Some of the bloodiest fighting in World War I occurred in Picardy, whose inhabitants are known in French as Picards. From September 1914 to August 1918, four major battles, including the Battle of the Somme, were fought by British, French, and German forces in the fields of Northern Picardy. The melancholy English ballad “Roses of Picardy” (1916) was popular among World War I soldiers. Picardy was also the scene of bitter fighting in World War II—in May 1940 and August and September 1944.
The first use of tanks in warfare was in the Battle of the Somme, fought in the summer and fall of 1916. The British Mark I was developed under the name “tank”, as a security measure to conceal its purpose.
After the June 2017 general election resulted in a hung Parliament, British Prime Minister Theresa May was able to win the support of the Democratic Unionist Party (“DUP”) of Northern Ireland to help her Conservative minority government stay in power.
Former Prime Minister of Belgium Elio Di Rupo is the son of Italian immigrants. He is the only one of his parents’ children to have been born in Belgium, all of the others were born in Italy.
Four of Canada’s Prime Ministers have been born outside Canada: two in Scotland (Macdonald and Mackenzie) and two in England (Bowell and Turner).
Canada’s wartime Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, communed with spirits, using seances with paid mediums. Thereby he communicated with Leonardo da Vinci, Wilfrid Laurier, his dead mother, his grandfather, and several of his dead dogs, as well as the spirit of the late President Roosevelt.
When Philip Wallach Blondheim III recorded the song San Francisco, he took the last name Mackenzie after the song’s co-writer John Phillip’s daughter Laura Mackenzie Phillips, and the first name Scott “for no reason.”
American actor Eli Wallach had a stage and screen career spanning six decades and appeared in more than 90 movies. He was born in Red Hook, Brooklyn, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants. He received BAFTA, Tony and Emmy awards for his work, and received an Honorary Oscar in 2010, dying four years later.
Three Dog Nights 1969 hit "Eli’s Comin’ " was written and recorded in 1967 by American singer-songwriter and pianist Laura Nyro. The song was first released in 1968 as the sixth song of Nyro’s album, Eli and the Thirteenth Confession.
Lyndon Johnson’s last full year as President of the United States was 1968. Beset by civil unrest at home and serious setbacks in the Vietnam War, he surprised the nation early that year when he announced he would not seek reelection.
On December 24, 1968, in what was the most watched television broadcast at the time, the crew of Apollo 8 read in turn from the Book of Genesis as they orbited the moon. Bill Anders, Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman recited Genesis chapter one, verses 1 through 10, using the King James Version text. Borman finished with “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas – and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.” An anonymous telegram to NASA read “Thank you Apollo 8. You saved 1968.”
On April 4, 1968, the night that the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, Senator Robert F. Kennedy addressed a crowd in an inner-city neighborhood of Indianapolis. His speech, a plea for peace, marked the first time he spoke in public of the assassination of his brother. It is credited for possibly averting in Indianapolis the rioting that broke out in more than 100 other cities that night and has been noted as one of the greatest in American history, ranked 17th by communications scholars in a survey of 20th century American speeches.
Two months later, on June 5, 1968, Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles.
Authors George Plimpton and Pete Hamill, football Hall of Famer Rosey Grier, and 1960 Olympic gold medalist Rafer Johnson were among several men who subdued and disarmed RFK’s assassin Sirhan Sirhan after a lengthy struggle.
Actress Pam Grier (“Jackie Brown”) attributes her exotic beauty to an ancestry consisting of a mix of African-American, Hispanic, Chinese, Filipino and Cheyenne Indian heritage
Golf legend Eldrick “Tiger” Woods calls his ethnicity “Cablinasian”, referring to his Caucasian, black, American Indian, and Thai roots.
Calvinball is a game played by Calvin and his stuffed tiger Hobbes as a rebellion against organized team sports; according to Hobbes, "No sport is less organized than Calvinball!"I t was first introduced to the readers at the end of a 1990 storyline involving Calvin reluctantly joining recess baseball. The only hint at the true creation of the game ironically comes from the last Calvinball strip, in which a game of football quickly devolves into a game of Calvinball. Calvin remarks that “sooner or later, all our games turn into Calvinball”, suggesting a similar scenario that directly led to the creation of the sport.
Christian reformer and writer John Calvin was buried in an unmarked grave in the Cimetière des Rois in Geneva, Switzerland, the country where he had taken refuge after fleeing vengeful pro-Vatican Catholics in his native France.
The Geneva drive or Maltese cross is a gear mechanism that translates a continuous rotation into an intermittent rotary motion. The rotating drive wheel has a pin that reaches into a slot of the driven wheel advancing it by one step. The drive wheel also has a raised circular blocking disc that locks the driven wheel in position between steps. The name derives from the device’s earliest application in mechanical watches, Geneva in Switzerland being an important center of watchmaking.
Voltaire wrote about Calvin, Luther and Zwingli, “If they condemned celibacy in the priests, and opened the gates of the convents, it was only to turn all society into a convent. Shows and entertainments were expressly forbidden by their religion; and for more than two hundred years there was not a single musical instrument allowed in the city of Geneva. They condemned auricular confession, but they enjoined a public one; and in Switzerland, Scotland, and Geneva it was performed the same as penance.”
Under Calvin, 58 “heretics” were executed in 5 years by beheading, burning at the stake, and other torture. One prominent victim was Michael Servetus, who had fled the Inquisition only to be burned to death by Calvin in Geneva.
Before embarking on his solo career, Luther Vandross was an in-demand background vocalist for several different artists including Judy Collins, Chaka Khan, Bette Midler, Diana Ross, David Bowie, Barbra Streisand, Ben E. King, and Donna Summer.