Scotland has only seven officially-recognized cities: Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Inverness, Perth, and Stirling. Inverness is in the Highlands, and the rest are in the Lowlands.
Broad Scots (not to be confused with Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic language) is considered a separate language from English, though both are in the Anglo-Frisian subfamily. The language used in Scotland’s schools is Standard Scottish English (SSE), a dialect of English. However, though SSE and Broad Scots are separate languages, one can observe a continuum as one travels north, the one language gradually changing into the other.
Robert Burns was one of the best known authors to write in Broad Scots.
Major Frank Burns was played by Robert Duvall in the movie “MAS*H”, in which he was carried off to a psychiatric hospital.
“Scots Wha Hae” is a stirring patriotic anthem written by Robert Burns in Broad Scots, supposedly based on Robert the Bruce’s address to his troops before the Battle of Bannockburn, where the Scots defeated the English under Edward II at Stirling Castle.
First verse:
‘Scots, wha hae wi Wallace bled,
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,
Welcome tae yer gory bed,
Or tae victorie.’
Broad Street is a major arterial street in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The street runs north–south, in between 13th Street and 15th Street (there is no “14th Street” in Philadelphia, because Broad Street takes its place). It is interrupted by Philadelphia City Hall, which stands where Broad and Market Street would intersect in the center of the city.
There are many US cities named for European cities, but only one European city named after an American city: Filadelfia in Calabria (named after Philadelphia, of course).
There are a few capital cities named after US Presidents but the only foreign one is Monrovia, Liberia.
Queen Victoria picked Ottawa, a backwoods lumber town, as the capital of the Province of Canada for defensive reasons: it had internal river communications to Lake Ontario and to Montreal, and was not close to the US border. The memory of the US invasions in 1775 and 1812 were still fresh.
Ottawa’s UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Rideau Canal, is 120 miles long and connects Ottawa ON CAN to Kingston ON CAN on Lake Ontario. The canal opened in 1832, in case of war with the United States.
The Rideau Canal runs south and connects the Ottawa River to Lake Ontario. The Ottawa flows south-east and enters the St Lawrence system near Montreal. The Canal and the Ottawa are two sides of a triangle, with the St Lawrence being the base. If the Yankees had captured the St Lawrence between Montreal and Kingston, the Ottawa and the Rideau Canal would have provided communications between Montreal, Ottawa, Kingston and Toronto.
Kingston Penitentiary was constructed in 1833–34, and opened on June 1, 1835 as the “Provincial Penitentiary of the Province of Upper Canada”. It was one of the oldest prisons in continuous use in the world at the time of its closure in 2013. In 1990, Kingston Penitentiary was designated a National Historic Site of Canada; tours are scheduled to start in June 2016.
The Correctional Service of Canada Museum (also known as “Canada’s Penitentiary Museum”) is located in the former Warden’s Mansion, built 1873, and explains the history of Kingston Penitentiary with displays of artifacts, photographs, equipment, and replicas.
(I highly recommend the museum to history and crime buffs. The displays are fascinating!)
The singing group the Kingston Trio was formed in San Francisco and they picked that name because their calypso style of music evoked thoughts of Kingston, Jamaica. Their first album, released in 1958, had the song Tom Dooley that sold over 3 million copies as a single. It also had the song (The Wreck of the) ‘John B’, their version of the Bahamian folk song The John B Sails that was made probably most popular with the Beach Boys’ version Sloop John B in 1966.
Kingston, Ontario was the capital of the province of Canada for three years, from 1841 to 1844.
After Dave Guard left the Kingston Trio he was replaced by John Stewart. Stewart, a songwriter, wrote Daydream Believer that The Monkees took to #1 in December 1967.
Jon Stewart was not only the presenter, but was also a writer and co-executive producer of The Daily Show. After Stewart joined, The Daily Show steadily gained popularity and critical acclaim, and his work won 22 Primetime Emmy Awards.
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A mnemonic, “A man and his dad put a bomb in the sink”, reminds geometry students of the relationship between the length of a cevian of a triangle and the length of its sides. A cevian of a triangle is any line segment having one end on a vertex and the other end on the opposite side.
The relationship, for a triangle having sides a, b, and c, and cevian dividing side a into segment lengths m and n (therefore m + n = a), where m is adjacent to c and n is adjacent to b, is:
man + dad = bmb + cnc.
This relationship is called Stewart’s theorem and is named after Scottish mathematician Matthew Stewart who published the theorem in 1746.
The Prince’s Cairn on the Loch nan Uamh marks the spot where Bonnie Prince Charlie is believed to have left Scotland in 1746, after the failure of the '45.
Cairns (pronounced kerns) are rocks stacked by people, frequently used as hiking trail markers in sparse, hilly or ‘bouldery’ trails where trees and shrubs are few. Cairns are often put to be on the horizon or on the skyline as hikers approach, for easier sighting.