The Wilamette Valley of northwest Oregon holds the major cities of Portland and Eugene as well as its capital, Salem. Much of the valley’s fertility comes from ice age floods from Glacial Lake Missoula in western Montana. Catastrophic releases of Lake Missoula’s waters helped to scour the landscape of Washington and Oregon, including the Columbia River Gorge and the Grand Coulee.
The whole “Day Care Satanic Abuse” hysteria included the years 1992 & 1993–exactly three hundred years after the infamous Salem witch trials. It’s now agreed that the two events had the same amount of validity; i.e. absolutely none.
The Rolling Stones album “Their Satanic Majesties Request” was their only venture into psychedelia, and had their only cover with lenticular printing. Its title is a play on the “Her Britannic Majesty requests and requires…” text that appears inside a British passport.
The earliest mention of an object we might recognise as a passport appears in the Bible, in the Old Testament book of Nehemiah. When Persian King Artaxerxes sends the prophet to Jerusalem he gives him signed letters to other lands’ rulers requesting Nehemiah have safe passage to Judah.
From Nehemiah 2:
The plot of “Casablanca” hinges on letters of transit that allowed their bearers safe passage through German and Vichy controlled areas. Depending on how you understand Peter Lorre, they were signed by either Free French General Charles de Gaulle or Vichy General Maxime Weygand. Sadly for Victor and Ilsa Laszlo, there was no such thing as letters of transit - they were invented by by Joan Alison for the original play “Everybody Comes to Rick’s”. Rick suggests to Police Captain Renault that the letters would not have allowed Ilsa to escape, let alone Laszlo: “People have been held in Casablanca in spite of their legal rights.”
Charles de Gaulle, hero of the French Resistance during World War II, served in various French government posts afterwards, including as President. He once said, “How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?”
Benito Mussolini is credited with observing “It is not impossible to govern Italians, merely useless.”
Alessandra Mussolini, the granddaughter of Benito Mussolini, is an Italian politician. She is a member of both the Italian Senate and the European Parliament.
She is also the niece of the actress Sophia Loren.
At #6 of the 100 best bodies of all time, with a 38C-24-38 measurements, Sophia Loren became a sex symbol in the 50s and 60s. (Opinion: and today, she still has a great figure.)
Sophia Loren was once famously quoted for saying ‘Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical’.
One of Keats’ best known quotes is the opening line of his poem Endymion: “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever”.
John Keats was only 25 when he died in Rome of tuberculosis (consumption). In his last days for treatment his doctor placed Keats on a starvation diet of one anchovy and one piece of bread a day - to reduce the blood flow to his stomach. The doctor also bled Keats; a standard treatment of the day, but this was likely a significant contributor to Keats’s weakness and demise.
The top three countries in terms of average daily per capita consumption of sugar are the USA (126.4g), Germany (102.9g) and the Netherlands (102.5g).
According to the Huffington Post, Brazil is the highest in per capita sugar consumption. Finishing the top five, Brazil is followed by Russia, Mexico, the EU, and Egypt.
After leaving the White House, Theodore Roosevelt co-led an Amazon River tributary expedition into previously-unexplored territory. He nearly died of tropical disease on the trip, and his health was never the same after. Rio Teodoro still bears his name.
Tivadar Soros (Esperanto: Teodoro Ŝvarc), the father of US billionaire political activist George Soros, was a Hungarian lawyer, author and editor who had fought in the Austro-Hungarian Army in WW1and spent years in a Russian POW camp in Siberia before escaping. He founded the Esperanto literary magazine *Literatura Mondo *(Literary World) and wrote the Esperanto short novels Modernaj Robinzonoj (Modern Robinsons) and *Maskerado ĉirkaŭ la morto *(Masquerade (dance) Around Death), an autobiographical novel about his experience during the Nazi occupation of Budapest.
During the 2012 campaign, President Barack Obama agreed to a meeting with George Soros, hoping the left-leaning billionaire would make a generous donation to his reelection campaign. According to the behind-the-scenes campaign book Double Down, Soros harangued Obama at length on everything he was doing wrong, and ended up donating nothing. The President was not pleased.
Weird Al’s song “Everything You Know is Wrong”, from his album Bad Hair Day, takes its title from a Firesign Theatre comedy album, which addresses and parodied pseudoscientific beliefs of the mid-1970s. The skits are connected to, or occurring in, “Nude Age Enterprises”, the recording studio inside the trailer home of “Happy” Harry Cox in the fictional town of Hellmouth, California. Cox (played by Phil Austin) records seminars and assorted reports, similar to books by such authors as Erich von Däniken, which he calls his “mind-breaking records”, to promote the “New Age” and other counterculture beliefs (“Dogs flew spaceships! The Aztecs invented the vacation! Men and women are the same sex! Our forefathers took drugs! Your brain is not the boss! Yes! That’s right! Everything you know is wrong!”).
Cox and Box; or, The Long-Lost Brothers, is a one-act comic opera with a libretto by F. C. Burnand and music by Sir Arthur Sullivan, based on the 1847 farce Box and Cox by John Maddison Morton. It was Sullivan’s first successful comic opera. The story concerns a landlord who lets a room to two lodgers, one who works at night and one who works during the day. When one of them has the day off, they meet each other in the room and tempers flare.
The Morton Salt Company was named after owner and founder Joy Morton, who was the son of J. Sterling Morton, who was the founder of Arbor Day.
The Austrian city of Salzburg (German for ‘salt fortress’) takes its name from the salt mines beneath the local mountains.