Trivia Dominoes: Play Off the Last Bit of Trivia

Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland, Ohio includes the graves of the President and Mrs. James A. Garfield, tycoon and captain of industry John D. Rockefeller, and John M. Hay, who served as a personal assistant to President Abraham Lincoln and later as Secretary of State to both Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.

Both Charles J. Guiteau, the assassin of President James Garfield and Leon Czolgoz, the assassin of President William McKinley, were held and arrested at the scenes of their crimes, while both John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln and Lee Harvey Oswald, escaped the crime scene. Oswald was arrested in a movie theater within the hour and was killed two days later by Jack Ruby, but Booth managed to elude the police for 12 days before being shot and killed.

Despite explicit orders to take John Wilkes Booth alive, when he was cornered and surrounded by soldiers in a burning barn, he was shot in the neck by Sgt. Boston Corbett. An investigation deemed that Corbett had not acted incorrectly. However, Corbett had longstanding mental problems, probably worsened by fumes from the mercury used in his trade as a hatter. As young man before the Civil War, in order to avoid the temptation of prostitutes, he took a pair of scissors and castrated himself.

Actor and Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth was shot in the Garrett tobacco barn, which was on fire at the time; he was taken to the nearby farmhouse and died on its porch. Both the barn and the house are long gone; the land on which they stood are now on a wooded median strip on U.S. Route 301 near Port Royal, Va. A small marker was placed on the site some years ago by the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

John Wilkes Booth came from a big family of actors. His father was Junius Brutus Booth, who was born in England, who moved to the United States in 1821, taking a flower girl with him and leaving his wife and children in England. He not only performed in English, but also in fluent French, according to reports from the times. All three of his sons, John Wilkes, Edwin, and Junius Junior, became actors. Edwin was considered the greatest actor of his time. Junius Sr.'s daughter, Asia Booth Clarke, was a poet and author. She wrote a memoir about her brother, John Wilkes. Asia’s husband, John Sleeper Clarke, was also an actor.

Queen Elizabeth II speaks fluent French, and does not make use of a Foreign Office interpreter when dealing with Francophone officials and visitors.

In simultaneous interpreting, the interpreter sits in a booth, listens to the speaker in one language through headphones, and immediately speaks their interpretation into a microphone in another language. This type of interpretation, used at meetings of international organizations such as the United Nations, requires a high level of concentration, since the interpreter is doing several things at once: listening and speaking; analyzing the structure of what is being said in order to present the speaker’s argument; listening to his/her own interpretation to check for slips of the tongue.
Interpreters therefore work only in short stretches, typically 30 minutes, before being relieved by another interpreter.

The Supreme Court of Canada has simultaneous interpretation for every proceeding, either English or French, depending on the language being spoken by counsel or a judge. The interpreters have the capability to use either language during a single hearing, as one counsel may speak English and the other French, and the judges will use the preferred language of counsel to address a question to them.

Les goddams is an obsolete ethnic slur historically used by the French to refer to the English. The name originated during the Hundred Years War (1337–1453) between England and France, when English soldiers were notorious among the French for their frequent use of profanity and in particular the interjection “God damn”.

Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, is married to Brigitte Trogneux, 24 years his senior, who was his teacher at La Providence High School in Amiens. They first met when he was a 15-year-old student and she was a 39-year-old teacher, but only became a couple once he was 18. His parents did not initially approve of the relationship.

Saint Brigid, who lived in the 5th century, was the founder of a monastery at Kildare and a patron saint of Ireland. Because of the saint, the name was considered sacred in Ireland, and it did not come into general use there until the 17th century. In the form Birgitta this name has been common in Scandinavia, made popular by the 14th-century Saint Birgitta of Sweden, patron saint of Europe.
“Brigitte” is the French and German form of the name; before Brigitte Macron, one of the best-known Brigittes was Brigitte Bardot, born 1934.

The Irish-American bar band Brace Yourself, Bridget! takes its name from an ethnic joke about an Irishman’s idea of foreplay.

The name of the plantation that Scarlett O’Hara grew up on was Tara, named by her Irish father for the legendary Kings of Tara, who asserted authority over all of Ireland, although there was never much of a royal rule over all of the island.

When Diana Rigg left The Avengers, the backstory was that her character, Mrs. Emma Peel, went back to her husband when he returned after coming back from being missing and presumed lost. Rigg was replaced by Linda Thorson as Tara King, but the show was never the same.

Jane Austen described the titular character in Emma as someone that none of her readers would like.

To the contrary, Emma is a fan favourite because much of the book is about her personal growth and self-awareness. The love interest is a good one, but pretty clear right from the start. The question is how Emma gets there, not who she will end up with.

Only a single portrait of British author Jane Austen, drawn from life, exists. She was never painted during her lifetime and died too early to be photographed. And although she wrote often of the wooing and winning of wives, she herself never married.

Austenite, also known as gamma-phase iron (γ-Fe), is a metallic, non-magnetic allotrope of iron or a solid solution of iron, with an alloying element. In plain-carbon steel, austenite exists above the critical eutectoid temperature of 1000 K (727°C); other alloys of steel have different eutectoid temperatures. The austenite allotrope exists at room temperature in stainless steel. It is named after Sir William Chandler Roberts-Austen.

Note: That’s what Wiki says. I know for a fact that there are non-austenitic, fully-martensitic stainless steels at room temperature too.

Jane Austen was a great admirer of Mary, Queen of Scots, as evidenced by her character sketches in her unpublished “History of England”. Her sister Cassandra provided “portraits” of a number of the kings and queens, based on Austen family members; the portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots has been identified by scholars and forensic experts as quite possibly based on Jane Austen herself.


Scroll 1/3 of the way down the page for the portrait of Mary Queen of Scots superimposed on the portrait of Jane Austen
http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol30no2/upfal-alexander.html

Mary Queen of Scots was married three times. All of her husbands pre-deceased her, with her third husband, Lord Bothwell, generally believed to have killed her second husband, Lord Darnley, in the murder at the Kirk o’Field.

James Tiberius “Jim” Kirk became the first and only student at Starfleet Academy to defeat the Kobayashi Maru test, garnering a commendation for original thinking for reprogramming the computer to make the “no-win scenario” winnable.