Amish people will remain in a courtroom with someone who has been shunned by their community while that person testifies, if they must, but will avert their gaze and give no indication that they acknowledge that person’s presence.
(As I learned from a rural Ohio custody dispute in the mid-1990s).
Amish-themed novels are currently a popular subgenre of romantic fiction. They are sometimes nicknamed “bonnet rippers”, punning on the term “bodice ripper” used for romantic historical fiction. They are far more popular among Evangelical Christian readers than among the Amish themselves, many of whom do not read fiction.
The Bonnet Carré Spillway is a Louisiana flood control operation that allows floodwaters from the Mississippi River to flow into Lake Pontchartrain and thence into the Gulf of Mexico. A similar Atchafalaya Spillway can divert water into the Atchafalaya River. (Pronounced chaffa-lye.)
The Lake Pontchartrain Causeway is a fixed link composed of two parallel bridges crossing Lake Pontchartrain in southern Louisiana, United States. The Causeway is the longest bridge over water (continuous) in the world. The original Causeway was a two-lane span, measuring 23.86 miles and opened in 1956. A parallel two-lane span, 1/100th of a mile longer than the original, opened on May 10, 1969.
The deepest part of Lake Pontchartrain is 65’ but the average depth on this 630 sq. mi. lake is only 12-14’. In late summer it is as warm as bathwater. One of the rivers that feeds it is Tchefuncte River. Local drummer, Stanton Moore, composed a piece called Tchefuncte as the word sounds like a drumming pattern.
Lake Pontchartrain is an estuary, which is a partially enclosed coastal body of brackish water with one or more rivers or streams flowing into it, and with a free connection to the open sea.
Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee are the names of rivers that are tributary to the Mississippi. After the rivers were explored and named, states were named after them when they were organized.
Behind the:
2,372,000 mi² — Amazon River
1,440,000 mi² — Congo River
1,256,000 mi² — Nike River
the
1,237,000 mi² —- Mississippi River (with the Missouri and Illinois Rivers) drains the 4th-largest watershed of all river systems on earth.
The 30-mile stretch along the Mississippi River near St. Louis MO, from where the Illinois River drains into the Mississippi to where the Missouri drains into the Mississippi, provides an interesting view of the river “superhighway” infrastructure that defined some early main transportation routes.
gMap: Google Maps
Before setting out on their Epic journey up the Missouri River and across the Rockies to the Colombia River and the Pacific Ocean, Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1803-1804 near the present-day Wood River, Illinois, gathering supplies and preparing the boats and personnel that would accompany them. The left on May 14th, 1804, not to return until September 1806.
“The Captains’ Return” is a 23-foot tall bronze statue in St. Louis of Lewis and Clark and their Newfoundland dog, Seaman. It was installed in 2006 at the foot of the Eads Bridge on the west shore of the Mississippi River. When the river flooded, the statue was often in or under water.
Picture: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/The_Captains'_Return_statue_and_Eads_Bridge.JPG
(I have seen it wet like this, and also high and dry, on several trips to STL.)
The statue stood there for 8 years until it was removed, and cleaned and restored in 2014. In 2016 it was moved closer to the Gateway Arch and, more importantly, on 17 feet higher ground.
The Gateway Arch is a 630-foot monument in St. Louis. It is the world’s tallest arch, and the tallest man-made monument in the Western Hemisphere. It is located at the site of St. Louis’s founding on the west bank of the Mississippi River.
The Arch was designed by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen in 1947. Due to delays in funding and land acquisition, construction finally began on February 12, 1963, and was completed on October 28, 1965. The monument opened to the public on June 10, 1967.
While Louis XIV, Louis XV and Louis XVI followed each other in numerical order on the French throne, none of the three were father and son. Louis XVI was the grandson of Louis XV, and Louis XV, who succeeded to the throne at age 5, was the great-grandson of Louis XIV.
Uninterrupted descent of the throne has been rather rare in English/British history. There has only once been a succession of five generations in the direct line: John - Henry III - Edward I - Edward II - Edward III in the 13th century.
The next longest run, of four generations in the direct line, did not occur until six centuries later, in the 19th and 20th centuries: Victoria - Edward VII - George V - Edward VIII.
George V of Hanover and George III of Great Britain were both blind. The Hanoverian from childhood accident and illness affecting the two eyes separately, and the British monarch in later years of his reign, from cataracts.
The lens of our eyes is made of mostly water and protein. Normally the protein is arranged in a way that keeps the lens clear and lets light pass through it, but as we age, some of the protein may clump together and start to cloud a small area of the lens. This is a cataract. By the age of 80, more than half of all Americans will either have a cataract or have had cataract surgery. A cataract can occur in either or both eyes. It cannot spread from one eye to the other.
The cataracts of the Nile are shallow lengths (or white water rapids) of the Nile River, between Aswan and Khartoum. Counted going upstream (from north to south):
In Egypt:
The First Cataract cuts through Aswan. Its former location was selected for the construction of Aswan Low Dam, the first dam built across the Nile.
In Sudan:
The Second Cataract (or Great Cataract) was in Nubia and is now submerged under Lake Nasser.
The Third Cataract at Tombos/Hannek.
The Fourth Cataract is in the Manasir Desert, and since 2008, is submerged under the reservoir of Merowe Dam.
The Fifth Cataract is near the confluence of the Nile and Atbarah Rivers.
The Sixth Cataract is where the Nile cuts through the Sabaluka pluton, close to Bagrawiyah.
The city of Aswan in Egypt was once known as Swenett, and later known as Syene. The stone quarries of ancient Egypt located here were celebrated for their stone, and they furnished material for the colossal statues, obelisks, and monolithal shrines that are found throughout Egypt.
Construction on the first Aswan Dam, now known as the Aswan Low Dam, was begun by the British in 1898 and was completed in 1902. Upon completion, it was the largest masonry dam in the world. The dam was designed to provide storage of annual floodwater and augment dry season flows to support greater irrigation development. It worked as designed, but provided inadequate storage capacity for planned development and was raised twice, between 1907 and 1912 and again in 1929–1933. These improvements still did not meet irrigation demands, and this led to the construction of the Aswan High Dam 3.7 mi upstream.
In the 1960s, before the construction of the Aswan High Dam, the monuments at Abu Simbel were cut into 20-ton blocks, moved to a new location 65 meters higher, and reassembled, to save them from the rising water,. The cost, from donations, was 300-million dollars (today’s value).
The ton is a unit of weight. The tun is a unit of liquid volume, historically used to measure wine by volume. The two terms are etymologically related. A tun of wine has usually been about one long ton in weight. In the imperial system a tun is 210 imperial gallons, while in the US system a tun is 252 fluid gallons.
A hogshead is one-quarter of a tun.
