geography tests.