Chester, in Western England near the Welsh border, is one of the best preserved walled cities in Britain. The name Chester is derived from its foundation as a “castrum” or Roman fort. In addition to the Roman ruins, it has a number of medieval walls, fortifications and buildings.
Chester Arthur, as a young lawyer in New York City before the Civil War, represented black clients who sought a court order to desegregate a streetcar line. He won, but continued to have difficulty forcing obedience to the order.
Arthur is the sidekick to the superhero “The Tick”. As ‘Moth Man’, he can fly, but otherwise has no superpowers.
American novelist Thomas Berger, perhaps best known for his reinvention of the Western genre with Little Big Man, later made into a movie starring Dustin Hoffman and Faye Dunaway, also wrote a retelling of ancient British kingly myth, Arthur Rex.
“Rex” is the name of a musical with music by Richard Rodgers, libretto by Sheldon Harnick, and book by Sherman Yellen. It’s a musical about the life of King Henry VIII.
Rex Harrison won his first Tony Award in 1949, for his performance as Henry VIII in the play Anne of the Thousand Days. He won his second Tony for the role of Professor Henry Higgins in the stage production of My Fair Lady in 1957. He also played the role in the 1964 film version, which earned him a Best Actor Oscar, edging out Peter O’Toole, Richard Burton, Anthony Quinn and Peter Sellers.
Rex Harrison’s sixth and final wife was Mercia Tinker. Mercia was one of the seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms known as the heptarchy that occupied what is now England: Mercia, Wessex (for west-saxons), Sussex (southern saxons), Essex (east Saxons), Northumbria, Kent, and East Anglia (eastern Angles). George RR Martin uses a similar naming convention for some of his fictional territories in A Song of Ice and Fire, with continents called Westeros, Essos, and Sothoryos.
The Essex class was a class of aircraft carriers of the United States Navy. A total of 24 were built, beginning in 1941 and finishing in 1950. The last of the class to be decommissioned was the USS Lexington in 1991. Fouor of the ships, including the Lexington, are preserved as Historial landmarks.
*FTR, I have been on the ‘Lex’ in Corpus Christi, TX several times. Quite an experience.
No Essex-class carriers were sunk due to enemy action during World War II, although several were badly damaged and one, the USS Franklin, was so ravaged by kamikaze attack near the end of the war that it was determined to not be cost-effective to repair her. Several of the carriers served as recovery ships during the Apollo missions to the Moon: the USS Boxer, Hornet, Bennington, Essex herself, Yorktown, Princeton, Hornet and Ticonderoga.
Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, was a favorite of Elizabeth II; he has been played on film and television by Errol Flynn, Charlton Heston and Hugh Dancy.
Queen Elizabeth II hosted a private screening of The King’s Speech, about the struggles of her father King George VI with stuttering, and was said by friends to have been favorably impressed by the film.
Ninja’ed. Will try to do better.
ps–gkster, I think that was Elizabeth I you were referring to?
Lonesome George was a male Pinta Island tortoise and the last known individual of the subspecies. The island’s vegetation had been devastated by introduced feral goats and George was the sole surviving member. He was relocated for his safety to the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz Island in the Galapagos, but breeding attempts failed. With his death in 2012, that subspecies is now extinct.
Or maybe not: Pinta Island tortoise - Wikipedia
In play:
George Washington of Virginia, land-rich but cash-poor, had to borrow money from a neighbor to travel to New York City for his April 1789 inauguration as the first President of the United States.
Actress and comedienne Aza Mira Dungey developed a very popular, often insightful and frequently hysterical YouTube series entitled Ask a Slave based on experiences and actual questions she received while impersonating Lizzie, a slave of the Washington’s, as a living history interpreter at Mount Vernon. She makes reference to actual other Washington slaves during the series including the cook Hercules and the maid Ona, both of whom successfully escaped to freedom.
Two sculpture museums are located on Vernon Blvd. in Queens, NY. One is Socrates Sculpture Park, which was an abandoned riverside landfill and illegal dumpsite until 1986 when a coalition of artists and community members transformed it into an open studio and exhibition space for artists and a neighborhood park for local residents. Today it is an outdoor museum and a New York City park. A few blocks south is the Noguchi Museum, founded and designed by Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi for the display of what he considered to be representative examples of his life’s work. Opened in 1985, the Museum is housed in a converted industrial building, connected to a building and interior garden of Noguchi’s design.
The Stainless Steel Rat, you’re right, I did mean Elizabeth I!
The borough of Queens was established in 1683 as one of the original 12 counties of New York. It was named after the Portuguese Princess Catherine of Braganza (1638–1705), Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
The Atlantic Portuguese man o’ war (Physalia physalis), also known as the man-of-war, blue bottle, or floating terror, is a marine hydrozoan of the family Physaliidae found in the Atlantic Ocean, as well as the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Its venomous tentacles can deliver a painful (and sometimes fatal) sting. Despite its outward appearance, the Portuguese man o’ war is not a jellyfish but a siphonophore, which, unlike jellyfish, is not actually a single multicellular organism, but a colonial organism made up of specialized individual animals called zooids or polyps. These polyps are attached to one another and physiologically integrated to the extent that they are unable to survive independently, and therefore have to work together and function like a so-called individual animal.
The name “man o’ war” comes from the man-of-war, an 18th-century armed sailing ship, and the cnidarian’s supposed resemblance to the Portuguese version at full sail.
The naval Battle of Swally, 29–30 November 1612 off the coast Gujarat, India, and was a victory for four English East India Company galleons over four Portuguese man-of-war vessels. This relatively small naval battle is historically important as it marked the beginning of the end of Portugal’s commercial monopoly over India, and the beginning of the ascent of the English East India Company’s presence in India.
Mary Alicia Rhett, who played the role of India Wilkes in Gone With the Wind, was one of the few authentic “Southern belles” in the cast. Her family, the Rhetts, were prominent; a newspaper article in 1939 quoted a Selznick International Pictures news release as saying that Rhett Butler’s first name was chosen by Margaret Mitchell because “Since earliest Colonial days, the Rhett family has occupied a prominent position in the South generally, and, more particularly, in and around Charleston, S.C.”