McMurdo Station is named after Lieutenant Archibald McMurdo of HMS Terror. McMurdo died Scotland on 11 December 1875.
Englishmen Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan, a composer, and Sir William Schwenck Gilbert, a dramatist, collaborated to produce 14 comic operas in the late 1800s. The most famous of these operas are H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado. The Mikado is one of the most frequently performed works in the history of musical theater.
The word “pooh-bah”, meaning someone who is grandiose and pompous, or just a high-ranking person, comes from a character by that name in The Mikado.
In the first chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh, A.A. Milne offers this explanation of why Winnie-the-Pooh is often called simply “Pooh”:
Milne named the bear “Pooh” after a swan that his son, Christopher Robin, named “Pooh”. Most of the other characters were named after his son’s toys. A.A. Milne served in both world wars, and while best known for his Pooh books, was also a novelist and playwright.
A.A. Milne’s most famous poem is arguably Disobedience about James James Morrison Morrison and his mother. The poem was set to music and a hit for the Chade Mitchell Trio
The folk music group The Chad Mitchell Trio was originally formed around 1959 by three Gonzaga University students: Chad Mitchell, Mike Kobluk, and Mike Pugh. Pugh left the group soon after, and was replaced by Joe Frazier. When Mitchell himself left the group in 1965, he was replaced by a young singer, Henry John Deutschendorf, who went by the stage name John Denver.
During the 1964 Olympics, the heavyweight boxer Joe Frasier broke his left thumb during the semi-final bout. He hid this from the trainers and won a close decision in the final, becoming the only American boxer to win a Gold medal that year.
Per Wiki, baseball at the Summer Olympics unofficially debuted at the 1904 Summer Olympics, and became an official Olympic sport at the 1992 Summer Olympics. The event was last played in the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing with South Korea taking the gold; the sport was dropped from the Summer Olympic program after that, but will be revived for the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.
The Tokyo Dome, nicknamed the Big Egg because of its white dome-like roof, is the home of the Yomiuri Giants baseball team. It has also hosted music concerts, basketball, American football and association football games, as well as puroresu (pro-wrestling) matches, mixed martial arts events, kickboxing events, and monster truck races.
(If you ever get a chance to attend an event there, do! It’s an unforgettable experience)
First baseman Sadaharu Oh played for 22 seasons for the Yomiuri Giants. He finished his career with 868 home runs (more than any MLB player has hit), and the Nippon Professional League’s home run champ fifteen times.
Shohei Ohtani played this season, his first in Major League Baseball, for the Los Angeles Angels. He previously recorded the fastest pitch by a Japanese pitcher and in the history of NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball) at 102.5 mph.
All Nippon Airways or ANA, is the largest airline in Japan on the basis of fleet size, with 231 aircraft. On 15 December 1953, it operated its first cargo flight between Osaka and Tokyo using a De- Havilland Dove. This was the first scheduled flight flown by a Japanese pilot in postwar Japan.
Japan Airlines was the only airline in Asia, together with Air India, to order the Concorde. But the stock market crash in 1973 and the oil crisis the very same year made the JAL management cautious about purchasing an airplane with a very high oil consumption. JAL cancelled its orders for the Concorde. Air France and British Airways were the only airline to ever operate the Concorde.
Per Wiki, Japan Airlines (JAL) was established in 1951 and became the national airline of Japan in 1953. After over three decades of service and expansion, the airline was fully privatized in 1987. In 2002, the airline merged with Japan Air System, Japan’s third-largest airline, and became the sixth-largest airline in the world by passengers carried. Japan Airlines is an official sponsor of Japan Football Association, Japan’s national football team, Shimizu S-Pulse, and Consadole Sapporo. All Nippon Airways, the largest airline in Japan, is JAL’s main competitor.
A national airline, or flag carrier or national carrier, is not always government owned. Pan Am, TWA, Cathay Pacific, Union de Transports Aériens, Canadian Pacific Air Lines and Olympic Airlines were all privately owned. Most of these were considered to be flag carriers as they were the “main national airline” and often a sign of their country’s presence abroad. United Arab Emirates has two: Etihad Airways, and Emirates. Both are state owned.
TAE Greek National Airlines, a state-owned company, was the predecessor of Olympia Airways, later known as Olympic Airlines. Aristotle Onassis bought the financially-troubled company in 1956 and quickly expanded the company and made it profitable. However, in 1973, shortly after the death of his son in an airplane crash, Onassis sold all of the company’s shares back to the Greek government. The company was hard-hit by financial problems in the 1980s, and subsequent management issues, along with continued lack of profitability, forced the company into selling its assets and ceasing operations on December 31, 2009.
Olympic National Park, in northwestern part of Washington state and on its Olympic Peninsula, was originally created by President Theodore Roosevelt as Mount Olympus National Monument in 1909. It was designated a national park by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1938. In 1976, Olympic National Park was designated by UNESCO as an International Biosphere Reserve, and in 1981 as a World Heritage Site.
The RMS Olympic was the White Star Line’s sister ship to the Titanic. It was the same size, but the Titanic had added features that gave it a great gross tonnage. When the Titanic sunk, the Olympic headed to pick up survivors but was too far away to get there in time. They offered to take passengers, but it was felt that the survivors probably wouldn’t appreciate boarding a ship the looked just like the one that sunk.
Charles Joughin served as baker on the RMS Olympic and as head baker on the Titanic. Before leaving the ship he helped to put women and children in lifeboats, provisioned lifeboats with several hundred pounds of bread, threw dozens of deck chairs into the water to serve as flotation devices for himself and others, brought third class passengers from the lower decks to the railings, and also drank a glass of liqueur.
Joughlin survived for over two hours in the freezing water before being pulled aboard a lifeboat; the only ill effects that he suffered were swollen feet. Possibly the alcohol that he had drunk helped him not to feel the cold; his testimony states that he felt colder in the lifeboat than in the water. In films about the disaster he is portrayed as being drunk; however, while he openly admitted to having taken liquor that night, he always maintained that he was not intoxicated.