“Rover” was a popular name for dogs in the 1700s and 1800s; it appears in a 1718 list of common hunting hound names, together with names like Bouncer, Caesar, Lively, Ranger, Thunder and Trouncer. George Washington had a dog named “Lady Rover.” In 2015, Rover was not among the top 100 dog names; the use of “people” names for dogs has become much more popular. In 2015 the top 5 male dog names were Max, Charlie, Buddy, Cooper and Jack; the top 5 female dog names were Bella, Lucy, Daisy, Molly and Lola.
The Danish surname of Skov means forest. Here is a list of forests in Denmark, from Wikipedia.
There is a National Forest in the USA that has no natural trees on it. The Nebraska National Forest was thought to have once been a forested area, and trees were planted on it experimentally, to see if the barren grassy region would again support trees.
How interesting!
The Nebraska National Forest was established in 1907 and was the largest man-made forest in the world, until a forest in Johannesburg, South Africa was determined to have more trees.
The Nullarbor Plain is part of the area of flat, almost treeless, arid or semi-arid country of southern Australia, located on the Great Australian Bight coast with the Great Victoria Desert to its north. It is the world’s largest single exposure of limestone bedrock.
Also interesting! Now that’s a place I’d like to see.
Australia’s longest straight road, going for 90 miles, lies in the Nullarbor Plain. Here’s a road sign: Nullarbor Plain - Google Search
It is known locally as the “90 Mile Straight” and is a section of the Eyre Highway between Balladonia and Caiguna.
The longest train in the world ran in Australia in 2001. The record-breaking ore train had a total of 682 cars and was 7,300 m (4.5 miles) long and carried 82,000 metric tons of ore for a total weight of the train, largest in the world, of over 100,000 tons. It was driven by eight locomotives distributed along its length to keep the couplings loads and curve performance controllable.
The Shanghai Maglev Train, also known as the Transrapid, is the fastest commercial train in the world with top speed of over 250 miles per hour. Maglev trains are less expensive to operate and maintain, because the absence of rolling friction means that parts do not wear out quickly.
From October 1997 until April 1998, a Spanish-language production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Starlight Express (the train musical with the players on roller skates) played at the Teatro Polanco in Mexico City. Many of the character’s names were Hispanicized, with Rusty becoming Ferro, Pearl becoming Perla, Poppa becoming El Jefe, and the National Engines were replaced with Carioca, a Brazilian train, and Pibe, an Argentinian train. A cast recording of this production was made but, owing to complications with the rights, was never released.
In 1968, musician Stephen Stills was present at a Judy Collins recording session in New York, and when she finished with studio time remaining, Stills paid the engineer privately to let him record song demos. But Stills left the tapes in the studio and eventually considered them lost.
When the studio was about to close in 1978, musician Joe Colasurdo, who was rehearsing there, was told by the owner that he could take away any tapes he wanted to before they cleared the place out. After seeing Stills’ name on several of the boxes, Colasurdo kept them safe until he could find a reel-to-reel machine to play them on. Colasurdo began attempting to get the masters safely back into Stills’s hands, an undertaking that took 25 years. In 2003, he was connected to Graham Nash after happening to meet a close friend of his named Dan Curland, who owns the Mystic Disc Record Store. Nash received the tapes and passed them on to Stills, encouraging him to release them. The tapes were finally released in 2007 as an album called Just Roll Tape: April 26, 1968.
Cool trivia! A great story.
Stephen Stills auditioned for The Monkees TV show (1966), but he was turned down - not because of a lack of talent, but because his hair and teeth were beginning to fall out, and the show’s producers thought he’d look too old for the role.
So Stills recommended his friend (and former roommate) Peter Tork, who resembled him, to the producers. Tork passed his audition, and became a Monkee.
HEY HEY HE’S A MONKEE!
Peter the Great ruled the Tsardom of Russia and later the Russian Empire from 1682 until his death in 1725, jointly ruling before 1696 with his elder half-brother, Ivan V.
Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, “V.”, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1963. (A rare example of a sentence using three consecutive different punctuation marks.)
King Pedro V of Portugal (1837-1861), officially known as Pedro de Alcântara Maria Fernando Miguel Rafael Gonzaga Xavier João António Leopoldo Víctor Francisco de Assis Júlio Amélio de Bragança e Bourbon Saxe-Coburgo-Gotha, ushered his country into the modern age by having roads, railways and telegraph lines built, and by advancing public health. Ironically, he died of cholera or possibly typhoid.
On 6 November 1893 [O.S. 25 October], nine days after the premiere of his Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky died in Saint Petersburg, at the age of 53. The official cause of death was reported to be cholera, most probably contracted through drinking contaminated water several days earlier. This explanation was accepted by many biographers of the composer. However, even at the time of Tchaikovsky’s death, there were many questions about this diagnosis.
Theories that Tchaikovsky’s death was a suicide soon began to surface. One variation of the theory has gained some ground—a sentence of suicide imposed in a “court of honor” by Tchaikovsky’s fellow alumni of the Imperial School of Jurisprudence, as a censure of the composer’s homosexuality. Nonetheless, the cause of Tchaikovsky’s death remains highly contested, though it may never actually be solved.
Ludwig Minkus was a Viennese violinist and composer who spent most of his career in Russia; he played the violin in the ensemble that premiered Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet No. 1 in D, as well as other works, and wrote supplemental pieces for virtuoso ballet solos that were inserted into Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty
Ludwig Minkus returned to Vienna when he retired at age 65, and spent his final years alone and in utter poverty, his wife having died in 1895, and the events of World War I having cut off his pension from Russia. During the extremely cold winter of 1917, Minkus developed pneumonia and died on 7 December 1917 at the age of ninety-one. He was interred at the Döbling Cemetery in Vienna.
In 1939 Minkus’s grave fell victim to the national socialist policies of the time when all cemeteries were systematically “cleansed” by the invading Nazi regime. Any graves of persons who were considered ethnically “undesirable”—especially if one was of Jewish descent, and his parents were Jewish —were exhumed and deposited into a mass anonymous grave.
Chinese cellist Jiaxin Cheng married fellow cellist Julian Lloyd Webber in July 2009. Their first recording together, released in March 2011, was Menotti’s Arioso for two cellos and strings, featured on the album The Art of Julian Lloyd Webber. In September 2013 Naxos Records released their first full-length recording A Tale of Two Cellos. This was followed by Vivaldi Concertos for two cellos Naxos Records with the European Union Chamber Orchestra in 2014.
Cheng and Lloyd Webber have one daughter, Jasmine Orienta, born on June 14,2011.
Antoni Vivaldi, 1678-1741, was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1703.
Antonio Vivaldi’s nickname, “Il Pretre Rosso”, the Red Priest, refers to his red hair. Three portraits of him survive, two of them ink monochromes. The third, an oil painting in which some viewers claim they see a lock of red hair under the powdered white wig, shows a musician holding a violin and pen, indicating that he is a composer. Some authorities (such as Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians) have recently disputed whether this painting actually depicts Vivaldi. Some say that this is a portrait of composer Arcangelo Corelli.
500 years ago, in the year 1516, the Dominican friar Johann Tetzel was sent to Germany to sell indulgences, the proceeds of which were to help rebuild St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Martin Luther, a German priest, would nail his 95 Theses onto the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenburg the following year, to protest this practice. The Protestant reformation was underway.