“The Hammer of the Gods” is a line from the 1970 Led Zeppelin song “Immigrant Song.” After the band played in Reykjavik, Iceland, Robert Plant was inspired to write the lyrics around elements of Viking legend.
The song, and the line, became closely associated with the band, and “Hammer of the Gods” became the name of an unauthorized (and allegedly highly inaccurate) biography of the band, written by Stephen Davis. The song was also, fittingly, used in the soundtrack of the Marvel film Thor: Ragnarok.
Iceland has an area of about 40,000 square miles and a population of about 350,000. It ranks 17th in size of the countries in Europe, and it is the most sparsely-populated European country. Two-thirds of the population live in Reykjavík and the surrounding areas in the southwest of the country.
Drivers from Finland have won more World Rally racecar championships (14 titles) than any other country, and more Formula One racecar championships compared to their country’s population (4 titles for 5 million inhabitants) than any other nation.
Race driver Mario Andretti was born in Italy, but emigrated to the United States as a teenager, and became a naturalized American citizen in his 20s. Andretti was highly successful in several different racing formats: he is the last American driver to win the Formula One championship (1978), and is the only driver to have won an F1 Championship as well as the Daytona 500 and the Indianapolis 500.
At age 107, Anthony Mancinelli still works from noon to 8, 5 days a week, at Fantastic Cuts in New Windsor, NY,an hour north of NYC.
Mancinelli was named the “World’s Oldest Barber” by Guinness World Records in 2007 at 96 and continues to break his own record.
He was born in 1911 near Naples, Italy, and emigrated with his family when he was 8, joining a relative in Newburgh, N.Y. He was one of eight children and went to work at age 11 in a local barbershop. By age 12, he was cutting hair and dropped out of high school to cut hair full time.
According to How to tie a tie.com, the Windsor knot is one of the five most popular methods of knotting a tie. The other 4 knots on this list are the Four-in-Hand, the Half-Windsor, the Pratt, and the bow tie.
King Edward VIII, having controversially abdicated the British throne in 1936 in order to marry his lover, the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, was named Duke of Windsor by his brother, who succeeded him as King George VI. The Duke was entitled to the style “His Royal Highness,” but his wife was specifically denied the privilege.
The United Kingdom has a population density of 704 people per sq. mi. In the world, that is just behind:
Vietnam, which has a population density of 741 people per sq. mi., and is just ahead of:
Pakistan, which has a population density of 652 people per sq. mi.
The most-densely populated independent country in the world is generally considered to be Monaco. Monaco has a population of only 37,000, but its size is just .78 square miles (2.02 square kilometers). Thus, it has a population density of 43,830 people per square mile. Next on the list is Singapore, with a density of 18,513 people per every square mile.
The nation of Indonesia consists of over thirteen thousand islands. The island of Java is the most populous of Indonesia’s islands: it’s home to over 141 million people (over half of Indonesia’s population), and it’s the world’s most populous island.
The island of Java has been producing coffee since the 1600s. The term ‘java’, which means coffee, may have originally meant to refer to single-origin coffee from Java.
In 1995, a programming language called Java was released and featured a steaming cup of coffee as its icon.
While some coffees advertise the fact that they contain “100% Arabica beans”, many coffee experts prefer blends of different types of beans because of the more complex flavor profile that they provide.
Around 60% of coffee cultivated worldwide is Arabica coffee. Robusta beans, which contain double the amount of caffeine and are used for espresso and instant coffee, account for around 30%. Excelsa beans, with a dark, lingering flavor, account for 7%, while Liberica beans, which have a strong, smoky flavor and pungent aroma, have become naturalized in much of Southeast Asia and are being cultivated as an heirloom crop.
A concentrated coffee/milk/sugar mixture was produced for the Union army during the American Civil War under the name Essence of Coffee, a teaspoonful of which was mixed with a cup of hot water to produce the first ‘instant coffee’. It was not a success and was soon discontinued. In more modern times in nations such as Portugal, Spain, and India, instant coffee is commonly mixed with hot milk instead of boiling water
The K-ration was an individual daily combat food ration which was introduced by the United States Army during World War II.
The C-Ration, was an individual canned, pre-cooked, and prepared wet ration. Development began in 1938 with the first rations being field tested in 1940 and wide-scale adoption following soon after.
The MRE was formally adopted as the Department of Defense combat ration in 1975, and the first large-scale production test did not occur until in 1978 with the first MRE I rations packed and delivered in 1981. The MRE officially replaced the C-Ration in 1981.
After the start of the Siachen Glacier Conflict, the Pakistan Army began a concentrated effort to supply forward posts with hot, cooked food instead of dry rations in order to increase morale. This was critiqued in some quarters as unnecessarily expensive. However it turned out to have been a good decision, since in those conditions a soldier needs upto 8000 calories a day, and tasty food combats another problem caused by the condition, loss of appetite, which causes soldiers to eat a lot less and suffer from creeping starvation.
Alaska’s Matanuska Glacier, 100 miles east of Anchorage, is the largest glacier accessible by car in the US. It is about 27 miles long by 4 miles wide.
The word “car” is derived from a Gaulish word, “karros”, meaning a two-wheeled war chariot. It entered English via Vulgar Latin and then Old French. There continue to be cognates in Welsh and Gaelic.