The Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle in history in terms of tonnage of ships in order of battle and ships sunk, took place off the Philippine Islands, from October 23-26, 1944. The battle involved 216 U.S. warships and 64 Japanese ships and resulted in the destruction of the Japanese Navy including the Japanese Battleship Musashi, one of the largest ever built.
The Imperial Japanese Navy was dissolved in 1945 at the conclusion of World War II. Japan’s current navy is called the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force. It has a fleet of 154 ships and 346 aircraft and consists of approximately 50,000 personnel. Its main tasks are to maintain control of the nation’s sea lanes and to patrol territorial waters.
Operation Olympic was an SPI game depicting the hypothetical invasion of Japan, if the A-bombs hadn’t existed.
It is a solitaire game, because the assumption was that by this time, the Japanese land forces were so decimated that they would have an almost automatic doctrinal approach to defending. The Japanese pieces therefore play according to a set algorithme, while the solitaire player has complete control over the strategy and tactics for the US pieces.
The other main assumption was that the American forces would succeed militarily. The real issue was how many US casualties they would take. The US player can win the battle but lose the game if the casualties are too high.
Lady Adelaide Cadogan was the British author of Illustrated Games of Patience (also known as Illustrated Games of Solitaire or Patience) published in 1875. Her book was the first collection of solitaire card games in the English language, and it listed 24 games.
Today, the Solitaire Central Rulebook offers rules to over 1700 different games.
Adelaide is Australia’s fifth most populous city and one of the few Australian cities without a convict history. Named in honor of Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, queen consort to King William IV of the United Kingdom, the city was founded in 1836 as the planned capital for the freely-settled British Province of South Australia.
Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, was founded in 1833, just three years before Adelaide, Australia. The college - the first in the U.S. to regularly admit women and minority students - was named after Johann Friedrich (or John Frederick) Oberlin, an Alsatian pastor and peacemaker who was considered the Gandhi or Martin Luther King of his day. Oberlin himself never visited the U.S. or the college which still bears his name.
William IV, husband of Queen Adelaide, was one of the most distant kings to succeed to the throne under the ordinary rules of succession.
At one point he was fourth in line, behind George, Prince of Wales; Charlotte of Wales; and Fredrick, Duke of York.
But they all died.
The Charlotte, North Carolina metropolitan area is the largest in the United States that doesn’t have a zoo. However, the North Carolina Zoological Park in Asheboro—which one of America’s largest chimpanzee troops calls home—is only 75 miles away.
Most of Charlotte Bronte’s siblings died of tuberculosis; the eldest sisters, Elizabeth and Maria, were not yet in their teens when they died of it in circumstances very much like the character Helen Burns in Jane Eyre. Sisters Anne and Emily were 29 and 30 when they died; their brother, Branwell also had it, but his death at age 31 was probably accelerated by alcoholism and laudanum and opium addiction.
Charlotte herself was the longest-lived of the siblings, dying at 38. Her death certificate lists tuberculosis as the cause of death, but modern biographers believe that she died from dehydration and malnourishment due to vomiting caused by severe morning sickness (she had married 9 months earlier and was several months pregnant). Her husband, Arthur Bell Nichols, survived her by 51 years, dying in 1906 at age 90, and her father, Patrick Bronte survived all his children, living to age 84.
PLaying off “Bell Nichols”:
Belsnickel (also Belschnickel, Belznickle, Belznickel, Pelznikel, Pelznickel, from pelzen (or belzen, German for to wallop or to drub) and Nickel being a hypocorism of the given name Nikolaus) is a crotchety, fur-clad Christmas gift-bringer figure in the folklore of the Palatinate region of southwestern Germany along the Rhine, the Saarland, and the Odenwald area of Baden-Württemberg. Belsnickel is a man wearing furs and sometimes a mask with a long tongue. He is typically very ragged and disheveled. He wears torn, tattered, and dirty clothes, and he carries a switch in his hand with which to beat naughty children, but also pocketsful of cakes, candies, and nuts for good children. In Lower Austria he is sometimes followed by a creature, called Krampus, covered with bells and dragging chains. Krampus is a wild, horned figure akin to the devil.
SICK AG manufactures lasers and optical scanners. SICK is headquartered in Freiburg DEU, in southwestern Germany, near the Rhine River. The company name SICK is named after Dr. Erwin Sick.
The term ‘laser’ is an acronym for ‘light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation’. The first laser was built in 1960 by Theodore H. Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories. This firm, now known as HRL, was originally the research and development arm of Hughes Aircraft, which was founded by Howard Hughes.
The Howards are one of the most aristocratic families in Britain. The current Duke of Norfolk, the 18th, is the premier Duke in the English peerage and also the premier Earl.
He also holds the hereditary position of Earl Marshal in the Queen’s Household. As such, he is responsible for organising the coronation of a new monarch.
All of the Dukes of Norfolk have been descended from King Edward I.
The two wives of Henry VIII whom he had executed were Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. They were first cousins, both granddaughters of Thomas Howard, the second Duke of Norfolk. Both of them were charged with adultery and treason and their supposed lovers were tortured and executed. Anne Boleyn was probably 31 when she married Henry and 35 when she was executed and the evidence for her adultery seems unconvincing.
Catherine Howard was only 16 or 17 when she married the 49 year old Henry and 18 or 19 when she was executed. There is stronger evidence, including a love letter in her distinctive handwriting, that she had had a romance while married to Henry, and Archbishop Cranmer, a political enemy of the Howards, seized the opportunity to discredit them.
According to folklore, Catherine Howard’s last words before laying her head on the axeman’s block at the Tower were “I die a Queen, but I would rather have died as Mrs. Thomas Culpeper.” Not that it would have mattered much, since Culpeper had already lost his own head. She was buried in an unmarked grave in the nearby chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula, inside the Tower walls, where the bodies of Catherine’s cousins Anne and George Boleyn also lay.
The Battle of Culpeper Court House was an American Civil War battle fought September 13, 1863, near Culpeper, Virginia, between the cavalry of the Union Army of the Potomac and that of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. the Union victory was one of the few times J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry was defeated and opened up the Culpeper region to Federal control, a prelude to the subsequent Bristoe Campaign.
Gaetano Donizetti’s 1835 opera Maria Stuarda is based on the life of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. It features an invented confrontation between her and Queen Elizabeth I; in fact, the two had never met. During the rehearsal, the soprano playing Mary Stuart delivered her lines denouncing Elizabeth so passionately that the soprano playing Elizabeth took offense and rushed at “Mary”, pulling her hair, punching her and biting her.
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Evita began as a 1976 concept album billed as a “rock opera.” The record’s success led to productions in London’s West End in 1978, winning the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Musical, and on Broadway a year later, where it was the first British musical to receive the Tony Award for Best Musical.
Phineas, Wilder, and Clio is not (or it may not be) the name of a law firm, or of an opera. They are the names of the first three children of film actor and director Mary Stuart Masterson.
After starring in Billy Wilder’s film version of Sunset Boulevard, Gloria Swanson worked with actor Richard Stapley (aka Richard Wyler) and cabaret singer/pianist Dickson Hughes on an adaptation titled Boulevard! Stapley and Hughes first approached Swanson about appearing in a musical revue they had written, About Time (based on Time). Swanson stated that she would return to the stage only in a musical version of her comeback film. Within a week, Stapley and Dickson had written three songs which Swanson approved.
Although Paramount Pictures, who owned the rights to the movie, gave verbal permission to proceed with the musical, there was no formal legal option. In the late 1950s, Paramount withdrew its consent, leading to the demise of the project.