Michael Schumacher, reported to be paralyzed and wheelchair-bound after a skiing accident although no longer comatose, usually took his holidays in the United States. Although one of the most famous sportsmen in the world, he was almost never recognized here. He made his Formula One debut with the Jordan-Ford team at the 1991 Belgian Grand Prix, driving car number 32 as a replacement for Bertrand Gachot, who was in jail for spraying CS gas on a London taxicab driver in a road rage incident.
A ‘contribution holiday’ is the term for the period during which an employer stops making contributions to a defined benefit pension fund because its total assets are greater than the present value of its actuarially projected liabilities.
Courtney Cox, later to go on to stardom on Friends, was the first person to use the word “period” in a tampon ad on American TV.
William Cox was an English soldier, known as an explorer, road builder and pioneer in the early period of British settlement in Australia.
In 1814 Cox commenced work on the building of the first road across the Blue Mountains, between Sydney and Bathurst. The completed dirt track was 12 feet (3.7 m) wide by 101 1⁄2 miles (163.3 km) long, built between 18 July 1814 and 14 January 1815 using five free men, 30 convict labourers and eight soldiers.
Governor Macquarie surveyed the finished road in April 1815 by driving his carriage along it from Sydney to Bathurst. He commended Cox on his oversight of the project and awarded him 2,000 acres of land near Bathurst. The road became known as Cox’s Road.
Governor John Kasich, Republican of Ohio, was narrowly elected in 2010 but easily reelected in 2014, and is now considering a campaign for President of the United States next year.
The Wash is the square-mouthed bay and estuary on the northwest margin of East Anglia on the east coast of England, where Norfolk meets Lincolnshire.
The most famous incident associated with the Wash is King John losing the Crown Jewels. According to contemporary reports, John travelled from Spalding in Lincolnshire to Bishop’s Lynn, in Norfolk, was taken ill and decided to return. While he took the longer route by way of Wisbech, he sent his baggage train, including his crown jewels, along the causeway and ford across the mouth of the Wellstream. This route was usable only at low tide. The horse-drawn wagons moved too slowly for the incoming tide, and many were lost, including those carrying the Jewels.
The current set of British crown jewels and coronation regalia is typically kept under heavy guard in the Tower of London. A recent episode of PBS’s Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberpatch and Martin Freeman, featured an attempted theft of them.
The Irish Crown Jewels were the heavily jewelled star and badge regalia of the Sovereign and Grand Master of the Order of St. Patrick. They were stolen from Dublin Castle in 1907 along with the collars of five knights of the Order. The theft was never solved and the jewels never recovered.
The case of the Five Knights was an important state trial during the reign of James I. Five knights were imprisoned for failing to pay an extra-parliamentary tax. They applied to the King’s Bench for a writ of have as corpus. The Attorney General filed a return that they were held by the King’s command. The Court held that was a sufficient return to the writ.
Although the Five Knights were unsuccessful, their case led to the Petition of Right by Parliament, which was an early restriction on the King’s powers.
James the brother of Jesus the Christ, of Nazareth, was the first Bishop of Jerusalem.
The bishop is the only chess piece not featured in “Through the Looking Glass.”
The Honourable Julie Bishop is the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs. She is the member for Curtin in Western Australia.
In England, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal (i.e. Bishops and Peers) sat together in one House of Lords, but in France, the clergy and the nobility were considered separate estates and sat separately in the Estates-General.
There are 26 seats allocated in the House of Lords for bishops of the Church of England. Five are automatically taken by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and the Bishops of London, Durham and Winchester. The other 21 places are allocated to the remaining diocesan bishops in order of their seniority.
Since the Isle of Man is not part of the United Kingdom, the Bishop of Sodor and Man, a diocesan bishop of the Church of England, may not sit in the House of Lords. He is however an ex officio member of the Legislative Council of the Isle of Man.
St Augustine later Bishop of Hippo and often thought of as the archetypal Christian Bishop, had a Concubine for many years which led to his mother’s disapproval and his famous saying "God grant me chastity and continence but noy yet".
The only time in major league baseball history that both pitchers in a game threw no-hitters occurred on May 2, 1917 at Chicago’s Weeghman Field (now Wrigley Field), as the Cubs’ Jim “Hippo” Vaughn battled the Cincinnati Reds’ Fred Toney. The Reds broke through with two hits and a run off Vaughn with one out in the 10th (under current rules it was therefore not a no-hitter, but we fans know better), while Toney finished the job in the bottom of the inning for the win.
The record considered to be “the most unbreakable of all baseball records” is Johnny Vander Meer’s record of back-to-back no hitters. He pitched those on 11 & 15 June 1938. To break this of course would require three consecutive no hitters, which is considered so very unlikely to happen.
Nolan Ryan threw seven no hitters from 1966 to 1993. He has by far the most. Sandy Koufax is next with four no hitters. No other pitcher has more than three.
On July 18, 1999, when the main news story was the search for John F. Kennedy Jr.'s missing plane, David Cone of the New York Yankees pitched the third perfect game (no batters getting to first base) in the team’s history, and the 16th perfect game in Major League Baseball (MLB) history.
Both Yankees catcher Thurman Munson and Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle died in crashes of their own airplanes. Munson died in 1979 when he messed up a landing of his Cessna Citation jet at his hometown of Canton, Ohio. Lidle died in 2006 when he crashed his Cirrus into an apartment building on the East Side of Manhattan, trying to make a box-canyon turn over the East River to avoid penetrating LaGuardia’s airspace without permission.
The loss of the Southern Cloud on 21 March 1931 was Australia’s first major aeroplane disaster. It disappeared while en route from Sydney to Melbourne, with the loss of six passengers and two crew.
The search for the missing plane lasted eighteen days and involved over twenty aircraft. No trace of the missing plane was found.
The Southern Cloud’s fate remained a mystery for 27 years until 26 October 1958 when a worker on the Snowy Mountains Project accidentally discovered the wreck.