On September 13, 1541, John Calvin returned to Geneva after three years of exile. His reformations of religious beliefs became known as Calvinism.
The Jet d’Eau is a prominent Geneva landmark. A fountain (literally “water jet”) 450 feet high, at the point where Lake Geneva empties into the Rhône river, it is visible throughout the city and from the air, even when flying over Geneva at an altitude of 33,000 ft.
Switzerland has four national languages: French, Italian, German and Romansh. Romansh is the only one of the four that is not an official language. Romansh is a descendant of the spoken Latin language of the Roman Empire, and is spoken predominantly in the southeastern Swiss canton of Grisons (Graubünden), where it has official status alongside German and Italian.
Squeezed on the border between AUT and CHE is the tiny principality of LIE, a doubly landlocked German-speaking microstate in Central Europe. AUT, CHE and LIE are the ISO 3166 country codes for Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. CH and CHE are for Confoederatio Helvetica, Switzerland’s Latin name.
Liechtenstein, a European principality, is only 61 square miles big, with a 2014 estimated population of 37,340.
Of the four nations that make up the United Kingdom, three were historically considered kingdoms, while the fourth, Wales, was a principality.
The flag of the Principality of Monaco is one of the world’s oldest national flag designs. It is almost identical to the flag of Indonesia, except for the ratio of height to width.
MCO (Monaco) is the smallest country in the world that has a coast line. Only one country is smaller, VAT (the Holy See), the smallest country in the world.
MCO is the airport code for Orlando International Airport, in Florida, USA.
VAT is the airport code for Vatomandry, Madagascar.
The airport code MCO for Orlando International Airport stands for the airport’s former name, McCoy Air Force Base, which was a Strategic Air Command (SAC) installation that was closed in 1975 as part of a general military drawdown following the end of the Vietnam War.
The movie Star Trek: The Final Frontier, which is not accepted as canon by many Trekkers, revealed that Dr. Leonard H. McCoy euthanized his terminally-ill father David to spare him further suffering.
“Trek” is the only non-slang word in English that forms its inflections by doubling the K. It came to English from Afrikaans about 200 years ago.
4WL TREK is my personalized California license plate on my car. I’ve had it on two cars now, for over 15 years (13 on car 1, a 2001 Honda CR-V, and 2 on car 2, a 2016 Jeep Grand Cherokee). I’ve driven those vehicles a total of over 275,000 miles in North America, including south of the Tropic of Cancer (just north of Cabo San Lucas).
2WL TREK is my personalized California license plate on my motorcycle. I have ridden from San Francisco on separate trips to: Los Angeles; Fort Sill OK; Phoenix AZ and Sedona and the Grand Canyon; and St. Louis MO.
STAR TREK (TOS) was originally marketed as “Wagon Train to the Stars,” after the popular 1957 western, Wagon Train.
Gene Roddenberry said he was influenced in developing Star Trek in part by the 1956 sf movie Forbidden Planet. The starship in that movie, the C-57D, bore the name of a World War II-era aircraft.
On October 28, 1420, Beijing was designated as capital of the Ming Dynasty during the same year that the Forbidden City, housing the seat of government, was completed.
Ketchup originated in China as a pickled fish sauce called ke-tsiap
Take that, Heinz!
Ketchup is currently viewed as a tomato-based sauce but different bases are available including mushroom (from England) and banana (from the Philippines). Ketchup flavored potato chips are popular in Canada.
Toyo and patis are common food sauces in the Philippines. Both sauces are liquidy, not thick, and they are more liquidy (thinner) than water. Toyo is soy sauce, and patis is also salty and is a fish sauce.
Records of the Dutch East India Company list soy sauce as a commodity in 1737, when seventy-five large barrels were shipped from Dejima, Japan, to Batavia (present-day Jakarta) on the island of Java. Thirty-five barrels from that shipment were then shipped to the Netherlands.
What the 18th century Dutch thought of it is lost to time…
The fermented fish sauce called patis in the Philippines is also widely used in Southeast Asia, including Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. Fish sauces were very widely used in ancient western cuisine, unlike the present, when the use of fish has decreased; however, the original Worcestershire sauce is a related product because it is fermented and contains anchovies. A salty fermented fish sauce was ubiquitous in Classical Roman cooking, where in Latin it is known as garum or liquamen. Garum was frequently maligned as smelling bad or rotten, being called, for example, “evil-smelling fish sauce”, which is also a complaint about the current Southeast Asian fish sauce from those unused to it.
Speaking of evil-smelling fish sauce, bagoóng is a Philippine condiment partially or completely made of either fermented fish (bagoóng isdâ) or krill (bagoóng alamáng) with salt. The fermentation process also produces fish sauce known as patís.
If you were to walk into a house where bagoóng is being made in the kitchen, you would never forget it.