Skanda, also known as Kartikeya or Murugan, one of the sons of Shiva and Parvati and the brother of the elephant-headed Ganesha, is the Hindu god of war. He rides a peacock, which according to legend is a conquered demon.
In a 1991 episode of The Simpsons, Mr. Burns, in gratitude for the family saving his life, gives them a giant stone head said to be that of the Olmec god of war, Xtapolapocetl. The head has appeared as a sight gag from time to time on the show, usually gathering dust in a corner of the Simpsons’ basement.
A talking stone head named Olmec was host Kirk Fogg’s sidekick on “Legends of the Hidden Temple”, which aired 1993-95 on Nickelodeon. Six teams of two children (one boy and one girl) competed to retrieve one of the historical artifacts in the temple by performing physical stunts and answering questions based on history, mythology, and geography.
Phileas Fogg, the protagonist of the 1873 Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days, was played by David Niven in the 1956 film version. The film was nominated for eight Oscars, and won five. It is one of the few Best Picture winners not to be nominated in any acting category.
David Niven first appeared in a movie as an extra in the 1932 British film called Here Comes the Bride. His last role was in 1983 in the movie Curse of the Pink Panther. In between he appeared in nearly 100 other movies, including Casino Royale, where he was cast as the second person to portray James Bond (Sean Connery was the first.) He won the Best Actor award in 1958 for his performance in Separate Tables.
James Bond has been played in the movies by:
George Lazenby was the third.
Roger Moore was the fourth.
Timothy Dalton was the fifth.
Pierce Brosnan was the sixth.
Daniel Craig was the seventh, and latest.
The Dalton Gang was a group of outlaws in the American Old West during 1890–1892. It was also known as The Dalton Brothers because three of its members were brothers (Grattan, Bob, and Emmett). The eldest brother, Frank, had been a Deputy U.S. Marshal, but was killed in 1888. A fifth brother, “Bill” Dalton, also had a career as an outlaw, but he rode with the Wild Bunch. Two of the brothers were killed and the third captured in a raid on Coffeyville, Kansas in 1892.
The Dalton Gang is also a nickname for the truckers who drive the Dalton Highway, connecting Fairbanks, Alaska to Prudhoe Bay in the North Slope oil fields, alongside the Alaska Pipeline. There are only 3 towns along its 414 mile length: Coldfoot, Wiseman, and Deadhorse. The highway is the featured road on the third, fourth, fifth and sixth seasons of the History reality television series Ice Road Truckers, which aired May 31, 2009 to present. It is also the subject of the second episode of America’s Toughest Jobs and the first episode of the BBC’s World’s Most Dangerous Roads.
According to CNN Travel, the world’s most dangerous road is a 65 kilometer stretch of highway from Jalalabad to Kabul, Afghanistan. Although the road runs through Taliban-occupied territory, it’s not the threat of terrorism that makes the road so dangerous, it’s the design and geography of the road and the reckless drivers that try to pass slow-moving trucks. Fatal crashes occur daily.
http://travel.cnn.com/explorations/life/worlds-deadliest-roads-098394/
Not so: Barry Nelson - Wikipedia
In play:
The Alaska class was a class of six large cruisers ordered before World War II for the United States Navy. They were officially classed as large cruisers (CB), but others have regarded them as battlecruisers. They were all named after territories or insular areas of the United States, signifying their intermediate status between larger battleships and smaller heavy and light cruisers. Of the six planned, two were completed, the third’s construction was suspended, and the last three were cancelled. USS Alaska and Guam served with the U.S. Navy for the last year of World War II as bombardment ships and fast carrier escorts. They were decommissioned in 1947 after spending only 32 and 29 months in service, respectively (per Wiki).
ETA: Ninja’d! None of the ships ever went to landlocked Afghanistan.
Afghanistan’s eastern panhandle, the Wakhan Corridor, is in part a political creation from The Great Game between the United Kingdom and Russian Empire. In the north, an agreement between the empires in 1873 effectively split the historic region of Wakhan by making the Panj and Pamir Rivers the border between Afghanistan and the Russian Empire. In the south, the Durand Line agreement of 1893 marked the boundary between British India and Afghanistan. This left a narrow strip of land ruled by Afghanistan as a buffer between the two empires. It was a historic trade route, apparently used by Marco Polo, but has been closed to regular traffic for over a century due to China’s blocking the border at the eastern end.
Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the only queen Pakistan has ever had (1952-1956). Her late father, King George VI, was its only king (1947-1952).
At the 2001 census, Chinese was the most widely spoken immigrant language in Northern Ireland, with Arabic and Portuguese also spoken by a significant number of people. However, an influx of people from recent EU accession states significantly increased the numbers of speakers of languages from these countries. In the 2011 census, Polish was the most widely spoken immigrant language, followed by Lithuanian.
The most notorious scofflaw driver in Ireland, according to the number of tickets issued and the name on the license read by the officer, is a Polish immigrant named Prawo Jazdy. The words mean “Driving License” in Polish.
Not in play: I should have specified Bond actors on the big screen. Barry Nelson was indeed the first to play James Bond, but it was on an episode of a television series in 1954. My bad.
In play:
Immigration from Poland to the United States experienced a small but notable increase in the years following 1989, when the Soviet Union was beginning to lose its rule over the country. During this wave, the most popular destination for Polish immigrants was Chicago, followed by New York City. Currently, there are an estimated 9.5 million Americans of total or partial Polish ancestry, representing about 3% of the U.S. population.
The word Polish / polish changes pronunciation depending on the capitalisation of its first letter.
Capitalization of all nouns still occurs in the German language. But not of modifiers derived from proper names. For example, "deutsche Sprache " In English, noun capitalization started to disappear a couple hundred years ago, but in the Declaration of Independence, most nouns were still capitalized.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is a document of the French Revolution and in the history of human civil rights. It was drafted in 1789 by General Lafayette, the same General who served with Washington during the American Revolution. It is included in the beginning of the constitutions of both the Fourth and Fifth French Republics and is still current.
West Lafayette IN is directly across the Wabash River from its sister city, Lafayette IN. Like many frontier towns, Lafayette was named for General Lafayette, a French officer who significantly aided George Washington’s Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War.
Wikipedia lists municipalities named “Lafayette” in 14 US states plus two more states having census-designated places with that name:
La Fayette, Alabama, a city
Lafayette, California, a city
Lafayette, Colorado, a Home Rule Municipality
LaFayette, Georgia, a city
La Fayette, Illinois, a village
Lafayette, Indiana, a city
LaFayette, Kentucky, a town
Lafayette, Louisiana, a city
Lafayette, Minnesota, a city
LaFayette, New York, a town
Lafayette, Ohio, a village
Lafayette, Madison County, Ohio, a census-designated place
Lafayette, Oregon, a city
Lafayette, Tennessee, a city
Lafayette, Virginia, a census-designated place
Lafayette, Wisconsin