The Olympic Games were one of four separate sporting events that were held regularly in Ancient Greece and were known collectively as the Panhellenic Games. The other three were the Nemean Games, the Isthmian Games and the Pythian Games.
Costa Rica advanced to the quarterfinals for the first time in the World Cup when they defeated Greece on penalty kicks in 2014.
Costa Rica is one of 21 countries - most of them very small, and with close ties to a much bigger friendly country - which have no military forces. Costa Rica abolished its military in Article 12 of its 1949 constitution.
In 2012 Costa Rica became the first country in the Americas to ban recreational hunting.
Although “hunting wild mammals with a dog” was made unlawful in England and Wales by the Hunting Act 2004, most of the famous hunting packs (the Quorn, the Belvoir, the Pytchley, the Cottesmore) continue to hunt. They operate within the law by taking advantage of an exemption that permits unusual forms of hunting wild mammals with dogs to continue, such as “hunting… for the purpose of enabling a bird of prey to hunt the wild mammal”.
The Chesapeake Bay Retriever, a hunting dog / bird dog / water dog, was declared the state dog of Maryland in 1964.
Botany Bay is located 13km south of Sydney. It was the first landing place in Australia of Captain Cook on 29 April 1770. In his journal Cook notes “The great quantity of plants Mr. Banks and Dr. Solander found in this place occasioned my giving it the name of Botany Bay”.
In 1621, during one of the confrontations between the Commons and King James I, the Commons passed the Protestation, which asserted that “the liberties, franchises, privileges, and jurisdictions of parliament are the ancient and undoubted birthright and inheritance of the subjects of England”. The Protestation also asserted that “every member of the house hath, and of right ought to have, freedom of speech” to debate all matters of public interest, even if the King did not want them to.
The King ordered the Journal of the House of Commons brought to him and ripped out the page containing the Protestation, then dissolved Parliament.
The phrase ‘a mess of pottage’ refers to something that is immediately attractive but of little value taken foolishly and carelessly in exchange for something more distant and perhaps less tangible but immensely more valuable. It is derived from the epsiode related in the Book of Genesis when Esau sells his birthright to his brother Jacob for a meal of lentil stew (“pottage”).
Jacob’s Ladder is a stairway to heaven from earth described in Genesis 28 in a dream that Jacob had. In his dream Jacob saw God’s angels ascending and descending the ladder, and the Lord told Jacob that the land on which he slept would be given to him and his descendants. When he awoke, Jacob named that place Bethel, or “House of God.”
The longest stairway in the world is the service stairway for the Niesenbahn funicular railway near Spiez, Switzerland. It has 11,674 steps and rises to a height of 1,669 m.
One of the world’s longest wooden stairways is the Flørli stairs in Forsand, Norway. It climbs 4,444 steps up the Ternevass dam. At the top are views of the Lysefjord and the Preikestolen Massive Cliff.
The Old Government Building, situated on Lambton Quay in Wellington in New Zealand, was completed in 1876. It is said to be the second-largest wooden building in the world after the Tōdai-ji Buddhist temple in Nara, Japan.
It now houses the Law School of Victoria University.
“Goliath” at Six Flags Great America in Gurnee, Illinois, is the fastest wooden roller coaster in the world. It is also the tallest and steepest. Its speed is up to 72 miles per hour, and its drop is 180 feet at a steep, almost vertical, 85 degree angle.
The Scenic Railway at Katoomba in the Blue Mountains of NSW is the steepest cable-driven funicular railway in the world, with a maximum incline of 52 degrees contained within a total incline distance of 310m.
The railway was originally constructed for a coal and oil shale mining operation in the Jamison Valley in the 1880s, in order to haul the coal and shale from the valley floor up to the escarpment above.
The most popular route taken by prospectors in the Yukon Gold Rush of 1897 was the route up the White Pass from Skagway, Alaska. A narrow gauge railway link was built in 1898, and the first ever train to operate in Alaska ran for four miles on 21 July 1898 out of Skagway. The White Pass summit was 2,885 feet high and 20 miles from Skagway. By the time the railway was completed in 1900, much of the Gold Rush fever had died down.
*The Courtship of Miles Standish *is a narrative poem by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, published in 1858.
In writing the poem Longfellow used the dactylic hexameter meter, the same meter used in classical epic poems such as Virgil’s *Aeneid *and Homer’s *Iliad *and Odyssey.
In 1858, Minnesota was admitted to the Union as the 32nd state.
The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) is the largest peak body representing workers in Australia. It is a national trade union centre of 46 affiliated unions. Among these are such varied organisations as the Blind Workers’ Union of Australia, the Christmas Island Workers’ Union and the Woolclassers’ Association of Australia.
In the United States, the first effective nationwide labor organization was the Knights of Labor, established in 1869. It grew strongly in the late 19th century but could not sustain its growth and organization. It waned in the early 20th century and became defunct in the 1940s.