Scotch whisky is malt whisky or grain whisky made in Scotland. All Scotch whisky was originally made from malted barley, but commercial distilleries began introducing whisky made from wheat and rye in the late 18th century.
Many Scotch whisky drinkers will refer to a unit for drinking as a dram.
In a September 1970 episode, Monty Python’s Flying Circus profiled the undeservedly obscure Scotch poet Ewan McTeagle, whose “poems” were all prose requests for money, including his masterpieces, “Can I Have Fifty Pounds to Mend the Shed?” and “What’s Twenty Quid to the Bloody Midland Bank?”
http://www.montypython.net/scripts/mcteagle.phpField Marshall Montgomery of Alamein, known as “Monty”, was renowned for his prickliness and lack of tact. Even his friend and supporter, Churchill is said to have summed him up: “In defeat, unbeatable; in victory, unbearable.”
El Alamein is a town in Egypt, best known for the World War II battles that took place near there. Cemeteries for those killed in the battle are near the current town. The German cemetery is an ossuary, built in the style of a medieval fortress. The Italian cemetery is a mausoleum containing 5,200 tombs. The Commonwealth war cemetery, has graves of soldiers from various countries who fought on the Allied side. Buried here are 6,425 identified Commonwealth service personnel and 815 unidentified ones, besides 102 of other nationalities.
Rudyard Kipling proposed the epitaph to put on tombstones operated by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission for unidentified remains: “A soldier of the Great War, known only to God.”
The Tilde and the Grave Accent appear on the upper left corner of the standard English USA keyboard, but both are impossible to use in any meaningful sense in American English. Where they are used, they occur as diacritical marks, which can be applied using a mechanical typewriter as a strike-over, but that is impossible on a computer text entry field. It is a wasted key position, that could have been used for familiar symbols, such a Cent of Degree. A glaring example of how nothing is ever designed by people who actually use it.
The tilde is not only used as diacritical mark as written above. It is used as logical negation in symbolic logic so ~A means NOT A
According to Wikipedia, there are at least six different ‘tilde-like’ Unicode characters.
These include the tilde, the small tilde, the tilde operator (used in mathematics, as described in the previous post), the swung dash, the wave dash, and the fullwidth tilde.
Who knew?
Mark Twain, the name used by Samuel Clemens in his writings, is from the determination of water depth using lead lines on riverboats. Mark Twain stands for "two fathoms (or 12 feet) of water. ETA: As far as can be determined, Mark Twain did not use Wikipedia to research his books.
Mark Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut’s only son and oldest child, was named after Mark Twain… During the Vietnam War, he filed an application with the draft board to be considered a conscientious objector, which was denied. After taking the psychological examination, he was given a psychiatric 4F classification and avoided conscription into the U.S. military.
A conscientious objector is an individual who has claimed the right to refuse to perform military service on the grounds of freedom of thought, conscience, or religion.
The first recorded conscientious objector, Maximilianus, was conscripted into the Roman army in the year 295, but told his superiors that because of his religious convictions he could not serve in the military. He was executed for this, and was later canonized as Saint Maximilian.
According to Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s 1915 memoir The Passing of the Armies, virtually every U.S. Army officer who wanted a brevet promotion was given one in the weeks after the April 1865 Confederate surrender at Appomattox. Chamberlain thought the grasping for largely-honorary promotions after the conclusion of hostilities was unseemly.
Joshua Tree National Park is located in southeastern California. A U.S. National Monument since 1936, it was declared a U.S. National Park in 1994 when the U.S. Congress passed the California Desert Protection Act. It covers a land area of 790,636 acres, an area slightly larger than the state of Rhode Island.
The Joshua Tree was the fifth studio album by Irish rock band U2, released in 1987. In 2014, it was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry.
Joshua, Son of None is a novel about the cloning of JFK, and attempts to raise the clone, Joshua, with the same life experiences as JFK, leading him to become president as well.
The title is a play on the description of the biblical Joshua, who is named as “Joshua, son of Nun.”
According to the Old Testament books of Exodus, Numbers and Joshua, Joshua was Moses’ assistant. Joshua was one of the twelve spies of Israel sent by Moses to explore the land of Canaan. After the death of Moses, he led the Israelite tribes in the conquest of Canaan, and allocated the land to the tribes.
Joshua also holds a position of respect among Muslims. According to Islamic tradition, he was, along with Caleb, one of the two believing spies whom Moses had sent to spy the land of Canaan. All Muslims also see Joshua as the leader of the Israelites, following the death of Moses.
In her 1973 political thriller Joshua Son of None, author Nancy Freedman was careful never to actually name the assassinated President, but her description of him as a young, inspiring, progressive leader slain in a Dallas motorcade in November 1963 leaves the reader in no doubt that she was describing John F. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts. His eventual clone, Joshua Francis Kellogg, even has the same initials.
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was a 33 year old college professor when he volunteered for the Union army in 1862. His college, Bowdoin, disapproved of his enlisting and he took a leave of absence, supposedly to study languages in Europe. He was fluent in nine languages other than English: Greek, Latin, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac.
After a distinguished career, he died of his lingering wartime wounds in 1914 at Portland, Maine, at the age of eighty-five. Beside him as he died was Dr. Abner O. Shaw of Portland, one of the two surgeons who had operated on him in Petersburg 50 years previously and had refused to give him up when other surgeons said that his wounds were mortal. He was the last Civil War veteran to die as a result of wounds from the war.
Former Maj. Gen. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (a hero of mine) was awarded the Medal of Honor for his leadership of the 20th Maine infantry regiment at the Battle of Gettysburg, and after the Civil War served four terms as Governor of Maine. He volunteered, at age 70, to serve in the Spanish-American War, but was refused, to his great disappointment.
During the Second Battle of Petersburg, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, motioning a forward charge, was shot through the right hip and groin. The Minié ball cut through his bladder and urethra, exiting his left hip. He feared that falling in front of his men might derail their momentum, so he stuck his saber in the ground and held himself upright on his saber for several minutes until he collapsed and lay semi-conscious from loss of blood. When he finally arrived at the field hospital, Chamberlain was close to death but asked the surgeons to leave him and see to the soldiers first.
Somehow, he was back at the front of his brigade within a few months. During the course of the war, Chamberlain was wounded six times and fell gravely ill twice. He returned to command quickly each time, though still weak and in pain. Chamberlain’s perseverance earned him the respect of his comrades, who called him “the Lion of the Union.”