Napoleon’s planned invasion of the United Kingdom at the start of the War of the Third Coalition, although never carried out, was a major influence on British naval strategy and the fortification of the coast of southeast England. French attempts to invade Ireland in order to destabilise the United Kingdom or as a stepping-stone to Great Britain had already occurred in 1796.
From 1803 to 1805 a new army of 200,000 men, known as the Armée des côtes de l’Océan (Army of the Ocean Coasts) or the Armée d’Angleterre (Army of England), was gathered and trained at camps at Boulogne, Bruges and Montreuil. A large “National Flotilla”[1] of invasion barges was built in Channel ports along the coasts of France and the Netherlands (then under French domination as the Batavian Republic), right from Étaples to Flushing, and gathered at Boulogne.
Napoleon also seriously considered using a fleet of troop-carrying balloons as part of his proposed invasion force and appointed Marie Madeline Sophie Blanchard as an air service chief, though she said the proposed aerial invasion would fail because of the winds.[4] (France’s first military balloon had been used in 1794 by Jean-Marie Coutelle.[5]) Though an aerial invasion proved a dead-end, the prospect of one captured the minds of the British print media and public.
On August 3,1936, just two days after the start of the Berlin Olympics, African-American athlete Jesse Owens won the 100 metres – the first of his four gold medals of the Games, a magnificent achievement in itself, but one which also gave lie to Adolf Hitler’s belief in Aryan supremacy. And snopes says the photo of Owens and Hitler shaking hands is a fake.
ETA: Hitler and Napoleon both tried to take over the world, and both died in disgrace.
BTW, ElvisL1ves, I’m a Celtic fan dating to when Hondo played, albeit it was towards the end of his career.
In play:
The game of basketball as it is known today was created by Dr. James Naismith in December 1891 in Springfield MA. In 1936, basketball was first included in the Olympic Games in Berlin. The first Olympic title was won by the U.S. national team: Sam Balter, Ralph Bishop, Joe Fortenberry, Tex Gibbons, Francis Johnson, Carl Knowles, Frank Lubin, Art Mollner, Donald Piper, Jack Ragland, Willard Schmidt, Carl Shy, Duane Swanson, Bill Wheatley and the trainer James Needles. Canada was runner-up; the games were played on an outdoor clay court.
At Celtic basketball player Larry Bird’s retirement party, Magic Johnson said “Larry, you only told me one lie. You said there will be another Larry Bird. Larry, there will never, ever be another Larry Bird.”
I saw Bird play, and I can sum him up in one sentence: On the basketball court, The Bird was not human.
Bird and Johnson were the stars of the opposing teams in the 1979 NCAA basketball tournament championship game. Johnson’s deeper Michigan State Spartans team defeated Bird and the Indiana State Sycamores 75-64 in what was then the most-watched basketball game ever played.
The Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus ordered that all Spartan war clothing be dark crimson red because it least resembled women’s clothing and was most warlike. The blood red color was also to arouse terror in the opponent and disguised Spartan wounds so the enemy would never see their blood. Many other Greeks eventually copied the Spartans uniform color as did the Romans and even the British Redcoats centuries later.
The San Jose State Spartans football team served unexpectedly with the Honolulu Police Department during World War II. The team had just arrived in Hawaii to play a series of post-season bowl games against the University of Hawaii Rainbow Warriors and the Willamette University Bearcats when Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941. The team was stranded on the islands for a number of weeks following the attack, and players were employed by the local police department to help improve island defenses against a possible Japanese amphibious assault and as guards for military bases on the island.
The bearcat, a mammal native to Southeast Asia, is the mascot of 13 collegiate teams in the United States. The Cincinnati Bearcats won back-to-back NCAA basketball championships in 1961 and 1962, defeating cross-state rivals the Ohio State Buckeyes both years.
The Stutz Motor Car Company, based in Indianapolis, was a builder of automobiles from 1911 until 1935. Stutz specialized in sports cars and luxury cars, and is best remembered today for the Stutz Bearcat sports car.
The Stutz marque was revived in the 1960s, and produced a small number of luxury cars from the 1960s through 1990s.
A Stutz is featured prominently in a car chase in John Buchan’s 1936 novel The Island of Sheep, a sequel to his best-known book The 39 Steps. Driven by the novel’s villain, it’s described as “a very powerful car of foreign make, coloured yellow and black. It looked to me like a Stutz. . . I had heard wonderful stories of what a Stutz could do.” The good guys escape from it only by outwitting its driver and using superior knowledge of back roads.
Although Stutz built a Bearcat car in the early 1910s, Grumman built the F8F Bearcat fighter plane in 1944. It became operational as WWII was ending and never saw combat during that war. The Bearcat saw its first combat in 1951 for the French, during the French-Indochina War of 1946-1954.
A highly-modified F8F Bearcat named “Rare Bear” dominated the Reno Air Races for decades. Rare Bear has set many performance records for piston-driven aircraft, including the 3 km World Speed Record of 528.33 mph (850.26 km/h) set August 21, 1989, which still stands in his class, and a new time-to-climb record (3,000 meters in 91.9 seconds set in 1972 (9842.4 ft - 6,426 fpm), breaking a 1946 record set in a stock Bearcat).
The Missouri state flag is a tricolor consisting of three horizontal stripes of red, white and blue. These represent valor, purity, vigilance, and justice. The colors also reflect the state’s historic status as part of the French Louisiana (New France).
French Louisiana was ceded to Spain in the 1763 Treaty of Paris that ended the Seven Years War, but reverted to France in 1800 in the secret Third Treaty of San Ildefonso in which Spain gained control of some territory in Tuscany.
The Six Flags St. Louis theme park was originally named Six Flags Over Mid-America, when it opened in 1971. In keeping with the original “Six Flags” theme, the “six flags” for the park were France, Spain, England, the United States, Missouri, and Illinois.
Over the years that US Route 66 existed (1926-1985) there were many routes in and through St. Louis. Different alignments included the main route as well as a bypass route and city route, “Bypass 66” and “City 66”. In the original alignment, US Route 66 entered St. Louis by crossing what is today the McKinley Bridge. gMap – https://goo.gl/ZE6xNS.