The Dakota Dinosaur Museum in Dickinson, North Dakota, houses twelve full scale dinosaurs, thousands of rock, mineral and fossil specimens and a complete real Triceratops and Edmontosaurus.
not in play: ElvisL1ives, the HMS Prince of Wales was heavily damaged but not sunk by the Bismarck. The ship was sunk, along with the HMS Repulse by the Japanese Army and Navy Planes, on 10 December 1941.
Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 into a prominent family in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her grandfather was one of the founders of Amherst College. Despite her family’s strong ties to the community, Dickinson lived most of her life in relative isolation in the family house, and she was considered an eccentric by others in the community.
Fewer than 12 of her poems were published while she was still alive. Most of her work was discovered by her sister after Dickinson’s death. A complete collection of her poetry became available for the first time when Thomas H. Johnson published The Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1955.
Lyndon Baines Johnson liked to tell the story of a teacher during the Great Depression who was desperate for work. He interviewed with the school board of a remote Texas county, the chairman of which told him, “Around here, some people think the world is flat, and some think it’s round.”
The teacher eagerly said, “I can teach it either way!”
LBJ’s Presidential Library is on the UT campus in Austin TX. Of the thirteen US NARA Presidential Libraries, seven have their President’s grave sites on their grounds: Hoover, FDR, Truman, Ike, Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. LBJ’s gravesite is at the family cemetery at the LBJ Ranch near Johnson City TX, some 65 miles west of his Austin library.
Austin Dillon won the 2018 Daytona 500, bringing the #3 Chevrolet to the winner’s circle for the first time since Dale Earnhardt’s death. After winning NASCAR Rookie of the Year in the Truck Series in 2010, Dillon won the Truck Series championship in 2011, and later the Nationwide Series championship in 2013, also one year after his Rookie of the Year title in 2012. He holds the record for most consecutive poles in the Nationwide Series with four.
Matt Dillon is a fictional character featured on both the radio and television versions of Gunsmoke. He serves as the U.S. Marshal of Dodge City, Kansas. He was portrayed by the actor James Arness over a 20-year span on TV.
Matthew Dillon, who was born in February of 1964, is an American actor and film director. He made his feature film debut in 1979 in the film Over the Edge. In 2002, he wrote and directed the film City of Ghosts, starring himself, James Caan, and Gérard Depardieu.
Dillon’s paternal grandmother was the sister of comic strip artist Alex Raymond, the creator of Flash Gordon.
Matthew Dillon starred in the movie, My Bodyguard (1980). It was the film debut for Adam Baldwinand Dean Devlin, and also for Jennifer Beals in an uncredited role. It was also Joan Cusack’s first major film.
Lord Devlin was a Lord of Appeal in ordinary, one of the British Law Lords when the House of Lords was the final court of appeal for the United Kingdom.
He retired after only 15 years on the bench, the shortest term necessary to qualify for a pension. The commonly accepted reason for his short tenure was that he was bored out of his wits by the large number of dreary revenue cases the Lords had to decide during his time in office.
Lord Liverpool, British prime minister in the early 1810s, appears in Susanna Clarke’s magical alternative history novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, as do such other real-world figures as the Duke of Portland, the Duke of Wellington, Lord Byron, King George III and six of his plump, ne’er-do-well royal duke sons.
Businessman James Buchanan Duke (1856-1925) made his fortune in tobacco and cigarettes. He was the first, in 1885, to use an automated cigarette rolling machine. By 1890 he supplied 40% of the cigarettes in the US. In 1924, one year before he died, he founded the university that bears his name, Duke University. James Buchanan Duke‘s statue stands in front of the west campus quad.
Although most of George III’s sons were decidedly not svelte, the exception was Prince Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, who eventually became King of Hanover. He was tall and slim, as befitted a former cavalry officer. He was also the most conservative and politically effective of the royal dukes, with a bad reputation, leading to speculation that he had killed his valet, had fathered a child on his sister, Princess Sophia, and planned to kill little Vickie so he could become King himself.
In spite of that, he was one of the most happily married of the royal dukes, a rarity amongst the Hanoverians. From the death of Princess Charlotte of Wales in childbirth until the birth of Victoria, he had a reasonable chance to have become King of Britain. He had to settle for being King of Hanover when his brother William IV died childless.
The largest man-made lake in North Carolina is Lake Norman, named after former Duke Power president Norman Atwater Cocke. Lake Norman is northwest of Charlotte NC.
Norman Bethune was a Canadian doctor of Scottish descent, and also a communist, who participated in the Spanish Civil War, where he developed a mobile blood transfusion service, and later in the Chinese Civil War. Mao wrote an essay In Memory of Norman Bethune which school children in China memorised. Bethune is one of the few Westerners who is memorialized in numerous statues across the People’s Republic,
The Dr. Norman Bethune Collegiate Institute is a high school in Toronto, Ontario. It partners with Beijing#15 High School in Beijing, People’s Republic of China.
Following the Norman conquest, William the Conqueror stripped Anglo-Saxons of their lands. Many of them, including groups of nobles, fled the country for Scotland, Ireland, Scandinavia and the Byzantine Empire. The latter was a popular destination for English nobles and soldiers, as the Byzantines needed mercenaries, and the English became a majority in the elite Varangian Guard, from which the emperor’s bodyguard was drawn.
Mozart’s “The Abduction from the Seraglio” tells of the rescue of Konstanze and her English servant Blonde from the harem of the Turkish court of Pasha Selim, by Konstanze’s fiance Belmonte. Much of the opera is spoken, including all of Pasha Selim’s role, since the short time available to Mozart to finish the work before its premiere left him unable to score it to his satisfaction.
I’ve seen the show set aboard the Orient Express instead of in Constantinople’s Topkapi Palace, and will soon see a production set aboard the USS Enterprise.
At 1,504 feet long (LOA, overall length), the longest ship ever built is the oil tanker, Seawise Giant. She was sunk in May 1988 in shallow waters during the Iran–Iraq War, but was later salvaged and restored to service.
At 1,122 feet long (LOA, overall length), the longest naval vessel ever built is the aircraft carrier, USS Enterprise CVN-65. She is decommissioned and awaiting disassembly.
Enterprise Rent-A-Car was established in St. Louis, Missouri in 1957 by Jack C. Taylor. Originally known as “Executive Leasing Company,” in 1969, Taylor renamed the company “Enterprise” after the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, on which he served during World War II. The first US Navy ship to bear the name USS Enterprise was a Continental Navy sloop-of-war that served in Lake Champlain during the American Revolutionary War.
In July 1609, French explorer Samuel de Champlain encountered the lake that now bears his name. Champlain named the lake after himself as the first European to map and describe it. Champlain was the first European to explore and describe the Great Lakes. A statue of Champlain with a guide is on Isle La Motte, in northwestern Vermont, on the shore of Lake Champlain.
