Since the establishment of the Kingdom of Belgium in 1831, there has never been a queen regnant - the country has only been ruled by kings. That may change when the reign of the current King, Philippe, ends, as his eldest daughter Princess Elisabeth, Duchess of Brabant, is first in line of succession. She is now 15 years old.
The Battle of Waterloo, at which Napoleon Bonaparte suffered his last defeat, took place in a region that was then in the Netherlands, but is now part of Belgium.
In their 1974 pop hit “Waterloo,” ABBA sang, “My, my, at Waterloo Napoleon did surrender,” but that is not so. He left the battlefield and surrendered a month later to Capt. Frederick Lewis Maitland of HMS Bellerophon, a British warship, off Rochefort.
On June 15, 1815, the Duchess of Richmond held a ball in Brussels, Belgium, that was and is described as “the most famous ball in history.” Lord Byron’s poem “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” emphasizes the contrast between the glamorous ball and the horror of the Battle of Waterloo which took place three days after the ball. On June 15, 1965, the British Ambassador in Brussels held a ball to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo and the Duchess of Richmond’s ball. This commemoration ball has now become an annual event.
In 1991, the University of Richmond Spiders became the first #15 seed to defeat a #2 seed in the NCAA basketball tournament.
New York City is divided, administratively and geographically into five boroughs: Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. Each borough is also a county within New York State. Only one of these bears exactly the same name as both borough and county: Queens. The borough of the Bronx is Bronx County. Manhattan is New York County, Brooklyn is Kings County and Staten Island is Richmond County.
New York state courts are unique in that the lowest-level trial court is called the Supreme Court. The next level up is the Supreme Court, Appellate Division, and the state’s highest court is called the Court of Appeals.
York Street in San Francisco figures into one of the most iconic car chase scenes in the movies – the famous San Francisco car chase in Bullitt (1968).
The chase is between Bullitt, played by Steve McQueen (who, BTW, was a Marine) driving a 1968 Ford Mustang, and two bad guys in a 1968 Dodge Charger. At the 1:27 mark in this video, before the famous car chase scene, Bullitt (Steve McQueen) is at 1511 York Street, San Francisco CA (here on the map) and heads south on York Street. The two cars had been headed east on the old Army Street which is now Cesar Chavez Street – at the 1:10 mark.
The full 6½ minute chase scene is shown in this video. The chase ends outside of San Francisco, in the small city of Brisbane CA which is just south and east of The City, at what is now at the intersection of Guadalupe Canyon Pkwy & North Hill Drive (here is a map). Back then, N. Hill Drive did not exist. The gas station that explodes is long gone from that east end of Guadalupe Canyon Pkwy.
Culinary mystery writer Diane Mott Davidson is a direct descendant of Joseph Mott, a butcher and tavern owner whose name is honored in New York City’s famous Mott Street.
Playing off of Annie’s post 36424… and mine in 36423…
The car chase can be see driving past the Marina Green, the large green grassy field alongside San Francisco Bay and near the Golden Gate Bridge on the street called Marina Blvd. The older, 1968 version of the Marina Safeway store is seen in the background. That Safeway store is still there today. Here’s a map.
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s 1968 musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat had its United States debut in 1976 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with a cast that featured Cleavon Little as the Narrator and David-James Carroll as Joseph.
“Technicolor” is the trademark for a series of color motion picture processes pioneered by Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation (a subsidiary of Technicolor, Inc.), now a division of the French company Technicolor SA. The Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation was founded in Boston in 1914 (incorporated in Maine in 1915) by Herbert Kalmus, Daniel Frost Comstock, and W. Burton Wescott. The “Tech” in the company’s name was inspired by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where both Kalmus and Comstock received their undergraduate degrees and were later instructors.
The first commercial release in Technicolor was The Gulf Between in 1917.
George Herbert Walker Bush was, in 1988, the first incumbent Vice President of the United States to be elected President since Martin Van Buren in 1836.
John Adams and John Quincy Adams were the only father and son to be elected as Presidents of the United States until George Herbert Walker Bush and his son George Walker Bush did it.
The city of Quincy, MA is named for the president. It’s pronounced Quin-zee by locals. Quincy bills itself as the “City of Presidents”.
Peter Quincy Taggart (Tim Allen) is the captain of the NSEA Protector, the starship featured in the 1999 Star Trek parody Galaxy Quest.
Quincy Trouppe was one of the oldest rookies to play major league baseball, moving from the Negro Leaguies to MLB when he was 39. He played only 6 games in MLB, and was one of the black Americans who played in the Mexican League before they were allowed to play in the USA. His son, Quincy Trouppe, is a professor emeritus at University of California, and wrote the definitive biography of Miles Davis.
Thomas De Quincey’s 1821 book, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, has been called the first addition narrative.
The often-abbreviated quotation “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people” originates from the introduction of Marx’s work A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, which he started in 1843 but which was not published until after his death. The introduction to this work was published separately in 1844, in Marx’s own journal* Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher,* a collaboration with Arnold Ruge.
Oops! That should be addiction narrative, not addition.
Carry on.