Jefferson City, Missouri, named for the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, currently holds, per Rand McNally, the title of America’s “Most Beautiful Small Town.”
My adopted city, Orlando, Florida, uses the nickname “The City Beautiful” for reasons that are not always apparent. The members of N’Sync, the Backstreet Boys, and O-Town all came from there.
There are communities named Orlando in Florida, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and West Virginia.
The name Oklahoma comes from the Choctaw phrase okla humma, literally meaning red people. Choctaw Chief Allen Wright suggested the name in 1866 during treaty negotiations with the federal government on the use of Indian Territory, in which he envisioned an all-Indian state controlled by the United States Superintendent of Indian Affairs.
The film version of the musical *Oklahoma! * was shot on location in and around Sonoita, Arizona, because the real Oklahoma in 1955 was so heavily farmed and developed that few suitable areas could be found that resembled the highly-rural and undeveloped Oklahoma of the turn of the century when the musical is set. Nogales, Arizona, the nearest town to Sonoita, was declared an honorary part of Oklahoma for the period of shooting, by the governor.
Cimarron County, Oklahoma, at the western end of its panhandle, borders on Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and Nebraska. It is the only county in the US including 4 state borders.
Cimarron won the 4th Best Picture Oscar (called Academy Award for Outstanding Production at the time) and was the only western to win Best Picture until Dances with Wolves.
That was near Philadelphia, FTR: Backhoe involved in fatal Amtrak crash had right to be on tracks – Chicago Tribune
In play:
No five-pointed stars appear on the state flags of Oklahoma, Colorado or Nebraska; one each appears on those of Texas and New Mexico.
ETA: No star appears on the Oscar statuette.
The flag of Norway can be cut into smaller pieces that form the flags of Indonesia, Poland, Malta, Finland, France, Netherlands and Thailand.
The flag of Austria is a red-white-red triband (horizontal bars).
Legend has that it comes from the white jerkin of an early Austrian Duke, after a major battle. The front of the jerkin was entirely red from the blood of his adversaries, except for a white stripe when he took off his belt. :eek:
The four red stripes on a golden background of the Catalan flag are known as Els Quatre Dits de Sang or The Four Fingers of Blood. The story goes that Count of Barcelona and many other Catalan territories, Guifré el Pilós or Wilfred the Hairy was fighting alongside the coincidentally named Carles el Calb, Charles the Bald, the Frankish ruler, against the Moorish Governor of Lleida, Lobo ibn Mohammed.
Wilfred the Hairy was seriously wounded. Catalonia did not yet have a flag so the next day the Catalan troops would have to go into battle without their leader or a standard to rally to. So before the battle began, Charles the Bald honored Wilfred by plunging his hand in Wilfred’s wound and wiped it across a golden shield and, with the shield held high, led the Catalan troops to victory.
Lobo is a fictional character that appears in DC Comics. Lobo is an alien born on the utopian planet of Czarnia, and works as an interstellar mercenary and bounty hunter.
One of the earliest known examples of a bounty comes from a message on a wall Ponpeii, beforel it was destroyed in 79 AD:
A copper pot went missing from my shop. Anyone who returns it to me will be given 65 bronze coins. 20 more will be given for information leading to the capture of the thief.The HMS Bounty was on a 1787 mission to Tahiti seeking breadfruit plants. The fruit of the breadfruit or jackfruit tree is the largest tree-borne fruit and can reach 80 lbs in weight.
The tomb of Captain William Bligh of HMS Bounty is behind the Garden Museum in London, in a building that was formerly the Church of St Mary-at-Lambeth. Britain’s only museum of the art, history and design of gardens is there because the former churchyard also is the location of the tombs of 17th-century royal gardeners and plant hunters John Tradescant the Elder and the Younger.
Pliny the Younger was the nephew of Pliny the Elder. Pliny the Younger and Pliny the Elder both witnessed the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. Pliny the Elder died in that eruption. About 25 years after the eruption, Pliny the Younger wrote two letters describing the event to the request of his friend, the historian Tacitus. Pliny the Younger’s descriptions were so detailed and accurate that modern volcanologists describe those types of eruptions as “Plinian eruptions”.
Earlier this year, after dominating *Zymurgy *Magazine’s annual survey of the Best Beers in America for eight of the 15 years it has existed, Russian River Brewing Co.'s elusive double IPA Pliny the Elder has been usurped.
Zymurgy, which is the official publication of the American Homebrewers Association, found that following a survey of over 4,000 of its members, that title now belongs to Two Hearted Ale, an IPA brewed by Bell’s Brewery in Galesburg, Michigan.
Besides his better-known histories of the Roman Empire, for which he is justly famous, Tacitus wrote three works in his younger days with a more limited scope. They were Agricola, a biography of his father-in-law Gnaeus Julius Agricola; the Germania, a monograph on the lands and tribes of barbarian Germany; and the Dialogus, a dialogue on the art of rhetoric.
ETA to add younger to make it work with Annies’ post below.
After the Younger-James bank robbers would caught by the Federal marshals, Cole Younger pled guilty to avoid being hanged, and served 26 years in prison before being paroled on July 10, 1901. He later wrote a memoir that portrayed himself as a Confederate avenger more than an outlaw. On August 21, 1912, Cole declared that he had become a Christian and repented of his criminal past.Cole Younger died, on March 21, 1916, in his hometown of Lee’s Summit, Missouri, and is buried in the Lee’s Summit Historical Cemetery.
The United States Marshals Service is the oldest American federal law enforcement agency, created during the Washington Administration by the Judiciary Act of 1789. The Marshals Service is the enforcement arm of the federal courts, and is responsible for prisoner transport, protecting judges and court officers, overseeing the Witness Protection Program, apprehending federal fugitives, and serving federal arrest warrants.