Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks was written for George II for the fireworks in London’s Green Park on 27 April 1749. It was to celebrate the end of the War of the Austrian Succession and the signing of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen) in 1748. The fireworks display was not as successful as the music itself: the weather was rainy and in the middle of the show the right pavilion caught fire.
A bowling green was an urban spaced laid out for the playing of Bowls, a lawn game. Before 1830, when Edwin Beard Budding invented the lawnmower, lawns were kept cropped by grazing sheep on them. Cities named Bowling Green are regional centers in Ohio and Kentucky.
San Francisco’s Marina Green is a rectangular stretch of grass on San Francisco Bay approximately 100 yards wide by 700 yards long. Previously marsh land, it was created by landfill from rubble resulting from the 1906 earthquake, and later more land was filled in there for the 1915 World’s Fair. That World’s Fair was the last time the Liberty Bell ever traveled on tour, and the first-ever time it had traveled west of St. Louis. The Liberty Bell has stayed in Philadelphia ever since.
On the Liberty Bell, the state of “Pennsylvania” is spelled “Pensylvania”.
A bible verse is engraved prominently on the Liberty Bell: Leviticus 25:10, “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all inhabitants thereof.”
Ezekiel 23:20: There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.
Song of Songs 7:1-5 (NIV)
1b Your graceful legs are like jewels,
the work of an artist’s hands.
2 Your navel is a rounded goblet
that never lacks blended wine.
Your waist is a mound of wheat
encircled by lilies.
3 Your breasts are like two fawns,
like twin fawns of a gazelle.
4 Your neck is like an ivory tower.
Your eyes are the pools of Heshbon
by the gate of Bath Rabbim.
Your nose is like the tower of Lebanon
looking toward Damascus.
5 Your head crowns you like Mount Carmel.
Your hair is like royal tapestry;
the king is held captive by its tresses.
The Lily of the Valley (not a true lily) is one of the most toxic of plants. Ingestion by humans of even tiny amounts of any part of the plant can cause significant adverse symptoms. However, 38 cardiac glycoside chemicals have been found in the plant, which could be valuable medicinally for heart patients, were it not for the high toxicity.
Digitalin was first extracted from the leaves of the foxglove plant by William Withering in the 1780s and used as a medication for heart failure. The leaves, flowers and seeds of this plant are all poisonous to humans and some animals and can be fatal if ingested.
Catha edulis, or Khat, is a mild stimulant used for thousands of years in Yemen, and is banned today in many countries. Khat is native to the Arabian peninsula and the Horn of Africa. It contains the alkaloid cathinone, an amphetamine-like stimulant, which is said to cause excitement, loss of appetite, and euphoria. Khat also goes by the names Abyssinian Tea, Somali Tea, and Arabian Tea.
In “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” by Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, and the Foggy Mountain Boys, we learned that oil, if a bubbling crude, is sometimes nicknamed Black Gold or Texas Tea.
While most of Leslie Meier’s cozy mysteries are named after holidays and/or events, she does have The English Tea Murder and The British Manor Murder.
97% of the water on earth is undrinkable, and yet water is by far the most commonly-consumed beverage. Tea is a distant second.
Manor, Texas, was the shooting location for the water tower scene in Gilbert Grape, a story set in Iowa. Most of the film was shot in Texas, where “Manor” is pronounced “MAY-ner”…
After Johnny Depp left 21 Jump Street to pursue a movie career (and star in the title role of Gilbert Grape), the had a new character state “I grew up in mun-au-chee” New Jersey. If he had grown up there (or someone had bothered to call the Borough Hall), he would know the Moonachie natives pronounce it MOON-au-kee.
My SF Bay Area coworker is from Moonachie, and she pronounces it MOON-au-kee. And now so do I. She recommends Bazzarelli Italian Restaurant there, and years ago when in NYC we went to dinner there. Very good. And when she was growing up she shared stories of riding bikes and playing among the construction site for Giants Stadium, also called The Meadowlands, in East Rutherford NJ.
The urban legend of Jimmy Hoffa being buried among its massive concrete structure was alive and well. Ground was broken for Giants Stadium in November 1972, and the stadium opened in October 1976. Hoffa disappeared in July 1975. The urban legend gave extra meaning for when football punters were trying to punt the ball into the “coffin corner.”
Meadowlands, Gauteng is a suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa. The city had its origin with the introduction of the Natives Resettlement Act of 1954 with its aim to move black people out of the center of Johannesburg from multi-cultural areas.
Lake Victoria, in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, Africa, is the world’s second largest fresh water lake by surface area, after Lake Superior in North America. Lake Victoria is the world’s largest tropical lake. The only outflow from Lake Victoria is the Nile River, which exits the lake near Jinja, Uganda. The uppermost section of the Nile is generally known as the Victoria Nile until it reaches Lake Albert.
In March 2010, Gordon Lightfoot changed a line of his song The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald during live performances to reflect new findings that there was no crew error involved in the sinking on Lake Superior. The line originally read, “At 7 p.m. a main hatchway caved in; he said…”; it is now sung as “At 7 p.m. it grew dark, it was then he said…”. Lightfoot learned of the new research when contacted for permission to use his song for a History Channel documentary that aired on March 31, 2010. Lightfoot has stated that he has no intention of changing the copyrighted lyrics; he will instead, from now on, simply sing the new ones in live performances.
“Superior Donuts” is a CBS television series starring Judd Hirsch and Jermaine Fowler. The story revolves around a donut shop owned by an older man who hires a young man to help to modernize the shop.