Eight US Presidents were born in Virginia: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, William Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, and Woodrow Wilson.
Six Presidents’ wives were born in Virginia: Martha Washington, Martha Jefferson, Rachel Jackson, Letitia Tyler, Ellen Arthur, and Edith Wilson.
Seven Presidents are buried in Virginia: Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Tyler, Taft and Kennedy.
Three US Presidents were NOT born in American: George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, simply because there was no country called the United States of America when they were born (I didn’t know this, but I won a cap in a trivia contest this July 4th because I took an educated guess).
President #4, James Madison, was born in Virginia Colony, in British America, in 1751. So was James Monroe (#5), same colony, in 1758. Martin Van Buren, #8, was the first President born in the new country of the United States of America. Van Buren was born in New York in 1782. #9, William Henry Harrison, was born in 1773 in Virginia Colony, British America. It is not until #10, John Tyler, when all Presidents were born in the new country of the United States of America.
There is no requirement in Canada that the Prime Minister be born in Canada. John Turner (1984) was the most recent foreign-born PM, being born in England during WWII.
Canada holds the record of most Winter Olympic Gold Medals of any country, 14, at the 2010 Vancouver games.
Giorgio Belladonna (1923-1995) won the World Contract Bridge Team Championship sixteen times, a record likely to last forever.
Fernando Tatis, playing for the St. Louis Cardinals, hit two grand slam home runs in the same inning off the same pitcher, Chan Ho Park of the Los Angeles Dodters. That is a record that will certainly never be broken, as that would require hitting three grand slams in the same inning.
My Wills and Trusts class in law school was nicknamed “Stiffs and Gifts.”
In play:
Barack Obama Elementary School is part of the Normandy School District, a public school district serving 24 municipalities in northern St. Louis County, Missouri. It was featured on NPR’s Morning Edition this morning.
Although the official style to name the Heads of State of the Bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey is "“The Queen in the right of Jersey [or Guernsey],” her subjects there refer to her as "“The Duke of Normandy.” These islands were passed down to Elizabeth from William I of Normandy who conquered them long before his gt-gt-grandson, the Bastard, conquered England.
As dairies became more commercial, the Guernsey cow (whose milk is a prized creamy light yellow-gold) did not have the stamina to compete like other breeds did, and their numbers, proportionally, have drastically declined in dairy herds.
The Jersey cow, which is closely related, is the second most-common dairy breed worldwide, after the Holstein. The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy includes the Guernsey on its “Watch” list, as a breed whose numbers are dwindling.
The United States is the leading nation in the world when it comes to cow milk produced, but if you count all the species (such as buffalo or goat) that provide milk besides cows, then India is the leading milk producer.
Sheep milk is the principal source of dairy products in Romania.
Mozzarella cheese is traditionally made from the milk of the Italian water buffalo.
The carabao, a domesticated water buffalo, is considered to be the national animal of the Philippines. While the caribou is a reindeer related to elk and deer, the carabou is a water buffalo related to bison and cows.
Buffalo Airways, based in Yellowknife, NWT, is the last operator of the DC-3 airliner on scheduled passenger service, with its daily service across Great Slave Lake to Hay River, NWT. The airline was featured on the documentary series “Ice Pilots”.
eating grilled arctic char at Bullock’s Bistro, Yellowknife, on the shores of Great Slave Lake as the sun goes down, is an experience not to be missed.
The word “slave” took its meaning from the many Slavs sold into slavery by conquering peoples.
This sense development arose in consequence of the wars waged by Otto the Great and his successors against the Slavs, a great number of whom they took captive and sold into slavery in the 10th and 11th Centuries.
A large portion of Slavs, Persians, and Indic-speaking Brahmin are agnatic descendants of a single king who ruled near the Volga River about 3300 BC.
At one point, there was some suggestion on a radio talk show that British Columbia should change its name to get rid of the word “British”. One of the suggestions for a new name was BeeCee, based on the common practice of referring to the province by its initials, BC.
The eclipse predictor of the Antikythera mechanism is calibrated for a date of 205 BC, leading scientists to conclude the mechanism was probably designed at about that date. This date suggests that Archimedes — renowned for astronomical prediction devices though none has turned up — may have contributed to the mechanism’s design.
This stupendous clock was lost in a shipwreck along with other treasures about 70 BC.