“As you were” is a military drill command that allows the drill instructor to correct him/herself. Most drill commands have two parts, a preparatory command (given with a rising voice) and then a command of execution (given sharply, smartly), e.g., ‘platoon, HALT’, or ‘forward, MARCH’. If after a preparatory command has been given, the drill instructor needs to change that command, an ‘As you were’ is given with a drawn out, even tone of voice. When done appropriately, the marching Marines (or doggies/squids/flyboys) do not anticipate and perform the command of execution, which was not actually given, but rather they reset and wait for the next command to be given.
John Philip Sousa (1854–1932) was an American composer and conductor, known primarily for his compositions of American military marches. Because of his mastery of march composition, he is known as “The March King”, or the “American March King”. Among his best-known marches are “The Stars and Stripes Forever”, which is the National March of the United States, and “Semper Fidelis”, the Official March of the United States Marine Corps.
Sousa’s march called “The Liberty Bell” was used as the theme for Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
US Marine John Philip Sousa served 1868–1875, and 1880–1892. He also served in the US Navy 1917–1918.
The sousaphone, named after John Philip Sousa, was named for him and created around 1893 by J.W.Pepper at his direction. Sousa was dissatisfied with the instruments used at the time; the sousaphone was designed to be easier to play than the concert tuba while standing or marching, and to carry the sound of the instrument above the heads of the band. It is now widely used in marching bands.
In the pseudo-biographical film “Stars and Stripes Forever”, the sousaphone was (falsely) shown as being invented by a band member played by Robert Wagner (Clifton Webb was Sousa, its actual inventor).
His father, a Portuguese immigrant named João António de Sousa, who was a trombonist in the Marine Band, enlisted John Phillip as an apprentice in it at the age of 13. He is said to have learned to play every instrument in the band by the age of 16 well enough to fill in for any of its musicians.
The name Philip (and its variant, Phillip) comes from the Greek name Φιλιππος (Philippos) which means “friend of horses”, composed of the elements φιλος (philos) “friend, lover” and ‘ιππος (hippos) “horse”. This was the name of five kings of Macedon, including Philip II the father of Alexander the Great. It was borne by six kings of France and five kings of Spain. It was regularly used in England during the Middle Ages, although the Spanish king Philip II, who attempted an invasion of England, helped make it less common by the 17th century.
The Greek word ἵππος (hippos), meaning horse, comes from Proto-Hellenic *íkkʷos (compare Mycenaean Greek 𐀂𐀦 (i-qo)), from Proto-Indo-European *h₁éḱwos, from *h₁oh₁ḱu- (“swift”).
Though the hippopotamus (the name comes from the Greek for “river horse”) has superficial resemblances to other land mammals, including pigs, its closest living relatives are actually cetaceans (such as whales and dolphins).
The hippopotamus is often cited as the most dangerous large animal in the world, killing an estimated 500 people a year in Africa. However, there are no academic or formal studies providing support for this claim, and its continued persistence seems to be dependent on the repetition of a well established folk narrative as opposed to actual reports or numbers.
The deadliest animal on earth is the mosquito. Mosquitoes are responsible for around 725,000 deaths per year. Most people consider them nothing more than a summer evening nuisance, but they are the deadliest animal on earth.
According to epidemiologists, Alexander the Great may have died of mosquito-borne West Nile virus, in its neuroinvasive form. They tested their idea using an online diagnostic program called GIDEON (Global Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology Network). After entering Alexander’s symptoms of respiratory infection, liver disorder, rash, as well as dying ravens mentioned by his biographer, the program’s answer was West Nile, 100%.
(A close family member almost died of West Nile meningitis a few years ago and we’ve all been using lots of mosquito repellent since then)
The risk of death among those in whom the nervous system is affected by West Nile fever is about 10%.
The river Nile has two major tributaries, the White Nile and Blue Nile. The White Nile is considered to be the headwaters and primary stream of the Nile itself. The Blue Nile, however, is the source of most of the water and silt.
The University of Iowa Hawkeyes football team plays in Nile Kinnick Stadium, named for a former player, the 1939 Heisman Trophy winner and the only Heisman winner in university history, who died in service during World War II.
The Heisman award was originally created by the Downtown Athletic Club of New York City in 1935 to recognize “the most valuable college football player east of the Mississippi.” After the death in October 1936 of the Club’s athletic director, John Heisman, the award was named in his honor and broadened to include players west of the Mississippi.
Former Notre Dame and Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann originally pronounced his last name “Theesman.”
When Theismann was playing for Notre Dame in 1970, and considered to be a Heisman Trophy candidate, Notre Dame’s publicity department convinced him to change the pronunciation of his name to “Thighsman” (rhyming with the name of the trophy), in hopes of creating a mental association among voters between the player and the award.
It didn’t work; Theismann finished second to Stanford’s Jim Plunkett for the 1970 Heisman Trophy. However, Theismann never reverted to the original pronunciation of his name.
The cathedral of Notre Dame is not owned by the Catholic Church. Under a 1905 law, Notre-Dame de Paris is among seventy churches in Paris built before that year that are owned by the French State. While the building itself is owned by the state, the Catholic Church is the designated beneficiary, having the exclusive right to use it for religious purpose in perpetuity. The archdiocese is responsible for paying the employees, security, heating and cleaning, and assuring that the cathedral is open free to visitors. The archdiocese does not receive subsidies from the French State.
According to lovemoney, the Catholic Church is estimated to hold 71.6 million hectares (about 177 million acres) of land in its worldwide real estate portfolio, an area larger than France.
Curbed claims that, in the U.S., Catholic organizations own property in nearly every county of all 50 states.
According to the CIA Factbook and the Pew Research Center, the five countries with the largest number of Catholics are, in decreasing order of Catholic population, Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines, the United States, and Italy.
During the American Civil War, Maj. Gen. William Rosecrans was Catholic, while Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman not, although Sherman’s wife was.
The Culinary Institute of America (CIA) is based in Hyde Park, New York. Prior to its use as a culinary school, the grounds of the CIA were occupied by St. Andrew-on-Hudson, a Jesuit novitiate was established there in 1903. As part of the novitiate’s property, a Jesuit cemetery was established just north of the main building (now named Roth Hall).
There are over a hundred graves of priests in the cemetery, the most famous being that of French Jesuit philosopher, anthropologist and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who gained considerable attention during his life for his writings. He was a professor of geology at the Catholic Institute in Paris, director of the National Geological Survey of China and director of the National Research Center in France. He died in 1955, while in residence at the Jesuit Church of Saint Ignatius Loyola in New York City.