Midlands and Yorkshire are cities?
Anyway, during World War II, The American Fat Salvage Committee was created to urge housewives to save all the excess fat rendered from cooking and donate it to the army to produce glycerin for explosives.
Heiðrún Bergsdóttir was born in Selfoss…
Well, yes, but I’m not sure you have the idea of this thread quite yet. Please continue reading and hope you will contribute.
in play (from ElvisL1ves):
The largest ship salvage yard in the world is in Karachi, Pakistan, where laborers break down ships up to and including supertakers. Overall, about 1,250 ships a year are salvaged, most in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and China.
I misread the list. It is a list of urban areas, and they are Birmingham and Leeds-Branford. Thanks for the catch. List of urban areas in the United Kingdom - Wikipedia
In play:
In play: more than 4,400 surplus aircraft and 13 aerospace vehicles from the US Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, Army, Coast Guard, and several federal agencies including NASA, are stored at the ‘boneyard’ at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson AZ. It is the largest aircraft boneyard in the world and includes the YAL-1 Airborne Laser, the modified Boeing 747 missile defense plane.
Ben Sliney, the Federal Aviation Administration’s National Operations Manager on duty on September 11, 2001 made the gutsy — and completely unprecedented — call to ground every single commercial airplane in the country. When he first made the call, the confused air traffic controllers ask if they should give the planes the option of landing. Sliney reportedly replied “You get those fucking planes out of that fucking sky.”
The PC game Tracon put the player in the role of an air traffic controller.
An air (Italian: “aria”; also ayr, ayre in French) is various song-like vocal or instrumental compositions, and can also be applied to the interchangeable melodies of folk songs and ballads. It is a variant of the musical song form often referred to (in opera, cantata and oratorio) as aria.
The Ballad of the Green Berets" is a patriotic song in the ballad style about the Green Berets, an elite special force in the U.S. Army. In 1966 it became a major hit, reaching No. 1 for five weeks on the Billboard Hot 100. The lyrics were written in honor of Green Beret US Army Specialist 5 James Gabriel, Jr., the first native Hawaiian to die in Vietnam, who was killed by Viet Cong gunfire while on a training mission on April 8, 1962.
“The Ballad of Buster Baxter” was an episode in the PBS children’s show Arthur. Art Garfunkel guest starred as a moose with a guitar who sings about young Buster’s travels and return home to Elwood City.
In “The Romance Resonance”, an episode of The Big Bang Theory, Howard played the song “If I Didn’t Have You (Bernadette’s Song)”, written by Garfunkel and Oates (Riki Lindhome and Kate Micucci), for his wife Bernadette.
George Keats was the brother of English romantic poet John Keats, and was also a close friend and business partner of John James Audubon. When George died in Kentucky, he left a priceless treasure of boxes of letters from John Keats, and works of art by Audubon, collected before either of them were famous.
John James Audubon was born in the colony of Saint-Domingue on Hispaniola, on a sugarcane plantation, and was raised in France. As a young adult in Pennsylvania he conducted the first known bird-banding on the continent: he tied yarn to the legs of eastern phoebes and determined that they returned to the same nesting spots year after year.
In the production of yarn, the most commonly spun animal fiber is wool harvested from sheep. For hand knitting and hobby knitting, thick, wool and acrylic yarns are frequently used.
Other animal fibers used include alpaca, angora, mohair, llama, cashmere, and silk. More rarely, yarn may be spun from camel, yak, possum, musk ox, cat, dog, wolf, rabbit, or buffalo hair, and even turkey or ostrich feathers. Natural fibers such as these have the advantage of being slightly elastic and very breathable, while trapping a great deal of air, making for a fairly warm fabric.
Yakety Yak, by the Coasters, was number one on the charts for seven weeks in 1958. Written by Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, the most prolific composers of the era, it was one of the first hit songs to celebrate the intergenerational gap between the teen music audience and their parents.
Similarly, “Get a Job” the Silhouettes was released in November 1957 and reached the number one spot on the Billboard pop and R&B singles charts in February 1958. And the group Sha Na Na took their name from the lyrics.
On 9/7/2011 a Yak-Service chartered flight from Yaroslavl Oblast, Russia bound for Minsk, Belarus crashed on takeoff. 44 of the 45 passengers and crew perished. The disaster is known as the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl crash because the passengers were the players and staff of the much-beloved Lokomotiv Yaroslavl hockey team. The only survivor was an employee of the charter air service Yak-Service. The Yak-Service airline had its license revoked by Rosaviatsiya (the Russian Federal Air Transport Agency) as a result of the crash. ETA: Yak-Service was established in February 1993.
Clint Benedict was the first hockey goalie to ever wear a mask, after a shot by Howie Mornez knocked him unconscious back in 1927. The mask was made out of leather, but when wearing it he could not see low shots, so it didn’t last.
It wasn’t until November 1, 1959, when Jaques Plante of the Montreal Canadians became the second goalie to put on a mask. Plante had been using his self made creations during practice but knew it wasn’t an accepted idea to use one in a real game. However, when Andy Bathgate’s shot clipped him in the head, Plante refused to go back on the ice without a mask. After a long fight Toe Blake, the Canadians’ coach, let him wear it and the rest is history.
In 1966, Bobby Orr joined the Boston Bruins, a team that had not won a Stanley Cup since 1941 and had not qualified for the playoffs since 1959. With Orr, the Bruins won the Stanley Cup twice, in 1970 and 1972, and lost in the 1974 Final. In both victories, Orr scored the clinching goal and was named the playoff MVP. In the final achievement of his career, he was the MVP of the 1976 Canada Cup international hockey tournament. In 1976, Orr left Boston as a free agent to join the Black Hawks, but repeated injuries had effectively destroyed his left knee, and he retired in 1978 at age 30.
The lyrics of “O Canada”, the country’s national anthem have been criticized and changes proposed, especially the lines
Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command.
In 1990, Toronto City Council voted in favor of recommending to the Canadian government that “our home and native land” be changed to “our home and cherished land” and that “in all thy sons command” be partly reverted to “in all of us command”. Councillor Howard Moscoe said that the words “native land” were not appropriate for the many Canadians who were not native-born and that the word “sons” implied “that women can’t feel true patriotism or love for Canada.” Senator Vivienne Poy similarly criticized the English lyrics of the anthem as being sexist and introduced a bill proposing to change the phrase “in all thy sons command” to “in all of us command.” The bill is still up before the House of Commons.