Vampires are traditionally said to be allergic to garlic, but those in the George R.R. Martin horror novel Fevre Dream - set along the Mississippi River before the American Civil War - have no problems with it.
Martin Sheen has received several Emmy and Golden Globe awards. He has appeared in five films that were nominated for the Best Picture Oscar: Apocalypse Now (1979), Gandhi (1982), JFK (1991) The Departed (2006) and Selma (2014). Of those, Gandhi and The Departed are winners in the category. However, he has never been nominated for an Academy Award.
The Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for Edmund Winston Pettus, a Confederate brigadier general and eventual U.S. Senator, is a bridge in Selma, Alabama. It is infamous as the site of the conflict of Bloody Sunday (March 7, 1965), where armed officers attacked peaceful civil rights demonstrators.
The SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior on 10 November 1975. Her crew of 29 perished, and none of the bodies was ever recovered. In Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad is the line,
With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more
Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty
Actually, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald was carrying 26,116 tons of taconite iron ore that day.
(But the lyrics are close enough)
That taconite ore was mined in the Mesabi Iron Range of Minnesota, one of the largest deposits of the material. The Great Lakes make (made?) a convenient route to take it to the steelmaking areas of Pittsburgh and the Ohio River valley, near coal deposits. The route didn’t go the other way because steel requires more coal than iron ore.
The Malleable Iron Range is not a geographic feature, nor is it related to mining iron ore. It is—rather was—a company that made wood-burning stoves starting in 1896. They later branched out into coal-burning and oil-burning stoves, then electric stoves; they also made other kitchen appliances.
Stovepipe Wells is a small way-station in the northern part of Death Valley, the desert valley located in Eastern California, in the northern Mojave Desert and bordering the Great Basin Desert. Other names include Stove Pipe Wells Hotel and Stovepipe Wells Hotel. It is commonly referred to as Stovepipe Wells Village. The settlement is now registered as California Historical Landmark #826.
A stovepipe hat was a type of top hat worn mainly in the 19th century, made of silk or other materials and having a very tall, cylindrical, flat-topped crown. The style was popularized in the United States by Abraham Lincoln during his presidency; one of Lincoln’s hats is kept on display at the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.
Prior to silk hats, European hats were made from felt. Felt in turn was made from fur, and the best fur for felt was beaver fur. The need for beaver pelts to make hats drove the economic development of Canada, first under the French, and then under the British. The trading patterns between European-Canadian fur companies (such as the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North-West Company), with indigenous peoples of North America, was the early driving force in Canadian exploration and east-west trade. By the early 1800s, traders from Montreal had developed an intensive trading network that stretched half-way across the continent, to the rich fur areas of Lake Athabaska and Great Slave Lake.
Comment:
Not when you buy things by the dozen. If a dozen eggs are 4 shillings, each egg is 4 pence. As well, 12 is more easily divisible than 10: 12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6, which 10 is only divisible by 2 and 5. Greater divisibility makes mental math in the market easier to do.
“The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” a song about a man famous for wearing a coon skin hat, was originally recorded by Bill Hayes and hit $1 on Billboard’s charts. Hayes later found fame as Doug Williams on the daytime soap Days of Our Lives. He also found love, marrying co-star Susan Seaforth. The couple was so popular that they were featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1976, the only soap opera stars to hold that distinction to date.
Per Wiki, the M-28 or M-29 Davy Crockett Weapon System was a tactical nuclear recoilless gun (smoothbore) for firing the M-388 nuclear projectile, deployed by the United States during the Cold War. It was one of the smallest nuclear weapon systems ever built, with a yield between 10 and 20 tons TNT equivalent (40–80 Gigajoules). It is named after American folk hero, soldier, and congressman Davy Crockett.
The 155mm W82 and W48 nuclear artillery shells were designed to be fired from the M198 medium towed howitzer. The M198 has been in service since 1979.
After back-to-back American horse racing Triple Crown winners in 1977 (Seattle Slew) and 1978 (Affirmed), Spectacular Bid won the 1979 Kentucky Derby and Preakness, only to come in third in the Belmont Stakes.
Belmonte, the hero of Mozart’s opera “The Abduction from the Seraglio”, was transformed by librettist and producer Josh Shaw into Captain James T. Belmonte for the Pacific Opera production of “Star Trek: Abduction”, which includes a dancing chorus of Klingons and a ton of English puns. It’s on Youtube and it’s hysterical - tenor Brian Cheney knows all of Shatner’s favorite poses and line-delivery methods. We just saw it in Orlando.
Two of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s grandsons, twins Brian and John, served as train-bearers for Meghan Markel at the wedding ceremony last month.
Ninja’ed, again!
The tradition of a bride wearing a white wedding dress was begun in 1840, when Queen Victoria wore a white gown trimmed with lace. Later, people assumed that the color white was intended to symbolize virginity.
The custom of decorating a tree at Christmas was also adopted by British, and soon American, popular culture because of Queen Victoria’s influence. Although it was part of royal household custom since the first Hanoverian kings came to the throne, only after her marriage to Prince Albert did the German custom get adopted by the commoners.
Two Hanoverian heirs died without succeeding to the throne: Frederick, Prince of Wales, elder son of George II, died before his father, who was eventually by Frederick’s son, George III.
George IV’s only child, Princess Charlotte of Wales, died in childbirth. If she (or her stillborn child) had lived, they would would have succeeded on George IV’s death and there would not have been the Victorian Age.
So closely associated with the failed British military policy in the American colonies was King George III that, after the October 1781 surrender of Lord Cornwallis to the Franco-American allied army at Yorktown, Va., he drafted - but never signed - an instrument of abdication.