Henry V gained his military experience fighting the Welsh during the revolt of Owain Glyndŵr, and against the powerful aristocratic Percys of Northumberland at the Battle of Shrewsbury.
Two signers of the Declaration of Independence with a Welsh connection are William Floyd, of Brookhaven, NY, whose family was of Welsh origin (as evidenced by the surname) and Francis Lewis of Whitestone, NY, who was born in Llandaff, Wales.
A Scots-born Presbyterian, the Rev. Jonathan Witherspoon, was the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. He headed the College of New Jersey, later known as Princeton University, and counted James Madison and Aaron Burr among his students.
Three US Presidents - John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe - died on July 4, the date at the top of the Declaration of Independence (so there, all you July 2-ists). A fourth, Calvin Coolidge, was born on July 4.
On his New Songs from the Briarpatch LP, released in 1977, Tom Paxton explains that he didn’t think he’s write another song about the Vietnam War, but reading Ron Kovic’s book inspired him to write another one about this Vietnam War veteran who served two tours and then ran out of luck, being hit by a bullet that paralyzed him from the waist down.
Now I wheel myself down
To the crossroads of town
To watch the young girls and their lovers.
And my mind is afire.
It’s alive with desire.
Christ, I’ve barely begun; now it’s over.
In my wheelchair for life
My mechanical wife.
I’m supposed to be cheerful and stoic.
I’m your old tried and true
Yankee Doodle to you.
Clean cut, paralyzed
And heroic.
I was born on the fourth of July.
No one more loyal than I
When my country said so
I was ready to go.
And I wish I’d been left there to die.
On July 22, 1822, the Nguyễn Emperor captured Hanoi in a victory that followed a quarter-century of continuous fighting. The Emperor had previously adopted the name Gia Long, name derived from Gia Định (Saigon) and Thăng Long (Hanoi) to symbolize the unification of north and south Vietnam—a unification achieved in the victory at Hanoi.
Emperor Akihito, who succeeded his father Hirohito on the Chrysanthemum Throne of Japan in 1989, gave a speech last year indicating that he was finding it increasingly difficult to fulfill his official duties due to his age and ill health. This was widely interpreted as a statement of his intention to abdicate in the near future. Early last month, the National Diet passed a bill allowing the Emperor to abdicate, something not earlier provided for under Japanese law.
The Peacock Throne was a famous jeweled throne that was the seat of the Mughal emperors of India. It was commissioned in the early 17th century by emperor Shah Jahan and was located in the Diwan-i-Khas (Hall of Private Audiences) in the Red Fort of Delhi. The original throne was subsequently captured and taken as a war trophy in 1739 by the Persian king Nadir Shah, and has been lost ever since. A replacement throne based on the original was commissioned afterwards and existed until the Indian war of Independence in 1857.
Along with the Peacock Throne, Nader also took with him the fabulous Koh-i Noor and Darya-i Noor diamonds to Persia where many of them remained in the Persian crown jewels, and some were sold to the Ottomans. The plunder took by Nader was so great, that he stopped taxation for 3 years. The bottom half of the Peacock Throne might have been converted into the Sun Throne also a part of the Persian crown jewels.
John J. Graham designed the first peacock logo for NBC television, which made its debut on May 22, 1956. It was an abstraction of an eleven-feathered peacock to indicate richness in color.
The NBC chimes, named for the radio and television network on which they have been used, consists of a succession of three distinct pitches: G3, E4 and C4 (middle C), sounded in that order, creating an arpeggiated C-major chord in the second inversion, within about two seconds time, and reverberating for another two or three seconds. The intervals of this progression are up a major sixth from G3 to E4 and down a major third from E4 to C4. The chimes were the first ever audio trademark to be accepted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Contrary to widespread belief, the “G-E-C” sequence is not a reference to the General Electric Company, which did not acquire NBC until 1986; however, GE’s radio station WGY in Schenectady, New York, was an early affiliate of the NBC Red Network, and GE was an early shareholder in RCA, which founded NBC by creating it as a subsidiary.
The first two broadcasting networks on US radio were the NBC Blue and the NBC Red networks. NBC was ordered by a court to divest itself of one of the networks, and so NBC Blue became ABC while NBC Red became NBC.
Blue is the traditional colour of the Conservative parties in Canada, while red is the colour of the Liberals. The NDP, founded in the mid-sixties, chose orange as its colour. The Bloc québécois naturally chose light blue and white, the colours of the Quebec flag, while the Greens are (what else?) kelly green.
“Blue House” has several different references, out of which I picked this one (a Wikipedia paste):
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House of Blues’ first location, in Cambridge’s Harvard Square, was opened in 1992 by Isaac Tigrett, co-founder of Hard Rock Cafe, and Dan Aykroyd, co-star of the 1980 film The Blues Brothers.
The new South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, eager to distance himself from his disgraced predecessor, Park Gyeun-he, announced in May that he plans to give up one of the job’s major perks: the mountainside presidential palace, the Blue House, where every modern South Korean president has lived and worked since the end of World War II. It is also closely associated with Park, who grew up there as the daughter of a dictator.
As the late, great Pete Seeger told us,*
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there’s doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same…*
Late Pleistocene Ice-age Leopards in Europe were sometimes found in caves, where they apparently sought shelter or hid their prey. They generally preferred smaller caves, most likely because larger caves were usually occupied by larger predators such as cave bears, cave lions, or humans.
The famous carved lions guarding the exterior steps of the New York Public Library appear in the opening scene of the 1984 smash hit Ghostbusters. They prefigure the two sculpted (and later living) monsters which appear atop Dana Barrett’s (Sigourney Weaver) apartment building.
The Lion Gate of Mycenae was the main entrance to the city. Dating from the 13th century BCE, it was the largest sculpture of the prehistoric Aegean.
Personal note: I’ve been there. It’s amazing.