Augsburg is Germany’s third oldest city, being founded by the Romans as Augusta Vindelicorum, named after the Roman emperor Augustus. It is also the only German city with its own legal holiday, the Augsburger Hohes Friedensfest, celebrated on August 8th of every year.
The emperor Augustus is a major character in the historical novel I, Claudius by Robert Graves. His wife Livia is shown as especially ruthless and powerful; a character whom she is about to have executed accuses her of being a master poisoner and asks her mockingly if she prefers fast poisons or slow ones. Years later, Claudius finds out that she has poisoned many political and personal rivals.
Crime author Mickey Spillane wrote “I, the Jury” in 1947, and followed it with six other titles which have sold over 225-million copies. He was the largest selling author of fiction in the 20th century. His success was based on the racy language, which was as sexually suggestive as any publisher was willing to go at the time.
Ironically, and interestingly, the Israelis flew a variant after WWII: Avia S-199 - Wikipedia
In play:
If the defendant in a capital case in Ohio waives a jury, his case must be heard by a three-judge panel, so that no single individual bears responsibility for determining guilt or innocence and, if he is convicted, sentencing him to death.
Physiological death is now seen as a process, more than an event: conditions once considered indicative of death are now reversible. Where in the process a dividing line is drawn between life and death depends on factors beyond the presence or absence of vital signs. In general, clinical death is neither necessary nor sufficient for a determination of legal death. A patient with working heart and lungs determined to be brain dead can be pronounced legally dead without clinical death occurring. As scientific knowledge and medicine advance, a precise medical definition of death becomes more problematic.
The old meaning of the word “nice” was “precise” or “close” depending on context. The Duke of Wellington famously described the Battle of Waterloo as "It has been a damned nice thing — the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life".
The French city of Nice was not definitively a part of France until the Treaty of Turin in 1860, when it was ceded as a territorial reward for French assistance in the Second Italian War of Independence against Austria, which saw Lombardy united with Piedmont-Sardinia. Nice was a strategic port city throughout history.
On April 11, 1544, Spanish and French forces fought the Battle of Ceresole in the Piedmont area of Italy. This was a large-scale pitched encounter during the Italian War of 1542–46. The French defeated the Spanish-Imperial army. Despite having inflicted substantial casualties on the Imperial troops, the French failed to exploit their victory by taking Milan.
Arabic Numerals are not used in Arabic writing. Europeans called them Arabic numerals, wen they first encountered the ten-based numbering notation, to distinguish them from Roman Numerals. The decimal notation was invented by the Arabs. But the Europeans, using the Roman alphabet, changed the numerals to the present western form. which is distinctly different from those still used by Arabic writers. They were developed about 700-AD, a time when the Europeans were the last to catch on.
One of the foremost modern writers in Arabic was Naguib Mahfouz of Egypt, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. He was the author of over thirty novels, more than a hundred short stories, and more than two hundred articles. Half of his novels were made into films which have circulated throughout the Arabic-speaking world. In Egypt, each new publication was regarded as a major cultural event and his name is inevitably among the first mentioned in any literary discussion from Gibraltar to the Gulf, even after he died in 2006. Some of his work was prohibited because of its alleged blasphemy through the allegorical portrayal of God and the monotheistic Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
When folk singer first read Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan’s poem “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” he asked Dylan what the song sounded like. Dylan replied “It’s not a song; it’s just a poem.” Paxton replied “Well, you should set it to music.”
And Dylan did.
On August 8, 2010, a massive mudslide in Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, China, killed 1,471 people. Called the 2010 Gansu mudslide, it occurred at midnight, brought on by heavy rains and flooding.
Ginsu knives are a strictly American creation, with nothing oriental about their origin except their name. The creators in Fremont, Ohio, first called them “Quikut”, but thought the name lacked panache, and came up with Ginsu, thinking the late night TV audience would associate their touted quality with samurai katanas through a Japanese-sounding name.
Ice cream maker Reuben Mattus was inspired by Jewish history when creating a name for his ice cream. “The only country which saved the Jews during World War II was Denmark, so I put together a totally fictitious Danish name and had it registered,” Mattus told an interviewer. “Häagen-Dazs doesn’t mean anything. [But] it would attract attention, especially with the umlaut.”
Mattus also felt that Denmark was known for its dairy products and had a positive image in the United States. His daughter Doris Hurley reported in the 1999 PBS documentary An Ice Cream Show that her father sat at the kitchen table for hours saying nonsensical words until he came up with a combination he liked. The reason he chose this method was so that the name would be unique and original.
On April 17, 1080, Canute IV became King of Denmark following the death of his brother Harald III. July 10 is recognized by the Catholic Church as San Canuto feast day, following his canonization in 1101. Canute’s feast day has become a counterculture holiday in southwestern Europe, inasmuch as “Canuto” is Spanish for a marijuana cigarette.
King Canute the Great, ruler of England, Denmark and Norway, is remembered for the legendary story of how he said he would stop the waves. The story is often told wrongly, portraying Canute as deluded by his own power. However, when it was first recorded in the 12th century, Canute sets his throne by the waves with the tide coming in to prove to his flattering courtiers that the power of God and Nature is greater than human power.
The unnamed “Elvenking” in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit is revealed in the sequel The Lord of the Rings to be named Thranduil, and to be the father of Legolas, an extremely skilled archer. Legolas is the sole Elf to join the Fellowship of the Ring.
Essence et Lubrifiants de France (known and marketed as Elf) was the first company to pioneer a total synthetic racing oil.
On September 23, 1932, the Kingdom of Nejd and Hejaz merged with Al-Hasa and Qatif to form the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with Ibn Saud as the first monarch and Riyadh as the capital city. The country changed from being poor to being rich with the discovery of oil in 1938.
The Hejaz was ruled by the Romans as part of the province of Arabia Patrea for about 500 years.