Bill Mitchell, a political cartoonist with the Potomac News, commented in 1987 that as Reagan got older and farther into his presidency, Mitchell was drawing him with a few more wattles.
The Golden Wattle Cookery Book, first published in 1926, is a foundational classic of Australian kitchen and cooking literature. It contains numerous recipes for longtime quintessential Aussie favorites as well as helpful cooking tips. To date, the book has been reprinted 27 times.
The classic Aussie dessert, the Pavlova, is a meringue dessert with a crisp crust and soft, light inside, usually topped with fruit and whipped cream. The dish is believed to have been created in honor of Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova either during or after one of her tours to Australia and New Zealand in the 1920’s.
There are at least five memorials to the ballerina Anna Pavlova in London, England: a contemporary sculpture by Tom Merrifield of Pavlova as the Dragonfly in the grounds of Ivy House, a sculpture by Scot George Henry Paulin in the middle of the Ivy House pond, a blue plaque on the front of Ivy House, a statuette sitting with the urn that holds her ashes in Golders Green Crematorium, and the gilded statue atop the Victoria Palace Theatre.
Ordered to hold the the road junction at Five Forks, Dinwiddie County, Virginia, Confederate General George Pickett instead lost almost 3,000 troops. The date was April 1, 1865 (April Fool’s Day). Pickett’s defeat was a pivotal moment that unraveled the tenuous Confederate line and caused Lee to order the evacuation of Richmond, and the retreat toward Appomattox Court House. It was a final humiliation for Pickett, because he was two miles away from his troops at the time of the attack, enjoying a shad bake. By the time he returned to the battlefield, it was too late.
Shad is a species of anadromous fish, meaning they spend most of their life in the sea but are born in fresh water and return there to spawn. Shad also have a history of being an important food fish.
The Lenape called the Hudson River Muhheakunnuk, meaning The River that Runs Both Ways, since the Hudson is a tidal estuary of the Atlantic and the effects of the tides are felt as far upstream as Troy, NY, over 150 miles from the river mouth in New York Harbor. The shad that came upstream in early Spring marked an important event in the year of the Lenape and the Iroquois.
The artist Thomas Cole is generally acknowledged as the founder of the Hudson River School. Cole took a steamship up the Hudson in the autumn of 1825, the same year the Erie Canal opened, stopping first at West Point, then at Catskill landing. He hiked west high up into the eastern Catskill Mountains of New York State to paint the first landscapes of the area. The first review of his work appeared in the New York Evening Post on November 22, 1825.
The New York Evening Post was established in 1801 by federalist and Founding Father Alexander Hamilton.
Wiki: That Hamilton Woman (also known as Lady Hamilton and The Enchantress), is a 1941 black-and-white historical film drama, produced and directed by Alexander Korda for his American company during his exile in the United States. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, the film tells the story of the rise and fall of Emma Hamilton, dance-hall girl and courtesan, who married Sir William Hamilton, British ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples. She later became mistress to Admiral Horatio Nelson.
On January 3, 1888, the 36 inch (91 centimeter) refracting telescope at the Lick Observatory, at the time the largest telescope in the world, was used for the first time. It is situated on the summit of Mount Hamilton, in the Diablo Range just east of San Jose, California.
The Hamilton Tiger-Cats (also Ti-Cats) are the CFL team in Hamilton, Ontario. They were founded in 1950 by the merger of two local teams, the Hamilton Tigers and the Hamilton Wildcats.
The club cheer is:
Oskee Wee Wee
Oskee Waa Waa
Holy Mackinaw
Tigers … Eat 'em RAW!!
The cheer is generally considered greatly inferior to the numerous songs and cheers of the Saskatchewan Roughriders.
The song Hey, Look Me Over is from the 1960 Broadway musical “Wildcat”. Lucille Ball (in her only Broadway show) and co-star Paula Stewart performed the song on The Ed Sullivan Show, and it was subsequently recorded and/or performed by, among others, Louis Armstrong, Judy Garland, Rosemary Clooney, Bing Crosby, Peggy Lee, Johnny Mathis, Bobby Short, Gene Krupa, Mel Tormé, Jerry Vale, Julie Wilson, Lucie Arnaz and British singer Ronnie Hilton.
John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett performed an amazingly funny and insightful sketch on the British Class system, based on their respective heights. Cleese was upper class, Barker was middle class and Corbett was lower class
John Cleese’s family’s surname was originally Cheese, but his father thought it was embarrassing and changed it when he enlisted in the Army during the First World War. Cleese was born in 1939.
The famous “Cheese Shop” sketch had its creative origins in a bout of projectile vomiting by Cleese.
On January 8, 1992, about 8:20 p.m JST, U.S. President George H. W. Bush fainted after vomiting at a banquet hosted by the then Prime Minister of Japan, Kiichi Miyazawa. It is the only documented occurrence to date of a U.S. President vomiting on a foreign dignitary.
The “Vomit Comet” refers to a NASA program that introduces astronauts to the feeling of zero-gravity spaceflight. Recruits climb aboard a specially fitted aircraft that dips and climbs through the air to simulate the feeling of weightlessness in 20- to 25-second intervals. This often causes vomiting by those unused to the craft, hence the name. Some companies today offer this experience to people for a fee.
On August 10, 1990, NASA’s Magellan space probe reached Venus on a mission to map its surface—fifteen months after its launch.
Tom Wolfe’s *The Right Stuff * retells the stories of the first Project Mercury astronauts selected for the NASA space program. It was published in 1979 and in addition to its popular success, it was praised by critics, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction.