Prince Henry, newly created Duke of Sussex on his wedding day Saturday, is only the second person to hold that ducal title. The first was a son of King George III, by whom the American colonies were lost - colonies that would become the United States of America, in which Meghan Markle would be born and raised, later to marry… well, you know.
The town of Colonie NY, near Albany and in Albany County, was formed in 1895 after the rural residents of the town of Watervliet opposed the state’s proposal to transform the entire town into a city of Watervliet. Within the town of Colonie are two villages, one also known as the village of Colonie and the other known as the village of Menands. Colonie was once a part of Rensselaerwyck manor. The north town line of Colonie borders Schenectady County, and Saratoga County, marked by the Mohawk River. The east town line is the border of Rensselaer County, marked by the Hudson River. Colonie lies near the junction of the Hudson and the Mohawk Rivers.
Mohawk Industries is an American flooring manufacturer based in Calhoun, Georgia, United States. It produces floor covering products for residential and commercial applications in North America and residential applications in Europe. Products include carpet and rugs, ceramic tile, natural stone and hardwood flooring, laminates, sheet vinyl and luxury vinyl tile.
The TV show Dukes of Hazzard was set in the fictional Hazzard County, Georgia. The first five episodes were shot on location in Conyers and Covington, Georgia as well as some locations in Atlanta. Production was then moved to Burbank, California.
In 1876, Dr. David Burbank, a dentist from Maine, purchased over 4,600 acres in Southern California and this became the city of Burbank. In 1937, the first power from Hoover Dam was distributed over Burbank’s own electricity lines. This was in part because back in 1928, Burbank was one of the first 13 cities to join the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, one of the largest suppliers of water in the world. This contrasted with other San Fernando Valley communities that obtained water through political annexation to Los Angeles.
Tom’s of Maine, now controlled by Colgate-Palmolive, claims to use only natural ingredients in its toothpaste and other personal care products. Officially headquartered in Kennebunk, its all-natural products from the natural north woods are made in an industrial park in the unlovely city of Sanford.
There have been four warships in the United States Navy named the USS Maine, the first of which was an armored cruiser destroyed under disputed circumstances in Havana harbor, Cuba, in 1898, helping to precipitate the Spanish-American War. The fourth is an Ohio-class Trident ballistic missile submarine launched in 1994 and still in commission.
The USS Maine’s mainmast is in Arlington National Cemetery, and her foremast is at the US Naval Academy.
Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, which is over 600 acres in size,contains the remains of more than 400,000 people from the United States and 11 other countries, buried there since the 1860s. Nearly 5,000 unknown soldiers are buried at The cemetery. Arlington averages 27 to 30 funerals, including interments and inurnments, each weekday, and six to eight services on Saturdays.
The intricacies of the English language can sometimes be baffling for non-anglos.
I once spent 15 minutes explaining to a francophone acquaintance that “weekdays” was not the same thing as “days of the week.”
Despite the indignation of the Académie_française, “les immortels”, modern French includes a number of wordsborrowed from English. A cheating spouse knows what is meant by “le dirty weekend”, for instance.
The longest running West End musical Les Miserables and the longest running Broadway musical The Phantom of the Opera are both based on books written in French. Andrew Lloys Webber picked up a copy of the latter in a used NYC bookstore for $2 before he wrote the musical.
Well, hell. double ninja’ed
*The Phantom *is an American adventure comic strip, first published by Lee Falk in February 1936, and still running in 2018 in 583 newspapers worldwide. The main character, the Phantom, is a fictional costumed crime-fighter who operates from the fictional African country of Bangalla.
Referring to what is today surely the most famous fictional African country invented for comics, due to the success of the film Black Panther, the town of Wauconda, Illinois has been besieged with phone calls proclaiming “Wauconda forever!”.
The Panther (also commonly known as the Black Panther) is a large member of the Big Cat family, native to Asia, Africa and the Americas. The Panther is not a distinct species itself but is the general name used to refer to any black colored feline of the Big Cat family, most notably Leopards and Jaguars.
Panthers were called catamounts in Vermont until their extirpation in the late 1800s. In the past 30 years there have been scattered reports of catamounts’ possible return to Vermont (the most heavily-forested American state), perhaps from Canada, but there have been no scientifically-verified sightings to date.
Despite the similar spelling, “catamount” and “catamite” are completely different.
“And now for something completely different,” as spoken by John Cleese, was a frequent catchphrase for the transition from one sketch to another on Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
In the mid-1980’s, John Cleese did a series of commercials for Compaq, who were trying to compete with IBM in the development of personal computers. The company grew in the 1990’s, but was eventually bought by Hewlett-Packard and the name as faded from memory.
Not in play: One of my first computers was a compaq.
Still not in play: Some of the commericals: - YouTube