[Not in play: nitpick re. post #38152, Ingolstadt is in Bavaria, DEU, not in AUT]
In play:
In the 1988 film A Fish Called Wanda, Kevin Kline’s character, Otto, thinks of a Porsche when he hears about a girl named Portia and asks “Why did they name her after a car?” Kline won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance.
Oh! :smack: Thank you! Yes, I see it now, it’s 50 miles N of Munich, and 60 miles S of Nuremburg.
The 1986-1993 Porsche 959 was technologically ahead of its time. The twin-turbocharged car was the world’s fastest street-legal production car at the time. It was originally designed as a rally car, not a sports car. It was one of the first high-performance vehicles with all-wheel drive and it had the most advanced all-wheel-drive system in any production car.
Porsche 959s finished 1st and 2nd in the 1986 Paris–Dakar Rally. The Porsche 959 provided the basis for Porsche’s first all-wheel drive Carrera 4 model. Its performance convinced Porsche executives to make all-wheel drive standard on all 911 Turbos starting in 1994.
Due to security problems in Mauretania, since 2009 the Paris-Dakar Rally, now known just as “The Dakar”, has actually been held in South America, with most of the route in Chile and Argentina.
The original RMS Mauretania (1906) was the world’s largest ship until the completion of RMS Olympic (1911) which, in turn, was the largest ocean liner in the world for two periods during 1911–13, interrupted only by the brief tenure of the slightly larger RMS Titanic. Titanic had the same dimensions as Olympic, but it had higher gross tonnage owing to revised interior configuration.
In 1913, the cost of a 3rd-class ticket to cross the Atlantic was $17.
The final vessel of White Star Line’s Olympic class, RMS Britannic, was sunk in the Mediterranean near Greece by a German mine when being used as a WWI hospital ship. Britannic was the largest ship lost in the First World War. The loss of the ship was compensated by the award of SS Bismarck to the White Star Line as part of post-war reparations. She became the RMS Majestic.
The wreck was located and explored by Jacques-Yves Cousteau in 1975. The vessel is the largest passenger ship on the sea floor, followed by Titanic.
In the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal of WWII, the light cruiser USS Juneau (CL-52) was sunk. 687 men were lost, including the five Sullivan brothers of Waterloo IA, in November 1942. Its wreck was found last week by Paul Allen.
Guadalcanal Diary is a 1943 World War II war film directed by Lewis Seiler, featuring Preston Foster, Lloyd Nolan, William Bendix, Richard Conte, Anthony Quinn and the film debut of Richard Jaeckel. It was based on the book of the same name by Richard Tregaskis.
Since there were no black members of the unit to be the first to be killed, Anthony Quinn as the Mexican guy served the role. Richard Jaeckel survived, as he also did later in The Dirty Dozen.
Guadalcanal, an island in the South Pacific Solomon Islands group, is named for a village in the province of Seville, in Andalusia, Spain. The village was the birthplace of Pedro de Ortega Valencia, a member of the Spanish expedition which explored the Pacific and landed in the Solomons in 1568. The indigenous name for the island is Isatabu.
The aforementioned Spanish expedition named the Solomon Islands after the wealthy biblical King Solomon. It is said that they were given this name in the mistaken assumption that they contained great riches. The Solomon Islands achieved independence from England in 1978. Currently, Solomon Islands is a constitutional monarchy with Queen Elizabeth II as its head of state.
The Pacific swallow (Hirundo tahitica) is one of the few species of land birds of the Pacific islands that remains unthreatened by invasive exotic species, and in fact has spread to southeast Asia. They differ from the Barn Swallow mainly by their lack of the long “swallow tail”. I can see a pair of them on a wire few meters from my window, as I write.
The portion of food, drink, or other material that will move through the neck in one swallow by an average human is called a bolus.
A formal white tie dress coat is sometimes called a swallow-tail coat or claw-hammer coat because of the shape of its long tails.
Spiders recycle their webs by eating them.
Hey boson, I don’t see the connection between the 2…?
In play:
Our middle ears contain three tiny bones informally called the hammer, anvil, and stirrup. These ossicles are named because of their distinctive shapes. And while spiders don’t have ears, they can still hear you coming because the hairs on their legs vibrate.
Spiders recycle their webs?!? And they can hear us coming with vibrating legs??? Brrrr…I’m not arachnophobic but these facts give me the creeps…
In play:
JRR Tolkien’s works contain giant spiders as fearsome and disgusting antagonists. When he was an infant, he lived in South Africa and was bitten by a tarantula, but said that he did not remember the incident and had no particular fear of spiders. He originally wrote The Hobbit for his son Michael, who was afraid of spiders, and created the giant spiders to play on that fear.
The Cleveland Spiders were a Major League Baseball team which played between 1887 and 1899 in Cleveland, Ohio. The team played at National League Park from 1889 to 1890 and at League Park (which still exists) from 1891 to 1899. They were previously called the Cleveland Forest Citys or Cleveland Blues, in the then-major American Association and later the National League. After the team was destroyed by mismanagement, it was replaced by the American League Cleveland Lakeshores/Blues/Indians.
The Broadway production of Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark was described early on as “the most technically complex show ever on Broadway, with 27 aerial sequences of characters flying” and engaging in aerial combat." And during the production, four cast members and two stunt performers were injured.
The longest-running show on Broadway is The Phantom of the Opera, which opened on January 26, 1988, and is still going strong with over 12,500 performances. Second on the list is the 1996 revival of Chicago, which opened on November 14, 1996, and is still running with over 8800 performances. In third place is The Lion King, which opened on November 13, 1997, and has over 8400 performances to date.
The top 3 longest-running musicals in London’s West End are Les Miserables (1985-present), Phantom (1986-present), and Blood Brothers (1988-2012).
Two Norman knights who took part in the Conquest of Britain in 1066, Robert d’Ouilly and Roger d’Ivry, were well known as blood brothers. It was said that they had agreed beforehand to share the profits of this adventure. They both survived Hastings and were granted lands in Oxfordshire and elsewhere, then worked together on various projects such as Wallingford Castle.