Appointment with Venus was a novel, later made into a film starring David Niven, about a fictional Channel Island during the war.
The British Agriculture ministry réalisés that a prize cow of impeccable bloodlines, named Venus, was accidentally left behind prior to the German occupation.
The British War Office organises a rescue mission to evacuate the cow, led by Niven, and aided by the niece of the hereditary Suzerain of the island, who provides the necessary love-interest, as well as local knowledge.
Meanwhile, the German commandant is himself a dairy farmer, realises the value of the cow, and makes plans to ship her back to the Reich where she can do her racial duty and mate with good Aryan dairy bulls.
It’s a race against time to save Venus from being assimilated into the master-race of dairy cattle.
Venus București, was a Romanian football club based in Bucharest. The club won 8 national titles which came in 1920, 1921, 1929, 1932, 1934, 1937, 1939 and finally in 1940. In 1948, due to communist regime norms that stated that all sport associations had to join a trade-union or a governmental institution, the team was forced to merge with “UCB” (“Uzinele Comunale Bucureşti” – Administration of Sewerage Systems).
The Venus of Willendorf is an 11.1-centimetre-tall (4.4 in) Venus figurine estimated to have been made between about 28,000 and 25,000 BCE. It was found on August 7, 1908 by a workman named Johann Veran or Josef Veram during excavations conducted by archaeologists Josef Szombathy, Hugo Obermaier and Josef Bayer at a paleolithic site near Willendorf, a village in Lower Austria near the town of Krems. It is carved from an oolitic limestone that is not local to the area, and tinted with red ochre. The figurine is now in the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria.
Venus, the second planet in our solar system, is the planet whose size is closest to the size of Earth. Venus is unique in that it rotates in the opposite direction of all the other planets, and it has no moons or rings. A day on Venus lasts longer than a year. It takes 243 Earth days to rotate once on its axis, while its orbit around the Sun takes 225 Earth days.
The Axis powers lost about a quarter of their total troops on the Eastern Front in the Battle of Stalingrad. In addition to the more than 300,000 Germans killed, wounded or missing, Italy, Croatia and Romania each had over 100,000 casualties.
During the war-crime trials at Nuremberg, the Soviets called General Paulus, the German commander at Stalingrad, as a witness for the prosecution. The Soviets had captured Paulus at the end of the Battle of Stalingrad and kept him a prisoner. Even though Nuremberg was in the US zone of occupation, the Soviets were able to smuggle Paulus into Nuremberg and call him as a surprise witness.
On 10 November 1961, Nikita Khrushchev’s administration changed Stalingrad’s name to Volgograd as part of his program of de-Stalinization following Stalin’s death. There remains a strong degree of local support for a reversion to Stalingrad, but intermittent proposals have yet to be accepted by the Russian government. In 2010, Russian monarchists and leaders of the Orthodox organizations demanded that the city should return to its original name Tsaritsyn, but the authorities rejected their proposal.
Despite the lyrics of the theme song of the TV police comedy “Car 54, Where Are You?”, Khrushchev never landed at Idlewild (now JFK Airport). For his 1959 visit, he landed at Andrews AFB near Washington, and went on to New York by train. For his 1960 visit (made as part of the USSR’s UN delegation, not as state leader, in the wake of the U-2 shootdown incident), he came to New York by ship.
Arkady Shevchenko was the highest-ranking Soviet to defect. His career in the Soviet foreign service brought him great privileges and access to power, including working with Gromyko and Khrushchev, accompanying them both on the ship to New York in 1960.
Nonetheless, he had grown to have doubts about the Soviet system. At the time of his defection he was an Undersecretary to the General Secretary of the United Nations, and had been playing a double game, providing regular reports to the US government.
When he realised that his cover was blown and he was being summoned back to Moscow, he tried to persuade his wife to defect with him. She refused, and may have called his superiors in the Soviet government to urge them to stop his defection. She was taken back to Moscow, possibly under heavy sedation, and died shortly afterwards.
Shevchenko never saw his son again.
He tells his story in his autobiography, Breaking with Moscow, which is a fascinating read, both for insights into the Soviet system, and Shevchenko’s increasing doubts about the morality of the Soviet system, leading him to throw away the high privileges he had obtained and risk his life as a soy for the US.
Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko was a Ukrainian poet, writer, artist, public and political figure, as well as folklorist and ethnographer. His literary heritage is regarded to be the foundation of modern Ukrainian literature and, to a large extent, the modern Ukrainian language. Shevchenko is also known for many masterpieces as a painter and an illustrator.
He was a member of the Sts Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood and an academician of the Imperial Academy of Arts. In 1847 Shevchenko was politically convicted for writing in the Ukrainian language, promoting the independence of Ukraine and ridiculing the members of the Russian Imperial House. He was exiled to what is now Fort-Shevchenko, Kazakhstan, on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea.
The Caspian Sea is the largest enclosed inland body of water on Earth by area, thus it is the world’s largest lake. Like the Great Salt Lake and the Dead Sea, it is an endorheic basin, meaning that it has no outflows. Its salinity is about a third of the salinity of most seawater.
The Caspian Sea contains about 3.5 times more water, by volume, than all five of North America’s Great Lakes combined.
The Caspian is a small horse breed native to Northern Iran. Although its original height probably ranged between 9 and 11.2 hands (36-46 inches) it is termed a horse rather than a pony because, size apart, it has much in common with horses in terms of conformation, gaits and character.
The Pontic-Caspian steppe is a broad area of steppe-land on the north side of the Black Sea and stretching to the Caspian Sea. It is believed to be the region where Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor of all Indo-European languages, developed and then spread out, over 6,000 years ago.
The speakers of Proto-Indo-European are believed to have been the people who domesticated the horse.
One of the major characters in C.S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian (one of the Chronicles of Narnia) is Trumpkin the Red Dwarf. Trumpkin is honest and loyal, but expresses his hot temper with alliterative phrases such as “Bulbs and bolsters!”, “Horns and halibuts” and “Thimbles and thunderstorms!”
Cernunnos is a mysterious Gaulish god, thought to have been a fertility god. He is depicted with antlers or horns. He is depicted in numerous reliefs and carvings which have been found throughout the Celtic-Gaulish area. Only one of the depictions gives his name: a relief on a pillar which was discovered underneath the foundations of Notre-Dame in Paris. The Cathedral is located on one of the longest-inhabited areas of Paris, originally known as Lutetia and inhabited by the Celtic Parisii tribe.
The Antlers is an unofficial student group that supports the University of Missouri basketball team. The name Antlers has nothing to do with the University of Missouri. It stems from a dance being performed by the Antlers during a basketball game. The dance closely resembled one from a skit from the 9/18/76 Lily Tomlin Saturday Night Live episode that had recently aired. In the TV skit, Tomlin danced with her hands at the side of her head, fingers outstretched like she had antlers. During the “Missouri Waltz,” at the next game, members of the group performed their new dance with their hands at their head like antlers. A member of press row noticed them doing the dance and dubbed them the Antlers. The Antlers continue to do the Antler dance to this day.
The Border War was the name of the rivalry between athletic teams from the University of Kansas Jayhawks and University of Missouri Tigers. Athletic competition between the two schools began in 1891 and continued until 2012. In 2011, Sports Illustrated described the rivalry as the oldest Division I rivalry west of the Mississippi River, but it has been dormant since Missouri departed the Big 12 Conference for the Southeastern Conference on July 1, 2012.
The last regular-season competition between the two schools was on February 25, 2012, when Kansas defeated Missouri in basketball 87-86 in overtime. Both teams were ranked in the Top 10 at the time.
The Kansas-Missouri Border War is a safe continuation of the actual bloody skirmishes between 1854 and 1861 over the legality of slavery in the nascent state of Kansas, where the issue was to be decided by popular vote according to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. A large number of “border ruffians” from Missouri flooded the territory, not only to vote for slavery but to terrorize abolitionists, and a number of “free-soilers” moved in to counter them. The abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher armed many of them with Sharps rifles, which allegedly became known as “Beecher’s Bibles” for their shipment in wooden crates so labeled. John Brown, later famous for his raid on the Harper’s Ferry arsenal, gained notoriety for leading a massacre of pro-slavery settlers at Potawotamie Creek.
The abolitionist movement has long been viewed as propelled by white Northerners, and the contributions of African Americans and Southerners have been overlooked. African American abolitionists include not only Frederick Douglass, whose memoir, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, (1845) became a bestseller, but also several who were born free, including the Rev. Hosea Easton, sea captain Paul Cuffee, and businessmen James Forten and Robert Purvis. James Forten’s daughter Margaretta, with her mother Charlotte and sisters Sarah and Harriet, co-founded the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society with ten other women. Angelina Grimké Weld and Sarah Moore Grimké, from a prominent South Carolina family, were also firm abolitionists.
Melvin Purvis was an American law enforcement official and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent best know for tracking down nortorious criminals like Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger. He resigned in 1935 to practice law. Purvis served in the United States Army as an intelligence officer during World War II, reaching the rank of colonel. He assisted with compiling evidence against Nazi leaders in the Nuremberg trials.