Charles August Lindbergh, father of Charles Lindbergh, was born Carl Månsson, in Stockholm, Sweden, to Lovisa Carlén, the 19-year-old mistress of Ola Månsson, a peasant member of the Riksdag of the Estates and a bank manager. When accused of bribery and embezzlement, Ola Månsson changed his name to August Lindbergh, left his wife and seven children, and emigrated to the United States with his mistress and their illegitimate infant son, Carl, in 1859. Lovisa became Louisa and young Carl became Charles August Lindbergh.
Brazil was a safe haven for embezzlers until the late 20th century. Brazilian law prohibited the extradition of any person in Brazil who was the sole support of a Brazilian minor child. So embezzlers could make it to Brazil with their ill-gotten gains, establish a liaison with a Brazilian woman, and be free from arrest and deportation as long as they had children. But it was not foolproof. Banks would offer such a high reward for fugitive embezzlers, it was worth the while of kidnappers to grab the suspect in Brazil and fly him back to American soil handcuffed in an executive jet.
Brazil borders every country in South America except for Chile and Ecuador, meaning, using the ISO 3166 country abbreviations, that BRA borders ARG BOL COL ECU FLK GUF GUY PRY PER SGS SUR URY and VEN.
A bra size in inches is NOT the bra’s size in centimeters divided by 2.54, at least as sold in Singapore. Singaporeans take the cm and inch measurements at, well, different points on the woman’s bosom.
In most of Europe and the metric world, the conversion factor is about 2.2. Hence, 30 = 65, and 40 = 90. But in France, it is closer to 2.5.
http://www.brasnthings.com/sizing-guide/international-bra-size-conversion
Most women’s bosoms have only two points, and as far as I know, neither are taken into account for the relevant measurement.
Research has shown that men perform poorly on cognitive tests after viewing images of top-heavy women. Steven M. Platek, a neuroscientist at Georgia Gwinnett College who has conducted experiments in this area, thinks that men were so distracted by the pictures that they couldn’t focus on other tasks.
If you have a professional grant writer write your application, can get millions of dollars to conduct experiments that show whether men lose their focus when they see top-heavy women. Dr. Planek’s research would have cost millions more, if he had brought in actual buxom women, instead of showing his group pictures of them.
Miss Buxley, General Halftrack’s secretary and Beetle Bailey’s love interest, takes her name from her buxomness. She appears in every strip printed on Wednesday, for reasons that are now lost.
When the scientist JBS Haldane was asked what could be inferred about God from studying His creation, he is said to have replied that God had “an inordinate fondness for beetles.”
Arthur Clarke called JBS Haldane the most brilliant science popularizer of his generation. Haldane learned Mendelian genetics while still a boy by breeding guinea pigs and often served as one himself when he helped his father, an Oxford professor of physiology. In one childhood episode, the elder Haldane made him recite a long Shakespearean speech in the depths of a mine shaft to demonstrate the effects of rising gases. When the gasping boy finally fell to the floor, he found he could breathe the air there, a lesson that served him well in the trenches of World War I.
A physically courageous 200-pounder, Haldane continued the family tradition of using his own body for dangerous tests. In one experiment, he drank quantities of hydrochloric acid to observe its effects on muscle action; another time he exercised to exhaustion while measuring carbon dioxide pressures in his lungs.
More colorful Haldane stories here:
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/people/john_haldane.html
South Africa has eight of the ten deepest mines in the world. The deepest is over 4km deep. The trip from the surface to the bottom takes over an hour, and the rock temperature reaches 150 °F.
The Guinness Book of Records shows 134° F (in Death Valley, California) as the highest recorded temperature of surface air. The highest natural ground surface temperature ever recorded was 201° F, also at Death Valley.
One Doper lives an hour’s drive from Weather Station 48400 which set several records recently. The highest temperature ever at that weather station, 110° F, was recorded just ten days ago.
The lowest and highest points in the contiguous US, Death Valley and Mount Whitney, are only 130 miles apart via a popular hiking trail. The elevation change is from -279 feet to 14,505 feet over that distance, much of it of course a steep climb.
Dallas Police Det. Jim Leavelle, best known as the man in the pale suit and cowboy hat escorting Lee Harvey Oswald when Jack Ruby shot Oswald, had been a sailor on the destroyer tender USS Whitney during the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Stella Dallas is a 1923 novel by Olive Higgins Prouty, written in response to the death of her three-year-old daughter from encephalitis. It tells the story of a woman who sacrifices her own happiness for the sake of her daughter.
The character reemerged as a stage play in 1924, two movie versions in 1925 and 1937, and a daily radio serial adaptation from 1937 to 1955, widely held to be the prorotype of the soap opera. Stella was played by Ida Lupino on the radio and Barbara Stanwyck in the later film, for which she was nominated for an Oscar.
Major Barbara is a three-act play by George Bernard Shaw, written and premiered in 1905 and first published in 1907. The story involves an idealistic young woman, Barbara Undershaft, who is engaged in helping the poor as a Major in the Salvation Army in London.
Guys and Dolls was a Broadway play (later made into a film with Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando) in which one of the dolls was a sister at the Save a Soul Mission.
Guys and Dolls was selected as the winner of the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for Drama but, because writer Abe Burrows had testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Trustees of Columbia University vetoed the selection, and no Pulitzer for Drama was awarded that year.
During filming of Guys and Dolls, Frank Sinatra got sick and had to quit for some time to recover. Sinatra didn’t like cheesecake, Marlon Brando knew that, and in the scene where Sinatra is eating cheesecake, Brando deliberately blew his lines so they had to redo the take. Take after take, more and more cheesecake for Sinatra. He got sick. Actor humor.
Judith Campbell Exner (nee Immoor) was a mistress of both John F. Kennedy and mafia boss Sam Giancana and claimed to have delivered bags of cash from the former to the latter. It was Frank Sinatra who first introduced Judith to each of these lovers.
Khartoum was a champion racehorse owned by movie producer Jack Woltz in the Godfather movie, which starred Marlon Brando. The Triple-Crown winner was bought for $600,000 by Woltz and who put his horse out to “stud”. The horse had a fine stable built for him, the best vets and horse breeders that money could buy, and even a small team of private detectives to guard him 'round the clock. Woltz was very attached to the horse, his pride and affection for the animal clearly evident. Khartoum was eventually killed and decapitated and then put in Woltz’s bed by Luca Brasi to convince Woltz to grant Johnny Fontane the lead in the new war movie he was shooting. Upon discovering Khartoum’s severed head, Woltz swore his staff to secrecy and had Khartoum quietly buried and his stables all torn down.
Khartoum is a reference to Charles Gordon, the British commander of Khartoum in the Sudan in 1885, who was captured by Sudanese and was ironically also beheaded