Mount Athos, on a peninsula in the North of Greece, is home to 20 monasteries under the direct jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. Over 2,000 monks from Greece and many other Eastern Orthodox countries live an ascetic life in Athos, isolated from the rest of the world.
Mount Athos is an excluded entity, lying outside the authority of the European Union. As specified in the EU compact, the free movement of people and goods in the special Mount Athos territory is prohibited, unless formal permission is granted by the Monastic State’s authorities. Evenn Google Streetview has been excluded.
Sometime in the early fifth century BC, in response to a Persian invasion of Egypt, an artifact was taken from the Jewish Temple on Elephantine Island and brought up the Nile to Tana Kirkos, a mountainous island in Lake Tana, Ethiopia. Another name for that island is Debra Sehel, which means Mount of Redemption in an Ethiopian language. Is it coincidence that the Grail Castle in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival is located atop Munsalvaesche — the Mount of Salvation?
The “mons veneris” is translated as the “Mount of Venus.”
Mars’ Olympus Mons, with an elevation of 16 miles, is the tallest volcano in the solar system.
A supervolcano is any volcano capable of producing a volcanic eruption with an ejecta mass greater than 10^12 tons. The La Garita Caldera in Colorado, which erupted about 27 million years ago in what is now Southern Colorado, covered at least 11,000 square miles at an average thickness of over 300 feet, or approximately 1,200 cubic miles of ejecta. Compare this to Mt. St Helens, with about 0.25 cubic miles of ejecta.
Mount Mayon, the Philippines’ most active volcano, had its most deadly eruption in 1814. Over 1,200 people died.
In 1814 we took a little trip along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississipp’. We took a little bacon and we took a little beans and we fought the bloody British in the town of New Orleans.
Singer Johnny Horton started the “historical ballad” song craze of the late 1950s / early 1960s. The Battle of New Orleans won the 1960 Grammy Award for Best Country & Western Recording. Horton also sang When It’s Springtime in Alaska (It’s 40 Below), North to Alaska and Sink the Bismark.
“Battle of New Orleans” was composed and first recorded by Jimmy Driftwood, which caught like wildfire, but radio stations then refused to give it a second play because he left the word “hell” in the lyrics and there were a few other verses that were deemed off-color. It took Horton about a week to get out a cover version, leaving out about 3/4 of the song and repeating the main verse over a few times.
Edward Everett Horton (1886 – 1970) was an American character actor. He had a long career in film, theater, radio, television, and voice work for animated cartoons. Despite dozens of movie and TV appearances, he may be best remembered as the narrator for Fractured Fairy Tales, a cartoon that appeared as part of the Rocky and Bullwinkle show from 1959 to 1964.
Singers Johnny Horton and Hank Williams married the same woman, Billie Jean Jones. Jone was the wife of Williams until his death. Later, she married Horton. Her full name was Billie Jean Jones Eshliman Williams Horton Berlin.
Alma Maria Schindler was a Viennese-born socialite and composer. She became the wife, successively, of composer Gustav Mahler, architect Walter Gropius, and novelist Franz Werfel, as well as the consort of several other prominent men.
Gustav Mahler was obsessed with the so-called ‘Curse of the ninth Symphony’, a belief that after a composer writes, arranges and performs their ninth symphony they will die. This pattern was supposedly at work in the lives and deaths of Beethoven, Schubert and Bruckner. Mahler was careful to avoid writing a “Tenth” symphony and used other names and formats for all of his work after his Ninth Symphony.
George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon died from septicemia after a mosquito bite a few months after he and Howard Carter broke into Tutankhamun’s tomb. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle helped advance the idea that this and other deaths were due to a Pharaoh’s Curse, but that idea had started with the killing, on the very same day the tomb was first entered, of Carter’s pet canary by a cobra — the same species symbolized atop King Tut’s death mask.
The word “canary” comes originality from “dog”. The Spanish Canary Islands (Islas Canarias) means “dog islands”, and the bird of that name is etymologically derived from the islands of its origin.
The word “canary” derives ultimately from a word (Latin canarius) meaning “dog’s,” but the word “dog” itself is unrelated to the Latin word. It has been adopted into French (dogue), Danish (dogge) etc., but the origin of “dog” is unknown, though first encountered in Old English.
The word “hound”, of Germanic origin, related to Dutch hond and German Hund, originally simply meant “dog” in general. This usage is now archaic or poetic only, and hound now almost exclusively refers to dogs bred for hunting in particular.
The English word ‘hound’ is cognate to the same-meaning French word ‘chien’, both deriving via sound changes from PIE ‘kwon.’ Similarly English ‘five’ and French ‘cinq’ are cognates, both deriving from PIE ‘penkwe.’
The song (You Ain’t Nothing but a) Hound Dog, first released in 1953, was the only hit song by Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton. It has been sung by many artists and has been recorded over 250 times. The most famous version is Elvis’s from 1956.